Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou Shu 9780824831202, 2011052152, 9780824865818, 0824865812, 0824831209

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity and the Civil to Bring Order
Chapter 1 Conquer and Govern: Wen and Wu as a Conceptual Pair in Classical Chinese Thought
Chapter 2 Righteous Warfare: Laying Siege to an Enemy in Disorder
Part II Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu
Chapter 3 Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu: Its Transmission and Reception
Chapter 4 Translation and Study of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu
Chapter 5 Dating and Language of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu
Appendix: Two Additional Military Chapters from the Yi Zhou shu
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Back Cover

Citation preview

coNQUer ANd

goverN EARLY CHINESE MILITARY TEXTS FROM THE YIZHOU SHU

Conquer and Govern

Conquer and Govern Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu

Robin McNeal

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

© 2012 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12   6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McNeal, Robin. Conquer and govern : early Chinese military texts from the Yi Zhou shu / Robin McNeal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3120-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Yi Zhou shu.  2. China—History, Military—To 221 B.C.  3. China—History—Zhou dynasty, 1122–221 B.C.  I. Yi Zhou shu. English. Selections.  II. Title. DS747.I25M35 2012 355—dc23 2011052152 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Josie Herr Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction1

Part I Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity and the Civil to Bring Order Chapter 1  Conquer and Govern: Wen and Wu as a Conceptual Pair in Classical Chinese Thought

13

Chapter 2  Righteous Warfare: Laying Siege to an Enemy in Disorder

40

Part II Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu Chapter 3  Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu: Its Transmission and Reception

73

Chapter 4  Translation and Study of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu97 Chapter 5  Dating and Language of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu136 Appendix161 Notes169 Bibliography231 Index243 v

Acknowledgments

Any first book is a testament to the many people who stood behind the author and made the work involved possible—the teachers, the colleagues, the students, the libraries, and other institutions. The list for this book is long. As early as 1994, as a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I had discussions with my advisor, the late Jack Dull, about my sense that there was a great deal to be learned from studying the Yi Zhou shu. He did not live to see me complete any substantive work on this text, but more than any other single person he taught me how to be a historian. I did not turn serious attention to the Yi Zhou shu until 1996 and 1997, when a fellowship from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China allowed me to spend a year at Peking University. Over the years that followed, I wrote a dissertation that drew on material from the text, albeit without first attending to issues of its authenticity. That dissertation was generously supported by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and various fellowships and stipends offered by the University of Washington. During those years, in the absence of Jack Dull, many people graciously stepped in to mentor and guide me. Bill Boltz taught me the philological skills I needed to do the sort of work that is now found in this book, and Kent Guy helped keep me on track as a historian. I spent a year at UCLA, working with Lothar von Falkenhausen, who has for more than a decade been extraordinarily generous and supportive of me. Bob Bagley, too, became a mentor to me and has offered immeasurable insight and encouragement over the years. The year in Beijing, however, was unquestionably the most formative for me. My relationship with Li Ling, who served as my faculty advisor there but soon became one of my closest friends, has continued to enrich and influence me to this day. From Li Ling’s example, I have learned what I consider to be the most important lesson of all my years vii

viii Acknowledgments

of study: a joyful love for the process of inquiry and discovery. I have been fortunate beyond my own expectations to have benefited from the guidance and support of this distinguished list of teachers, and many more whom I have not mentioned. This book is but the beginning of a tribute to their generosity. The institutions mentioned above all left their mark on me and my work as well, but this book did not begin in earnest until my arrival at Cornell in 2000. Soon after, I decided to set my dissertation aside and focus on the Yi Zhou shu itself; this book is the first fruit of that decision. I started over, translating anew those portions of the text I had drawn on during work on the dissertation, and moving substantially beyond that body of materials. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies allowed me to turn a semester’s study leave into an invaluable full year devoted to the research and writing of the manuscript. Both the Department of Asian Studies and the East Asia Program at Cornell University provided additional funding to support first, in 2002, a trip to Hunan, where a cache of tomb manuscripts including material pertinent to the study of the Yi Zhou shu are housed, and then, in 2007, a small conference held here to study these manuscripts. Several scholars at the Hunan Provincial Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology, in particular Zhang Chunlong, have been extremely helpful, providing access to the still-unpublished cache of manuscript materials and preliminary transcriptions of their contents. The conference was made possible by additional support from the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the LT Lam Fund for East Asian Studies. Working carefully through those manuscript materials slowed completion of this book considerably, and waiting for their eventual publication would unnecessarily slow it even more. To all the people and institutions named above, I owe a debt of gratitude, and seeing this book through to publication is probably the best thanks I can offer for all the friendship, insight, and support I have received over the years. Only one thing remains to be said about the topic of this book. It is an attempt to write an intellectual history based primarily on military texts. No one should make the mistake of imagining that there is anything the least bit appealing to me about war. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Introduction

Your servant respectfully maintains that an enlightened ruler must have substantive accomplishments. And what are the accomplishments of an enlightened ruler? I say: if the state is small, he is able to enlarge it; if it is weak, he is able to strengthen it; he {Ө Ө} yet is capable of making others revere him. These are the substantive accomplishments of an enlightened ruler. Through what achievements is the ruler revered? When battles in the field are won, the ruler is revered. When territory is acquired through siege, the ruler is revered. Now the means of winning battles in the field and acquiring territory through siege lie with devoting one’s energy to siege and battle, and that is enough. For this reason, worthy officers and enlightened rulers know to preserve the tactics of siege and battle.1

The sentiments expressed in this brief passage, which opens a manuscript found in 1973 in a tomb near Changsha, Hunan, in central China, may strike many readers familiar with early Chinese thought as somehow atypical of that time and place.2 This impression could not be more wrong. It grows out of a vision of early Chinese intellectual history that has been overdetermined by late imperial ideology and a particular strain of Confucianism. This vision of early China’s philosophical legacy needs little elaboration here, for in its outline form it is both eminently recognizable and obviously anachronistic. The standard line goes something like this: Early Chinese thought was dominated by Confucianism, which was above all a humanistic and civilian political philosophy that rejected violence and warfare and embraced pacifism and harmony.3 Even a casual familiarity with historical events, written sources, or the material record of the fifth through first centuries BCE—the classical era proper and the focus of this book—will shatter this vision of a 1

2 Introduction

peace-loving empire. The centuries leading up to the classical period were characterized by constant, bloody warfare, and the period itself saw the violent destruction of the old Zhou social structure and much of the Zhou culture.4 The fifth to third century was a particularly brutal era that witnessed the continued growth and proliferation of armies, the creation of increasingly efficient and elaborate weapons of destruction, the development of ever more sophisticated strategic models, and the building of complex state structures capable of waging war on an unprecedented scale. The third and second centuries BCE saw the culmination of these centuries-long conflicts in the creation of a unified empire built from the rubble of the old Zhou order. Finally, during the second and first centuries BCE, as the new empire was consolidated, attention was turned outward toward its peripheries and their inhabitants, and a new centuries-long pattern of often violent interaction with central Asia got underway. Moreover, a careful look at sources from the period shows that “Confucianism” was by no means the dominant intellectual position at the time.5 Indeed, if we cling to the later idealization of early Confucian thought as pacifist, we must conclude that this body of thought could not have seemed compelling to early rulers or generals. Clearly, warfare was at the center of political concerns throughout the entire classical period, and evidence abounds that it received careful attention from some of the most sophisticated minds of the day, Confucian and otherwise. As was already noted, this has all been acknowledged within the field of early China studies, both in the West and in Asia. Nevertheless, the patterns of historical inquiry prevalent in the field today still derive largely from the notions and approaches inherited from or informed by traditional Chinese scholarship. Thus, the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius still sit at the center of our own canon of Sinology, alongside the Laozi and Zhuangzi, which perhaps form their counterparts, a mystical and poetic yin to the drier and more down-to-earth yang of the Confucians.6 This is an overly simplistic if convenient paradigm from which to approach ancient China, for it obscures many differences between the classical period and later imperial times, providing for an erasure of distinctions and changes both across time and within the classical era itself. Most problematic of all, it allows us to accept many of the principles and assumptions of later imperial scholarship while at the same



Introduction3

time asserting the creation of a new, more modern and more scientific mode of critical inquiry. Yet we are forever hampered by our sources. The percentage of once prominent, widely circulating, and presumably influential materials from the classical period that survives to this day is miniscule, and to further limit our vision of the past by embracing the very works that the later tradition selected for us, while relegating so many others to obscurity, is to deny ourselves the possibility of glimpsing any hint of what early China might have been like, if indeed it was not a harmonious Confucian-inspired empire of benevolent rulers and loyal ministers. So while the general consensus has somehow been reached and scholars will nod their heads approvingly when told that Confucianism was neither as one-sided nor as politically prominent as many late imperial scholars might suggest, we have yet to make much progress in redefining our own intellectual discourse to reach beyond the old stereotypes and the familiar texts and formulate a new set of questions and tools.7 What we do have, ready at hand, is a large corpus of new textual materials from which to draw. Some of these are literally new to us, as with the manuscript cited above. Although discovered texts have been unearthed continuously throughout China’s long history, a series of remarkable discoveries began in the early 1970s with the excavation of the early Han funerary libraries at Yinqueshan in Shandong province (including many military treatises, among them a manuscript of Sunzi’s Art of War) and then the spectacular finds at Mawangdui near Changsha, Hunan (including two manuscript copies of the Laozi and several texts now usually associated with Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor). The 1980s and 1990s produced numerous finds as well, ranging from administrative, legal, and divinatory texts from a Chu kingdom tomb in Baoshan, Hubei, to the mantic, medical, and mathematical texts of the early Han found near Jiangling, Hubei.8 The publication of such materials, and the scholarship based on them, has often been slow; restoration is a painstaking and costly process, but one with which researchers are now increasingly familiar. In any event, early China studies have undergone a sort of renaissance, born of these new discoveries and the methodological rigor they have required of their students. Additionally, these texts have in many cases drawn our attention back to materials from the transmitted record that

4 Introduction

had long been neglected or treated with some disdain. Thus the publication of the various manuscript finds and research based on them has become a catalyst in the reconfiguration of ancient Chinese social and intellectual history that is currently unfolding. In a recent issue of the Harvard University Gazette, Tu Weiming likens the importance of several tomb texts found in 1988 at Guodian, Hubei, which include passages known to us from the Laozi as well as a number of other texts clearly associated with the early Confucian school, to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the West, and he suggests that now “the history of ancient Chinese philosophy in general will have to be reconfigured.” 9 In fact, in the face of so many newly discovered texts, as well as new attention to long known but often overlooked materials, such reconfiguration has been ongoing for at least a generation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of work being done in this field has concentrated on those texts or areas already deemed significant by a scholarly tradition beholden to late imperial perspectives. If scholars like Tu truly hope to reinvigorate early China studies, the starting point seems simple: broaden our curriculum. The following chapters of this book are an initial attempt at doing just this.10 The Confucian tradition and its representative thinkers are included here, but alongside political philosophers, statesmen, and strategists whose intellectual affiliations are not always easy to discern. Fairly eclectic texts such as the Lüshi chunqiu and the Guanzi will be important to the inquiry below, as well as works generally categorized as military texts, such as the Sima fa and the Sunzi bingfa. But the second half of the book will engage in a detailed study of a handful of chapters from one early text in particular, the Yi Zhou shu. These chapters date to no later than the fourth century BCE and may well date even slightly earlier (this holds true for large portions of the rest of that text as well). The material from this early section of the Yi Zhou shu seems to have been well known throughout the classical period proper, and interest in its contents was not limited to any one school of thought. For reasons we will explore in chapter 3, however, attention to the text as a whole declined over the centuries to the extent that it is now virtually unheard of outside of a small handful of specialists.11 The text takes on special meaning here because among all early sources, it contains the most elaborate and detailed information on



Introduction5

the theme that gives structure to the present study, the early Chinese conception of the interplay between the civil (wen) and martial (wu) realms of government as a defining mode of creating and administering an empire. Outside of the Yi Zhou shu, the clearest expressions of the importance of this interplay of wen and wu in early thought tend to be abstract. These can be found in a number of texts dating to the very end of the Warring States period (the third century BCE) or from the Western Han (second and first centuries BCE), but these texts in turn share much in common with slightly earlier Warring States traditions. This suggests that the theoretical dynamics of treating the civil and martial as a conceptual pair emerged over many centuries, but like so much of the intellectual heritage of this time, were only given careful, systematic articulation in the third and second centuries BCE as part of broader attempts to formulate a coherent and unified cosmology and ideology out of diverse earlier traditions. It will be helpful as we proceed to keep that broader process in mind. It often involved articulating correlations already implicit and occasionally explicit among Warring States traditions, making what amount to several already organic systems of thought cohere by highlighting some of the sympathetic aspects among them. At the same time, the reverse must also have been true, as significant differences were explained away or simply elided to create a convincing and comprehensive intellectual framework for a political system that could lay claim to being a seamless extension of organizing structures inherent in the natural world. Speaking much more broadly, this process did not actually stop after the Western Han, but continued endlessly down the centuries as new challenges to empire arose and new forms of administration were developed. Nevertheless, the classical period was formative, leaving its mark on the course of all later ideological innovation. The fifth through first centuries BCE can and in many ways must be treated as a single epoch when addressing social and intellectual history. The exact role of military power in this newly emerging universal ideology, we might guess, was open to debate. Generally speaking, it is problematic for all states and is especially urgent where an empire is being built through conquest.12 Why was military conquest leading to the creation of order justified in the past, and why is it now no longer an option, except for its occasional use by the government to secure

6 Introduction

or expand its accomplishments? The simple textbook answer would be that the Confucian vision of Heaven’s Mandate allows for occasional outbreaks of revolutionary war when the moral force of a ruling house has declined and Heaven deems its overthrow necessary to select a new, morally capable leader. Unfortunately, this concept is not particularly sophisticated, and it cannot have satisfied many political thinkers in the fourth and third centuries BCE, who had begun to sense that Heaven had lost interest in the moral unfolding of human history. In any case, it is clear that concern over the role of the military was keen and generated diverse opinions. Undeniably, important strains of thought rejected the centrality of military force in the developing ideology, including those of prominent Confucian thinkers. While neither Mencius nor Xunzi completely denied any role to the military in their political thinking, both tried to shift the focus of debate away from warfare and toward moral suasion. Mencius rejected the basic premise of what must have been the single most important narrative in all of early Chinese military thought, the story of the Zhou conquest of the old Shang house. For Mencius, that battle could not have been bloody and violent, but must rather have involved the voluntary surrender of Shang armies to the virtuous Zhou forces. Xunzi rejects the military strategists of his day and their vision of government and the military as deceitful and manipulative.13 Notice that there is not a single Confucian position on military force; positing such broad oversimplifications obscures the true nature of early Confucianism and early intellectual history in general. As we will see in the chapters to come, there were probably strains of “Confucianism” that embraced military strategy in particular and the idea of an active role for military concerns in government policy in general. In fact, there is no evidence that Confucius himself rejected military concerns, and our best indications are that military training was a part of his curriculum. Nevertheless, there is a broader discourse about the legitimate use of military force that both Xunzi and Mencius are participating in and that spans virtually the entire range of early texts as well, not limited to any school of thought. The vocabulary of this discourse often appears superficially at least to be Confucian, but in reality thinkers from many different traditions were engaged in creating, sustaining, and transforming this discourse, and it is again a misperception based on later



Introduction7

assumptions that Confucians necessarily dominated this process. Given this popular discourse, any strain of thought that argued for the exclusion of military concerns from the broader intellectual realm would have looked naïve and incomplete. Not only were there eloquent debaters within the Confucian tradition itself who wanted to preserve military concerns as an aspect of state ideology, as we will see in chapter 1, but there were prominent intellectual and strategic traditions in many states that placed military concerns at or near the center of political and therefore moral discussions. The role of military thinking in early Chinese intellectual history has been a relatively neglected field, but even outside of the strictly military corpus, as exemplified by the Sunzi or the Wuzi, it is apparent that theories and thinking about warfare played a prominent role in the intellectual history of classical China.14 As noted above, in the political environment of the Warring States era, it would have been nearly impossible to deny the importance of military concerns. During the early Han, despite the apparent resolution of the central political problems fueling the incessant wars—that is, the creation of a unified polity and the death of the old multistate system— the Han emperors still faced considerable challenges to the project of empire. Sometimes these came from within the ruling family itself, at other times from local power bases not yet fully incorporated into the Han system. And as political scientists and historians have noted, the creation of a centralized empire seems to be a catalyst for the creation of its own enemies, as people on its peripheries in turn adopt or are pressed into more systematic and lasting forms of organization.15 There can be little doubt that questions concerning the legitimate use of military force, that is, questions that grew out of the relationship between civil administration and the application of coercive power, must have remained at the heart of the early Han project of realizing and consolidating their empire.16 Indeed, the early Chinese discourse on the relation between the civil and the martial realms of government came to encompass many sophisticated analyses of the generation, exercise, and reproduction of power, and they lay at the heart of some of the defining conceptions of the state. Prominent among these was the issue of the relationship between the state and its subjects, an issue engaged by the wen-wu dichotomy in a number of ways. Naturally, the very notion of who was a subject and who

8 Introduction

was an enemy became deeply enmeshed in this discourse. Eventually, all who were perceived as susceptible to the ethical suasive power embodied in the civil administration of a sage ruler were taken as fit subjects, deserving of emancipation from the tyrannical rule of immoral, selfserving lords. This vision of moral leadership generated a conception of righteous warfare that harked back to older forms of authority rooted in the decrepit Zhou political system, while also justifying an expansionist policy that ultimately demolished the remnants of that system and went far beyond the scope and scale of government ever achieved under the Zhou model. In so doing, the discourse on the civil and martial placed warfare squarely under the rubric of a paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of the people, a cornerstone of early Chinese moral and political thought that was certainly embraced by the Confucians but must also have both predated Confucianism proper and enjoyed a wider influence than any one school of thought could ever have achieved.17 Moreover, early paternalistic conceptions of government must have changed considerably with the changing social and political realities of the Eastern Zhou; we will briefly explore changes in the scope of such paternalistic values in chapter 2. Additionally, the dynamic of the oppressive lord’s relationship to his subjects was treated as analogous to other unfair relations in society, such as the nobility’s domination of local populations or even the criminal’s mistreatment of his victims. Therefore, the discourse on wen and wu came to engage issues of criminal punishment, the creation and reproduction of social order, and the transformation of local customs and practices through education or moral transformation. These issues are themselves of course crucial to the success of centralized rule, and will be discussed in chapter 1. Finally, the dichotomous and ultimately complimentary framework of the wen-wu concept was woven into the fabric of everyday life in a number of ways. Throughout the Warring States period, as strong states expanded and competed for human and material resources, there was constant pressure to devise more efficient forms of social organization and mobilization. Elaborate systems of mathematically precise social units were envisioned, and they inevitably combined civil administration with military training, taxation, and recruitment. There is good evidence that by the fourth century BCE, older forms of social organization largely



Introduction9

modeled on the “feudal” holdings of the nobility were being dismantled and replaced with closely monitored and accountable administrative units whose dual purpose was defined by the wen-wu dichotomy. Consequently, an examination of the discourse on the relationship between these two sides of government activity promises to shed light on a broad array of social, intellectual, and political issues in early Chinese history. Part I of this study explores the vocabulary of this discourse, demonstrating that there was a sophisticated and broadly based discourse during these centuries on the nature of warfare, its cosmological and moral underpinnings, its role in history, and its importance to the stability of the state. Chapter 1 illustrates the broad outlines of this discourse by focusing on the terms wen and wu, the civil and the martial, used in philosophical and military texts as a dynamic pair (akin to yin and yang) to frame the various issues involved. Chapter 2 shows how this discourse overlapped with a complex and influential notion of righteous warfare, that is, morally legitimate use of force, as a means to end chaos and tyranny and usher in proper civil administration. Part II of the work is a detailed study and translation of the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. Chapter 3 demonstrates the authenticity of the text and specifically the military portions, addressing the early history of the text and its relationship to military thinking. Why the text fell into neglect and was even held in contempt is also discussed. Chapter 4 translates chapters 6 through 10 of the Yi Zhou shu, the core of the military section of this work, and addresses their broader significance to the development of the genre of military texts that became so important in the Warring States era. I argue that one of the five chapters is a textual relic of an ancient practice of miaosuan (battle calculations performed in the ancestral temple prior to a campaign), a largely unstudied aspect of early Chinese warfare. Three of the remaining four chapters are rhymed, and I argue that this structure reveals something about the social context in which these texts were generated and used. Chapter 5 turns to a detailed examination of certain linguistic features of these military chapters that allow us to determine their dates (fifth to fourth century BCE) and also translates additional material from the Yi Zhou shu that helps demonstrate the relationship between these military chapters and the rest of the work as a whole.

Part I Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity and the Civil to Bring Order

1

Conquer and Govern Wen and Wu as a Conceptual Pair in Classical Chinese Thought

King Wen used the civil to bring order, and King Wu used martial accomplishments to expel the calamities of the people.1

Historical Precedent The Zhou conquest over the Shang dynasty is arguably the single most important historical event portrayed in classical and preclassical Chinese texts. It was seen as the historical moment that created the Zhou political, social, and moral order, and thus in its details could be found all the lessons needed for rulership and sagehood. This single event came to be understood as both an act of war and the cessation of all strife, the bloody overthrow of a corrupt ruling house coupled with the establishment of a civil administration that settled the known world and bestowed benevolent government on the people. The posthumous titles of the Zhou founders captured this dual nature of the father-and-son accomplishment: the Civil and Martial Kings. The retelling and embellishing of the story of the Zhou’s rise to power and ultimate victory over the Shang must have begun very early in Chinese history, perhaps even before the victory was won. It is an inexhaustible repository upon which all classical writers were inclined to draw, regardless of the sort of argument they might be making. But it is especially suited to those who wish to discuss warfare and its many social and political implications. For this reason, it is one of the single most difficult events in early Chinese history to understand; it is possible that virtually everything we think we know about the Zhou conquest is wrong, the product not of the Western Zhou but of writers from 13

14

Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity

the Eastern Zhou, Han, or later. The story and its main characters will appear again and again in this study, and for the most part there will be little attention paid in these pages to how much of what the classical texts tell us about the conquest is accurate history. We are interested in these retellings for what they reveal to us of classical conceptions of government and war, the civil and the martial. There is a good chance that these two realms of state activity were already conceived of in complementary terms during the Western Zhou (as evidenced by the pairing of the posthumous titles of Kings Wen and Wu) and that whatever political philosophy lay behind this early conception is organically related to later classical ideas about the state and its dual role as a civilizing force and a war machine. Our sources simply do not permit a clear look at the development of such concepts over the Western Zhou (eleventh to eighth century BCE) and Spring and Autumn (late eighth to sixth century BCE) periods. This difficulty means that in this study we will speak of concepts appearing in texts from the fourth or perhaps fifth centuries BCE on. Some of these concepts must certainly have ancient roots, yet no attempt will be made to pinpoint accurately the earliest origins or emergence of such concepts. It is hoped that as progress is made in the study of inscriptional materials, in the dating of early texts, and in the general history of these earlier eras, scholars will be able to better see how the values that Warring States and Han thinkers assumed were rooted in Western Zhou thought might actually have developed over time and in response to particular circumstances. Our focus here will be with how both old ideas, genuine or imagined, and new ideas concerning warfare and government came to constitute a coherent position that gained widespread currency in the formative period just prior to the creation of a unified empire but just after the demise of the celebrated Zhou order. In other words, we ought to be better able to move back into the Spring and Autumn or Western Zhou periods once we have identified and clarified more of the important intellectual and social issues that dominated the age when so many of our reports of antiquity were generated. Conceptions of the Civil and Martial in the Han Dynasty In sources written or compiled during the Western Han dynasty, we find the notion that the civil and martial spheres of the state must be



Conquer and Govern

15

understood as forming a complete system, each crucial in its own way to the long-term stability of the state. The work Shuoyuan, a collection of moral, political, historical, and philosophical vignettes compiled by Liu Xiang, the famous Han bibliographer of the first century BCE, includes several passages useful to our inquiry. In the opening chapter, “Jundao” (The Way of a Lord), we find the following brief anecdote set in the early years of King Cheng, whose father had conquered the Shang but left much of the job of consolidating the administration of the new polity to his son: King Cheng enfeoffed Bo Qin [the Duke of Zhou’s son] as the Duke of Lu. Summoning him, he addressed him, saying: “Do you know the Way of acting as the ruler over the people? . . . Should you possess the civil but lack the martial, you will have no means to awe those below. Should you possess the martial but lack the civil, the people will fear you but not draw close. If the civil and martial are implemented together, then your awe-inspiring virtue will be achieved. Once your awe-inspiring virtue has been achieved, the people will draw close and submit; those who are pure and of good intention will have access to the top, and those who are deceptive and wicked will be blocked below. Those who want to remonstrate will be able to approach, and loyalty and trust will thereby accumulate.” 2

The discussion here is abstract, with no mention of what the civil or martial actually entail. This is typical of literature of the period; the focus of the passage is the realization of an awe-inspiring authority that both draws subjects to the ruler and puts them in fear of his might. The effect of achieving this awesome authority, the passage goes on to elaborate, is to open the ruler to good-intentioned advisors while striking fear in the hearts of would-be malefactors. This notion of an awe-inspiring yet somehow not alienating imperial visage is of particular concern among thinkers who lived close to the founding of empire in the late third century BCE, but it has older roots. It is no doubt an ancient problem, but one that received renewed attention as the scope and nature of the state evolved radically during the third and second centuries BCE. We find the terms wen and wu used by authors of this era as a conceptual pair, representing between them the total range of

16

Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity

state activities. Chapter 15 of the Shuoyuan, “Zhiwu” (Exhibiting the Martial), shows this very well. The chapters of this work were organized by Liu Xiang around themes and constitute distinct essays of a sort. Liu Xiang seems to have relied for the most part on existing passages that he collected during his life’s work compiling and collating official versions of philosophical and literary texts. It is clear that he organized these passages and in some cases inserted brief passages from canonical texts such as the Changes or the Odes in order to tease out certain rhetorical features of the stories or impose a sort of editorial direction to his composite essay.3 Liu Xiang opens this chapter about military concerns with a passage from the Warring States military treatise Sima fa, demonstrating how this already centuries-old text still embodied meaningful messages: The Sima fa says: “Those who are fond of battle, even if their state is a great one, will surely perish; at the same time, even if the realm is at peace, if we forget about battle we will also be imperiled.” The Changes says: “The nobleman thereby puts in order the weapons of war, to be prepared for unexpected difficulties.” The military cannot be treated as a plaything; if you do so, then you will lack the ability to inspire awe. Yet the military cannot be done away with; if you do then you are summoning bandits. In the past, King Fuchai of Wu was fond of battle and he perished, while King Yan of Xu lacked all military capacity and was for his part destroyed. Thus, the way an enlightened king orders his state is like this: above, he does not treat the military as a plaything; below, he does not do away with the martial. The Changes says: “When preserved, do not forget peril.” In this way, your person will be safe and your state can be protected.4

The passage posits a middle path between a facile fascination with war and an idealistic rejection of any use of force, arguing that enlightened rulers and enduring states need to devote attention to military preparations even when their goal is to maintain peace. During the Western Han, continued attention to the military textual traditions of the Warring States period represents in part the ideological need to grapple with the role of the military under a unified empire. Of course, broadly conceived, this was but a subset of the larger intellectual proj-



Conquer and Govern

17

ect of the Western Han, which was dominated by attempts to render the great intellectual and textual heritage of the Warring States period comprehensible and even useful to the new social and political forms being forged as empire took shape. But that the old military traditions survived and indeed flourished under the Han and later is actually quite remarkable. The China of 500 BCE and that of 100 BCE were in many ways fundamentally different entities. Whatever economic and political institutions sustained the diverse technical and intellectual traditions of the Warring States, we can be sure that the very social fabric that such institutions comprise was radically remade by the founding of empire in 221 BCE and the events leading up to that watershed. We are not accustomed to recognizing this fact, since so much of traditional Chinese historiography places emphasis on continuity, not change. But change defined the Warring States era. A simple but powerful example will suffice to demonstrate that plex intellectual and practical traditions were, of course, inticom­ mately tied to their historical contexts, to the political forms and ­economic practices that sustained them, to a web of beliefs and habits that allowed for their emergence and reproduction over time. In the 1970s, archaeologists working in northwestern Hubei uncovered the spectacular tomb of Marquis Yi of the small state of Zeng. His tomb included an elaborate orchestra and most stunningly, an enormous set of cast bronze bells inscribed with a description of music theory as known in the fifth century BCE in China.5 The sophistication of this inscription stunned scholars, as did the technical mastery apparent in the creation of the tuned bell set. Music masters in the early Warring States period, it turns out, had an extraordinarily well-informed and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the chromatic scale, as well as a highly advanced technical mastery over the difficult art of casting sets of tuned, two-toned bells. Both sets of skills were apparently lost by the Han dynasty; nothing in the textual or archaeological record of the Han or later suggests anything close to the levels achieved by the artisans and music masters behind the Marquis of Zeng’s ensemble. As shocking as such a loss might seem to us now, it is not difficult to understand. The ruling nobility that commissioned and used such musical ensembles was wiped out during the centuries following the reign

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of Marquis Yi of Zeng, and there must have been a great many practices and beliefs that perished along with it. A harsh but readily apparent lesson from history is that envisioning, creating, and sustaining complex bodies of knowledge and practice requires enormous amounts of energy and resources, but destroying them is a relatively quick and easy affair. We might say simply that the musical knowledge of fifth-century BCE China disappeared with the interest in it, along with the sociopolitical world that valued and sustained it. More surprising than the wholesale destruction of vast, intricate bodies of knowledge across broad epochs marked by warfare and political upheaval is the survival of other, equally complex, and specific bodies of knowledge. Military texts from the Warring States period are one example. On first consideration, this genre of texts might seem inextricably linked to the specific historical context that gave rise to it, the incessant, ever-escalating violence of the Eastern Zhou multistate system. If any body of literature might have been irrelevant in the newly created unified empires of the Qin and Han, would not it have been these texts, which conceive of warfare precisely in terms of several competing states? Readers who have any familiarity with such works as Sunzi’s Art of War will immediately argue that there is timeless value in them. Such an appraisal may help to explain the popularity of the Art of War today, but it is likely that the genre of military texts as a whole created an intellectual space in which a timely discourse continued to unfold long after the competing states of the Eastern Zhou period were demolished. The reasons why this genre was able to sustain or remain integral to such a discourse are of course complex and varied. One factor working in their favor was the theoretical sophistication of the genre. Military writings from the Warring States era often range over issues relating to the intersection of political efficacy, training, resource management, ideology, legitimacy, and morality. The diverse concerns of these texts meant that they opened up a space for thinkers, strategists, professional military officers, and politicians of different times and places to work through questions of how the military sphere of the state was implicated in other aspects of statecraft, administrative policy, and political philosophy. It must be noted here that as we turn to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, a further argument related to the question of continuous



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interest in the genre of military writings will emerge. It is possible that there was a major shift in the nature of military knowledge from the Warring States period to the Han and later imperial eras, one obscured by the military texts themselves. The texts may have been r­ adically restructured during the third and second centuries BCE as they became texts in a decidedly literary genre, gradually divorced from the fuller practical traditions of which they were no doubt once part. That is, it may be that the theoretical aspects of military writings that are so celebrated by intellectuals and theoreticians throughout history were extracted from a very different set of living practical traditions and f­ undamentally restructured into textual, literary traditions. Military writings from the Warring States period that have been ­transmitted down to us today probably preserve a great deal of information about military thinking and practice in the fourth and third centuries BCE, but they also surely represent to a great extent how such military thought was received and re-employed under the early empires. Liu Xiang’s “Exhibiting the Martial” One of the most problematic series of questions any thinker who devoted attention to the nature of the state had to face was how, when, and why state-backed force was to be employed. This question is at the heart of the wen-wu conceptual pair. As we examine passages from the fourth through first centuries BCE that employ the notion of the civil and martial as complementary spheres of state activity, we will find that there is general agreement among authors from disparate intellectual backgrounds and separated by vast reaches of time that the wen-wu pair can help to answer these questions. Formulating the pair as a comprehensive and complementary dyad made it possible to understand disparate goals of the state as interrelated and made it possible to conceive of integrated ways to move from civil administration to warfare without invoking different sets of values and justifications governing such fundamentally different actions. Liu Xiang’s “Exhibiting the Martial” chapter is an interesting starting point for our inquiry because it brings older passages on military thought and citations from canonical works together into an essay that clearly intends to speak to his own time, the first century BCE. Almost immediately following the opening passage cited above, he presents his

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readers with a story about the legendary King Yan of Xu.6 Here we find one of the classic arguments in early literature for the importance of both the military and administrative arms of the state: Wangsun Li addressed King Wen of Chu, saying, “King Yan of Xu is fond of implementing the Way of benevolence and righteousness. Thirty-two of the feudal lords east of the Han River have already completely submitted to him. If you, my king, do not attack Xu, Chu will inevitably end up serving it.” The king said, “If Xu indeed possesses the Way, then it cannot be attacked.” Li responded, “The great attacking the small, or the strong attacking the weak, is like a large fish swallowing up a small one, or like a tiger devouring a hog. In what sense is this unreasonable?” King Wen subsequently attacked Xu, defeating it. King Yan of Xu, just before he died, lamented, “Being over-reliant on civil virtue, I did not understand martial preparations! Being fond of implementing the Way of benevolence and righteousness, I knew nothing of the heart that would deceive men—thus I have come to this end!” Is it not evident that those who ruled in antiquity indeed made preparations? 7

This story is paralleled or mentioned briefly in numerous early texts and was apparently well known. This particular rendering, however, shows signs of careful reworking. The earliest version of the story in our possession is found in the Hanfeizi, dating to the last half of the third century BCE. The story as told there is structurally close to Liu Xiang’s version (which may still predate Han Fei’s version, since Liu was clearly drawing on many Warring States writings when he compiled his work), but the differences are worth noting, because they point us to other pertinent materials. The passage in the Hanfeizi reads as follows: In antiquity, King Wen resided between Feng and Hao, with no more than one hundred square li of territory. Yet, practicing benevolence and righteousness, he embraced the Western Rong and consequently ruled as king of all under Heaven.



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Now King Yan of Xu resided east of the Han River, holding five hundred square li of territory. He, too, practiced benevolence and righteousness, and thirty-six states turned their lands over to him and submitted to his rule. King Wen of Jing [Chu] feared that this would harm his position, so he raised up troops and attacked Xu. Consequently, he extinguished Xu.8

The underlying features of this narrative that appear common to all early renderings are that King Yan of Xu ruled as a benevolent and righteous man, and yet was defeated. Han Fei juxtaposes King Yan with the Zhou founder, King Wen; his reason for citing this story is precisely to illustrate his conviction that government policies must change with the times. Indeed, setting aside the Shuoyuan version of this story, it is clear that all early references to this narrative intend basically this same point. One of several mentions of the story in the second-century BCE work Huainanzi makes this explicit: “King Yan of Xu understood benevolence and righteousness, yet did not understand the times.” 9 Looking back at Liu Xiang’s telling of the story, we find that the language there is carefully crafted to make a different point: that the civil and martial are equally important. It is likely that the use of the expression “the heart that would deceive others” is a conscious allusion to the genre of military texts. In his third-century BCE essay on warfare, Xunzi makes the association between the militarists and deceptive techniques central to his arguments.10 While Xunzi certainly has his own polemical point to make in this essay, none of the military texts reject this characterization, and the Sunzi bingfa is notorious for embracing the art of deception.11 Liu Xiang, or the author of the passage that he employs here, is consciously but subtly acknowledging the importance of this genre of military texts. Another careful choice of wording points us to a canonical tradition that supports the notion that the civil and martial must be equally regarded. In the dying words of King Yan of Xu, which clearly provide the moral of the story in this rendering, we find not simply the wenwu pair, but the more elaborate wende and wubei, civil virtue and martial preparations. If King Yan’s dying words did not drive home the author’s particular focus in telling this story, our author recaps the story by asking rhetorically, “Is it not evident that those who ruled in antiq-

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uity indeed made preparations?” Among educated readers in the early Han, this story cannot but have brought to mind a passage from the Guliang commentary to the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) that also links the civil and the martial, employs the specific phrase wubei (martial preparations), and also addresses broadly the link between humane government and the need for military capabilities. The setting is a meeting between the rulers of Qi and Lu where an oath is to be sworn between the two sovereigns. It is one of a handful of places in the Chunqiu chronicle and its commentaries where Confucius is recorded as acting in an official position in service to the state, so it was sure to have been immediately familiar to literati in the third and second centuries BCE. Confucius has convinced the Duke of Lu to arrive at the meeting with Qi accompanied by a full military entourage, and this foresight prevents Qi from pressing Lu into undesirable terms. The passage is a celebration of Confucius’ political and ritual savvy, and it ends with the following comment: “whenever conducting civil affairs, there must also be martial preparations.” 12 The use of this specific vocabulary in the “Zhiwu” chapter of the Shuoyuan, absent from all other tellings of the King Yan story, is likely to have been a conscious allusion to this story. It has been subtly reworked to turn our attention not only to the notion of the civil and martial as a pair, but also to an intellectual position on the wen-wu paradigm that has been integrated within the broader Confucian program. Liu Xiang of course identified himself as a Confucian and a scholar of the Chunqiu.13 That his work would contain an entire chapter devoted to an examination of military thought, interspersed with citations from canonical texts, should alert us to the possibility that not all “Confucian” thinkers were opposed to granting military considerations a place in their conceptions of government and philosophy. His chapter incorporates material from such military works as the Sima fa and the Taigong bingfa, stories about the famous general Wu Qi, material from and discussions of the Chunqiu, citations from the Changes, and numerous stories revolving around Confucius.14 The underlying vision the chapter seeks to articulate accepts military actions as a legitimate part of the state apparatus but argues against naked aggression and emphasizes the need for a ruler and his people to find strength in unity:



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The Chunqiu records the survival or destruction of states in order to demonstrate to future generations that although a state possesses vast territory and a large populace, strong armor and sharp weapons, and awesome, fierce generals, if officers and troops do not feel an intimate bond with the ruler, they cannot be employed to achieve victory in battle or to attain merit.15

Xunzi’s argument with the Lord of Linwu, which is presented as a Confucian rejection of the militarists’ project, makes the same point. Xunzi, however, has set up a straw man in the Lord of Linwu. Xunzi’s insistence on strength from unity is a fundamental premise with which the authors of military texts are in full agreement. Notice how the language of Xunzi’s opening statements about military affairs matches closely the passage above, employing exactly the same phrase, qinfu, “to become intimate or treat as family, and adhere to,” and thus “feel an intimate bond with”: The ancient Way [of military arts] that I have heard of is this: the root of employing the military to lay siege and do battle lies in uniting the people. If the bow and arrows are not properly strung and prepared, then even the famous archer Yi would be unable to hit the target; if the six horses in a team do not work together well, then even the famous charioteer Zaofu could not drive them far distances. If the officers and commoners do not feel an intimate bond with the ruler, then not even the dynastic founders King Tang and King Wu would have been assured of victory. Thus, those who excel at bonding with the people are precisely those who excel at employing the military. Therefore, the essence of military arts lies in excelling at bonding with the people, and nothing more.16

Xunzi’s opponent in this debate is made to disagree and even to cite the most famous militarists, Sunzi and Wu Qi, in support of his position, but Xunzi is playing a trick on his readers. None of the standard military treatises would disagree with the emphasis on strength born from unity. The opening chapter of the Sunzi bingfa lists five crucial rubrics under which a state’s military capacity must be evaluated. The very first is dao, the Way, which is immediately defined as

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that which “causes the people and their superiors to be of unified intentions.” 17 Other Han texts support the idea that there was at least one strain within the Confucian tradition that embraced the notion of the wen-wu conceptual pair. A brief chapter in the Da Dai Liji titled “Yongbing” (Employing the Military) portrays a series of exchanges between Confucius and Duke Ai of Lu on the role of warfare in history. The chapter begins as Duke Ai ponders the origins of war, a question that we will find in the next chapter captured the attention of thinkers in the third and second centuries BCE: The Duke asked, “Were the origins of employing the military inauspicious?” Confucius replied, “Why would it be inauspicious? The sages employed the military in order to suppress cruelty and stop violence in the realm. Now coming to later ages, rapacious men employ the military to cut down the hundred surnames and imperil the state.” 18

Confucius goes on to discuss the role of warfare in ending chaos and initiating eras of sagely rule. This notion of the legitimate, morally responsible use of war is important to our study, and will be addressed in chapter 2 below. It is inseparable from the broader Confucian position on the military and plays a part in virtually all discussions of the wen-wu pair in early literature. Attention to this important conception of morally acceptable forms of violence, often conceived of as punishment, makes the following passages from texts in the Confucian tradition more comprehensible. In the Kongzi jiayu, undeniably a Confucian text, we find an anecdote relating to Ran You, a disciple of Confucius’ in the service of a powerful ministerial line in Lu: Jisun [Ji Kangzi] asked Ran You, “As to your knowledge of battle, have you studied it?” . . . Ran You replied, “I have.” Jisun asked, “As a follower of Confucius, how is it that you studied battle?” Ran You answered, “It is precisely that I studied it with Confucius.



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Confucius is a great sage; there is nothing outside of his ken. His knowledge embraces the civil and the martial, their combined application, and their mutual interpenetration. But I have only just heard about his battle techniques, and have not yet learned them in any detail.” 19

We cannot be certain of the date of this passage. Like Liu Xiang’s Shuoyuan, the Kongzi jiayu clearly combined earlier materials with contemporary passages; it may be as late as the second century CE, although there is no reason to assume so.20 In any case, that Ran You had to correct the notion that Confucius’ teachings did not include military matters suggests that whenever it was composed, this would have been a fairly common assumption. Clearly the Mencius and the Xunzi have been read at times to support the notion that early Confucianism was a pacifist movement that allowed no role for military considerations. Read in isolation from the broader theme of the “Zhiwu” chapter, certain passages included by Liu Xiang can be interpreted in such a manner: Duke Ai of Lu asked Zhongni [Confucius], “I wish to protect the small and lay siege to the big—what is the Way of doing this like?” Zhongni answered, “If your court possesses proper ritual, then those above and those below will be close, and the masses of people will all be your herds—who will my Lord lay siege to? Yet if you lack proper ritual, then those above and those below will not be close, and the masses of people will all be your enemy—who will my Lord protect?” 21

Read out of context, Confucius surely appears to be a pacifist here. But the “Zhiwu” chapter as a whole presents a far more sophisticated grasp of historical circumstances than this idealistic passage suggests. Confucius lived in a time of great social chaos and violent turmoil. What Confucians and many thinkers of other persuasions alike emphasized was not the need to do away with military affairs altogether, but rather the need to anchor military actions into the broader civilizing project of the state.22 Another passage from the same chapter states the matter concisely: As for the sage’s rule over all under Heaven, he places civil virtue first and martial force last. In any case of raising up the martial, it is because

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of those who do not submit. Only if civil transformation does not change them is deadly punishment applied. When those below are obtuse and cannot be influenced for the better, and pure virtue cannot transform them, only then is martial force applied to them.23

This understanding of the relationship between the civil and martial arms of the state encompasses not just military actions but punishment in general, as military campaigns are portrayed always as a form of punitive campaign. In this way, the sage Confucius is found to have participated in both civil and martial affairs; there is a well-known story that portrays Confucius as briefly holding the post of commander of punishments in Lu. His first official action in this capacity was to apply the death penalty to the powerful but corrupt Shaozheng Luan.24 Again, the wen-wu conceptual pair was a useful ideological construct precisely because it helped dissolve the tensions and contradictions among seemingly disparate state functions. Thus a passage from the “Zhiwu” chapter lists Confucius’ use of the death penalty alongside the Duke of Zhou’s military campaign to suppress the rebellion led by disaffected members of his family in collusion with the remnants of the Shang house, and the legendary military campaigns of Yao and Shun against rebels and barbarian enemies.25 The transformative power of the moral government (transformation of this sort always implies moral transformation) is regularly linked to the state’s dual ability to reward and punish, to instill awe and fear while also bestowing benevolence. Elsewhere in the Shuoyuan we find the following two discussions of transformation and punishment that closely parallel the discussions of the civil and martial in the “Zhiwu” chapter discussed above: There are three varieties of government. The government of the king transforms the people. The government of the hegemon awes the people. The government of the powerful coerces the people. Each of these three varieties of government has its strengths, but transformation is the most noble. Now when you attempt to transform them but they do not change, try to awe them. When you attempt to awe them but they do not change, try to coerce them. When you attempt to coerce them but they do not change, punish them. As for resorting to punishment,



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it is not something that those who rule as kings take as noble. For this reason, sage kings place transformation by virtue first, and place the use of punishments last.26 In ruling a state there are two keys—these are punishment and virtue. A king gives precedence to virtue and makes sparse his punishments. A hegemon employs punishment and virtue side by side. Powerful states give priority to their punishments and place virtue last. It is punishment and virtue that give rise to transformation. . . . Thus, the most exalted form of virtuous transformation earns reward, while the most extreme form of punishment extends to execution. As for imposing the death penalty or granting rewards, this is how the worthy and unworthy are distinguished and those with and without merit are made manifest. For this reason, execution and reward cannot be employed erroneously. If they were to be used erroneously, then good and bad would be thrown into chaos. Should you fail to reward those with merit, then good people would find no encouragement. Should you fail to execute the guilty, then evildoers would have nothing to fear. To have good people finding no encouragement and evildoers fearing nothing, and yet to be capable of implementing moral transformation throughout the realm—I have never heard of such a thing.27

The position described here is probably a synthesis of early Confucian moral and ritual thinking dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries BCE with political philosophies that emerged out of the new demands placed on statecraft and ideology as the outlines of empire emerged in the third century BCE.28 Examining newly discovered manuscripts dating from the late fourth century BCE, Scott Cook has identified a debate over the use of coercion in early texts associated with the Confucian tradition.29 In a sense, the moralists ultimately won this debate, since their moral vocabulary became an integral part of the way empire was imagined and described. In apparent contradiction to the descriptions of moral transformation backed by the threat of punitive force presented above, there is a decidedly Confucian position also readily found in early texts that insists that moral transformation be engendered through ritual and music. Chapter 19 of the Shuoyuan, “Xiuwen” (Cultivating Refinement), opens with a passage that includes the following assertion: 30

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Ritual and music are the best means of carrying out moral transformation. Confucius said, “For altering customs and changing practices, nothing is as good as music. For giving stability to those above and ruling the people, nothing is better than ritual.” For this reason, the sage king cultivates ritual patterns, establishes local schools, and lays out the bells and drums. . . . These are the means of carrying out virtuous transformation.31

This position might imply a rejection of force, but the Shuoyuan couches this passage between a well-known citation from the Analects, “When the Way is prevalent in the realm, then rituals, music, and punitive campaigns issue from the Son of Heaven,” and an elaborate discussion of the “rituals of the left and right,” which came to designate rituals of yang versus yin, civil versus martial rites, and court versus mourning ceremonies.32 In other words, ritual and music are here conceived as comprising all state activities, including military actions, which are always portrayed as punitive campaigns. One of the clearest descriptions of these correspondences between pairs is found in another Western Han text, the “Banfa jie” chapter of the Guanzi: “Banfa” means to take the positions of Heaven and earth as the model and emulate the movements of the four seasons in order to govern the realm. The movements of the four seasons have their hot and cold, and the sage takes them as models. Therefore, he has the civil and the martial. The positions of Heaven and earth have their front and back, left and right, and the sage takes them as models, thereby establishing the warp and guideline [of his government]. Spring gives birth on the left, and fall brings death on the right; summer brings growth in the front, and winter conceals behind. Matters of birth and growing are wen, while matters of collecting and concealing are wu. For this reason, civil affairs take position on the left and martial affairs take position on the right, and the sage takes them as his model.33

This passage leads us away from the strict Confucian tradition and toward another important conception of empire that gained prominence from the third through first centuries BCE, one that sought to ground all state activity in patterns found in the natural order.34 As we move on to



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consider other sources, we will find that whatever earlier debates might have taken place about the application of the state’s force versus non­ coercive forms of government, by early in the Han the two positions had in effect been integrated into one unitary vision of the state that can be characterized by a series of conceptual dichotomies and the movement between them. The Wen-Wu Pair in Other Late Classical Sources The appeal of such a vision meant that even textual and intellectual traditions that developed in opposition to or at least largely separately from the moral vocabulary of Confucianism still embraced the notion of a single, all-encompassing empire characterized by the interplay of the civil and the martial spheres. The collection of manuscripts unearthed from Mawangdui that scholars have largely come to refer to as the Four Canons of the Yellow Emperor seems to represent a distinct philosophical position whose political vision is rooted not in Confucian moral doctrines but rather in conceptions of the natural world as morally normative, much as we saw in the passage from the Guanzi above.35 One of these texts, the Jingfa, is of special interest to our inquiry, for we find the wen-wu pair used prominently.36 Most scholars date the various texts in this find to the third century BCE; the tomb was interred early in the second century BCE. The first mention of the wen-wu pair matches closely the Guanzi passage on the homology between the cycle of life and death found in the changing of the seasons and the state’s implementation of civil or martial policies: Heaven has its seasons for taking and giving life; the state has its policies for taking and giving life. If you rely on Heaven’s power to give life in order to nurture life, we call this civil. If you rely on Heaven’s power to take life in order to attack and kill, we call this martial. If you can implement the civil and martial together, then the entire realm will follow you.37

As we have already seen from other contemporary sources, the coercive apparatus of the state is conceived of in comprehensive terms; no distinction is made between military campaigns and criminal punishments. Within the naturalistic rubric, no appeals to morality are

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required. The correspondence with natural processes, here the lifeand-death cycle of the progression of the seasons, provides the justification for the state’s punitive actions.38 As long as actions are in accord with the patterns of nature, they are considered proper. A later section of the manuscript describes this as forming a trinity with Heaven and earth: When rulers and their officers hold their appropriate positions, we call this tranquility. When worthy and unworthy are kept in their appropriate places, we call this upright. When “putting into motion” and “tranquility” form a trinity with Heaven and earth, we call this civil. When punishments and prohibitions are implemented in the appropriate season, we call this martial. When there is tranquility there is peace; when there is uprightness there is order. With the civil comes enlightenment, with the martial comes strength. When there is peace, then you can attain the root; when there is order, then you can attain people. When there is enlightenment, then you can attain Heaven; when there is strength, then your awesomeness will be promulgated. You will form a trinity with Heaven and earth, and be at harmony with the hearts of the people. When the civil and martial are established together, we call this the highest unity.39

The naturalist vision of the wen-wu pair was influential even though it could stand alone, apart from the almost ubiquitous Confucian moral vocabulary discussed above. We find its imprint not only in the Guanzi and the Mawangdui manuscripts, but in the Huainanzi as well, a synthetic work compiled in the second century BCE that emphasized the need to align government and other human activities with natural patterns and cycles. Timing becomes a crucial component in rendering all state activities legitimate, since the seasons are the ultimate model of the cycles underlying the order of the cosmos. Timely application of the two components of the civil and martial pair becomes a cycle in itself, a notion that has a powerful effect on the way warfare comes to be seen operating in history (a topic we will return to in the next chapter). The Huainanzi’s “Fanlun” chapter describes how departure from the timely use of the civil and martial aspects of the state has contributed to a misuse of both modes of government action:



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In any given age, the civil and martial succeed one another like the “hen” and “rooster”: each has its season for use.40 Yet those who employ the martial nowadays in doing so negate the civil, while those who employ the civil in doing so negate the martial. The civil and martial become mutually negating, and no one knows the appropriate season for employing them.41

The Huainanzi includes a separate long essay devoted to a discussion of military affairs, but we will turn to it in the next chapter. It is clear that early in the Han dynasty, the wen-wu pair provided thinkers of various persuasions a way of navigating problematic issues related to the state’s use of coercive power. In part, this must be related to the increasing prominence in intellectual and political discourse at this time of systematic cosmological theories. These theories seem always to be characterized by the centrality of numerology, and binary pairs are inevitably one of the most fundamental conceptual building blocks of early Chinese numerological systems. The yin-yang pair is by far the best known of these, and its ubiquity probably encouraged the folding in of other conceptual pairs to systems that were intended to be all-encompassing.42 The presence of additional felicitous pairs, themselves suggestive of binary comprehensiveness, must have been seen as confirming the entire project. We might, then, conjecture that the wen-wu pair was largely a Han dynasty invention, produced in emulation of other such semantically charged pairs. Several factors demonstrate that this is not the case and that the pair has a long history prior to the Han dynasty. The pair of terms itself is ancient, appearing in posthumous names from the late Shang and early Zhou and occasionally in later inscriptional materials. Nevertheless, in the Warring States period patterns of occurrence in philosophical and technical discourses where the question of the proper balance between the state’s civil administration and military capacity was at issue reveal how the term took on new significance over time. Articulations of the theoretical sophistication of the pair, of the interplay between these two spheres of state activity and their relationship to other philosophical systems, occurred first in military texts of the fourth and third centuries BCE, and only then began to appear in other political and philosophical texts, where they eventually took on

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new urgency in the cosmological discourse that flourished under the newly established empires of the Qin and Han. The earliest text we have that employs systematic correlative cosmology as an umbrella under which to combine various intellectual traditions from the classical era into a politically useful synthesis is the Lüshi chunqiu, which was compiled in the middle of the third century BCE under the auspices of Lü Buwei, prime minister in the state of Qin just prior to the establishment of the Qin empire. We find the wen-wu pair used occasionally in this text, but not with the same theoretical sophistication as seen in the Mawangdui manuscripts or other Han sources. We will examine passages from this text in the next chapter, but a single example here will demonstrate that the pair is used not to suggest the complete range of state functions or any deeper correspondences with the natural order, but rather to juxtapose policies that range over diplomatic and military options. Ning Yue, a late fourth-century BCE thinker from the state of Zhao apparently held in high regard during the third century BCE, hears of a recent victory against the state of Qi, where Zhao was able to pile up thirty thousand enemy corpses to make a ceremonial mound. Ning Yue comments that it would have been better to return them to Qi as part of an elaborate plan to exhaust the resources of Qi and turn the populace against its rulers. This sort of tactic is referred to in early texts as a form of wenfa, “civil attack,” that is, winning a battle through policies, not warfare.43 At the end of the story, Ning Yue’s approach is summed up: Ning Yue can be said to understand how to employ the civil and martial. Using the martial, victory is won through force. Using the civil, victory is won through virtue. If you can win victory through both the civil and the martial, what enemy will not submit to you? 44

As we will see below, this usage of the wen-wu pair is common in Warring States military texts and seems not to imply any correlative or cosmological significance. It is not surprising that late Warring States texts later assigned to the Legalist tradition employed the wen-wu pair, since many characteristic features associated with Legalism can be easily subsumed under the binary rubric they provide; emphasis on agriculture and the military,



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or on rewards and punishments, are simply particular examples of the civil-martial divide. The Hanfeizi states: Indeed, as the ten-thousand phenomena must have [their cycles of] flourishing and decline, and the ten-thousand affairs must have [their cycles of] expansion and contraction, so the state must have [its cycles of] the civil and the martial, and the administration of offices must have [its cycles of] reward and punishment.45

The other great classic of early statecraft, The Book of Lord Shang, states plainly: As for rewards, they are part of the civil. As for punishments, they are part of the martial. The civil and martial are what bind together the law.46

To understand how the paired term wen-wu made its way from a mundane abstraction used in third-century texts to indicate the broad range of tactics, policies, and strategies a state might employ in interstate diplomacy and warfare, to a cosmologically charged binary term encompassing both actions of the state and patterns in nature, we must turn to the genre of military texts. The Wen-Wu Pair in Early Military Texts Military texts from the Warring States era are of course the most obvious place to look for careful articulations of the relationship between the civil and martial spheres of government. This genre of writing flourished in the classical period, and we still have a rich literary corpus of such works extant today, including such well-known texts as the Sunzi bingfa (Sunzi’s Art of War) and the Wuzi. A careful examination of the entire literary record of the classical period shows that essays or sections of many other works also addressed military issues: bingfa, “the art of war,” was among the most influential and popular topics of intellectual engagement; bingshu, “military treatises,” were among the most prolific and widely circulated of early texts.47 Highly specialized technical knowledge about weaponry, terrain, battle formations, training methods, supplies, and the like must have become a prized commodity in the war-

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torn multistate world of the Eastern Zhou. We know little about the reproduction and transmission of such expertise, but there must have been fairly sophisticated institutions within the larger states charged with training military leaders and all the technical specialists they would have needed to remain competitive in the violent political climate of the day. The military texts passed down to us today must in part reflect the textual legacy of such institutions. However, there is good reason to believe that the genre as we now know it is actually removed from the original social and institutional context that must have given rise to specialized military knowledge. We can surmise this in part because the theoretical sophistication of the genre and its literary structures share so much in common with the other philosophical texts of the Warring States period. There must have been a fairly long history of formation and development of military expertise that preceded its transformation into texts the likes of which we have now. A great deal of that history must have unfolded outside the realm of literature, passed on in oral and practical traditions just as any highly specialized technical knowledge is. The written record we do have provides hints of this longer, more technical, and probably less philosophical history. The Sima fa, a military text originating in the state of Qi in the fourth century BCE, may preserve some of the oldest materials among such works.48 Accounts of the origins of the text tell us that King Wei of Qi, a member of the powerful Tian family that had slowly usurped the ruling power of the ducal house of Qi during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, ordered the collection of older military traditions associated with the office of Sima (commandant of the horses, an ancient military title), traditions and expertise that were apparently considered particularly strong in Qi and worthy of preservation.49 If true, this compilation was likely a bold political act. Qi’s ruling ducal line was descended from the Grand Duke, Taigong Wang, the celebrated general who helped the Zhou defeat the Shang and found the Zhou dynasty in the eleventh century BCE. As the Tian lineage assumed control of the state of Qi, it took the lead in manipulating popular sentiment in an effort to legitimate their rise to power.50 The creation of a textual tradition associated with the state of Qi yet unrelated to the figure of the Taigong would have been a daring statement about the relevance of the original ducal line to the heritage and



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power of Qi. Among our extant military texts from the early period, the Sima fa is unique: all other texts are named for and organized around the figure of a famous, charismatic military leader. This structural feature suggests that such works were compiled or written in part in response to the expectations and habits of the philosophical texts of the period, whereas the compilation of the Sima fa may have been guided by different concerns—lending authority not to a line of teachers and disciples that traced itself back to a historical figure, but to the ruling house that sponsored the work.51 If we take the story of the Sima fa’s origins seriously, we must then imagine a set of institutions, knowledge, and certainly texts of some sort to which its compilers turned. In fact, this must have been roughly how each of the early military treatises were composed—by drawing on existing bodies of knowledge and perhaps even other sorts of written texts. Some of the military texts seem to contain citations of older, probably anonymous military treatises.52 Part II of this study will examine a handful of early texts that help bring this broader body of early Chinese military expertise into view.53 For now, it is sufficient to keep in mind the likelihood that the military texts passed down to us over the centuries were, from their first appearance, already abstracted from actual practical and technical traditions. Furthermore, we have plenty of evidence to show that most of the military texts we now have existed during the Warring States and Han periods in a form quite different from what we might expect. The two best kinds of evidence come from testimony of what the texts looked like in those two times. First, there is Ban Gu’s testimony in the “Yiwen zhi,” the bibliographic treatise of the Hanshu, from the first century CE. We find it difficult to match our extant texts, as they were passed down to us from the Song dynasty (for example in the Wujing qishu edition of the texts), with the titles and descriptions provided in the “Yiwen zhi.” The Sima fa, known to us now as a text in five chapters, appears to be listed under the rubric of ritual texts, in a stunning 155 chapters.54 Texts associated with the Taigong are listed under the Taoist category and number 237 chapters in three different varieties.55 Today, a handful of texts credited to the Taigong are extant, but it is primarily the Taigong liutao that seems to be composed of material from the very late Warring States and very early Han. Our extant texts have clearly been edited down from much larger collections of material.

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The same picture of early military textual traditions is conveyed by the manuscript finds from Yinqueshan, in Shandong province, dating from the early second century BCE. The tomb contained a copy of the Sunzi bingfa that matches closely the transmitted text, but it was accompanied by a second text called the Sun Bin bingfa, previously unknown to us except through early mentions and citations. Additionally, there was a large corpus of other manuscript material related to the two Sun family texts. The “Yiwen zhi” mentions both texts, the Sunzi bingfa in eightytwo chapters and the Sun Bin bingfa in eighty-nine, with four scrolls of illustrations.56 Once again our transmitted version of the Sunzi text has gone through a process of drastic editorial reconfiguration, and the tomb texts suggest that even prior to the Han these texts were in a state of constant change.57 If we could see all the differences between the Sunzi bingfa in the Han imperial library, in eighty-two chapters, and our version, which totals only thirteen chapters, we might understand something more about how literary conventions and book culture altered the military texts over time. At the moment they were first written down in the Warring States era, already they were being extracted from their practical contexts. No doubt much was lost and perhaps much was gained, in the way of theoretical sophistication, in that transition. Then over time, as they were reduced from large, living textual traditions to single, fixed books—a centuries-long process–there was sure to be another great rift between the texts as they emerged in basically the forms that we see today and the rich world of thought and practice of which they were originally relics. All of this is to say that the military texts we have may not always be reliable sources for the full development of early military thought. Nevertheless, they remain important sources, and we must not neglect them even as we are cautious about the conclusions we can draw from them. Examining the wen-wu pair in early military texts, we find that the use of the terms parallels what is found among late Warring States philosophical literature. There is little evidence here of any concerted attempt to use the wen-wu rubric to organize larger bodies of knowledge or grand correspondences among other binary pairs. Only the Taigong liutao, which is likely to have been compiled late in the development of the genre (probably the third or even second century BCE), uses the pair as a set of categories to lend structure to binary modes of



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activity or knowledge. This aspect of the text is primarily evident to us only through the organization of chapters. The title, liutao, means “six bow cases,” and clearly is intended as a metaphor, since the text is then divided into six large chapters, each of which then includes several subchapters. The first is called the wentao, or “civil bow case”; the second is called the wutao, or “martial bow case” (the remaining four chapters are named for the dragon, tiger, leopard, and dog). Additionally, we find both the words wen and wu used individually in subchapter titles in ways that clearly invoke the wen-wu pair.58 We cannot be sure how old the title and chapter divisions of the text are, since the “Yiwen zhi,” as we have seen, does not name individual texts associated with the Taigong, only broad categories, and it certainly tells us nothing about organization or chapter divisions. Within the text itself, we find the terms used only a few times. The most interesting is this brief exchange between King Wu and the Taigong: King Wu asked the Taigong, “What about using the army to form the ‘Heavenly Battle Formation,’ the ‘Earthly Battle Formation,’ and the ‘Human Battle Formation?’” The Taigong said, “The sun and moon, the planets and stars, and the Big Dipper: now one to your left, now one to your right, now facing one, now turning your back to one—this is what we refer to as the ‘Heavenly Battle Formation.’ Hills and mounds, bodies of water and springs: these also present advantages of front and back, left and right—this is what we refer to as the ‘Earthly Battle Formation.’ Now employing chariots, now employing cavalry, now using the civil, now using the martial—this is what we refer to as the ‘Human Battle Formation.’” 59

This laconic passage actually describes three important ways that military arts were conceived of in early China. The first describes a category of military knowledge that was most directly related to divinatory arts, in which the positioning of the army in relation to various celestial phenomena was apparently considered crucial.60 The second is concerned with terrain and parallels the interest of the first category in advantageous positioning. The third, then, covers all aspects of what we might refer to as “human resource management,” that is, training and deployment, psychological approaches to warfare, diplomatic policies,

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and the like. Here, the wen-wu pair is used in a broad sense to reveal the relationship between actual warfare and other aspects of state administration and policy.61 The same sense is found in one other passage of the text.62 Other early military texts emphasize the complementary nature of the civil and martial. The opening line of chapter 4 of the Wuzi, from the fourth century BCE, states: Wuzi said, “The one who encompasses the civil and the martial is the general of the army.” 63

The Weiliaozi, a text that was likely written in the third century BCE, echoes this emphasis on the civil and martial as two halves of an integrated whole: In the military, take the martial as the trunk and the civil as the root; the martial as the outer face and the civil as the inner content. One who can examine into these two can understand victory and defeat [before engaging in battle]. The civil is what we use to see advantage and harm, and distinguish stability from danger. The martial is what we use to oppose strong enemies, and strengthen siege and defense.64

The passage emphasizes the inseparable nature of the two concepts, which is echoed in the Sima fa as well; this passage may have been the inspiration for the Weiliaozi’s analogy to inner and outer: Anciently, the demeanor appropriate for state affairs was not allowed into the army, and the demeanor appropriate for the army was not allowed into the state. If the military demeanor were to enter into the state, then the people’s virtue would be cast out. If stately demeanor were to enter into the military, then the people’s virtue would be weakened. Therefore, within the state, language is refined (wen) and discourse is warm. Within the court, one is decorous in order to yield, and cultivates oneself in order to serve others. If not summoned, one does not approach, and if not asked, one does not speak. It is difficult to advance but easy to retreat. Within the army, one stands as an equal, and behaves decisively and with resolve. Soldiers wearing armor do not bow, and those mounted in chariots do not make obeisance. When on the



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city walls, one does not rush about, and in the midst of danger one does not pay heed to seniority. Thus, rituals and laws are like outer surface and inner content; the civil and martial are like left and right.65

This last passage emphasizes the differences between the civil and martial realms but closes by drawing our attention back to their integration into a single whole. We have seen that military texts from the Warring States period employ the terms wen and wu in this way, regularly underscoring the complementary relationship between the two spheres. Our examination of Warring States military and philosophical texts taken together suggests that the integration of this binary pair into broader correlative or cosmological frameworks was a late development, coming only at the end of the classical era, probably in the closing decades of the third century BCE. Unfortunately, we have yet to discover much in these texts that sheds light on how Warring States thinkers, statesmen, or generals might have understood the dynamics of how the wen-wu pair actually functioned. In this regard, the texts still appear abstract at this point in our investigation. There are two more important elements of the development of the wen-wu pair that must be explored before we can arrive at a more detailed understanding of what these terms meant to early military thinkers. In the following chapter we will take up the ancient notion of righteous warfare, which came to play a crucial role in the way the civil and martial were understood to function in concert with one another. Finally, we will turn to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, which must clearly be understood in relation to the genre of military texts, but which provide us a detailed look at the interplay of the civil and martial realms in the creation and expansion of the new, centralized states of the classical era.

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Righteous Warfare Laying Siege to an Enemy in Disorder

The origins of the military lay in the distant past. Yao did battle on the banks of the Dan River, in order to bring the southern Man tribes to submission. Shun drove away the Miao people and changed their customs. Yu laid siege to Caowei and brought the stubborn ruler of Hu to submission, in order to implement his teachings. From the time of the three kings and earlier, certainly all rulers employed the military. In times of chaos they employed it, and in times of order they ceased. To attack a state that is already well-ordered—there is nothing more inauspicious than this. To fail to punish a chaotic state—there is nothing more harmful to the people than this. These are the causes of the transformation of order and chaos, and that from which the civil and martial arise. The civil is the substantiation of love; the martial is the manifestation of hate. When love and hate comply with righteousness, and the civil and martial have constancy—this is the sage’s beginning. It can be compared to the progression of heat and cold: the season arrives and all affairs are born in response to it. The sage cannot cause the seasons, but he can make affairs suit the season. One whose affairs suit the season will have great achievements.1

Righteous War In our examination of early conceptions of the civil and martial spheres of state activity, we have seen that by late in the third century BCE, roughly coinciding with the establishment of unified empire, some thinkers imagined bringing the human, political order into harmony with the natural order, taking the patterns of growth and decline appar40



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ent in the progression of the seasons as the model for granting rewards or inflicting punishments. In this framework, warfare was seen as homologous with punitive measures taken against criminals, differing only in scale. As we will see, the two kinds of actions were sometimes characterized as “internal” and “external.” Moreover, as we will examine in this chapter, underlying any justified use of the state’s coercive power, applied outside to enemy states or within the state to those who transgress the law, was a single notion—righteousness. Righteousness was probably already an ancient value in the classical era, and its association with war may well have been ancient also. By the classical era, righteousness was being invoked in diverse sources to justify and reproduce a broad range of social hierarchies and power relations. There is good evidence that at the semantic core of the term, yi, lay a basic distinction between in-group and out-group.2 In many uses of the term, we find that it implies not just a morally proper way to treat someone or to behave, but a morally proper code of conduct defined in terms of one’s position in a complex web of social relations. Yi is both situational and hierarchical.3 The history of this term has often been linked closely to the Confucian school, and it is true that it became one of the core values the promotion of which was directly associated with Warring States thinkers who took Confucius as their intellectual and spiritual leader. It may well be that the complementary term, ren (humaneness or benevolence), was substantially shaped by the uses Confucians put it to, but righteousness seems to have been an important term outside of Confucian discourse, and probably well before Confucius’ lifetime; much like de, virtue, it had deep roots in Zhou culture and a broad range of nuances in political and moral discourse.4 A full study of the history of this term in the preclassical and classical period is well beyond the scope of this work and would require a monograph of its own. As with attempts to understand so many other important values and philosophical terms in early China, such a study would be plagued by the difficulties our sources present; it is hard to see a clear picture of development prior to the fourth or fifth century BCE, at which point the Confucian influence on our sources has already begun. In any case, we will find the term used in the same range of sources discussed in chapter 1, from avowedly Confucian texts to military treatises, the Mawangdui manuscripts (sometimes associated with an as yet

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ill-defined Yellow Emperor or Huang-Lao tradition), and syncretic texts that clearly drew on values from competing intellectual traditions. If indeed the term is more ancient than any of these sources, then some of the assumptions and associations we find underlying notions of righteousness in classical sources may date to earlier centuries, while many may be innovations of the classical era. We will find that as the term righteousness is applied to warfare and the legitimate use of force, it always reinforces a vision of government concerned for the welfare of all its subjects. This vision is likely the result of specific social and historical forces that emerged in the Spring and Autumn period, as the growing scale of warfare forced the nobility to expand their political base by incorporating commoners into their armies in more integrated ways and in larger numbers than ever before. A complex set of social and historical changes was set in motion by this development, such as the weakening of older hierarchical privileges and a new emphasis on merit rather than noble birth.5 As the frequency and scale of warfare accelerated in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, only states that were able to better manage resources, muster larger, better-trained, and better-supplied armies, and develop new, more centralized forms of administration were able to survive. Soon, states were clamoring to settle and register larger numbers of commoners, incorporating them and the crucial resources they represented (such as grain, implements and weapons, and able-bodied soldiers) into their domains. In part because the nature of warfare itself meant that settled territories were subject to annexation, and in part because the climatic conditions and agricultural practices that dominated the commoners’ lives made them quite mobile, there emerged a sophisticated discourse centered on ways to settle farmers permanently and earn their longterm allegiance. One of the great challenges facing scholars who hope to better understand how the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods differed from the Warring States era, how the values of one were received by the next, is finding specific ways to trace continuity and innovation across the centuries in spite of the gaps and shortcomings of our sources. In the case of early Chinese conceptions of moral government, this change in the social scope of values such as righteousness, trustworthiness, or virtue may prove to be a crucial issue. Our sources from the Warring States



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almost universally project their vision of morally inspired, benevolent rulers, who place the welfare of even the lowliest subjects at the center of their political agenda, back into the distant past. The legitimacy of such sage rulers is portrayed as growing in part out of their desire not to simply rule, but to instruct and civilize. The civil and martial arms of the state are conceived of, then, as simply two means of achieving the same ultimate goal—the extension of the state’s morally transforming power ever outward. Thus the military accomplishments of the legendary sage heroes of high antiquity are made to exemplify this goal. In the passage from the Lüshi chunqiu that opens this chapter, which dates to the middle of the third century BCE, the exemplars of moral sagely rule are acknowledged to have risen to power through conquest, but such conquest always pitted them against archetypal enemies—immoral, rebellious, unconcerned with their own populace or the proper ritual and hierarchical norms that create and sustain good government.6 These celebrated cultural and historical precedents define the acceptable, even necessary, use of warfare. A central tenet of classical notions of righteous war is that war can only be waged against a state in disorder, a state in flagrant violation of accepted standards of political behavior. In fact, the passage makes it clear that a true sage ruler is actually morally bound to go to war with such a state. This sense of when it was acceptable or necessary to wage war and when it was not was rooted in at least two different ways of assessing warfare. First was the undeniably ancient and probably universal tendency to view war as a form of punishment for misbehavior. Early inscriptions on bronze vessels show that in the Western Zhou period warfare was already considered a way of “setting straight,” of correcting the errors of wayward tribes or other outsiders.7 Thus there may have been a great deal of continuity in this form of justification for war from the tenth or ninth century BCE down through the classical era. War was to be used against those enemies who posed not only a real threat to the security of the state, but against those whose values and institutions were perceived to pose a threat to or constitute a direct rejection of forms of authority and legitimacy embraced by the in-group. Second was a sophisticated set of factors to be weighed in determining if waging war was likely to be advantageous. Some of these factors lent themselves easily to rational, empirical assessment, as long as good

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“intelligence” was available: which army was better supplied, how well fortified was a walled city, and which army had the advantage of terrain. Other factors were more abstract and required consideration of cultural habits and beliefs: which army had higher morale, how were various spirits likely to influence the battle, and how might victory be perceived by other neighboring states? There was an ancient practice called miaosuan, “temple calculations,” that was used in the Warring States period as a rubric for carrying out such assessments. This practice will be addressed in more detail in chapter 4. For now, we need only note that these two ways of determining when and where war was sanctioned merged easily and produced both a code of conduct for the proper unfolding of warfare in moral terms and a rich body of expertise about waging war under diverse conditions to ensure maximum advantage. The marriage of these two ways of assessing warfare is exemplified by another passage from the same chapter of the Lüshi chunqiu cited above: As for the use of the military, it is used in the pursuit of advantage and used in the pursuit of righteousness. If you lay siege to the chaotic, then they will submit, and if they submit, then the siege will have been advantageous. If you lay siege to the chaotic, then you are righteous, and if you are righteous, then the attack will have been glorious. Glorious and at the same time advantageous—even a mediocre ruler would know to follow such a course of action, to say nothing of a worthy ruler. Whether it be ceding territory or [gifts of] precious vessels, [laying up] spears and swords, [offering] humble words, or bending and bowing—none of these are sufficient to thwart enemy attack. Only being well-ordered is sufficient to thwart enemy attack. If you are well-ordered, then those who seek advantage will not lay siege to you, and those who seek reputation will not attack you. Any time an opponent lays siege or attacks, if it is not to gain advantage then it must be to earn reputation [for righteousness]. If in fact a reputation cannot be earned, then even if a state is powerful and large, it will not lay siege to the enemy.8

This emphasis on a well-ordered state is prominent in classical discussions of war and will re-emerge throughout this study. It is of course linked to the notion that conquest should be a civilizing force. But we



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will also find that this and other aspects of the righteous war discourse usually encompassed realistic appraisals and goals. Some classical authors seem quite willing to speak frankly about the political implications of being known as a righteous opponent. Duke Huan of Qi, first of the acclaimed hegemons of the Spring and Autumn period (reigned ca. seventh century BCE), is lionized in the Guanzi for what looks to us like manipulating the cultural values of his day, cloaking his expansionist policies in the garb of the old, already politically dysfunctional ritual standards of the Zhou house. By claiming to uphold and enhance the imaginary power of the impotent Zhou king, Duke Huan earned a reputation for exercising his state’s military power for moral goals, bolstering the civilizing influence of Zhou culture. One particularly clear passage expresses it in terms we have seen already in other sources: As for the relationship between the other states of the realm and Duke Huan: The people of distant states gazed at him as they would their mother or father, while the people of neighboring states followed him like flowing water. Therefore, he moved through distant lands and mobilized their inhabitants, obtaining people in great numbers. Why was this? They cherished his civility yet feared his martiality. Therefore, he killed those who lacked the Way and made firm the Zhou house, and there were none in the realm who could resist him. In this way his martial affairs were established. He put the three types of armor to rest and brought the five kinds of weapons to a standstill, so that those coming to court to submit were willing to cross any river with no worries for their safety. In this way his civil affairs were victorious.9

This passage integrates the wen-wu pair with the notion of a morally sanctioned war (punishing those who “lack the Way”), doing so through the use of an important motif we find articulated in many early texts: the notion of the use of war to end war. To resolve this apparent contradiction, the juxtaposition of the civil and martial proved a particularly useful paradigm. Since the two were already conceived as an integrated system, like left and right or inside and outside, the interplay between the two dissolved the tension between a rhetoric of embracing peace and order and military actions that unleashed violence and destruction. Another section of the Lüshi chunqiu illustrates the relationship between

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waging war and establishing peace through reference to that archetypal battle, the Zhou conquest of the Shang: King Wu used the martial to obtain the realm, but used the civil to maintain it. He inverted spears and unstrung bows, demonstrating to all under Heaven the cessation of military action; this is how he preserved it.10

The passage seems to describe some sort of ritual display signifying the end of war and resumption of civil rule. In fact, this single moment in history became the model for marking the transition from the legitimate use of force to the inception of legitimate and benevolent rule. The Zhou Conquest of Shang: The War to End All Wars As noted in the opening pages of this study, the conquest of the Shang by Kings Wen and Wu in the eleventh century BCE was far and away the most celebrated moment in early Chinese history. For those who embraced Zhou civilization and by the tumultuous Eastern Zhou period longed for the epoch of peace and high culture they projected back on the reigns of the early Western Zhou kings, the victory over the Shang marked not just the greatest of military achievements, but the foundational act of the great civilizing project of the Zhou. That project was understood to be fundamentally a morally transformative one, ushering in a benevolent government that would first and foremost bring an end to cruelty and injustice. Thus the conquest itself marked not just a single transition from war to peace, but the archetypal shift between these two modes of state activity. Elsewhere in the Lüshi chunqiu, cited above, we find another passage describing this transition in far more imaginative and detailed terms: King Wu conquered the Yin [Shang] and entered the city of Yin. Before he dismounted his war chariot, he issued commands to enfeoff the descendants of the Yellow Emperor at Zhu, to enfeoff the emperor Yao’s descendants at Li, and to enfeoff the emperor Shun’s descendants at Chen. Then he dismounted his chariot and issued commands to enfeoff the descendants of the Xia rulers at Ji and to establish the descendants of Cheng Tang [founder of the Shang] at Song, in order to continue



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offerings at Sanglin. King Wu was filled with trepidation and, breathing a deep sigh, with tears streaming down his face, he ordered the Duke of Zhou to present the surviving elders of Yin, to ask them the reasons why Yin had perished. Moreover, he asked them what the masses would delight in, and what the commoners desired. The surviving elders of Yin responded, saying, “We desire to restore the policies of Pan Geng.” Thereupon, King Wu restored the policies of Pan Geng. He opened up the Great Bridge granary, and distributed the money from the Deer Terrace treasury, to demonstrate his generosity to the populace. He released those who had been seized and pardoned convicts, divided up resources and forgave debts, in order to relieve the impoverished and distressed. . . . Only after all of this did he return to the west, crossing the Yellow River to make his ritual announcement in the ancestral temple. Thereupon he pastured his war horses at Mount Hua, and his oxen at Peach Orchard—the horses never to be driven again, the oxen never to pull a load again. He consecrated the drums, flags, armor, and weapons, and stored them away in the armory, not to be used again in his lifetime. Such was the virtue of King Wu.11

The entire passage reads as if it were a complete inversion of how we might expect a conqueror to behave at the moment of victory, and is no doubt a carefully choreographed fantasy of what the ritual behavior of a true king should have looked like. Rather than engaging in a celebratory show of grandeur and ferocity, King Wu is portrayed as remorseful and solemn. Before even dismounting, he begins the act of restoring civil and spiritual order, ensuring that the spirits of the great sage rulers of antiquity will be remembered and sacrificed to by establishing states for their descendants. Next follows his interview with the surviving elders of the Yin people, who long for the policies of Pan Geng, ruler of the Shang in happier times (reigned thirteenth century BCE). This portrayal of the conqueror as liberator is a key element in conceptions of righteous war. The notion that the captured resources suddenly available to the conquering army ought to be used locally to enrich the subjects of the old regime seems fanciful, but we will see it again and again in early sources, including military texts that on the whole seem less interested in propagandizing than in examining the actual

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political reasons for such actions. Here, as elsewhere in the sources we will examine, the ultimate goal of military conquest is to incorporate the vanquished enemy’s territory and all its resources into one’s own state. Far more important than tasting the immediate spoils of victory is finding a way to make that victory last, so that the benefits of war will be felt for generations to come. We will return to this insight later in the chapter and again when we turn our attention to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. The passage closes with a series of symbolic acts paralleling the unstringing of bows and turning down of weapon tips, signifying the turn away from warfare and back to civil administration. We might suspect that this notion of waging war to end war was a recent innovation in the late third century BCE, one that accompanied the final stages of consolidation leading up to unification that reduced the number of real contenders to an increasingly small number of powerful states. In these final decades before 221 BCE, that only an act of grand military force would be sufficient to put an end to the centuries-long interstate conflict would have been a plausible notion. As it turns out, this conception of warfare long predated this moment in history. There is a famous passage in the Zuo zhuan, a text that at the very latest was compiled in the fourth century BCE and was certainly composed out of many diverse, earlier materials, that portrays events and speeches surrounding a major battle between the states of Jin and Chu. After a decisive victory, a leading general in the Chu army, Pan Dang, suggests to the Chu ruler, who is there in the field, that he have the corpses of the Jin soldiers collected and piled in a mound to announce Chu’s victory. In rejecting this gruesome proposal, the ruler of Chu gives a speech that again juxtaposes the celebration of the glories of war suggested by General Pan with solemn remorse over having taken so many lives and that alludes to King Wu’s exemplary behavior at the conquest of the Shang: Pan Dang said, “My lord, you should build a war monument and gather the corpses of the Jin soldiers to make an exhibition tumulus. I have heard that when you defeat an enemy, you must display it to your descendants, so that they will not forget your martial accomplishments.” The ruler of Chu said, “This is not something that you understand. In the written script, the stopping of weapons constitutes the



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martial.12 When King Wu conquered the Shang, he composed a hymn with the lines: ‘Now collecting shields and halberds, now encasing the bows and arrows. Seeking a graceful virtue to extend throughout our homeland, the king truly protects this.’ . . . Now in the case of the martial, it means prohibiting violence, collecting weapons, preserving the great, establishing merit, bringing peace to the people, uniting the masses, and making resources abundant. This is what causes our descendants not to forget our splendor. Today I have caused the bones of the soldiers of our two states to lay exposed on the battleground; this is violence. I have unsheathed our weapons in order to awe the feudal lords; this is not collecting weapons. Being violent and not collecting weapons—how can I hope to preserve the great? And despite our victory, the state of Jin still survives—how can this be called establishing merit? Moreover, I have gone against the desires of the people in many ways—how can they find peace in this? Lacking virtue and grappling for power with the feudal lords—how can this unite the masses? Deriving benefit by putting others in peril, and finding peace by putting others into chaos, and then taking this as one’s own glory—how can this make resources abundant? The martial has these seven virtues, yet I haven’t a single one of them. What am I to display to my descendants? At most we can fashion an altar to our former lords and make a ritual announcement of the victory, and that is all. My accomplishment is not truly martial. Anciently, enlightened kings would attack those who were not respectful, and capture the oppressive tyrants among them, piling them up in a mound and slaughtering them. This served as an exhibition tumulus, to give warning to those depraved and wicked ones. Yet today I can find no one to blame, as the people all gave their complete loyalty, dying to carry out their lords’ orders. How am I to make an exhibition tumulus? I will offer sacrifice to the River and make an altar to our former lords, to announce the completion of the battle. Then we will return.” 13

The author who fashioned this imaginary speech was sure to have been drawing on some older sentiments and traditions, so that even though we cannot accept it as an approximation of Spring and Autumn values concerning warfare, we can at least surmise that it reflects certain currents in the way the legitimate use of force might sometimes have been

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portrayed.14 That the Shi jing hymn cited in the speech prefigures some of these currents bolsters our confidence that these were indeed ancient ways of portraying and rationalizing war.15 The notion that the defining act of a martial ruler was the cessation of war became commonplace in classical Chinese culture. The prominent position that this conception of sanctioned warfare had in such canonical texts as the Shi jing and Zuo zhuan ensured that it would dominate learned discourse on the use of force throughout Chinese history. As noted previously, the story of the Zhou victory over the Shang was told and retold in many early sources. It was an endlessly productive topos, and while many common elements resurface in almost every detailed version, most also present us with interesting variations or completely new information. We return now to Liu Xiang’s “Zhiwu” chapter of the Shuoyuan, which includes a long passage that was probably originally included in the Taigong liutao, but which has dropped from the extant version of that text. We find here the argument, best known from the Mencius, that waging war on a tyrant is not a form of insubordination. We also revisit in considerable detail the motif of foregoing the spoils of war: King Wu was preparing to launch his attack against Zhoừ [name of the last ruler of the Shang dynasty], so he summoned Taigong Wang, asking him, “I desire to know that victory is assured without engaging in battle, to know that [a thing is] auspicious without divining, and to enlist those who are not my own subjects. Is there a Way to do this?” The Taigong said, “There is a Way. If my king can attain the hearts of the masses in order to plot against those who lack the Way, then without yet engaging in battle you can be sure of victory. If you use the worthy to attack the unworthy, then without divining you will know it is auspicious. When the enemy ruler harms his own people but I benefit them, then even though they are not my own subjects, they can be enlisted.” King Wu exclaimed, “Superb!” He then summoned the Duke of Zhou and asked him, “Throughout the realm all those who would plot against the Yin dynasty take its ruler to be the Son of Heaven, and take Zhou to be but one of the feudal lords. If a feudal lord lays siege to the Son of Heaven, is there a Way to defeat him?” The Duke of Zhou responded, “If the Yin ruler is truly the Son of



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Heaven, and the Zhou is truly but a feudal lord, then there is no Way to defeat him—what is there to lay siege to?” King Wu asked angrily, “Is there an explanation for your words?” The Duke of Zhou responded, “I have heard that one who lays siege to a state ruled by ritual is an outlaw, and one who lays siege to a righteous state is a tyrant; but one who has lost his own subjects is reduced to being a mere plebeian. It seems the one my king will lay siege to has lost his own subjects. In what way are you laying siege to the Son of Heaven?” King Wu exclaimed, “Superb!” Thereupon he mustered the masses and raised up generals, engaging the Yin in battle at the wilds of Mu. He inflicted a great defeat upon the Yin. When he ascended their halls, upon seeing jades he asked, “Whose jades are these?” The response came, “They are the jades of the feudal lords.” So King Wu seized them and returned them to the feudal lords. All in the realm heard of this and exclaimed, “King Wu is not miserly with resources!” When he entered their quarters, upon seeing women he asked, “Whose women are these?” The response came, “They are the women of the feudal lords.” So King Wu seized them and returned them to the feudal lords. All in the realm heard of this and exclaimed, “King Wu is not promiscuous!” Then he opened up the Great Bridge granary, and divided up the money from the Deer Terrace treasury, giving it to the officers and commoners. He retired his war chariots and did not mount them again, and dismantled his weaponry, never to use it again. He released his horses on Mount Hua and pastured his oxen at Peach Orchard, to show that he would not employ them again. All those in the realm who heard of this said that King Wu was implementing righteousness throughout the realm. Was it not grand? 16

The notion that the rise of the Zhou was marked by ritually prescribed, highly conscientious political and military acts is an important theme in understanding how the many narratives that grew up around the general setting and context of the conquest served the rhetorical and polemical purposes of Warring States writers. The very next passage in the “Zhiwu” chapter reiterates the motif of foregoing the spoils of war. This time the setting is the reign of King Wen, during the expansion and consolidation that set the stage for the conquest of Shang, but the passage actually introduces us to a series of prohibitions that may

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well have been implemented within real conquering armies during the Warring States period to help preserve the many resources that a newly annexed territory represented: King Wen was about to attack Chong. He first announced to the people of Chong: “I have heard that Lord Hu of Chong demeans his father and elder brothers, and is disrespectful to elders; that in deciding legal cases he is off the mark, and in apportioning resources he is not fair; that the hundred surnames exhaust their strength for him, yet cannot obtain food and clothes. I am about to come and punish him; it is strictly on behalf of his subjects.” Thereupon he attacked Chong, ordering his army not to kill civilians, not to destroy buildings or block up wells, not to cut down trees or disturb the six kinds of domestic animal. He announced that anyone who disobeyed would be punished by death, and none would be pardoned. When the people of Chong heard of this, they offered to surrender.17

Here we see how the concept of righteous war informed the way military actions might be presented within the interstate arena, to convince critics in or outside the state of the just cause being served. This was the framework that was slowly constructed during the Eastern Zhou to render the constant violence of the age comprehensible. Some components of the discourse on righteous war were probably ancient, while others must have grown from the specific social, intellectual, and political exigencies of the day. The web of historical facts known to us from this period does not allow us to completely dismiss this discourse as mere propaganda. On the one hand, even if we cynically condemn this rich and varied body of thought as mere self-serving, contrived propaganda, the historian is no less responsible for understanding in some detail how it actually functioned as such. How could such propaganda have been convincing? How influential were such moral and intellectual rationalizations for warfare? But beyond such issues is a fundamental disjuncture between the skeleton of facts and sources we have from this period and the general emphasis of most modern scholarship on the period, which has tended to give priority to intellectual and philosophical matters without always managing to place them into the broader social context of the era. We must at some point address several central



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problems in the history of the Eastern Zhou period: How did the old, largely defunct Zhou political and cultural system maintain its hold on the imaginations of Eastern Zhou politicians and thinkers? How could political actors in the Eastern Zhou have ever made sense of the shifting world they lived in long enough to function coherently, given the rapid pace of social change and the massive, inescapable scale of violence? How can we resolve the apparent contradiction between our two disparate images of classical Chinese culture—as a time of profound historical upheaval and conflict and also a time of great moral awakening and philosophical introspection? The wide-reaching discourse on the role of warfare in history, on the use of righteous war, and on the interplay between the civil and martial aspects of state, was born at the nexus of such issues, and if we refuse to acknowledge the role of this discourse in broader social and intellectual trends of the time and consider carefully its various facets, we will likely miss many opportunities to sharpen our understanding of those bigger historical problems. Let us then allow for the possibility that many in early China would have taken the story about King Wen’s invasion of Chong seriously. What did his behavior mean to them? As it turns out, this particular passage is echoed in many early texts, and we find that the program laid out in these passages is part of a sophisticated set of insights into the politics of conquest, insights that give more prominent consideration to psychological factors and the logistics of long-term administration than to enjoying the immediate spoils of war or reveling in the glory of fresh conquest. It is important from our perspective to understand these insights, because a clearer picture of the political and intellectual world that generated them and was in part sustained by them will inform our reading of all Eastern Zhou sources and will be particularly crucial when we turn to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu in part II of this book. Pronouncements similar to the one King Wen is purported to have made before advancing on Chong may have become regular parts of prewar rituals in the Eastern Zhou. A brief passage of the Hanfeizi puts similar words into the mouths of other conquerors; that the precise language is so similar to the passage cited above suggests both that Han Fei was familiar with that story and that such language may have become highly conventional and formulaic:

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When Duke Wen [of Jin] attacked the state of Song, he first made a pronouncement, saying: “I have heard that the lord of Song lacks the Way, is disrespectful of elders, is off the mark in apportioning resources, and issues instructions and commands that cannot be trusted. I am coming to punish him on behalf of the people.” When Yue attacked Wu, the ruler first made a pronouncement, saying: “I have heard that the king of Wu builds magnificent terraces and digs deep pools, exhausting the hundred surnames in bitter toil; that he is extravagant in his use of resources, exhausting the people’s strength. I am coming to punish him on behalf of the people.” 18

There are two long, detailed passages from late classical syncretic works that mirror King Wen’s pronouncement to the state of Chong. Each is part of a much longer essay on military affairs, and both of them deserve our careful attention, since these two sources show us how conceptions of righteous war could be fully integrated into larger philosophical and even cosmological systems. These two essays are rich amalgamations of early military and political thought, cosmology, moral philosophy, and other intellectual traditions current in the third and second centuries BCE. It is surprising that despite renewed scholarly interest in the genre of military texts, neither of these essays has received much critical attention.19 Righteous Warfare in Historical and Cosmological Context We have already seen numerous passages concerning the wen-wu pair and righteous war from the Lüshi chunqiu, an abundant repository of textual traditions from the mid-third century BCE. Although this text drew on many diverse intellectual trends, it was an attempt to provide a theoretical framework in which to give each of its component positions its own role in a comprehensive ideological system. Arguments and value systems that had emerged and taken shape within Mohist circles, Confucian lineages, and a range of other early intellectual groups were brought together in a single work, with the intention of revealing how each position had a specific contribution to make in the creation and proper maintenance of government and society. The organization of the text is the key to understanding its means of resolving tension among these disparate intellectual positions and of



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forging an integrated system from such diverse material. An intellectual trend I have termed Naturalism, which had gained great currency in the late fourth and early third centuries BCE, provided the rubric for this amalgamation. The text was divided into three large sections, the first of which mirrored a calendar of the twelve months of the seasons. This section, called ji, is divided into twelve juan, or scrolls, each of which contains five chapters. The first chapter of each scroll is a calendrical text for one month of the year, describing the appropriate ritual and administrative activities of the state in that month. The following four chapters are thematic, addressing some of the concerns suitable to that month according to a set of conventions about correspondences between the season and human activity. Thus mourning, a topic of considerable concern to Confucians and Mohists alike, is discussed in various chapters under the three winter months, while self-cultivation is associated with nurturing life and is therefore discussed under the three months of spring, thereby bringing these human activities into harmony with the natural progression of life and death, growth and decay. In this way, patterns and activities understood to be rooted in the cycle of the seasons are taken as normative, and the calendar becomes the template for organizing widely differing intellectual positions into one system. In the text’s thematic organization, military affairs are associated with the autumn; this was a conventional association with roots in a variety of logistical and customary factors. Military campaigns were best mounted after the commoners had brought in the harvest and their extended absence from the land would not cripple the state’s agricultural production. Fielding an army required a great initial expense, which might be more easily shouldered when the harvest had been freshly reaped. Finally, autumn weather was probably the most forgiving to armies on the move, since spring was likely to be much wetter and summer much hotter. Should military actions take longer than planned and spill over into the winter months, planting and other crucial agricultural activities would still be safe. On top of all these logistical factors was the sense that autumn was the cosmologically appropriate season for war. War meant killing and spoils, just as the harvest marked not only the collection of nature’s bounty but also the turn from growing to dying, as plants withered and the landscape turned brown, slowly sapped of vitality. The opening chapter of the first month in the autumn section of the Lüshi

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chunqiu describes the state’s turn away from activities associated with growth and flourishing and toward warfare and punishment: The Son of Heaven personally leads the Three Dukes, the Nine High Ministers, the feudal lords and the Grandees in a ritual inauguration of autumn in the western suburb. Returning, he then issues rewards to the military leaders at court. The Son of Heaven then orders his generals to select officers, drill foot soldiers, and swiftly train brave stalwarts, employing only those with merit, in order to launch punitive campaigns against the unrighteous and punish the violent and rebellious. In this way he makes clear good and bad, and patrols the distant regions.20

The following four chapters are all centered on the state’s capacity to wage war and administer punishments. Taken together, they constitute a series of five related essays on various aspects of warfare. The second chapter begins by situating military affairs in a historical context and establishing a link between war and human nature. The chapter is actually, in part, a clear response to extremist calls to bring an end to offensive warfare, a position that modern scholars are well aware the Mohist school embraced. We have the names of a few individual thinkers from the fourth or third century BCE who are said to have argued forcefully for the complete abolition of offensive war, but extant sources do not preserve any reliable records of their arguments outside of the Mozi itself.21 Other chapters of the Lüshi chunqiu in the other two major divisions of the text, the lan and lun, return to this refutation of arguments to do away with warfare, and we will examine some of those later in this chapter.22 In all these passages we find that the complete rejection of warfare is juxtaposed with the historical need for righteous war: In the time of the ancient sage kings, there was righteous war but not the complete cessation of war. The origins of the military reach back to highest antiquity, arising together with mankind itself. Warfare is a matter of awe-inspiring power, and awe-inspiring power is a matter of sheer force. That human society is marked by awe-inspiring power and sheer force is a part of human nature. Human nature is what we are endowed with from Heaven, and is not something we can fashion ourselves.23



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The chapter goes on to discuss the mythic battle between the Yellow Emperor and Chiyou, simultaneously orienting the debate within a cosmological and quasi-historical framework, mirroring the passage that opens this chapter, where the military accomplishments of Yao, Shun, and Yu serve the same purpose. This chapter argues forcefully for warfare’s potential to liberate: Warfare cannot be abolished. It can be compared to water or fire: if used wisely, then it brings good fortune, but in the wrong hands can produce disaster. Or it is like the use of medicine: if you obtain excellent medicine, then it can save lives, but if you get hold of bad medicine, it can kill people. Righteous war is excellent medicine for use on the entire realm, on a grand scale!24

The text continues in exuberant celebration of the merits of war as a tool of ending oppression and liberating the people: If warfare is truly righteous, and used to punish violent lords and relieve the bitterness of the people, then the people’s delight in seeing the troops will be like a filial son’s delight at seeing his loving parents, or a starving man’s delight at seeing fine food. The people will cheer and flock to them the way an arrow shot from a mighty crossbow races deep into a valley, or the way volumes of dammed water rush when the dike is breached.25

The next chapter develops this theme, arguing that in a degenerate age, righteous behavior will attract the enemy’s subjects and bring them under one’s own sway. We saw already in the Shuoyuan how King Wu was portrayed as asking the Taigong how to employ the enemy’s populace as one’s own. This is the ultimate goal of warfare by the fourth century BCE. In centuries past, warfare may well have been one of the great cultic duties of the ruling nobility, who were bound to bring glory to the ancestral line.26 By the fourth century BCE, however, old religious and social values had been radically overhauled, and the old “feudal” nobility had practically devoured itself. Warfare was now a competition for the most valuable resource, human beings. It was not enough to win glory on the battlefield; states now needed to annex territory from their

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enemies. And it was not enough simply to annex territory; measures had to be taken to ensure that the populace of these newly incorporated regions would remain settled and productive. It was this desire to secure the long-term benefits of conquest that encouraged rulers and generals to forbid plunder and extend care to the enemy’s subjects, both crucial components of righteous war as it was articulated in classical texts. A populace already alienated from its ruler was easy to win over: The current age is turbid in the extreme; the toil of the black-headed people could not be any worse. The institution of Son of Heaven has just been terminated, and worthy men have all been dismissed or are in hiding. Current rulers behave with no restraint and have become alienated from the people, who have no place to lodge their grievances. Should there emerge a worthy ruler or talented official, he ought to examine into this doctrine, and then his army could undertake this righteous cause. Among the people of the realm, take those who are dying and grant them life, those who are humiliated and make them honorable, those who toil and set them at ease. When current rulers behave with no restraint, average people will turn their backs on their lords and abandon their families, to say nothing of how vulgar commoners will behave. Therefore, when righteous troops arrive, the rulers of the age will be unable to keep their subjects, and even families will be unable to stop their own children from abandoning home [to join the invader].27

This and the next chapter, “Jinsai,” are actually one continuous argument, primarily concerned with discrediting the Mohist position of championing defensive warfare while hoping to abolish offensive war. Both chapters maintain that the indiscriminate Mohists fail to take account of crucial moral issues and end up defending immoral rulers against the punitive attacks of righteous adversaries. The Mohist project, then, would serve to maintain the status quo by hindering any move toward ushering in an age of moral rule by a benevolent conqueror. The fourth chapter in the series opens on this point: As for those whose hearts are set on saving and protecting [a state under siege], they cannot avoid protecting those who lack the Way and saving the unrighteous. There is no disaster greater than protecting those who



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lack the Way and saving the unrighteous, and no greater harm to the people of the realm.28

The final chapter in this series, “Huaichong,” is a rich description of righteous warfare that stands on its own and may have separate origins from the preceding materials; it is worth citing in its entirety. We find here another detailed example of a pronouncement made by an aggressor as his troops prepare to lay siege to an enemy territory, along with an elaborate discussion of the rationale for doing so: As a rule, noblemen do not engage in idle discussions, and talented men’s debates are not simply verbal exercises. There must be some matter of principle before a nobleman will engage in a discussion, and there must be a question of righteousness before a talented man will debate something. Then, through discussions and debates, one can hope to increase appreciation of principle among kings, dukes, and great men, and promote righteous behavior among talented men and commoners. When the Way of principle and righteousness is made manifest, then the arts of violence and oppression, cruelty and trickery, and incursion and grasping will subside. Violence, oppression, cruelty, and trickery are contrary to righteousness and principle; the conditions of these two cannot simultaneously prevail, cannot simultaneously find a foothold. Therefore, when the army enters an enemy state’s borders, the commoners know where to find shelter; the black-headed people know they will not perish. When the army arrives at the outskirts of walled cities or towns, they do not damage the five grains, nor unearth tombs. They do not fell trees or other lumber, nor burn their stockpiles. They do not set fire to buildings or homes, nor seize the six kinds of livestock. Should they obtain prisoners, they offer to return them to their homes, in order to make manifest the difference between good and bad. They earn the trust of the people, and in this way take away the enemy’s resources. If there are still some who express hatred or feign to bear a grudge for things in the past, and refuse to obey, then even if you apply military force, it will be acceptable. First issue a pronouncement, saying: “Our troops are coming to save the people from death. Your ruler, in his position over you, lacks the Way, is haughty and arrogant, indulgent and insolent. He is avaricious

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and cruel, and oppresses the masses. He is brazen and pompous, and rejects the regulations of the sages. He defames the former kings and finds fault with the ancient statutes. Above, he does not accord with Heaven, and below, he is not kind to the people. He collects taxes whenever he sees fit, and his demands can never be satisfied. He accuses and executes the innocent, and rewards those he should not. In these ways, he earns the punishment of Heaven, and becomes the enemy of the people: he should not be a ruler. Today our troops are coming in order to punish one who should not be a ruler, and by removing an enemy of the people, to accord with the Way of Heaven. Should any of his subjects oppose the Way of Heaven and try to protect this enemy of the people, they will be executed and their families slaughtered, with no exceptions. Yet those who can bring a single family to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a family. Those who can bring a hamlet to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a hamlet. Those who can bring a rural district to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a rural district. Those who can bring a town to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a town. Those who can bring an entire city to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a city.” Therefore, conquest over an enemy state does not extend to its subjects. Execute only the executor, and no more. Promote talented local officers and enfeoff them; select worthy men and pay respect to them. Seek out the widows and orphans among them, and give compassion and relief to them. Give audience to their elders and treat them with proper ritual reverence. Raise salaries and increase ranks across the board. Assess the guilt or innocence of those accused of crimes, and release those jailed wrongly. Distribute funds from the treasury and hand out grain from the granaries, in order to relieve their masses. Do not treat their resources as your private booty. Ask about ancestral rites at the local shrines; whatever practices the people do not wish to abolish, make sure to reinstate, and where there are errors, improve their ritual performance. In this way, worthies will esteem your reputation, elders will delight in your rituals, and the commoners will embrace your virtue. If there were such a person today, even if he saved only a single life, everyone in the realm would compete to serve him. Righteous troops have saved many such individual lives—who would not be delighted by this? Thus, when the righteous troops arrive, the people of



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neighboring states will turn to them like flowing water, and the subjects of the enemy state will gaze upon them as if they were their mother and father. The further afield they go, the greater the number of people they attract. Without the armies even crossing swords, the people submit as if transformed.29

This remarkable passage is the single clearest and most concise expression of what righteous warfare actually entails in our extant early literature. We cannot, finally, judge the extent to which it was the pure fantasy of its authors, an actual blueprint for propaganda campaigns employed by armies in the third century BCE, or perhaps even a reflection of the real values and instructions taught to armies in that age. It may even have been equal parts fantasy, propaganda, and policy, as these three endeavors tend so often to merge into one (if modern-day justifications for war are any guide to human behavior in the past). Whatever the case, it is notable that this particular way of conceiving of warfare clearly dominated the classical discourse on the state’s use of coercive force. It was a carefully constructed position, rooted in conceptions of history, morality, human nature, and hands-on experience with the details of subjugating and administering an enemy populace. That is, it was a position that grew out of and was sustained by the intersection of several different practical and intellectual traditions, rather than a pure ideological construct. This is suggested already by the level of detail we find in the passage concerning matters such as local religious practices, persuading enemy populations to submit through the granting of fiefs and salaries, and the preservation of the agrarian economy and its local infrastructure. We will find a similar level of concern in the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, where details of the military and strategic elements of conquest are prominent as well. Evidence that the late classical articulation of righteous warfare grew out of the cross-fertilization of several fields comes also from other classical texts, including military treatises themselves. There is one other great syncretic philosophical work from the late classical era, and it also embraces the notion of ­righteous warfare. We must turn our attention to this second-century BCE compilation before we move to other kinds of texts. The Huainanzi is in some ways the younger sister of the Lüshi chun-

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qiu. It too was compiled by a large group of scholars under the auspices of a powerful patron, in this case Liu An, the prince of Huainan, a powerful and erudite member of the royal Han family whose local powerbase lay south of the Huai River. Here, Liu An collected a great library and employed scholars to forge a compendium of knowledge ranging across such fields as cosmology and astronomy, topography, rulership, self-cultivation, and military affairs. It seems likely that we do not possess the entire collection of texts they assembled, but we can discern that, as with the Lüshi chunqiu, the authors and compilers of the Huainanzi drew on a broad range of textual, intellectual, and practical traditions and were clearly aiming at a synthesis of all knowledge pertinent to the cultivation of a ruler’s political and spiritual power. Naturalism was for them also a key means of achieving this integration, although we might fairly characterize this text’s chief approach to naturalism as astronomical rather than calendrical, to the extent that such a distinction can be made.30 Just as we found in the Lüshi chunqiu, when military matters are introduced, they are first placed within a moral and historical context. The military chapter of the Huainanzi, “Binglüe,” opens with the following statement: Anciently, those who used the military did not do so for the benefit of expanding their territory, nor out of an avaricious desire to seize bronzes and jades. They did so in order to preserve what was imperiled, to carry on what was being cut short, to bring peace to the disorder of all under Heaven, and to expel the calamities of the ten thousand people.31

The text goes on in familiar fashion to describe the advent of oppressive rebels and immoral tribes, and the rise of the sage rulers of antiquity, who restored social order by first civilizing and then, when needed, punishing all wrongdoers: They instructed them in the Way, and led them with virtue; if they did not obey, then they confronted them with an awesome martial prowess. If in the face of such awesome martial prowess they still did not follow, then they brought order to them through the use of weapons.32



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The use of military force is always a last resort, and in many classical texts addressing warfare there is the belief that just the threat of overwhelming power backed by moral conviction and a display of disciplined battle formations and superior weaponry would be enough to awe enemies into submission.33 Moreover, the use of military force is part of the entire historical justification for the creation of political systems and hierarchies. Borrowing a model of history found in writings that A. C. Graham and Harold Roth have described as “Primitivist” Daoist sources, the “Binglüe” chapter depicts the unfolding of human history as a series of steps down from an ideal past and a series of human and sagely responses to the appearance of chaos and oppression.34 Political rulers are established precisely to punish cruel tyrants and maintain a livable human social order. Thus, within the space of a few lines of text, the chapter describes the purpose of warfare and political systems in precisely the same terms: As for the military, it is what we use to prohibit violence and suppress the chaotic. . . . The reason for establishing lords is to prohibit violence and suppress the chaotic.35

The text moves on to a passage that closely parallels the Lüshi chunqiu pronouncement to the enemy on the eve of launching a punitive campaign. The two passages are so similar that the authors/compilers of the Huainanzi chapter were probably using the earlier text as their template: 36 Thus when you hear that the ruler of an enemy state has treated his people with cruelty, then muster troops and confront him at their border, accusing him of unrighteousness and denouncing him for his transgressions. When your troops arrive at the outskirts of the enemy city, then issue orders to the generals of the army, saying: “do not fell trees or other lumber; do not exhume tombs; do not scorch the five grains; do not set fire to their stockpiles; do not take prisoners; do not take the six kinds of livestock.” Thereupon, issue an announcement, saying: “Your state’s ruler has been arrogant before Heaven and insulted the spirits. He has imprisoned innocent people and executed the guiltless. This makes him one who Heaven punishes and the people treat as an

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enemy. Our troops are coming to cast out this unrighteous one and restore virtue. Should there be any who oppose the Way of Heaven and lead bandits [to resist us], they will be killed and their entire lineage exterminated. Yet those who can bring a single family to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a family. Those who can bring a hamlet to obey us will be rewarded with the salary of a hamlet. Those who can bring a rural district to obey us will be enfeoffed with a rural district. Those who can bring a county to obey us will be made marquis of a county.” Conquest over an enemy state does not extend to its subjects. Cast out their ruler and change their government. Revere talented local officers and make glorious worthy and good men. Bring relief to the widows and orphans, and show compassion to the impoverished. Empty their prisons and reward those with merit. The hundred surnames will throw open their gates and await your arrival, washing rice and setting it aside for you. Their only fear will be that you do not arrive. This is how Tang and Wu [founders of the Shang and Zhou] became kings, and how Duke Huan of Qi became hegemon. Thus when a ruler acts without the Way, his people’s longing for your troops is like their hope for rain in a drought, or their thirst for a drink when parched. In such circumstances, who will cross swords with your troops? Thus when righteous troops arrive, it is even possible for them to complete their mission without ever fighting a battle.37

There can be little question that by late in the classical era, this sophisticated, clearly articulated vision of righteous warfare would have captured the imagination of any thinker inclined to give serious thought to the question of the state’s legitimate use of coercive power. The entire notion of a unified empire must have drawn in part on this conception of the use of overwhelming military strength to end social chaos and political tyranny, and usher in an age of unified benevolent rule. In fact, when we look briefly at inscriptions made to commemorate the founding of the Qin empire in chapter 5 below, we will find that this formulation of righteous war and the use of military power to enforce unity was indeed crucial to the way the Qin envisioned and portrayed their own role in history. Nevertheless, participation in the discourse on righteous war was not limited to those texts, like the Lüshi chunqiu and Huainanzi, that were from their inception already implicated in the cre-



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ation, reproduction, or reconfiguring of empire. We find it within the military treatises themselves, which tend to acknowledge the multistate system and imagine, rather than a cosmologically aligned empire, the old Zhou order as an ideal form. Conclusion By the middle of the third century BCE in China, an astute observer might have been able to predict the eventual victory of a single state and the advent of unified rule. The Zhou ruling line had finally been extinguished, by Qin in 256 BCE, removing the last symbolic barrier to the creation of a new order.38 Looking back over the history of the Eastern Zhou period, our observer would be able to survey the decline of the once-mighty state of Jin, whose Duke Wen had once acted as hegemon over all the feudal states, as it split into the three states of Zhao, Han, and Wei. These states in turn saw their power rise and then fall, until by 250 BCE none were contenders in the political and military race to empire. Our observer would also have been able to look back at the southern kingdoms of Wu and Yue, seeing them rise rapidly to eminence and then disappear from the historical stage. The up-and-down fate of their neighbor, Chu, was more complicated but no less instructive. Chu had once built a formidable confederation of states that threatened to rival the Zhou in its heyday, then saw its strength and status ebb and flow over the Warring States period until it gradually lost ground to mighty Qin in the west. The vision of how a single, well-disciplined army might put an end to centuries of social and political chaos was presumably not hard to conjure. A few generations earlier, however, political philosophers, statesmen, and military thinkers could not have been so certain of what the future might bring. In texts dating at least as early as the fourth century BCE, we find another sort of unified realm conjured up from the textual and cultural relics of the past, this one a federation of allied states led by the moral force of the Heavenly-sanctioned Zhou. This federation, as imagined in Eastern Zhou texts and projected back on the skeleton of the actual early Western Zhou, was held together first and foremost by ritual bonds and the deeply rooted shared values that these rituals fostered among the community of Zhou states. The extent to which coercive force was ever a necessary component of this early federation was

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open to far more debate than the role of coercion in the new empires of the third century BCE ever came to be. It was no doubt much easier to fantasize about bloodless conquest and the peaceful spread of civilization from such a great historical distance than to envision it in the real, conflict-ridden world of the third century BCE. Thus it was in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE that the Mohists first proffered their vision of a society free of offensive war and that thinkers such as Mencius could imagine the Zhou conquest unfolding in a relatively peaceful manner.39 Both Mozi and Mencius rooted their visions of the ideal human community in the models of the great sage rulers, such as Yao, Shun, and Yu. But neither thinker seemed capable of or concerned with imagining human history without a necessary role for the legitimate use of force. Mencius, by late in the fourth century BCE, was already thinking in terms of some sort of new, unified monarchy to rule the entire realm, and he clearly thought that a moral leader could mobilize the masses and win victory against the short-sighted and morally bankrupt states of his day. Mozi, while rejecting contemporary offensive warfare for its cruelty, waste, and destabilizing political effects, left a place for righteous war in history and acknowledged its potential role in the establishment of a new age of peace: Our Master, Mozi, said, “If in fact there were someone able to establish himself in the realm by means of a righteous reputation, and attract the feudal lords by means of virtue, then the submission of the entire realm could be achieved.” 40

The discourse on righteous warfare in the fourth century BCE, evidenced in the philosophical and military texts of that era, is marked by deep rifts over moral, religious, and political issues, rifts that permeated the intellectual culture of the Warring States period. In retrospect, we can say that thinkers were findings ways to come to terms with the radical social and political changes of the era. Old values and beliefs persisted, even as the social fabric they had once been woven into was torn asunder. What currency should such old values and institutions have in the new world taking shape in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE? The third- and second-century BCE sources we have looked at so far suggest that initial approaches to answering such questions involved



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finding ways to bridge the rifts among competing intellectual, moral, and political positions and forging a syncretic system that foreshadowed, in its comprehensiveness, the unified empire it was intended to guide.41 Before such syncretic solutions appeared, we tend to find variations on the standard set of Eastern Zhou moral and political values so often associated with the Confucian tradition: benevolence, righteousness, trustworthiness, and the like, absent any correlative or Daoist cosmology and not yet part of a grand naturalistic pattern.42 By the middle of the third century BCE, Xunzi is able to cling to the old moral vocabulary only by addressing Naturalism directly, as he does in his essay on Heaven.43 A bit earlier, we find that in the moral and political systems the military texts project onto the past, these same values are prominent: not only righteousness, but benevolence (ren) and ritual propriety (li) as well. We have looked already at the Sima fa, a text that underwent major editorial revisions or at least reductions in its long transmission. The vision of warfare presented in its opening chapter, “Renben” (Taking Benevolence as the Root), is as concerned with righteous warfare as our third-century texts, but the entire structure of authority and political organization suggested by the text is based on the older multistate model. In the opening lines, we find this concise statement of the just use of warfare: If you attack a state but care for its people, then attacking it is permissible. If you use battle to bring an end to battle, then even though you yourself are doing battle, it is permissible.44

Li Ling has pointed out the composite nature of this text and how it combines materials from the middle Warring States and earlier, making it hard for careful readers to differentiate the strata.45 These simple lines may well reflect a later layer of this chapter. Further along in the chapter is a long passage that in general terms parallels the discussions of righteous war we have explored above, including a brief public pronouncement and a series of prohibitions issued to the invading army concerning its behavior in the field. Yet we will see that there are differences as well, particularly in the political context within which the text assumes warfare will unfold and the values it reflects. The passage

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begins with a brief, idealistic description of how the multistate system ought to work at its best, and then turns to a longer, more detailed discussion of how the players in the multistate system should respond to any breakdown in social harmony and peace: The way of ruling used by the former kings was: while according with the Way of Heaven, conforming to the benefits of the earth, and assigning offices based on the virtues of the people, to rectify names and bring order to all matters. They established a hierarchy of offices, and apportioned salaries based on rank. The feudal lords were delighted and drawn close, while those from outlying regions came and submitted. The penal system sat idle and the military came to rest. Such was the rule of sagely virtue. Second to this was the worthy kings’ orderly system of rituals and music, laws and measures. They created the five punishments, and raised up troops, in order to suppress the unrighteous. They carried out royal inspections, surveying outlying regions and convening the feudal lords, examining any deviations from the prescribed standards. If there were any who neglected their mandate and disrupted the constant precepts, who turned their back on virtue and acted contrary to the seasons of Heaven, or who imperiled meritorious leaders, they would announce it widely to all the feudal lords, to make manifest their crimes. Then a ritual announcement would be made to August Heaven, the Lord on High, and to the sun, moon, and stars. Prayers would be made to the god of the soil, the spirits of the four directions, and the altars of mountains and rivers. Finally, the former kings would be ritually addressed. The chief steward would then request troops from the feudal lords, saying “such-and-such a state has acted without the Way: subjugate them. On such-and-such year, month and day, let the armies convene at said state with the Son of Heaven, to correct and punish them.” The chief steward along with the hundred officials issued orders to the army, saying: “On entering the territory of the guilty ruler, do no violence to local deities. Do not engage in any hunting, nor destroy their earthworks. Do not set fire to walls or buildings, nor cut down forests or trees. Do not seize the six kinds of livestock, grains, or implements. If you encounter the aged or young, return them to their homes and do them no harm. Even if you encounter able-bodied men, if they do not engage you, do



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not treat them as the enemy. If you wound an enemy soldier, provide medical treatment and then release him. Once you have punished the guilty party, the king and the feudal lords will repair and set aright their state, and place worthy men in charge, to restore their offices.” 46

The religious and political world this passage reflects was already largely antiquated in the fourth century BCE, and we have already seen that in similar passages from a century later, most features of this old society have dropped away. The ritual and religious glue that held the old Zhou federation together is by the third century entirely gone. The conception of righteous war, however, has made the transition from the old multistate system to the new era of unified empire relatively intact. While the army is here, as elsewhere, forbidden from plunder and pillaging, the single most conspicuous difference between this notion of righteous war and articulations of righteous war from a century later lays with what constitutes unrighteous behavior. Crucial to all later appeals to righteous war is censure of the enemy ruler’s mistreatment of his subjects. This theme does not occur at all in this long passage. Here, it is disregard for the prescribed ritual and political system that invokes an elaborate religious, political, and military response from the king. It is possible that the Sima fa here preserves an older conception of what it meant to be righteous, still prevalent early in the Warring States era, but possibly dating back to the Spring and Autumn era and perhaps even rooted in more ancient, long-standing Western Zhou sociopolitical values. As we turn our attention to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu in part II of this study, we will discover in them materials pertaining to the state’s military capacity that can clarify our picture of the development of Warring States notions of efficacious and morally sanctioned forms of warfare. These rich yet almost completely neglected sources will show us how ideas about righteous war and elaborations of the interplay between the civil and martial realms of state activity grew from many practical considerations and gave shape to an elaborate and insightful conception of how to annex new territories and integrate them into one’s administrative structure, of how to conquer and govern.

Part II Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu

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Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu Its Transmission and Reception

Jiao Hong (1540–1620) argued that the inclusion of the Zhou Documents [the Yi Zhou shu] in the category of Venerated Documents was mistaken, and thus he recategorized the text under the “Miscellaneous History” rubric. Although his intent was to revere the classics, in fact he did not understand the categories employed by people from antiquity. Since Liu Xiang [in his comments preserved in the “Yiwen zhi”] says “It comprises announcements, oaths, and commands from Zhou times; it may well be what was left over after Confucius edited the hundred chapters [of the canonical Shang shu],” then the Zhou shu belongs precisely to the [category of the] Shang shu. . . . Would it be permissible, in order to revere the qilin [a sacred mythical animal], to say that horses and oxen do not belong in the category of ungulates? Or in order to revere the phoenix, to say that swallows and sparrows do not belong in the category of avians? 1

Overview Part I of this study demonstrated that military power and its relationship to legitimate civil rule were topics of particular interest to intellectuals and statesmen from the fourth through first centuries BCE. Contrary to some long-standing characterizations of early Chinese thought as pacifist, there was a sophisticated and broadly based discourse during these centuries on the nature of warfare, its cosmological and moral underpinnings, its role in history, and its importance to the stability of the state. This discourse developed alongside a more technical discourse on such topics as mobilization, weaponry, defensive strategies, and deploy73

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ment of formations, some of which was recorded in the early military treatises that survive to this day. Those treatises are often suggestive of creative interaction between specialized developments within the army, such as modes of organization or conceptions of authority, and theories or policies of statesmen and scholars. Yet as was apparent in the preceding chapters, where early conceptions of the relationship between the civil and martial arms of the state survive, particularly in sources dating before the middle of the third century BCE, they are often too brief or abstract to allow a deeper understanding of the richness of how the discourse developed over time. This is true even when, taken together with late third- and second-century BCE sources and other passages on righteous warfare, they suggest that this discourse grew in importance and complexity as the first empires emerged and were finally realized. The military treatises themselves were much neglected as sources of early Chinese history and thought, both in China and here in the West, until newly discovered manuscripts demonstrated the antiquity of several works that were long labeled forgeries and drew attention to the genre in general. Mark Edward Lewis’ book Sanctioned Violence in Early China marked a conceptual turning point in Western Sinology, suggesting that warfare itself was the most important force driving the many developments and changes in Chinese history during the ancient period. This hypothesis is compelling, and in many ways the current study has been aimed at articulating and refining this notion. The early conception of wen and wu as a comprehensive and dynamic pair capable of encompassing the entire structure and purpose of the state was an intellectual stage on which the many problems that came about during the centuries of constant war, consolidation, and empire building could be worked out. Glimpses of this can be seen in the Mawangdui manuscripts cited in the preceding chapters of this study and can be seen in the relatively coherent and systematic essays on this topic from the Lüshi chunqiu and later works such as the Huainanzi. Turning our attention beyond the third century BCE to look for earlier stages in this discourse, however, we find our endeavor fraught with difficulties that are standard in most inquiries into this period of Chinese history. By and large these problems are rooted in a lack of reliable and datable sources. Mention of wen and wu in texts that originated prior to the middle of the third century BCE is common and



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is often suggestive of connections to broader conceptual schemes laid out clearly in later texts, but seldom are these early passages detailed or concrete enough to allow us to describe with certainty the relationship between what appear to be two stages in the conceptualization and articulation of the wen-wu dichotomy: a more cosmologically oriented stage that is articulated in the early Han as part of a broader intellectual and ideological process linked to the appearance of empire; and an earlier stage presumably linked more to the concrete concerns of waging war in the complex political arena of the Warring States. It is therefore a great boon to this study that we have, apart from the now largely verifiable collection of military treatises and the newly discovered manuscripts from the pre-imperial era, a separate source of information, rich in detail, pertaining to the wen-wu pair. I refer to a handful of chapters from a much-neglected ancient text called the Yi Zhou shu (Remainder of the Zhou Documents).2 The Yi Zhou shu The Yi Zhou shu is purportedly a collection of speeches, dialogs, essays, and other historical sources pertaining to the Zhou ruling house, particularly its rise to power and conquest over the Shang, but including speeches and records of events set in later generations as well. It has traditionally been treated as a part of the category shu, “documents,” of which the Shang shu (Venerated Documents), is the canonical representative. As with that better-known text, determining the actual dates and circumstances of the authorship of various chapters of the Yi Zhou shu requires considerable research, and complete consensus on such matters will probably always be elusive. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to say with confidence that a text much like the Yi Zhou shu that has passed down to us today was known during the Han dynasty and that at least a large portion of that work circulated during the Warring States period as well. A full study of the authenticity and transmission of this text is not possible here, but a brief discussion of the evidence will establish the merit of using it as a source for the period under discussion.3 Additionally, in the sections that follow, we will look at the rationale for treating a group of chapters from the text as a unit and for regarding this unit as closely related to other military texts. Finally, before beginning a detailed study of this group of chapters, we will consider some

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of the reasons for the text’s obscurity from medieval times down to the present, as this issue bears directly on the subject of our inquiry. The bibliographic treatise in the Hanshu, the “Yiwen zhi,” records the holdings of the imperial library near the turn of the common era. The “Yiwen zhi” was compiled by Ban Gu in the first century of the common era, using an annotated bibliography made by Liu Xiang and Liu Xin near the end of the Western Han period. The first questions one must ask of a text purporting to have reached us through transmission from the Warring States period are: Does it appear in the “Yiwen zhi,” was it known to and cited by Han authors, and is there evidence that it was known prior to the Han? In the case of the Yi Zhou shu, the answer to all three questions is yes. Under the category shu, or historical documents, we find a listing that almost certainly matches the work; it is given here with a note that appeared in Liu Xiang’s original catalog: Zhou shu in seventy-one chapters; historical records of the Zhou. Liu Xiang says, “It comprises announcements, oaths and commands from Zhou times. It may well be what was left over after Confucius edited the hundred chapters [of the canonical Shang shu].” 4

A number of issues are raised by just these few lines. First of all, the text was known simply as Zhou shu (The Documents of Zhou) in the Warring States and early Han. It is thus cited, as we will see below, numerous times throughout this period. Xu Shen, in his Shuowen jiezi, completed around 100 CE, is the first person known to use the name Yi Zhou shu, presumably to avoid confusion with those chapters of the Shang shu that are known under the heading “Zhou shu”; the sections of this canonical work are divided according to ruling house, and thus the term Zhou shu in early citations might mean “documents from the Zhou era collected in the Shang shu,” or it might refer to the work Xu Shen styled the Yi Zhou shu.5 It seems likely that Xu derived this name from the tradition that Liu Xiang refers to in his note to the entry given above: the assumption that the documents comprising the Yi Zhou shu were among those left on the “editing floor” by Confucius when he reduced a vast collection of documents from the Zhou era to the handful preserved in the Shang shu. Scholars now widely discredit the entire story that assigns editorship of the canonical works to Confucius, and



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there is no reason for us to accept the notion that the Yi Zhou shu was in some way a collection of rejected or leftover materials. Nevertheless, we too must take care to distinguish this Zhou shu from the “Zhou shu” section of the Shang shu. When the text began to attract serious critical attention from scholars in the Qing dynasty, Yi Zhou shu was the preferred title for the work, and for good reason. Neither the simple Zhou shu nor Xu Shen’s more imaginative Yi Zhou shu had been the common title for this work in the centuries between the Han and Qing dynasties. Rather, the text became erroneously known as the Jizhong Zhou shu (Zhou Documents from the Tomb at Ji Commandery).6 Sometime between 279 and 281 CE, tomb robbers plundered an ancient burial ground of the state of Wei, a Warring States–period kingdom, and broke into what came to be thought of as a royal tomb, probably interred in or around 299 BCE. The robbers’ objective must have been the lavish furnishings that would have been entombed within, but their excavation became known to the authorities, whose investigation of the site brought to light a library of texts that eventually made their way to the court of the Western Jin dynasty. Most notable among these was a text now called the Zhushu jinian (Bamboo Annals), a chronicle of ancient China down to the beginning of the third century BCE, about the time when the library was interred.7 But many other texts were recovered along with this chronicle, and early reports of the various texts include the title Zhou shu. What exactly this text was remains unclear; those same early reports fail to explain if this text is related to the one we now know as the Yi Zhou shu. By the time of composition of the Sui shu imperial catalog (ca. end of the sixth century CE), the “Jingji zhi,” we find an entry for a Zhou shu in ten juan, or scrolls, with no mention of the commentary by Kong Zhao, of the third century CE, but with a note reading, “one of the Ji tomb texts; it seems to be material left over from Confucius’s editing of the Documents.” 8 This last line is of course a paraphrase of the comment found in the Han bibliographic treatise’s entry for the text, and the “Jingji zhi” authors were certainly intimately familiar with that work, but they make no mention of the apparent contradiction involved in a Ji tomb text being listed in the “Yiwen zhi” more than two and a half centuries prior to the discoveries at Ji commandery. In the bibliographic treatise of the Xin Tang shu, we find two entries, a Jizhong Zhou shu in ten scrolls and a Zhou shu in eight scrolls with com-

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mentary by Kong Zhao.9 From the Song dynasty on, this title, Jizhong Zhou shu, is used for many editions of the Yi Zhou shu, all in ten juan and all carrying the Kong commentary.10 This commentary is not extant for every chapter still preserved in the text, and it is thus probable that all our editions are derived from a single source, which itself may have been a combination of a fragmentary copy of the eight-scroll work with Kong’s commentary to those chapters still preserved there, and a copy of the ten-scroll work that included additional chapters already missing from the former but without Kong’s commentary.11 How exactly this text, known and cited regularly from at least the fourth century BCE down to the third century CE, suddenly became confused with a collection of texts discovered when a Warring States tomb from the state of Wei was plundered late in the third century CE remains unclear; this is a question that must be left for another study. For now it is enough to say that careful attention to the transmission of this text and the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Ji tomb manuscripts shows no evidence that the Yi Zhou shu was recovered there.12 Still, this (mistaken) association with those texts may have contributed in some way to the neglect of this text in later ages; nearly every other text unearthed from this tomb has long since perished. Certainly the idea that the chapters of this text were deemed unsuitable for inclusion in the canonical Shang shu by the sage Confucius himself would have undermined the authority of this text and anyone who might hope to study it in later ages. Free of the prejudices that hindered some traditional scholars in imperial times, we can use the title that is likely to ­create the least confusion, Yi Zhou shu, and turn a new critical eye toward this text. As we have it today, the Yi Zhou shu is indeed a work in seventy-one chapters, although only sixty of these are still extant. Fortunately, the titles of the missing chapters have been preserved, and in many cases we even have a brief description of the contents of the missing chapters or the purported circumstances of their composition, recorded in chapter 71 of the text, the “Zhou shu xu,” or “Preface to the Zhou Documents.” The existence of this chapter presents its own complex set of problems and questions, some of which can only be touched on in passing here.13 It is important to note that the text in Liu Xiang’s possession in the first century BCE ought to have included this prefatory chapter for the total



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number of chapters to add up to seventy-one. Only three works from antiquity carry such prefatory material: this text, the Shang shu, and the Shi jing (Classic of Poetry, or Odes). The structure and style of the Yi Zhou shu preface matches in general terms that of the Shang shu, but the preface to that work is now widely held to be a forgery of much later provenance. What is important from the perspective of this study is that regardless of the nature and date of the currently available preface to the Shang shu, it is likely that early in the Western Han there was an authentic preface known to that work. It would be helpful to know more about the exact date of the preface to the Shang shu and more about the intellectual milieu from which it emerged, since a rational assumption would be to expect some close relationship between these two prefatory works, but there is little hope of finding out anything reliable on this matter given our current sources. It may rather turn out that if we are able to date the preface to the Yi Zhou shu, this will in turn allow us to make some guesses about the no longer extant preface to the Shang shu. We will look at the prefatory passages pertaining to the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu in the following chapter as we study those texts in detail. The appearance of the Yi Zhou shu in the imperial Han library is one important clue to its authenticity, but more important is the considerable evidence from contemporary sources showing that Han intellectuals were familiar with the work. Prior to Liu Xiang’s catalog, we find that Sima Qian drew on material from the text in the composition of his magnum opus, the Shi ji. The full extent of his familiarity with the text is not easy to gauge, since there are substantial passages in his work that are most likely derivative of the Yi Zhou shu but in which we find no explicit mention of the text.14 Elsewhere, however, a speaker in his history cites the work by name. We would like to know what the text looked like in his day, but we must settle for the likelihood that he knew a collection of materials by the name Zhou shu that included passages and chapters we still find there today.15 There are other reasons to believe that material from the Yi Zhou shu circulated in the Western Han, but by and large evidence from this period does not sharpen our picture of the form or availability of the text. Some passages from the Huainanzi parallel passages from the work, and these may eventually shed more light on the text.16 It is not until the Eastern Han that we have ample evidence of the text, apparently

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known to many intellectuals of the day and probably available to them in roughly the form that we now know it. Wang Fu’s Qianfu lun (second century CE) cites it by the name Zhou shu twice, and Zheng Xuan’s commentaries to the ritual texts twice cite the work, once mentioning a chapter title.17 As noted above, Xu Shen paraphrases it frequently in his work, where we first see it called the Yi Zhou shu. Ma Rong’s commentary to the Lunyu cites a Zhou shu “Yue ling,” one of the chapters no longer extant. A work from the late Eastern Han that was itself an essay on the genre of “Yue ling” actually gives the following information, further bolstering our conclusion that the Zhou shu cataloged by Liu Xiang and circulating in the Eastern Han was the text we have before us today: The Documents of Zhou is a work in seventy-one chapters; the “Monthly Ordinances” is chapter fifty-three.18

Although the chapter is no longer extant, its name does occupy chapter 53 in the table of contents and preface. The existence of the work during the Han period in a form at least similar to the one we now have is thus suggested from such external evidence.19 Based on the evidence from the Han period, it seems likely that the Yi Zhou shu circulated widely and in a standard format only after its recognition in the Han imperial catalog. We would expect Sima Qian to have been familiar with the work (or material in it) in whatever form it might have taken in his day, even if it were not widely available, and as noted above we cannot be certain of the degree to which the Zhou shu he saw matched our own. Evidence from the Warring States period, however, shows that material from the work was well known before Sima Qian’s day, as early as the fourth century BCE, and was cited as an integral text or coherent corpus of documents know collectively as Zhou shu. The Hanfeizi, Lüshi chunqiu, Zhanguo ce, and Mozi all cite lines from the Zhou shu that match or closely parallel passages in the extant Yi Zhou shu. Of three citations of Zhou Documents in the late third-century BCE work Hanfeizi, one matches closely a line in the “Wujing” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu. From the same period, the Lüshi chunqiu cites Zhou Documents four times, and two of these passages can be matched to lines in two separate chapters of the work. The Zhanguo ce was put together in the Han from older materials; it cites two passages, both of which are



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found in the text today. The Mozi contains a single citation from the Zhou Documents that can be matched to a passage in the “Wenzhuan” chapter of the work. Additionally, the Zuo zhuan twice cites simply Shu (Documents) that match closely passages in the Yi Zhou shu and once cites a Zhou zhi (Zhou treatise) that also matches our current text.20 There are two other sorts of evidence pertaining to the authenticity of the text that both promise to provide much richer details on its date and usefulness as a source. The first is internal to the text and consists of such elements as its grammar and vocabulary. In this regard the language of the chapters of the Yi Zhou shu must be examined individually, and then perhaps in small groups of related chapters, because the text is clearly not the product of a single time or individual author. In the 1960s, Gu Jiegang published a masterful examination of the language of and historical details presented in one chapter of the work, the “Shifu,” an account of many details surrounding the Zhou conquest of the Shang in the eleventh century BCE. He, and later Shaughnessy in his return to the same issues, presented compelling evidence that this document includes substantial material written close in time to the actual events it describes. Based on this initial discovery, several scholars have gone on to propose a small group of chapters of the Yi Zhou shu that were probably written during the Western Zhou period. While these chapters present a variety of complex problems pertaining to vocabulary and grammar, there is good evidence that indeed at least a few chapters of the work are archaic.21 These chapters, however, are exceptional, and it is clear that the bulk of the Yi Zhou shu was written sometime in the Eastern Zhou. The language of the military chapters considered below is examined in some detail, and like the language of the text in general supports a date sometime in the Warring States period, no earlier than the fifth century BCE but no later than the third century BCE either. As the analysis unfolds, more details about the date of these chapters will emerge. There is a final piece of evidence that is of great significance to the study of the Yi Zhou shu in general and the small group of chapters treated here in particular. In 1987, a tomb from the Warring States–era kingdom of Chu was unearthed in northwestern Hunan province, along the Li river, in a region now known as Shiban village, outside of Cili. The first brief report mentioning the site noted the existence of inscribed bamboo strips, which are now fairly common from tomb finds through-

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out the Chu cultural sphere dating from the late fourth and third centuries BCE. Work on restoring and deciphering the strips has been unusually slow, but by the late 1990s there were preliminary reports that they included several important manuscript finds, including material from the Yi Zhou shu. It is now clear that the cache of manuscripts includes one fairly complete version of chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu, “Dawu,” one of the military chapters, as well as fragments of what appears to be a second copy of the same text. Virtually no photographs or transcriptions of these finds have been published so far, but the archaeologist in charge of the work has described them in talks and briefly in writing, and based on this information we can draw important conclusions about the materials.22 Moreover, he and his colleagues in Changsha, where the manuscripts are currently housed, were extraordinarily generous in allowing me to visit and inspect the bamboo strips and transcriptions in the summer of 2002 and again in bringing photographs of the strips to a small international workshop held at Cornell in the summer of 2007. Laws and customs regarding the publication of such finds do not allow me to talk in any detail about these materials until their official publication, but it is possible to confirm here reports that the manuscripts match extraordinarily closely the chapter as it has been transmitted to us across the millennia. When the manuscript finds are eventually published, they may allow more detailed insights into questions concerning the textual history of “Dawu.” For now, the close match between these fourth-century BCE finds and our version of the chapter as preserved in the Yi Zhou shu further bolsters our confidence that the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu are reliable Warring States–era documents. More generally, we may conclude that in spite of general scholarly neglect of the work throughout the long history of traditional Chinese scholarship, it is clear that the Yi Zhou shu is a valuable text containing authentic material from the pre-imperial era, worthy of careful examination. Association with Military Texts With this preliminary introduction to the Yi Zhou shu in mind, we may now look more carefully at the handful of chapters that have long been associated, at least among the small group of scholars who have looked carefully at the text, with early Chinese military thought. One of the



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most promising approaches to making sense of the varied makeup of this text is to look for groups of chapters that are clearly related to one another, and then look for relationships among those groups. Several chapters of the text are concerned with military conquest, state policies related to warfare, or specific details of waging war, but it does not always make sense to group these chapters into one category. As noted above, chapter 40, “Shifu,” has been studied in great detail by Gu Jiegang and Edward Shaughnessy; both scholars argue that this document preserves accurate historical details concerning the Zhou conquest of the Shang state in the eleventh century BCE. As we will see later, traditional scholars who condemned the Yi Zhou shu often had this chapter in mind when they deplored the unreliability of such records of immoral acts of aggression as it purports to document. But this chapter belongs to a different stratum of the text, no doubt the earliest. Its authors were mainly concerned with recording certain facts relating to the unfolding of the conquest, and they were perhaps preoccupied with the sort of details that scribes and specialists who are employed to facilitate ritual reporting of such events to the ancestors would be. This chapter does not attempt to present a systematic program for any aspect of military organization, ideology, or operation. Other chapters of the work do, and these I refer to as the military chapters of the text. Scholars throughout the imperial era have noted the relation between several chapters of the Yi Zhou shu and military texts in general. Not all scholars agree on exactly which chapters ought to be grouped together as a coherent category or what criteria should be used to define a chapter as belonging to the category of military text, and as we will see a few chapters are problematic. I propose to begin with the least problematic chapters, 6 through 10, and examine them in detail. These chapters are all primarily concerned with the presentation and analysis of information directly related to when, how, and why a state ought to go to war. That is, they represent a position within early Chinese thought poised precisely at the nexus of discourse and force, providing a window into early ideas about navigating between these two approaches. The results of this study will allow us to look at a few other chapters that may deserve to be considered together as well, but our focus will remain primarily on this core of five chapters. That the chapters in question come sequentially is certainly of some

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significance. I have discussed elsewhere how the chapters of the Yi Zhou shu appear to have been laid out in more or less chronological order, to the extent that each chapter can be associated with historical events or people.23 The majority of chapters in the text are set in particular historical contexts, primarily spanning the reigns of the kings Wen, Wu, and Cheng (roughly the second half of the eleventh and the opening years of the tenth century BCE). The first ten chapters, however, are distinct from the chronological chapters of the work in that they are not presented to us as records of speeches or events set in specific times and places. The overt chronological structure of the text appears only with chapter 11, “Dakuang,” which is set early in the reign of King Wen. Thereafter, the chronological layout of the text is apparent throughout juan 3, 4, and 5, overtly expressed in the structures of the vast majority of chapters that lead us up to the conquest of the Shang and just beyond it. In the next juan of the work, explicit setting is almost completely absent from the chapters themselves, but the preface portrays them as emerging out of historical circumstances during the reign of King Cheng and the de facto rule under the Duke of Zhou. The last four juan of the text comprise only the final thirteen chapters plus the preface itself, which largely continues to portray the setting of the final chapters as consistent with the overall chronology. These last chapters are a mixed bag, however, and the chronology clearly unravels here. It appears that the text as we have it contains at its core a chronological treatment of the Zhou house during its formative years before and after the conquest of the Shang, with other material added both at the front and back ends of the more strictly chronological material (and perhaps some scattered throughout the text as well). Despite the lack of any overt setting in the opening chapters of the text, the preface portrays these documents as if they relate to events that would have led up to the chronological narrative that begins to unfold in chapter 11. A look at the lines from the preface that introduce chapters 6 through 10 shows that at the very least the author of the preface considered the last three a unit: Chapter 6, “Wucheng”: When King Wen took the throne, to the west he resisted the Kunyi, and to the north he prepared for the Xianyun. He created military strat-



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egies that would allow him to illuminate his awe-inspiring [power] and his all-embracing [benevolence], and therefore wrote the “Wucheng” [Balance of the Martial]. Chapter 7, “Yunwen”: [He] used the martial to prohibit violence, and used the civil to settle the virtuous. Greatly sagacious, he truly united [these qualities of wen and wu], and therefore he wrote the “Yunwen” [Truly Civil]. Chapters 8, 9, and 10, “Dawu,” “Da mingwu,” and “Xiao mingwu”: The Martial entails seven virtues; King Wen wrote the three chapters “Dawu” [The Greatly Martial], “Da mingwu” [The Great Illumination of the Martial], and “Xiao mingwu” [The Lesser Illumination of the Martial].24

The first line provides a general historical setting for the group as a whole, simply placing their authorship early in the reign of King Wen; even if the author were not treating these five as a group, the chronological arrangement of the text assumed by the preface means that this single line will convey historical context until a new setting is overtly mentioned. The entry for chapter 7 makes clear the importance of wen and wu as concepts, and not just as names of kings. The final entry collapses comments on chapters 8 through 10 into a single entry on the seven virtues of the martial. The preface here provides specific information that demonstrates a gap between the content of the chapters and the intellectual position and probable date of the preface: the seven virtues are not an element of the Yi Zhou shu itself, specifically not of these three chapters, but rather of a famous passage from the Zuozhuan, cited in chapter 2 above. Chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu, “Dawu,” opens with a discussion of “seven systems” within the military, but careful examination of the chapter shows that there is no relationship to the Zuozhuan’s seven virtues. The line is an academic flourish by the author of the preface, an allusion to a text that did not seem to be on the minds of the authors of the military sections of the Yi Zhou shu (which in any case may predate the compilation of the Zuozhuan), and a clumsy one at that, suggesting as it does that its author was not actually familiar with the context of one or both of the passages he links here.25 We will return to this allusion to a speech in the Zuozhuan below when we examine chapter 8 in detail. At this point, our concern is with

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determining the extent to which it is useful to treat chapters 6 through 10 as some sort of unit. It is noteworthy that scholars in China, both modern and traditional, have often perceived a relationship among them. One of China’s leading scholars of the Shang shu, Liu Qiyu, has looked carefully at the chapters of the Yi Zhou shu with an eye toward understanding groups of chapters related by date, structure, and style. He proposes a list of chapters from the Yi Zhou shu he thinks can be meaningfully categorized as military texts. We can note that his list overlaps considerably with that of Huang Huaixin, whose monographlength study of the textual history of the Yi Zhou shu marked a turning point in the scholarly world’s recognition of this text; Huang also talks about a group of military writings within the text. More recently, Luo Jiaxiang devotes a chapter to the military thought of the text, laying out a similar list (Table 1).26 I have argued elsewhere that chapter 32, “Wushun,” is indeed related to military texts and to the other military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, but must date to the second half of the third century BCE, while chapters 6 through 10 must be earlier. Chapter 26, “Rouwu,” is likely to be in some sense derivative of material in chapters 6 through 10 and will be treated Table 1 List of Yi Zhou shu chapters categorized as military texts by modern scholars Chapter

Liu Qiyu

Huang Huaixin

Luo Jiaxiang

6  “Wucheng”

+

+

+

7  “Yunwen”

+

+

+

8  “Dawu”

+

+

+

9  “Da mingwu”

+

+

+

10  “Xiao Mingwu”

+

+

+

26 “Rouwu”

+

32 “Wushun”

+

+

33 “Wumu”

+

35 “Wuchuang”

+

38 “Wenzheng”

+

68 “Wuji”

+

+

+

+



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in more detail in chapter 5 below. Chapter 35, “Wuchuang,” shares certain stylistic features with chapter 26 and will be addressed together with it. Of the remaining chapters, only 68, “Wuji,” is considered by all three scholars, Liu, Huang, and Luo, to be closely related to military texts. Its relationship to chapters 6 through 10 is complex and will be addressed in chapter 5 as well. As our examination unfolds, the question of the relationship between these military chapters and other groups of chapters will also come into play and may help us to categorize those chapters that seem to fall somewhere between the obvious groups. In categorizing these chapters as military texts, Huang, Liu, and Luo have no doubt all been influenced by traditional scholarship; critics and annotators over the centuries have often perceived a close relationship between these chapters and military texts from the same era. Specifically, there is a long-standing tradition that links the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu to a specific branch of military texts, those associated with the figure of the Taigong, or Grand Duke, who assisted the Zhou house in their conquest of the Shang. Evidence for this connection is spread throughout a range of texts, and becomes compelling only after careful scrutiny. Traditional scholars who have perceived the possibility of this link through their own intimate knowledge of the arcana of classical sources have, unsurprisingly, not felt compelled to build and present a full case for their convictions. When the habits and goals of traditional scholars lead them to produce works that also happen to conform to our own expectations, we can only be thankful, but when they do not we must try ourselves to follow the path to which they allude. Some of the reasons traditional scholars want to associate military chapters from the Yi Zhou shu with the genre of military texts that take the Taigong as their charismatic figure of authority can be set aside in our inquiry, for they grow out of uncritical assumptions about the antiquity of both that genre and the Yi Zhou shu itself. That is, if commentators take at face value the claim that the various chapters of the Yi Zhou shu all date from the periods that the preface assigns them, and if they also accept the full authenticity of the various texts associated with the Taigong and assume he was active in both the conquest of the Shang and the creation of military treatises passed down to later generations, then it will be an easy assumption that these chapters in the

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Yi Zhou shu were penned under the influence of his thinking. In fact, the military texts now in our possession that claim affiliation with the Taigong are all quite late; the Taigong liutao is now regarded as the most likely source for early information on this genre. Manuscript fragments that match closely with portions of the transmitted text were unearthed at Linyi, Shandong, from the same second-century BCE tomb library that gave us Sun Bin’s Art of War and fragments of the Weiliaozi. There is no clear consensus among scholars today concerning the date of the Taigong liutao, but there is considerable evidence internal to the text that it must date to the third or second century BCE.27 Extant material from the Taigong tradition is therefore likely to postdate the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, probably by more than a century. Nevertheless, we cannot so easily dismiss the possibility of a link between the two groups of texts. The first meaningful piece of evidence that traditional scholars have turned to when suggesting this link is a story told in the Zhanguo ce and the Shiji about the well-known rhetorician Su Qin, who lived during the Warring States era. After failing to persuade the rulers of his day with his historical arguments, he fell into disfavor with his relatives and was ridiculed for choosing to become an itinerant scholar and politician. Dedicated to changing his reputation, he locked himself away to study a collection of texts, emerging several months later a changed man. Here is how the Shiji tells the story: Su Qin heard [the taunting of his relatives] and was ashamed and dejected. Thereupon, he locked himself in his room and brought out his books, surveying them all. He said to himself, “I have already committed myself to the occupation of a scholar and received these books with bowed head. Yet I cannot employ them to obtain honor and respect—so many books, but of what use are they?” And then he got hold of the Zhou shu yinfu [Secret Talisman of the Zhou Documents], and, hunching over it, he studied it. The next year, based on his study, he emerged from his deliberation, saying “This can be used to persuade the lords of our day!” 28

Basically the same story is told in the Zhanguo ce, where the title of the book is listed as the Taigong yinfu (Secret Talisman of the



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Taigong).29 There is a text extant known as the Yinfu jing (Canon of the Secret Talisman) and associated indirectly with the figure Taigong; the book is purported to date from the time of the Yellow Emperor but to have been passed down in an esoteric tradition of commentators that reaches from the Taigong to Guiguzi, or Master of Ghost Valley, who elsewhere figures as Su Qin’s teacher in strategic and rhetorical arts. This text bears no meaningful relationship to the Yi Zhou shu and is probably a much later work.30 The figure Guiguzi is obviously imaginatively named, and his historicity is problematic. We can set aside these issues, but the link between the Zhou shu and Taigong Wang merits further examination, for we find scattered throughout literary sources from later periods citations and notations that reveal an overlap between the content of the Yi Zhou shu and passages associated with the Taigong. First of all, it is likely that there was a separate work, probably known under both titles, Taigong yinfu and Zhou shu yinfu, that might have born some relation to material in the Yi Zhou shu. The bibliographic treatise of the Sui shu lists a Zhou shu yinfu in nine scrolls, under the heading Militarists (bing jia).31 Literary compendia from the medieval period, such as leishu (encyclopedia, or commonbooks), provide some insight into the possibility that such a work was related to the broader Taigong genre as well as the Yi Zhou shu. Li Shan’s commentary to the Wenxuan includes the following citation of the Zhou shu yinfu: In the Zhou shu yinfu, the Taigong says, “Those fond of employing ‘petty kindness’ will not obtain real worthies.” 32

The full passage this line comes from is found in the Shuoyuan, where it is part of a discussion between Taigong Wang and King Wu.33 Liu Xiang does not tell us his source for the passage, but once we have seen the full passage here, we can recognize it from the Taigong liutao, where it is cast as a discussion between the Taigong and King Wen.34 The Taigong liutao passage is abbreviated and does not contain the line cited in the Wenxuan, but the Shuoyuan passage makes it clear that these are in origin the same passage. In another passage cited in Li Shan’s notes to the Wenxuan, we find the following line attributed to the Zhou shu:

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The Taigong said, “Those who share a common hatred assist one another, and those who share a common fondness compete with one another.” 35

We do indeed find these lines in the Yi Zhou shu (close parallels appear in three different chapters), but in none of the extant passages are the lines attributed to the Taigong. Moreover, the extant Taigong liutao also includes this same line.36 Entry 827 of the Taiping yulan cites a story about King Wu, on the eve of launching an attack on the Shang, asking subjects of that regime if there have been omens of its decline. The text attributes the story to the Taigong liutao, but a comment appended to the passage adds, “the Zhou shu . . . matches (this item).” 37 There is no such story in the extant Yi Zhou shu. Elsewhere, we find the same pattern of overlap. The ­Wuxing dayi (sixth century CE) cites the Zhou shu when telling a story about various spirits testing the supernatural knowledge of King Wu. Only the Taigong is able to provide the king with the proper answers to the question posed. Versions of this story appear in the Jiu Tang­shu, where it is attributed to the Taigong liutao, and in commentaries to the Shiji and Wenxuan, which both cite the Taigong jingui (The Tai­gong’s Metal Repository), another book attributed to the Taigong.38 The Beitang shuchao cites a brief line concerning the use of punishments, attributed there to the Zhou shu; the same line is attributed to the Taigong liutao in the Taiping yulan.39 Similarly, variations on a brief passage concerning ritual are attributed in the Beitang shuchao to the Zhou shu, but in both the Chuxue ji and Taiping yulan to the Taigong liutao.40 The Tongdian (early ninth century CE) includes a passage attributed to the Zhou shu yinfu that closely resembles two separate passages in the currently available Taigong liutao.41 It seems likely from such evidence that up until the Song dynasty, there was a large body of material associated with the Taigong that more or less constituted a genre and that specific collections with independent names were still fluid. Nevertheless, there was probably a work within this genre associated with the name Zhou shu, and it may have overlapped to some extent with the extant Yi Zhou shu. When we encounter citations from the Zhou shu, we must keep in mind not only the possibility that they derive from the “Zhou shu” section of the Shangshu,



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but also the chance that they are related to military writings and may shed light on the overlap between military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu and the broader category of Taigong literature. The following line from the Zhanguo ce and Hanfeizi is a particularly good example. While it is unattested in any extant sources today, it clearly reflects the militarists’ standpoint: The Zhou Documents say, “if you desire to defeat your enemy, you must first assist him; if you desire to take your enemy, you must first give to him.” 42

The line would not be out of place in the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu that are examined below. The Taigong liutao was likely the most inclusive and widely read of the various Taigong texts. It must have circulated in much larger and perhaps looser conglomerations than the Taigong liutao available to us today; there is a manuscript fragment of the work from the Dunhuang library discovered in the early twentieth century which consists of more than twenty chapters, only a small handful of which correspond to material in the transmitted text. Among the additional chapters is a section with the heading you Zhou zhi ershiba guo (Treatise of the Zhou [passage on the right], Twenty-eight States), in which a brief historical account of rulers of past regimes is given. This section of the Taigong liutao manuscript includes state and ruler names that do not figure in the standard retellings of early Chinese history and appear in the early record in only one other place: the Yi Zhou shu.43 The Moralist Prejudice Against the Text Given its verifiable antiquity and that it was known to some of the most important scholars in the Eastern Han and beyond, it is surprising that the Yi Zhou shu was still largely overlooked by the main currents of scholarship from the Song dynasty on. The most likely explanation for this is that scholars who came to the Yi Zhou shu brought expectations about the morality and profundity of ancient works that were not easily satisfied by the diverse contents of the text. In fact, the work was diverse enough to evoke in its readers many disparate and even incompatible impressions and understandings. Classical scholars were

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almost unanimous in rejecting the notion that the military portions of the text were produced by the early sage rulers of the Zhou house, rife as they were with blatant opportunism and references to violence. Blinded by their own moralistic penchant, these critics of the text were unable to see that behind the references to tactics, trickery, and combat was a fairly comprehensive and sophisticated position on the state’s use of force. These scholars’ mode of reading texts from antiquity resulted in what may now seem to us an ironic conclusion: that large portions of the work were not the authentic traces of the Zhou founders’ wisdom, but were rather the writings of militarists during the Spring and Autumn or Warring States periods. Thus modern scholarship finds itself in agreement with these traditionalists concerning the dates of these chapters, but we are not prone to share their judgment concerning their value as historical documents. It is worth examining some of the reactions this text has elicited over the centuries, to get a sense of the difficulties the text has so long presented to scholars. These difficulties range over a broad spectrum of issues, from the corruption of the text over time to its archaic and diverse linguistic makeup, and to the seeming impossibility of finding in it a single narrative or interpretive thread that can help us make sense of its contents. Zhu Yizun’s entry for the work in his monumental Jingyi kao (Examination into the Meaning of the Classics) collects many revealing comments by scholars over the centuries that show us how problematic the Yi Zhou shu was for them.44 Ding Fu (active ca. 1220) discusses the moral deficiencies of the text, but moves on to argue that it is an authentic pre-Qin work, and he closes by bemoaning the fact that it has fallen into obscurity and that readable copies have become hard to obtain. His conflicting thoughts are representative of late imperial scholarship generally: Confucius established the Documents in one hundred chapters, but Mencius rejected all but two or three bamboo strip’s worth of the “Wucheng” chapter, noting that its description of bloodshed approached the ridiculous. Now the text that is called the Jizhong Zhou shu is itself filled with such exaggerated language, and is moreover mixed with perverse and deceitful teachings. How is it possible that this text reflects the affairs



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of Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou, and was selected by Confucius and Mencius [as worthy of transmission]? And yet, within the text there are still many instances of holding Heaven in awe, respecting the people, revering worthies, and elevating virtue, as well as the wise words of former kings of antiquity and traces of their government systems. When we consider the chapters “Shixun” or “Mingtang,” they were drawn upon by those who recorded and compiled ritual texts; “Ke Yin” and “Duoyi” were used as sources by Sima Qian. It seems there is in the work that which cannot be dispensed with. . . . [The text goes on to enumerate early citations from the work and its appearance in the “Yiwen zhi,” concluding]: that the work did not first become known from the Ji tomb is evident. What a pity that later generations never again assigned such value to the work [as was given it in the Han], and that its readability deteriorated on a daily basis.45

Each of Ding’s three main points—that the text is morally deficient, that it is nevertheless valuable, and that it is difficult to read—is echoed by other scholars across the ages. There is no consensus on the language of the text, although clearly what is often at issue is simply the physical deterioration of manuscripts. But lacunae, orthographic variation, and other problems associated with transmission over time are not the only explanations for the challenges presented by reading the Yi Zhou shu. The language of the text is no more uniform than its intellectual content, and for some traditional scholars, these two issues were not easy to separate. Hong Mai (1123–1202) puts it thus: The Zhou shu that we now have in seventy chapters is of a completely different style of writing than the Shang shu. Moreover, the events and phenomena that it records by and large exceed the truth, and there is nothing valuable or reliable in it.46

Liu Kezhuang (1187–1269) notes that other scholars criticized the text because “in recording events it missed the facts” and in its writing “there are many inconsistencies,” but he goes on to argue that the violence described in the various depictions of the conquest of Shang within the work exceeds the bloodiness of the careers of the First Emperor of Qin or Emperor Wu of the Han; its content, in his opinion, is “ridiculous,

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exaggerated, far-removed from human emotions, and is far worse than being merely ‘inconsistent.’” 47 Fang Xiaoru’s (1357–1402) critique of the text is one of the most detailed, and his tone is one of almost pure moral outrage.48 He opens by noting that the text was clearly available throughout the Han and that its association with the Ji tomb texts is mistaken. But he then goes on to reject the notion that Confucius had anything to do with the text: Liu Xiang refers to this as Zhou documents, and says they are precisely those materials left over by Confucius when he edited [the Shang shu]: this is false. How can we know this? Because the events it records are doubtful. To give just some obvious examples, when King Wu attacked the Shang, he killed their ruler and took pity on their people, and that was it. And yet the “Shifu” chapter [of the Yi Zhou shu] describes cutting off 1,100,709 ears of the war dead [for sacrificial offering], and the capture of another 3,010,000. So many war dead? Even in the chaos between Chu and Han [at the fall of the Qin], there was not such tyranny and violence as this, and to say that King Wu brought this about? If those he killed had been counted by the millions and tens of thousands, would there have been anyone left alive in the realm? Or take the Duke of Zhou, who in employing people did not need to seek out methods from a single person; yet in the “Guanren” chapter, it says [he] “intoxicated subordinates with wine to observe their respectfulness; tempted their desires to observe their patterns of behavior; enticed them with advantage to see if they were impoverished; lavished them with music to see if they were immoral.” Relying on methods of trickery to entrap people and yet hoping to attract worthy people and use them to govern—although the strategists of the Warring States period themselves would not dare practice such deception, they would have us believe the Duke of Zhou used these means to employ people? Or again, take the generals of a true king: they prohibit chaos and eliminate violence, taking benevolence and righteousness as their foundation. Yet the “Dawu” chapter says, “in the spring, cut off access to their fields, in the summer eat off of their grain, in the autumn, seize what they have harvested, and in the winter, expose their preparations.” Is there anything less benevolent than this? The “Daming” chapter says “to indulge them, use excessive music, to bribe them, use fine women.” Is there anything less



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righteous than this? These are things which men of later ages with even a hint of a kind heart could not bear to do, yet we are to believe that a true king’s use of the military was like this? 49

His critique goes on to cite a few more chapters of the work that do not agree with his notion of antiquity and then returns to the conquest of Shang: When it comes to recording the events involved in King Wu’s attack of the Shang, the text is often ridiculously exaggerated and in disagreement with the Shang shu. When looked at in this way, it is absolutely clear that these are not real Zhou documents, and that to say they were left behind after Confucius compiled and edited the Shang shu is false.50

Despite this heated attack on the authenticity of the work, even Fang cannot deny that some chapters in the text are in agreement with the classics and thus of some worth. Scholars studying the formation of the canon and interpretive traditions that grew up around the classics throughout the imperial period of Chinese history have been struck by commentators’ willingness to overlook inconsistencies among the various works in the canon and their tenacity in forging the notion of a single vision of moral governance from such disparate sources.51 When compared to the Yi Zhou shu, however, the canon proper is obviously more susceptible to coherent moral interpretation. While traditional accounts of the classics are almost always clouded by an uncritical acceptance of their antiquity and profundity, the conclusions most traditional scholars finally arrived at to explain the problems they found in the Yi Zhou shu look to us today curiously critical and surprisingly sound: that the text is a composite which may include some authentic materials from the Western Zhou period, but which is composed largely of chapters written during the Eastern Zhou era by authors concerned primarily with political issues pertinent in their own day but not, as far as we can tell, in the distant past.52 Ironically, those elements of the Yi Zhou shu that made it suspect and unappealing to traditional scholars are in large measure what make the text so interesting to us today. Its linguistic and intellectual diversity pose challenges for us as well, but both suggest that the materials in this

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collection have not been homogenized by the editorial habits of traditional classical studies. The possibility of finding individual chapters that may date from any point on the broad timeline from the founding of the Western Zhou in the eleventh century down to the establishment of a bureaucratic empire in the second century BCE, and that may represent perspectives not commonly found in transmitted texts from the early period, are both exciting prospects. The military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, while so distasteful to moralists from late imperial times, turn out to be full of fascinating surprises for the historian of ancient China.

4

Translation and Study of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu

Relying on Heaven’s seasons to attack those who Heaven is destroying is called “martial.” To employ the martial comprehensively and then use the civil to follow close behind brings real accomplishments.1

The Context of the Military Chapters We turn now to chapters 6 through 10 of the Yi Zhou shu. We will find that they present a vivid description of how the civil and martial arms of the state work in concert with one another, first to lay siege to an enemy territory, then to settle the newly conquered region and govern it as one’s own. We will also find that while they are clearly a part of the broad genre of military texts, in many ways they are different from any early military text we have seen before. It is therefore necessary to do all we can to assess their broader context and significance. Aside from the handful of lines the preface provides to situate these chapters within the broader chronological framework of the text, there is nothing here to provide the reader with any historical or narrative context. Preceding the military chapters, we find that the opening three chapters of the work are theoretical and must date to late in the compilation of the work. They deal with the psychology of governing large populations, envisioning a theory of rulership informed by an understanding of human nature and buttressed by a cosmological framework. Such concerns only emerged late in the fourth century BCE, and during the third and second centuries BCE they formed part of the domi97

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nant intellectual discourse. The opening lines of chapter 4 share this outlook, but the text quickly turns to a style of prose exceedingly common in the Yi Zhou shu, one that I have described elsewhere as enumerative.2 It is often difficult to discern meaningful intellectual positions from long enumerative lists, except to the extent that such enumeration itself constitutes evidence of important intellectual orientations. The enumerative thinking so prominent in much of the Yi Zhou shu is not the sort of exhaustive list making that scholars of Han thought are used to encountering, although the historical development of the latter might constructively be reconsidered in light of what I believe must be an earlier stage of enumerative thinking represented in this text. Here we see little evidence of systematic mathematical relationships, yin-yang thinking, or Five Phases numerology. This looser sort of enumeration figures prominently in one of the military chapters considered below and appears briefly in another of them as well, so we will have ample opportunity to examine this stylistic and intellectual approach as we reach those chapters. The first obvious break in continuity one encounters in the Yi Zhou shu comes in chapter 5, which is concerned with ceremonial activities and maintenance of infrastructure and which turns out to be unique within the collection; several chapters of the text can be said to deal with matters of ritual, but chapter 5 does not appear to be closely related to any other section of the book. It is a detailed set of proscriptions concerning public works, state sacrifices, and other ceremonial activities and how they are to be scaled back during times of scarcity. The transition from the opening, theoretical chapters to this one is clumsy, and again when one moves on to the military themes in chapters 6 through 10 the transition is abrupt; the authors of the preface could do no more than simply assert that these documents were all penned in the early years of the Zhou, prompted by the needs of the day.3 The first of the overtly military chapters in the text, chapter 6, “Wucheng” (The Martial Scale), however, is filled with parallels to Warring States military treatises and is clearly a product of the Eastern, not Western, Zhou period. The exact relationship between this document and the Warring States military works is nevertheless far from evident, and it will be helpful to look at this group of five chapters together before trying to assess issues of dating and origins.



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Yi Zhou shu Chapter 6: “Wucheng,” The Martial Scale This chapter opens with a single general observation about the balance of power among states of varying sizes, then moves on to a list of eleven different aspects of the martial, that is, different components of what constitutes proper military conduct in various situations. The chapter is chock full of references to righteous warfare, but these are matched almost in every instance by straightforward strategies for tricking, bribing, or otherwise manipulating one’s enemy. This constitutes a good part of what troubled scholars and moralists about this text in later ages. It also prompts us to reconsider the history of the term yi, righteousness, and specifically to look for nuances of the word beyond the standard Confucian interpretation, which of course eventually came to dominate the way most people around the world have understood that term. This task is made easier by attention to all five chapters. While the formulaic structure of this chapter imposes a certain unity to its component definitions of the martial, it may nevertheless seem to be a clumsy hodgepodge of statements. In fact, as we will examine below, there is a fairly consistent organization to the chapter. Moreover, certain ideas resonate throughout much of the chapter, and indeed throughout the group of chapters as a whole; these will be of primary concern to us as we proceed. But one cannot escape the sense that some of the lines recorded here have a long history and were culled from other sources and from perhaps richer contexts. In a couple of cases, we find enough supporting evidence to reconstruct a bit of such context, and those possibilities will be explored after a complete translation has been presented. The text of the Yi Zhou shu, as noted before, has been damaged in some places, so where lacunae have been reported by textual scholars of the past, I will insert the following indication: {Ө = one missing graph reported}. Where a missing word can be supplied by context, it is placed in the same parentheses, but it should be understood to represent an educated guess. Chapter 6: “Wucheng,” The Martial Scale A great state does not dissipate its awesomeness, a small state does not forfeit its modest position, and equals do not lose the balance of power.4

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Sever precipitous territory and attack on level ground. Incorporating the small and seizing the chaotic, {Ө} the strong and laying siege to the weak, while assaulting those who are not upright—this is the mooring of the martial. Attack when the enemy is in disorder, is ill and plagued—this is compliance with the martial. As for the worthy, assist them; as for the chaotic, grasp them. As for those who wish to rise up, encourage them; as for those who are corrupt, destroy them. As for those who are apprehensive, make them fearful; as for those who harbor desires, indulge them. This is the application of the martial.5 Fine men can bring ruin to the elders; fine women can bring ruin to the consort.6 Immoderate scheming can bring ruin to {Ө}; immoderate craftiness can bring ruin to timeliness. Immoderate music can bring ruin to the upright; immoderate speech can bring ruin to righteousness. These are the destructive techniques of the martial. Pardon their masses and bring an end to their misfortunes. Settle their (people) and bring relief to their public purse. This is the separating technique of the martial. Entice the enemy in order to divide up and expose their supplies. By means of attack lend support to virtue. Pursue the exigencies of the moment. This is the pinnacle of the martial. In spring, interfere with their agriculture. In fall, cut down their harvest. In summer, seize their grain. In winter, expose their supplies to the cold.7 In spring and fall, be inclined to leisure. In winter and summer, be inclined to haste. This is the seasonality of the martial. The long are victorious over the short, the light over the heavy, the straight over the bent, the many over the few, the strong over the weak, the well-fed over the hungry, the decorous over the angry, the first over the last, the hurried over the late. This is the victory of the martial. When pursuing troops do not plunder. With worn down invaders, do not force a confrontation; those whose power is worn down and vitality is sapped are easily conquered. This is the technique of martial pursuit.8 Once you have vanquished a foe, raise up banners to proclaim orders. Command officers to forbid plunder. Do not engage in cruel or violent acts. Do not reduce ranks; do not destroy fields and dwellings.



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Each will settle his own relatives and the people will submit as if transformed. This is the settling technique of the martial.9 When the hundred clans have all submitted, disband the troops and raise up virtue. Level out their dangerous terrain in order to destroy their military preparations.10 All within the four quarters will fear and submit, and you will broadly possess all under Heaven. This is the securing technique of the martial.11

As mentioned above, the unfolding of the various aspects of warfare in this chapter suggests a conscious order to the whole. The passages move from general descriptions of conditions for attack to specific tactical approaches, such as fostering immoderate behavior or offering bribes of fine women. Much attention is paid to winning over the loyalty of the populace, which appears to be a tactic used both during active campaigns, probably to facilitate swift conquest, and at the end of a successful campaign, where the goals are clearly to restore social order. This theme figures prominently in the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. Broadly conceived, then, the chapter proceeds from the invasion of enemy territory to conquest and annexation. This same narrative framework reappears in three of the remaining four chapters. Taken alone, almost every passage of this chapter can be linked to passages from other Zhou period works concerning government or military affairs. Among the opening passages we find some of the clearest and strongest statements in the early literature about the need to wage war against weak and immoral enemies. Couched as they are among other passages concerning bribery, trickery, and corruption, these passages suggest the extent to which the concept of righteous warfare was rooted in concrete political and tactical concerns. Attacking an enemy in disorder is not only morally justifiable, it is also easier than trying to defeat a well-ordered foe. The same argument applies to an enemy ruler who has alienated his own populace. Throughout the second half of the chapter, we find several passages with important parallels in other military texts. The brief passage concerning seasonality has a close parallel in chapter 8 and is discussed below; the notion that government activities ought to be carefully timed to match the seasons is an important concept that is woven into the fabric of many chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, providing evidence of the intellectual coherence of much of the text.12

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The next two passages echo the closing lines of the Sunzi bingfa, chapter 7, where we find the lines: Using the near to confront the far; using the rested to confront the exhausted; using the sated to confront the hungry—this is one who knows how to control strength. . . . Do not cut off a returning army; always leave an avenue of retreat when surrounding an army; do not press an exhausted enemy—this is the method of employing the military.13

The notion that an army on the verge of victory should not pursue a desperate foe too closely or with too much zeal may reflect several different concerns, some of them having to do with archaic (or imagined) codes of chivalry. Yet it is most likely that this tactic grew out of a desire to allow retreating enemies to disperse, rather than cornering them and forcing them to fight to the death, a costly tactic even if you are assured victory. The final passages of the chapter are concerned with the behavior of the conquering army once an enemy territory has been annexed. We have of course examined many similar passages in chapter 2 above, from the Sima fa, the Lüshi chunqiu, the Huainanzi, and elsewhere. Notably, here the focus of advocating such policies appears straightforwardly practical: to secure the loyalties of the newly conquered populace and preserve the resources and infrastructure of the territory intact. Once the enemy populace has been settled, troops are disbanded and weapons put away, a symbolic act discussed in several other texts, and the strategic terrain of the territory is leveled out, a tactic that appears in the opening lines of chapter 10 as well. From this handful of parallels in other texts, we cannot draw any final conclusions about the direction of borrowing or influence; it may be more accurate to say that many of these parallels simply represent some of the common wisdom among military theoreticians in the Warring States era and that wording was probably borrowed and modified widely as needed by many textual traditions. Again, we will be better armed to address these questions after looking at the entire group of five chapters and after considering other kinds of evidence about the date of these pieces, such as grammar.



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Yi Zhou shu Chapter 7: “Yunwen,” The Truly Civil Chapter 7, “Yunwen,” echoes many of the same conceptions seen in chapter 6. Both are most fundamentally concerned with how to incorporate a defeated enemy into one’s own administrative and economic system, primarily by ensuring that the process of conquest does not destroy the enemy’s existing infrastructure or alienate its populace. It is the smooth and timely transition from the application of martial techniques to civil policies that determines the success of military conquest, and thus the civil and martial become a conceptual pair that can encompass a range of concerns and tactics that, as we have seen, would be incompatible with later, moralistic visions of sagely government. This chapter opens, in a sense, where the last chapter ended, with the storing away of weapons and the turn to administrative measures to make one’s defeated enemy into a productive and settled part of the realm. We saw that chapter 6 is presented as a list of formulaic statements, each defining a specific aspect of the martial. The text has a sort of rhythm to it, achieved through the regular return to the pattern “this is the X of the martial.” Chapter 7 has a much more regular rhythm, as the entire text is a long rhymed verse. The poetic structure we see here will reappear again in chapters 9 and 10 as well: four-character lines alternate between rhymed and nonrhymed endings. In this chapter, there are apparently only two rhymes, and they are used throughout the whole piece. The chapter opens with fourteen or fifteen rhymed couplets where the word in the rhyming position belongs to the Old Chinese rhyme category zhi, in the rising tone (words all ending in *-əgx); it is difficult to know the exact number of rhymes, since the text appears to be corrupt in at least one place.14 There is a single graph in rhyming position which simply does not rhyme (but may nevertheless be the correct graph), and two graphs in rhyming positions that must be erroneous.15 Well past the middle of the chapter, the rhyme switches and we find seven or eight couplets where words in rhyming position fall into the yu rhyme category in the rising tone (words all ending in *-agx).16 Interestingly, the final lines of the poem return to the first rhyme, but only briefly; two zhi rhymes (in what become rising tones) appear at the very end of the chapter. The effect might seem a bit clumsy after such long passages that sustain the same rhymes couplet after couplet. If the

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poem is read in rounds, however, starting over at the beginning immediately after finishing once, then the zhi rhyme continues on uninterrupted for roughly two-thirds of the poem.17 This would have facilitated repetitive chanting of the piece, which is how these rhymed chapters must have been employed, as part of a process of training in the broader military arts. We will explore the implications of this understanding of these rhymed texts when we come to chapters 9 and 10 below. It will be useful to consider the structure of these rhymed chapters in diagrammatic fashion, allowing us to note where the regularity of the poem is disturbed and otherwise to make apparent the extent to which these chapters are unique in the Yi Zhou shu and in early military literature as well. The chapter is represented below, with each couplet numbered; “x” stands for a single graph that occurs in nonrhyming position, “R” stands for the rhyming word, and “E” stands for an exception to the expected rhyme. In all the rhymed chapters of the Yi Zhou shu we find a handful of rhymes that differ by what eventually became tonal distinctions; these were not considered irregular rhymes. Rhyme group names are given at the start of each rhyme, differences in what becomes tone are noted, and rhyme groups are indicated for irregular rhymes. Missing graphs are as usual indicated by Ө. Occasionally, the last word in the nonrhyming line of a couplet conforms to the rhyme, and this is noted with Ř. Such “double” rhymes were apparently not considered infelicitous. Finally, it is likely that one word in the final line is unstressed, blending into the rhythm of the final four words without disrupting the regularity of the rest of the piece; unstressed words will be indicated by the symbol ~ (Table 2). A few problems are brought to light by looking at the text in this diagrammatic fashion. Most troubling is the jarring disregard for rhyme in line thirteen. It is tempting to consider the graph here a textual error, but it starts a series of lines that are linked to one another in various other ways, such as the repetition of the final word in one sentence in the opening position of the next, making it unlikely that the graph is erroneous. There is no obvious graphic variation that might help us emend the text, and the meaning of the word in rhyming position fits the overall context of the piece well enough. Moreover, the rhyme is doubled in the next line (that is, a rhyming word occurs in the final position of the nonrhyming line, Ř), then doubled again in the follow-



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ing line where a new rhyme is introduced. Thus it is possible that the text may be damaged here; it seems odd to introduce a new rhyme in the nonrhyming position. Yet it may be that this sort of break from the regular pattern was an acceptable variation. Even when we consider all the textual errors and other difficulties of this chapter, it is a remark-

Table 2 Structure of Rhymes in Yi Zhou shu Chapter 7 Line Rhyme pattern and group

Line Rhyme pattern and group

1

13

xxxx, xxx R

xxxx, xxx E

(zhi rhyme, rising tone; *-əgx) (*thing, geng rhyme, level tone) 2

xxxx, xxx R

14 xxx Ř, xxx R (*hməgh, also zhi rhyme but departing tone)

3

xxx Ř, xxx R

15 xxx Ř (new rhyme begins, yu rhyme, rising tone; *-agx), xxx R

4

xxxx, xxx E

16

xxxx, xxx R

17

xxxx, xxx R

18

xxxx, xxx R

(*ləgh, also zhi rhyme but departing tone) 5

xxxx, xxx R

6 xxxx, xxx R (emending the text with Zhu Junsheng and Sun Yirang) 7

xxxx, xxx R

19

xxxx, xxx R

8

xxxx, xxx R

20

xxxx, xxx R

9

xxxx, xxx R

21

xxxx, xxx R

10

xxxx, xxx R

22 xxxx, xxx R (return to zhi rhyme, rising tone, *-əgx)

11 xxxx, xxx R (emending the text with Lu Wenchao, Liu Shipei, etc.)

23

xx

12

24

xxxx, ~xxx R

xxxx, xxx R

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ably organized piece that was undoubtedly carefully crafted, probably to be chanted aloud, and it has been transmitted to us in remarkably pristine fashion, especially considering that its poetic structure went uncommented on for millennia. As we turn to the translation, note that the phonetic values of the rhymes, according to Li Fang-kuei’s systematic modifications to Karlgren’s reconstructions of Archaic Chinese, are given, along with detailed notes about the emendations mentioned above. Readers should keep in mind that the reconstructions are not intended to show what language actually sounded like in the pre-imperial period, but rather to present as systematically as possible the various phonological information we can derive from our limited sources. We cannot hear the real poetry of the piece, but we can nevertheless inform our reading of it by knowledge of some of the rules to which its rhymes must have conformed. Chapter 7: “Yunwen,” The Truly Civil When considering settling and disarming a conquered populace Truly the civil constitutes the guideline (*kjəgx). Illuminate and announce throughout: This is where the banners are located (*dzəgx)!18 Collect their weapons but refuse bribes (*hwəgx).19 Do not relocate their residences (*ljəgx). As for their existing offices and military posts, and their associated duties Base your rule on their various officials (*ljəgh). Measure the public purse And bestow wealth to relieve the impoverished ­officers (*dzrjəgx). Relieve, care for, and subsidize the needy And appropriately tax fields and markets (*djəgx).20 Order men to resume their posts In order to do away with distress and shame (*hnrjəgx). Orphans, widows, and the helpless Will attain good treatment and all will rejoice (*hjəgx). Inquire into all their outer relations And record their whereabouts (*dzəgx). Relocate those of the same family And establish one of them as the lineage leader (*tsjəgx).



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In leading (organizing) them, employ tens and fives. In settling them, employ {Ө}.21 In instructing them, use the illumination of trust And it will be as if they obtained parents (*məgx). If you take up leniency to rule them Who will not listen (*thing)? 22 If they hear the teaching yet do not regret (*hməgx) Reverently nurture those who are unenlightened (*hməgh). Once they have been enlightened, they can be taught (*njagx). And from this comes the truly martial (*mjagx). For those who are condemned to death, consider allowing them to live For the living, consider ways to restore them to their places (*skrjagx). When people know that they will not be abandoned They will care for and protect their homes (*gagx). Superiors and subordinates will work together in harmony And there will be no enemy who does not fall (*gragx). Take up their jade scepter In order to settle their realm (*gwjagx) And the common people will all cultivate their land And the young and able-bodied will offer support (*bjagx).23 Do not abolish what they have engaged in. Open their borders (*thagx). The people will look up to the troops As if waiting on their parents (*məgx). In this way, in the course of a single day One can settle the realm and possess all in the four seas (*hməgx).24

This chapter closes, as the previous one did, with language that echoes the grand statements of the Documents that recount the conquest of Shang and establishment of the Zhou order. It makes explicit the immediate shift to paternalistic rule once an enemy has been conquered, yet it is worth noting that the tone of the chapter is decidedly pragmatic. Missing here are any broad, abstract moralistic visions of the state. Rather, the morality that the text espouses emerges from the specific contingencies that a conqueror must grapple with when trying to turn military conquest into long-lasting political victory. Settling a populace, recording their whereabouts, restoring or preserving local offices,

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ensuring that economic activity can resume quickly—these measures ease the burden of the invading army, reduce the threat of local unrest, and help turn the annexed territory into a loyal and productive part of the state. To this end, it is crucial that the human and economic resources of the former enemy be preserved. Weapons are collected as a final act of war and perhaps as a symbolic act marking the transition to civil rule, but other resources are not to be disturbed. The territory is not to be looted, behavior fitting a marauding band that has no intention of occupying and governing its defeated enemies. Rather, the occupying force actually invests in the new region, or distributes the accumulated resources now at its disposal, to help the needy and pay the local nobility. Local officials are to be encouraged to resume their posts. Farmers are to be encouraged to return to their tilling. As we have already seen in chapter 2 above, all these themes—preserving local resources, distributing grain and cash, earning the loyalties of the newly conquered subjects—can be found in other Warring States sources. In texts such as the Lüshi chunqiu or Huainanzi, however, we sense that the moral behavior of the army has become a polemical point, argued by political philosophers and theoreticians who may have little experience with or concern for the actual logistics of waging war. Even the Sima fa passage that discusses the behavior of an invading army looks to us idealistic, as if it were a moralist’s reworking of details from military practice. Here, however, and again in chapters 9 and 10 below, we find these themes woven together with practical concerns and even detailed technical issues pertaining to warfare. If the authors and compilers of these other texts indeed drew on a range of textual sources that were themselves closer to traditions of military praxis to inform their more theoretical positions, these chapters of the Yi Zhou shu might provide us a glimpse of what such materials would have looked like. Of course these chapters of the Yi Zhou shu are not technical manuals; they are themselves, in a sense, highly abstract texts, rendered in poetic form and, as we will see, drawing on certain archaic linguistic forms and ornate phrases. Nevertheless, they present a much fuller picture of the complete program that the wen-wu pair encompassed. If we are to take this program seriously, it suggests to us that there was in the Eastern Zhou period a set of common assumptions about how



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a government ought to act, what its responsibilities toward its subjects were, and what level of infrastructure and social welfare it needed to maintain for the state to expand and remain functional. The paternalistic sentiment espoused by this chapter is not portrayed as something foisted on the populace, but something that springs naturally from a community when its rulers provide a stable social environment and address the needs of local nobility, farmers, merchants, and the destitute. Such arguments are of course made elsewhere in the early philosophical literature, by figures such as Mencius. We ought to examine these arguments seriously and not dismiss them as veiled machinations. The fostering of such paternalistic views of the role of government was certainly a political tactic, but it was likely also a deeply rooted cultural assumption and a functional approach to state building in this contentious time. The Warring States period saw experimentation with a range of new administrative forms, the creation of new means of social organization and mobilization, and the gradual creation of formal, bureaucratic structures replacing older informal, hereditary offices. Yet Chinese society as a whole, for most of its history, has been characterized by organizational and administrative structures (and values that underpin them) that are a blend of the bureaucratic and the patrilineal/paternalistic. Continuity between state and family is one of the grand homologies on which much of Chinese ideology has been constructed. A few lines from this chapter reveal something of the early history of this homology, reflecting a process that must have begun to dominate social organization within competing states at least by the sixth century BCE. In settling a conquered populace, the text advises: Inquire into all their outer relations, and record their whereabouts. Relocate those of the same family and establish one of them as the lineage leader. In leading [organizing] them, employ tens and fives. . . . In instructing them, use the illumination of trust, and it will be as if they obtained parents. If you rule them leniently, who will not listen?

On the one hand, this passage seems to hark back to a time when local social organization was a matter of lineage organization, yet we know well that throughout the Warring States period this social structure

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was collapsing or being consciously demolished. On the other hand, the passage makes mention of organization by “tens and fives,” which has long been understood in China to refer to a form of social organization purportedly espoused by Shang Yang (fourth century BCE) and celebrated by statesmen and political theorists later grouped under the heading of Legalist.25 Variations on the phrase “tens and fives” are scattered throughout early texts and refer to a system that probably originated in military organization, where fighting divisions were made up of small five- or ten-man units. As noted before, as states scrambled to field larger and better-trained armies in the increasing warfare of the Eastern Zhou period, they were forced to enlist more and more footsoldiers from among the commoners, and applying military forms of organization to society at large would have facilitated this process. This shift toward mobilizing entire populations was no doubt piecemeal, always easier on paper than on the ground, and probably easier to accomplish in newly annexed territories than in areas where longentrenched nobility would surely have resisted the change. The ultimate goal of such shifts was to put the many resources of settled and productive regions under the direct control of the new semibureaucratic state apparatus, without the need to rely on large lineage structures that might be competing with the state for those resources. The goal was to preserve older paternalistic values and notions of loyalty and authority but to disentangle them from powerful lineages and the institutions that maintained them. The state, acting directly as “father and mother” to the people, was to be the sole benefactor of their loyalty and sole manager of their varied resources. Thus we see in these lines the reconstitution of small-scale family organization in an effort to restore social order, but the use of “fives and tens” suggests that state control over these social structures was the real goal. The state must rule its subjects benevolently, so that “it will be as if they obtained parents.” Yi Zhou shu Chapter 8: “Dawu,” The Great Martial We move now to chapter 8, “Dawu.” We have seen that the first two chapters in this group of military texts fit together quite coherently. They are similar enough in intellectual approach and content to argue that they were most likely produced in relation to one another. We will find in



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chapter 8 short passages that are echoed in other places of the Yi Zhou shu and a general approach to military matters that is compatible with chapters 6, 7, 9, and 10. But the chapter as a whole is difficult to assess, as it is made up largely of detailed enumerative lists. Just what the relationships among these different lists (or among lists and any broader organizational themes) are is not readily apparent. Matters have been complicated by the fact that the text of this chapter is demonstrably defective, as some of the items in various lists have been lost somewhere in the transmission of the work. Fortunately, substantial passages of this chapter were long ago incorporated into long essays on military concerns in the Sui dynasty compendium Beitang shuchao before the text had become corrupt. Careful attention to the logic and structure of the transmitted texts and the earliest commentary reveal that the Beitang shuchao material is accurate and can be used to reconstruct the text. As noted above, recently discovered manuscript versions of this chapter from the late fourth century BCE match our transmitted version quite closely, and they also verify the authenticity of the Beitang shuchao testimony concerning some of the corrupt passages, thereby confirming the reconstruction of the text based on that testimony.26 The translation below is primarily based on the reconstructed sequence as it appears in Zhu Youzeng’s Zhou shu jixun jiaoshi, with notations where I differ from this base text. It is possible that with the eventual official publication of photographs and transcriptions of the Cili manuscripts, we will be able to further correct some details of this chapter, but as we will see below the structure of the text itself demonstrates that such modifications will not likely be of significant scope. The complete structure of the chapter and all the numerical lists it comprises are now by and large known to us. Only individual words or phrases might be altered by careful study of the new manuscripts, but this work will have to await their full publication. The chapter opens with a progression of assertions that are clearly informed by a common logic, but it immediately turns to the sort of standard enumeration seen throughout much of the Yi Zhou shu, a style of exhaustive listing that does not convey any deeper logical connections. Our challenge with this chapter is manifold: to unravel the relationship between the opening lines and the body of the chapter; to reveal the

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logic of the opening lines and understand the argument being made there; to look for stylistic or intellectual relationships between the enumeration found here and that are prevalent in so many other chapters of the work; and finally to try to make sense out of the laconic passages that make up the many lists in the body of the chapter, many of which appear to us as non sequiturs. Given that we can now be certain this text has been handed down to us over more than two millennia relatively intact, it is crucial that we try to understand it as a coherent and meaningful unit, even though such enumerative lists often look for all the world as if they have been ripped from some broader practical or pedagogical context and make little sense to us today. Chapter 8: “Dawu,” The Great Martial The Martial consists of seven formulae: governing; siege of walled cities; incursions at the perimeter of the enemy’s territory; attack campaigns into enemy territory; swift strikes; planned battle on neutral ground; and skirmishes.27 If you excel at governing, you will not need to lay siege to walled cities. If you excel at siege, you will not need incursion. If you excel at incursion, you will not need campaigns. If you excel at campaigns, you will not need strikes. If you excel at strikes, you will not need planned battle. If you excel at planned battle, you will not need skirmishes. If you excel even at skirmishes, you will not be defeated. In governance there are nine reliances: the nine reliances consist of four forms of marital relation and five kinds of harmonizing. In siege operations there are nine openings: the nine openings consist of four calamities and five excellencies. In incursions there are seven considerations: the seven considerations consist of four kinds of collection and three kinds of accumulation. In attack campaigns there are seven triggers: the seven triggers consist of the four seasons and the three risings. In swift strikes there are seven inveiglements: the seven inveiglements consist of three despairs and four pardons. In planned battle there are eleven incitements: the eleven incitements consist of six enticements and five protections. In skirmishes there are eleven unorthodoxies: the eleven unorthodoxies consist of six examinations and five considerations.28 The four forms of marital relation are: one, within the clan; two, exogamous marriage; three, friends and peers; four, those from the



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same district.29 The five kinds of harmonizing are: one, if you have Heaven, there will be no hatred; two, if you have the people, there will be no dissension; three, those with common interests will defend one another; four, those with common dislikes will assist one another; five, treat generously those who reside far off.30 These nine are the reliances of governance. The four calamities are: one, to attack according to Heaven’s seasons; two, to attack according to the advantages of terrain; three, to attack according to the virtue of the leaders; four, to attack according to the implementation of benefit.31 The five excellencies are: one, to obtain the humane; two, to obtain the wise; three, to obtain the brave; four, to obtain the talented; five, to obtain the artful. These nine are the openings of siege. The four kinds of collection are: one, treat them with humanity; two, embrace them with joy; three, broadly draw together the people of the region; four, use trust in establishing encirclements. The three kinds of accumulation are: one, men and women form a pair; two, . . . artisans materials . . . ; three, treat the death of the people as a grave affair. These seven are the considerations of incursion.32 The four seasons are: one, in spring encircle their fields; two, in summer, eat off of their grain; three, in autumn seize what they have reaped; four, in winter expose their stores.33 The three risings are: one, govern in accordance with the seasons; two, use the well-ordered to attack the chaotic; three, use the sated to attack the hungry. These seven are the triggers of the attack campaign. The three despairs are: one, they have no surplus of basic necessities; two, losing their people; three, burying their relatives.34 The four pardons are: one, in defeating others there must be surplus; two, in achieving awe-inspiring power trust must be renewed; three, people take joy in preserving their lives; four, pardon what the people despise. These seven are the inveiglements of swift strikes.35 The six enticements are: one, through behavior encourage humaneness; two, by means of the Way encourage wisdom; three, through bravery encourage martiality; four, use the knights to encourage the army; five, the rector of stables encourages the chariot drivers; six, the archery commanders encourage the five-man units.36 The five protections are: one, illuminate humaneness to encompass altruism; two, illuminate wis-

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dom to support strategies; three, illuminate martiality to uphold courage; four, illuminate talent to uphold knights; five, illuminate artistry to uphold offices. These eleven are the incitements of planned battle. The six examinations are: one, illuminate commands; two, illuminate disgrace; three, illuminate rewards; four, illuminate punishments; five, sharpen weapons; six, remain vigilant to the end. The five considerations are: be suspicious when the enemy marches at the sounding of drums; two, be prepared for pursuit and return; three, supporting chariots raise up banners; four, employ the strategies of the local officers in charge of forests and mountains; five, when the rear engages entwine them. These eleven are the unorthodoxies of skirmishes.37 It is only lacking vigilance that constitutes harm; where there is merit, there will be no defeat.38

Readers will now have a good sense of what detailed enumerative lists in the Yi Zhou shu look like. The opening paragraph is not typical of this style of prose. There we have a different mode of presentation seen often in Warring States texts, one that fits the general rhythmic pattern “if A then B; if B then C.” Such passages usually convey a straightforward logic, and the style of presentation helps impart meaning to laconic or otherwise difficult passages. On the other hand, the simple enumerative style that follows this opening section provides almost no clues to interpreting the specific meaning of difficult passages or to the overall purpose of such enumeration. Yet we have seen that the text of this chapter was transmitted relatively intact over millennia, was drawn on liberally by the authors of the military sections of the Beitang shuchao, and contained passages and ideas that crop up throughout other parts of the Yi Zhou shu or are quoted or paraphrased elsewhere in early literature. It was unquestionably an important document that must have conveyed rich meaning to earlier audiences. Let us begin our inquiry with the logic of the opening paragraph. The seven aspects of warfare listed here are clearly presented as a set of preferences, but readers familiar with early Chinese military texts may find these preferences at odds with their expectations. Siege of walled cities, gong, comes immediately after governance, and ahead of a long list of other forms of military engagements. This may initially strike us as being in sharp contrast to arguments made in the Sunzi



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bingfa, a text that has dominated most understandings of early Chinese strategic thinking, in both East and West, for centuries. In the opening chapters of that text we find the notion that siege of walled cities is too protracted and costly. Chapter 3 gives its own list of strategic preferences, and siege of walled cities is at the very bottom of the list. D. C. Lau and Roger Ames have argued that the Sunzi bingfa represents an earlier approach to warfare (late Spring and Autumn era), formulated during a time when siege of walled cities was not the primary objective of warfare, while the later Sun Bin bingfa reflects the realities of the Warring States era, when siege of major walled cities was a regular objective of war.39 While this description of the increasing scope and scale of warfare throughout the Warring States era is surely accurate, and while the Sunzi is certainly earlier than the Sun Bin text, I do not believe we need to insist on a chronological development in every theme from one text to the next. In fact, the Sunzi ranks siege as a last resort when considered alongside other, nonmilitary options. Chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu accounts for this in its opening line: “If you excel at governing, you will not need to lay siege to walled cities.” Beyond this, chapter 8 turns to other varieties of warfare, while the Sunzi, at least in its opening, more theoretical chapters, is concerned with the more fundamental decision of whether or not to wage war at all. Broadly speaking, the approaches of these two texts are compatible. And yet siege of walled cities must be a primary concern of “Dawu.” The logic that governs this opening progression, from governance to siege and on down through planned battle in the field and skirmishes, is not entirely foreign to the Sunzi. There the author seems most concerned about the various costs of waging war. In our text, the author is concerned with efficacy. The best explanation of our list of seven approaches to warfare is to understand it as a ranking of gains to be procured relative to the effort expended. Siege of walled cities may have been the most costly form of war, but to our author it also promised the greatest reward, a belief shown by the detailed descriptions of how to turn a conquered territory into a productive part of one’s administrative realm that are presented in chapters 6 and 7 of the work. Incursions at the perimeter of an enemy’s territory would require far less effort, but would bring only limited gains; attack campaigns into enemy territory should be understood as requiring deeper penetration into enemy

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lands, and therefore involving more risk.40 There is no reason to believe that either tactic results in the long-term occupation of productive regions. Much less swift strikes, which might only provide immediate spoils while inflicting limited damage on an enemy. Planned battle on neutral ground, between two large armies arrayed in battle formations, might have been decisive in determining who was the victor in a major, long-term war between large states, but the costs would have been high and results not easy to assess, since it is unlikely that useful territory was regularly captured in such battles. Finally, skirmishes were likely to have occurred with little or no planning and offered little promise of profitable gain. If the opening passage is governed by the logic of calculation, the consideration of investment made and the return to be expected, then can we find any connection to the remainder of the chapter? We might hope to find some clue in our two earliest descriptions of the chapter, the preface and Kong Zhao’s third-century commentary. The relevant entry in the preface mentions seven virtues of the martial, surely an allusion to a famous speech in the Zuo zhuan. The passage in question comes at the end of the famous Battle of Bi in 597 BCE, discussed above in chapter 2. King Zhuang of Chu and his forces had just routed the Jin army, and his general, Pan Dang, urges him to celebrate the victory by piling up the bodies of the dead Jin soldiers as a monument. He notes, “Your servant has heard that after conquering an enemy, one must display this conquest to his descendants, so that they will not forget these Martial accomplishments.” The Chu king’s response is fascinating: The ruler of Chu said, “this is not something that you understand. In the script, the stopping of weapons constitutes the graph for martial. When King Wu conquered the Shang, he composed a hymn with the lines ‘now collecting the shields and halberds, now sheathing the bows and arrows’. . . . Now as for the Martial, it means prohibiting violence, collecting weapons, preserving the great, establishing merit, bringing peace to the people, uniting the masses, and making resources abundant. This is what causes our descendants not to forget our resplendence. . . . The Martial has these seven virtues, yet I have not a single one of them. What am I to display to my descendants?” 41



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There can be no question that the seven virtues listed here, prohibiting violence, collecting weapons, etc., bear no relation whatsoever to the list that opens chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu. Yet the sentiment expressed in this speech is entirely recognizable now that we have examined the broader discourse on righteous war prevalent during the Eastern Zhou period. It seems likely that the author of the preface was led by the general consonance between the intellectual position of the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu and this speech from the Zuo zhuan to conflate the seven formulae with the seven virtues. In so doing, he averts our gaze from the true significance of the chapter. At first glance, Kong Zhao’s commentary to the chapter might not appear to offer much more promise of clarifying the purpose or meaning of all this enumeration than the Zuo zhuan speech does. His notes are terse and of limited scope and seldom address the overall importance of any of the chapters. Yet in a short sentence coming at the end of the list of preferences that begins chapter 8, just before the text turns to detailed enumeration, he presents us one small clue that may help us unravel the whole chapter. The passage in the text reads: If you excel at governing, you will not need to lay siege to walled cities. If you excel at siege, you will not need incursion. If you excel at incursion, you will not need campaigns. If you excel at campaigns, you will not need strikes. If you excel at strikes, you will not need planned battle. If you excel at planned battle, you will not need skirmishes. If you excel even at skirmishes, you will not be defeated.

Kong follows this with the laconic line: “This refers to victory in the ancestral temple.” 42 Later commentators are not in agreement on the relationship between Kong’s remark and the list: does victory in the ancestral temple refer only to the opening line, where even siege of walled cities is not employed? Or is this some sort of mystification of warfare? 43 Whatever Kong’s intentions, he alerts us to the possibility that this chapter, with its elaborate enumerative lists, is a relic of the ancient practice of calculations made before battle, probably carried out, originally at least, in the ancestral temple as part of the ritual announcement to the spirits of the ancestors that the country was going to war. Our evidence suggests that this practice had become, by some time

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late in the Spring and Autumn era, a relatively rational process of calculating the chances of victory and defeat by analyzing a broad range of data concerning terrain, preparedness, morale, and other factors pertinent to waging war. Mention of the practice is made frequently enough in early and medieval literature to testify to its importance, but detailed information concerning how such calculations were carried out, or how the whole process might have developed over time, is sparse. We know from the terminology used that the calculations were done using long, thin strips of bamboo, wood, or perhaps reeds of some sort. In this respect, temple calculations were part of a broader practical tradition that tied together divination, calendrics, and mathematics and other forms of calculation under the same set of principles. We cannot be sure how these strips were manipulated to produce meaningful data, but the fact that the use of these strips in military calculations was associated with the ancestral temple suggests a long history of evolution from divination and consultation with ancestral spirits to the much more rational approach that is described in our textual sources. One of only two detailed early descriptions of temple calculations comes at the end of the first chapter of the Sunzi bingfa. This chapter, titled “Ji” (“estimations” or “calculations”), is devoted almost entirely to laying out a set of factors that must be examined before deciding to wage war, such as the weather, the terrain, and the condition of the opposing armies. The same theme is prominent in other chapters of the work, and the Sunzi is of course much celebrated for its theoretical sophistication, especially the extent to which it argues for thorough, rational assessments of all factors related to warfare. Yet few in the modern era have paid as much attention to the closing passage of this first chapter, which reveals to us the fundamental link between the book’s theories and this practical tradition. There the author makes it clear that these estimations are to be carried out in the ancestral temple by manipulation of these calculation strips: In any case where, prior to engaging in battle, one determines victory in the temple calculations, it is because he obtained more strips in his favor (than he determined his enemy would obtain). In any case where, prior to engaging in battle, one determines defeat in the temple calculations, it is because he obtained fewer strips in his favor. The opponent



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with more strips defeats the opponent with fewer strips, to say nothing of an opponent who obtained none. If I look at it in this way, then victory and defeat will be evident.44

The list of factors that the Sunzi presents for analysis in these temple calculations includes information related to the morale and psychological condition of the troops; throughout the text, the Sunzi argues for taking such considerations seriously. We have already seen that the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu also recognize the importance of paying attention to the morale of both the army and the newly subjugated populace. There is one other detailed mention of temple calculations in the early literature, the following passage from the military chapter of the Huainanzi already discussed in some detail in chapter 2 above: Those who wish to use the army must first carry out “temple warfare” [calculations]. Comparing the rulers, who is more worthy? Comparing generals, who is more capable? Of the two populations, which has the closer bonds to their ruler? Comparing the states, which is better ordered? Comparing supplies and stores, who has more laid up? Comparing troops, whose are more skilled? Comparing weapons and armor, whose are sharper? Comparing the various implements and equipment required, who has more ready at hand? Thus, one manipulates the calculating strips from within the temple hall, yet determines victory to be won over a thousand li away.45

If we understand the various lists making up chapter 8 as relics of a larger practical tradition of calculating crucial factors prior to launching specific kinds of military campaigns, the chapter as a whole now appears far more integrated and logical. Difficult phrases or passages still present us with unsolvable questions, but we can begin to understand how the range of items in these lists might have been related to the types of warfare they are subsumed under, and how the group of lists taken together constitutes an intellectually coherent whole. To examine this possibility further, it is helpful to diagram the various lists and reveal the schematic nature of the chapter (see chart below). The chapter, rendered in diagrammatic form, is composed of seven lists (the seven systems of the martial). The first two are made up of

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nine items each, both lists being further divided into two groups of four and five items apiece. The next three lists are composed of seven items each, once again further divided into two subcategories, this time of four and three, four and three, and three and four. Finally, the last two lists comprise eleven items each, both made up of two groups of six and then five items. In this respect, the list is regular; only the list of the seven inveiglements upsets the symmetry by placing a subdivision of three items ahead of the subdivision of four items, reversing the order seen in the preceding two lists. Each list totals nine, seven, or eleven— that is, an odd number. It may be significant that each list is made up of one odd and one even numbered subset; perhaps this figured in the manipulation of the calculating strips.46 Yet numerological relationships stop here. One cannot find meaningful numerological combinations beyond this by adding the different numbers up in different ways (e.g., 9 + 9 = 18; 7 + 7 + 7 = 21; 11 + 11 = 22). The diagram below thus differs from magic squares and other such numerological charts, which became prominent in the Han period, in that it does not imply any deeper set of relationships waiting to be revealed through correlation, addition, multiplication, etc. Yet visualizing the text in this diagrammatic fashion can be helpful in at least two ways. First, to the extent that the diagram is symmetrical and shows a fair degree of structural order, we can be confident that our

Nine Reliances: 4 marital relations 5 harmonies Seven Considerations: 4 collections 3 accumulations

Nine Openings: 4 calamities 5 excellencies

Seven Triggers: 4 seasons 3 risings

Eleven Incitements: 6 enticements 5 protections

Seven Inveiglements: 3 despairs 4 pardons

Eleven Unorthodoxies: 6 examinations 5 considerations

The numerical structure of Yi Zhou shu chapter 8, “Dawu.”



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reconstruction of the text using the Beitang shuchao testimony and the newly discovered manuscripts is largely accurate and complete. When the manuscript finds are published, we should not expect to find additional lists or categories not now seen in the text.47 The chapter is a closed system. Second, that the text is a system should be obvious, and this is helpful in allowing us to link its many enumerative lists to the practical tradition of temple calculations. Under the opening category, governance, while most of the items seem related to issues of loyalty, it is not immediately clear in what way “governance” would be related to temple calculations, except perhaps in determining if there are options outside of warfare or political approaches that should be tried first. Under the category of siege, however, we are struck by the extent to which the items presented mirror those found in the Sunzi: terrain, weather, and qualities of the leader all figure here, just as they do in the first chapter of the Sunzi. Under incursions, the first subset has primarily to do with the treatment of the enemy populace, while the second subset is corrupt and hard to understand. As noted above, it is not entirely apparent why these factors appear here and not elsewhere, but there is certain to be a great deal we cannot explain if indeed a rich practical tradition has dropped from our view, leaving only these textual hints. Under the heading of attack campaigns we find a number of issues that might well have been considered before launching a protracted, far-reaching military excursion, such as seasonal rules for kinds of attack, and calculations related to preparedness, supplies, and discipline. Under the next category, swift strikes, we find material largely related to the psychological condition of the enemy. It is again unclear how this material is related to its specific heading, but the final two groups of lists, categorized under planned battle and skirmishes, provide many items that are easily understood as factors to be considered before such engagements.48 The training of troops figures prominently in the first list, and the final category includes attention to rewards and punishments, weaponry, and tactics. In chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu, placed precisely in the middle of a five-chapter-long group of texts presenting a detailed and sophisticated way of envisioning the relationship between the realization of civil rule and the implementation of military power, we may have the single most

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elaborate and technical relic of a long-lost tradition of miaosuan, temple calculations. Like so much of the practical contexts of early Chinese intellectual history, this has been obscured to us by a later tradition that emphasized the generation and manipulation of textual knowledge over the transmission of praxis. Insight into this case may sharpen our tools for examining enumeration more broadly in the Yi Zhou shu and in early Chinese intellectual history in general. Long, detailed, enumerative chapters in this text are surely evidence of a larger living tradition of political, moral, and historical knowledge, passed down only in part through texts. Zhou culture at the very top was reproduced generation to generation through odes, rituals, myths, speeches, and other vessels of historical memory and historical re-enactment. In such a world, some texts might merely have served as prompt books, convenient lists of stock phrases, or allusions to events or practices. They might appear to us today as mere lists, frustratingly cryptic, quaint, or irrational. Yet they come to us shorn from their contexts, less than skeletons. We must always try our best to make sense of them, but when we cannot we must resist the urge to conclude that they simply do not make any sense.49 That enumeration may have played an important role in the way elite culture was formulated and transmitted during at least some of the long Zhou era not only helps explain the prevalence of this genre of writing within the Yi Zhou shu, but it also helps us make sense of the reappearance of terms and lists in different chapters of the work that do not otherwise display any particular similarities. As was noted above, certain lists or portions of lists appear in both the military chapters of the text and in chapters that fit the broader chronological layout of the work. Such chapters usually purport to record speeches, harangues, or conversations and are usually set in specific historical contexts, unlike the military chapters of the work. The appearance in both sorts of chapters of enumeration generally and of closely paralleled passages specifically is one kind of evidence that reveals the intellectual coherence of the Yi Zhou shu. After examining these five military chapters, we will turn to one chapter from the text that combines the setting and style of the speech chapters with enumeration and military content. Again we will find reason to believe that, generally speaking, the military chapters share enough important features with other parts of the text to compel us to look for connections among various groups of chapters.



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Yi Zhou shu Chapter 9: “Da mingwu,” The Great Illumination of the Martial We come now to chapter 9 of the work, “Da mingwu.” Like chapter 6, this text presents us with a handful of short passages on various aspects of warfare, ranging from theoretical and administrative issues to details of attacking walled cities, all cobbled together by means of the same stylistic approach seen in chapter 7: rhymed verse. With the exception of the opening lines and a brief passage of enumeration coming in the middle of the text, this entire chapter is based around three rhymes.50 This fact speaks to us again about the probability that these military chapters were originally composed and transmitted as part of a broader tradition of military knowledge, both practical and textual. There is little chance that this “poem” was designed with purely literary aesthetics in mind. It was more likely intended to be chanted and memorized as part of a pedagogical process and indeed a ritual process, an important part of the socialization that commanders and perhaps their troops would have undergone. Mark Lewis has pointed out how during the Spring and Autumn period, warfare and hunting were religiously charged activities, sacred duties tied to notions of ritual bloodletting, feasting, and other kinds of ritual violence.51 These rhymed pieces may have been memorized and then later intoned at specially marked times in the training of troops or even prior to battle, helping to inculcate a special set of values and an approach to warfare that set battle apart from other sorts of social violence, marking it as a consecrated endeavor. Despite inevitable changes in the religious context of war over the Eastern Zhou period, it seems likely that warfare remained a sacred, ritually charged activity. Once again, we are left with only a textual relic, from which we must try to imagine a complex social phenomenon that surely was carried on throughout much of the Eastern Zhou period: the generation and reproduction of a body of military knowledge and values by a specific group within elite society. Within the courts of powerful states, specialists in strategy, tactics, battle formations, temple calculations, mobilization, propaganda, weaponry, and dozens of other fields related to warfare forged traditions of praxis and pedagogy related to both the execution of warfare and the ideological integration of their institutions and approaches within the broader intellectual discourse on politics and power. The major military

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texts known to us from the early period, such as the Sunzi, the Wuzi, and the Sima fa, are of course relics of this vast social phenomenon as well, but for centuries they have been interpreted and transmitted within an intellectual framework dominated by textual and philosophical specialists. We have already seen how scholars in later ages were outraged at the moral inadequacies they perceived in the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. That the text as a whole was so neglected by the scholarly rank and file in the late imperial era has probably contributed to the text’s ability to preserve a unique set of perspectives on a range of important issues. Given the long passages from chapter 8 cited in the Beitang shuchao, it seems likely that these materials remained readily accessible as late as the Tang dynasty. Citations from the text as a whole and from closely related materials from the Taigong genre show that the Yi Zhou shu remained a vital part of intellectual discourse on warfare, history, and political philosophy into the medieval era. But during the Tang and Song dynasties, as the older military texts were gradually gathered under the rubric of the Seven Military Classics and wedded to a new institutional structure that would mirror the civil service examination system based on the Four Books and the various conglomerations of the “Confucian” classics, these chapters of the Yi Zhou shu were ignored.52 The transition that a body of knowledge such as is represented by the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu undergoes as it moves from a living, vibrant tradition to a textual relic is of course a long and complex one. In chapter 9, we find evidence of the earliest stages of this transition. In the midst of rhymed lines, we find two long enumerative lists, undoubtedly added as explanation and not a part of the original as it would have been recited. Yet they match the style of enumeration that is so prominent elsewhere in the text, which suggests that they were recorded by people who were a part of the living tradition of the use and transmission of these chapters. One of the few scholars to devote considerable attention to the study of the Yi Zhou shu in China today, Huang Huaixin, has argued that lines such as these are evidence of an early commentarial tradition that has been conflated with the text.53 His observations are not far from the mark. Yet we need not imagine a commentarial tradition, such as developed in the Han and over later dynasties, to understand how these lines of enumeration have entered our text. That such enumeration is a fundamental part of so many chap-



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ters of the Yi Zhou shu makes this argument counterintuitive. Rather, the lines are likely evidence of that very first transition from oral to written transmission, perhaps inserted very early in the history of this chapter as a written document.54 Once we are aware of the use of rhyme in these chapters, readers cannot fail to notice how out of place such enumerations seem now, clumsily interrupting the verses as they do. Table 3  Structure of Rhymes in Yi Zhou shu Chapter 9 Line Rhyme pattern and group

Line Rhyme pattern and group

1 xxxx, xxx R (yang rhyme group, level tone; *-ang)

15 xxxx, xxx R

2

xxxx, xxx R

16 xxxx, xxx R

3

xxxx, xxx R

17 xxxx, xxx R

4

xxxx, xxx R

18 xxxx, {Ө}xx R

5

xxxx, xxx R

19 xxxx, xxx R (emended)

6

xxxx, xxx R

20 xxxx, xxx R

7

xxxx, xxx {Ө}

21 xxxx, xxx R

8 {Ө Ө Ө Ө} (?), xxx R

22 xxxx, xxx R

9 xx~xx, xxx R (the extra word in the 23 xxxx, xxx R the first line is probably unstressed) 10 xxxx, xxx R

24 xxxx, xxx R

11 xxxx, xxx R

25 xxxx, xxx R

12 xxxx, xxx R

26 xxxx, xxx E (should start ge rhyme group, level tone, *-ar; instead we get *-ig)

* Insertion of 10 arts and 10 reli- 27 xxxx, xxx R (emended to ances; total of 65 characters ge rhyme group, level (counting one lacuna) tone) 13 xxxx, xxx R 28 xxxx, xxx R (yu rhyme group, rising tone; *-agx) 14 xxxx, xxx R

29 xxxx, xxx R (irregular, but allowable: wei rhyme group, level tone)

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As transmitted to us today, the text of chapter 9 has been corrupted enough to have obscured some of its rhymes. The opening few lines may or may not have been intended to fit the rhyme scheme that dominates the rest of the chapter; the rhythm of regular eight-character verses does not begin until several lines into the text (for suggested emendations that would restore the regular meter of the opening lines, see note 59 below). Where rhymes may have existed in those opening lines, and where they clearly appear (or should appear) throughout the text, I have again included Li Fang-kuei’s reconstructions of the phonetic values of the words to facilitate an appreciation of the rhythm and poetry of the piece.55 The rhymes fall into three groups. Assuming that the opening lines are a part of the poem, the first begins with fang (*pjang) and probably consisted of eleven or twelve couplets, all ending in words in the level tone and belonging to the yang rhyme group.56 The next series of rhymes probably begins with fu (*bjagx), and consists of thirteen couplets, all but one of which ends in a word in the rising tone and belonging to the yu rhyme group.57 As we will see, the final four rhymed couplets present problems, and it is not immediately clear what the rhyme was intended to be.58 The outline of the rhymes (Table 3) follows the suggested emendations that would render the first few lines regular (see note 59). Setting aside the intrusion of nonrhyming material in the middle of the piece, the text and its rhymes have been transmitted in fairly good condition; only one word in rhyming position is clearly erroneous yet difficult to correct. Without the suggested emendations to the first few lines, the otherwise almost perfect symmetry of the chapter would be disrupted only by a handful of introductory phrases. Chapter 9: “Da mingwu,” The Great Illumination of the Martial Fearsome and stern is great martiality. Oh, it is the four quarters (*pjang) That through fearsome majesty are settled. Heaven created the martial and cultivated weapons and troops (*pjiang) In order to assist the righteous and rectify the wayward 59 And comply with Heaven’s movements (*grang). Let the officers of the five offices inquire into their administration



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And speak of any deficiencies (*mjang). As for their city walls, moats and ravines, Their height and thickness, these we measure (*ljang). When you take the battlefield, Be prepared for and wary of any misfortune (*?jang). Revere your stern leader Then, battle . . . [corruption/missing graph where rhyme should appear].60 [Missing line?]61 The ten arts must be illuminated (*mjiang) [and supplemented by the ten reliances];62 Then no enemy will remain undefeated (*hmang). Deployments should be thick like clouds Invasions as swift as the wind advancing (*grang). Light chariots form two flanks Enveloping the infantry on both sides (*pjang). Given the comprehensive nature of our generals None of the troops are not solid (*kang). As for the ten arts: one is great relief; two is perspicacious following; three is extra sons; four is nurturing uprisings; five is attacking others; six is punishing excess; seven is multiplying doubts; eight is reports from spies; nine is frugality; ten is inciting anger. As for the ten reliances: one is to propagate humaneness; two is to conquer desire; three is ritual feasting of guests; four is free concourse for travelers [merchants]; five is family and relatives by marriage; six is the poor and oppressed; seven is those who share the same endeavor; eight is arraying strategies; nine is [promoting?] ability; ten is beneficial affairs. When the arts and reliances are put to use in sequence This we call strong support (*bjagx). Respond to Heaven and comply with the seasons The seasons have their cold and hot (*sthjiagx) Bringing wind and rain, famine and pestilence In this way the people cannot remain settled (*khrjagx). They abandon their land and scatter, and cannot be gathered63 And farmers turn to commerce (*kagx).

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Corrupt the enemy with lewd music And bribe them with lovely women (*nrjagx). If the enemy chooses to fight64 Advance [the army] to their city wall’s perimeter (*gragx). From high mounds, look into their city Day and night do not rest (*gragh).65 If our divisions on all sides attack at once Who will be able to resist (*njagx)? Though it is easy to achieve, it must be treated reverently This we call illuminating the martial (*mjagx). If the walls are high and it is difficult to get level with them Pile up mounds using soil (*thagx). Leave an avenue of escape Then swarm over them with weapons and shields (*lagx).66 Employ fire if you are upwind Dam water and release it on the enemy below (*gragx). With kindness employ their masses With the civil arts, instruct the widowed and orphaned (*kwragx). Alongside their walls bore holes and force water in from outside Destroying their walls and flooding their ravines (*gig).67 When their elderly and weak are left to dwell alone Their strategies will then become entangled (*ljar).68 Once you have conquered them, make peace with those who submit Allowing their masses to all find their proper places (*ngjar). Finish off their weapons; This we call great peace (*rәd).69

Setting aside the various textual issues that attention to rhyming allows us to uncover, we can see that in many ways chapter 9 reflects the same intellectual position that dominated chapters 6 and 7 of this work. In the opening lines, we see reference to the notion of righteous war, the sense that “Heaven created the Martial and cultivated weapons and troops in order to assist the righteous and rectify the wayward.” We see attention to seasonal conditions for warfare, the use of bribery and trickery, and the most detailed technical information pertaining to siege techniques we have encountered so far. More importantly, we see again the clear sense that an enemy territory is to be preserved intact



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and its population incorporated into one’s administrative system. The goal is to re-establish peace and return the people to productive, settled livelihoods. The text generally follows the same logical progression that we saw in chapters 6 and 7 above, where the chronological unfolding of battle, conquest, and the settling of the defeated populace largely defined the narrative. The progression appears flawed here and there, as the chapter shifts occasionally from one theme back to another; this is probably because the need to rhyme dictated the placement of certain passages. All in all, the text is an excellent fit with the preceding three chapters and is itself a coherent and vivid piece of verse. To those who argue that there is nothing in the early Chinese tradition to compare with early Western poetic celebrations of the glory of war, this chapter will be no answer. The authors of these military chapters were less concerned with the glory of the battle than with the glory of empire, less concerned with the immediate thrill of victory than with the satisfaction that must have come with the gradual articulation and transmission of a systematic approach to and justification for warfare. Yi Zhou shu Chapter 10: “Xiao mingwu,” The Lesser Illumination of the Martial In chapter 10, we encounter the same themes that have been so prominent in the preceding chapters. Again the overriding concern here is with an approach to warfare that treats conquest as a type of liberation, freeing the enemy’s populace from tyranny and extending care and protection to them, in order to incorporate them into one’s own administrative domain. We find toward the end of the chapter another passage urging troops not to lay waste to the resources of the conquered enemy, so that “conquering a state is like transforming it.” Transformation always refers to a moral and cultural transformation, and this chapter is particularly rich in suggestions for how to attack yet also embrace an enemy. The chapter is also arranged as a poem, or chant, dominated throughout by a single recurring rhyme. With the exception of the opening four-character phrase, which serves as a sort of introduction, the entire chapter is composed of eight-character lines, twenty-four of them in all. Extant editions indicate two spots where the word in rhyming position

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has been lost, but one of these indications is itself an error; the rhyme remains, but an earlier graph in the line has been lost. There are a total of three “irregular” rhymes in the piece, that is, words in rhyming position that are not a perfect rhyming match. Of these, one may represent a change in phonology either over time or regionally.70 The other two may of course be explainable as textual errors, but in each case the reading we have now fits closely the specific context of the line. Moreover, while these two words are not perfect rhymes, they do both end in final consonants that are produced from the same point of articulation in the mouth, suggesting that if they do break from strict rhyming conventions, they may do so in acceptable or ultimately explainable ways, amounting to a play on or development out of the dominant vowel of the rhyme.71 In the following chart, rhyme groups are given for irregular

Table 4 Structure of Rhymes in Yi Zhou shu Chapter 10 Line Rhyme pattern and group

Line Rhyme pattern and group

* xxxx 1

xxxx, xxx E (exception 1: zhi rhyme)

13 xxxx, xxx R

2 xxxx, xxx R (yu rhyme group, rising tone; *-agx)

14 xxxx, xx Ө R

3

xxxx, xxx R

15 xxxx, xxx R

4

xxxx, xxx R

16 xxxx, xxx R

5 6

xxxx, xxx E 17 xxxx, xxx R (exception 2: hou rhyme) xxxx, xxx R 18 xxxx, xxx R (emended) (emended)

7

xxxx, xxx R

19 xxxx, xxx E (exception 3; dong rhyme)

8

xxxx, xxx R

20 xxxx, xxx R

9

xxxx, xxx R

21 xxxx, xxx R

10

xxxx, xxx R

22 xxxx, xxx R

11

xxxx, xxx Ө

23 xxxx, xxx R

12

xxxx, xxx R

24 xxxx, xxx R



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rhymes; all regular rhymes are from the yu rhyme group in rising tone, *-agx (Table 4).72 Clearly, the piece maintains a highly regular rhythm, and at least one other rhetorical and linguistic feature has been employed to enhance this: virtually all the words coming in the fourth position of each line end in a glottal stop (some dental stops occur as well), imparting a singsong style to the whole. Naturally, commentators over the centuries could not help but notice this sing-song quality, but few of them grasped the exact pattern of rhyme. Several commentators want to amend or interpret the text such that rhymes between the fourth and eighth characters in each line emerge, but it is clear that such rhymes were not important in the construction of the verse. These commentators were no doubt struck by the play on vowel alteration combined with regularity of final glottal stops in the fourth position and tried to respond to this feature of the chapter without realizing that rhyme is not the only rhetorical feature of prosody at play here.73 Finally, before presenting the poem itself, mention must be made of the title, “Xiao mingwu” (The Lesser Illumination of the Martial). The titles of this and the previous chapter, “Da mingwu” (The Great Illumination of the Martial), clearly mark them as a pair. There are three such pairs in the Yi Zhou shu. The others are chapters 22 and 23, “Dakai” (The Great Inception) and “Xiaokai” (The Lesser Inception);74 and chapters 27 and 28, “Da kaiwu” and “Xiao kaiwu” (the order of the last two graphs has almost certainly been reversed; they ought to read “Da Wukai” and “Xiao Wukai,” that is, the Greater and Lesser Inceptions of King Wu).75 Examining these three pairs, it is not easy to discern the exact distinction between “greater” and “lesser.” The general consensus is that the titles refer simply to a difference in length, and indeed chapter 9 falls just short of three hundred characters, while chapter 10 comes in at just over two hundred characters long.76 The titles might also relate to the relative antiquity of the two chapters within the early tradition of their creation and transmission, or to the authority assigned to them by those who studied and chanted them. In any case, the titles alert us again to the certainty that there were numerous relationships among these five chapters, further justifying our treatment of them as a unit.77

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Chapter 10: “Xiao mingwu,” The Lesser Illumination of the Martial In general, as for the Way of laying siege: You must obtain the advantageous configuration of terrain And use this to comply with Heaven’s seasons (*djegx).78 You must observe the matter from [the vantage point of] the present And examine it through [the lessons of] the past (*kagx). Lay siege to their perverse administration And destroy their strategic terrain (*tsrjagx). Establish the five teachings for them In order to extend kindness to those below (*gragx). Take pity on orphans and the poor and oppressed It is over them that you become ruler (*tjugx).79 The five teachings are truly the trunk While in succession the “branches and leaves” can be taken up (*kjagx).80 If a state engages in deceit and artfulness And in the rear palaces adorns its women (*nrjagx); If its fields are barren and they must drive off wild beasts Yet in the hunting grounds (*skrjagx) They build high terraces to observe from With springs and pools below (*gragx); If they indulge in pleasure without limit; Then the hundred surnames will suffer and feel bitter (*khagx). When those above issue troublesome orders Then there will be extreme . . . [missing graph in rhyme position]. When superiors are restrictive and subordinates fractious Move troops to their outlying areas (*ragx). Earnestly implement the Kingly Methods And relieve the people by employing the bells and drums [of war] (*kagx). Compel surrender by arraying your battle formations Without confusion or anger (*nagx).81 Secure main routes and attack along alleyways But do not invade private residences (*gagx). Do not take their property or accept bribes; In attacking employ crossbows and bows (*nagx).82 If superiors and subordinates offer prayers and sacrifices



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Then there are no spirits that will not descend (*gragx). Together employ rushing war chariots and ladders Incite them to motion using long flags (*rag).83 Embrace relatives by marriage and be mindful of the finish The right and left should be zealously courageous (*rungx).84 Do not eat their six kinds of domesticated animals Nor gather their sons and daughters (*nrjagx). Our pennant-bearing divisions are like lightning Make an announcement at the inner wall’s edge (*gragx). Sound the drums to form ranks and have them sound off To bring order to the units of tens and fives (*ngagx). Above there are carriages and ceremonial caps (as rewards for merit) But axes and halberds (for punishment) lay below (*gragx). Defeating an enemy is like transforming him Thus we call this “Illumination of the Martial” (*mjagx).85

Once again we see a familiar narrative structure to the chapter. It begins with grand strategies and approaches to warfare, emphasizing the moral dimensions of liberating oppressed subjects. The poem moves on to describe conditions under which an enemy can be attacked, when government is breaking down and the subjects are filled with resentment. The description here matches closely the more laconic passages in chapter 6, where only weak enemies are to be attacked. When the conditions are right, troops move on the enemy city. The chapter now turns to a detailed description of the actual siege of a walled city. There is a group prayer or sacrifice, and much attention is paid to the manipulation of banners or pennants used to direct the attack. We see again the strict orders not to take bribes or booty and to treat the populace well, including the specific injunction against seizing domestic animals seen in so many other early texts. In the final lines, the chapter describes conquest as a form of transformation, a phrase that shows up in several other chapters of the Yi Zhou shu as well. In early Chinese political and moral philosophy, the image of transformation is always one of metamorphosis toward the good, and in this context the sense is clearly one of liberation. The dual visage of the state is particularly clear here, the invading conqueror ready to reward those who comply or punish those who disobey.

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So many aspects of these five chapters are noteworthy. First of all, despite the undeniable relationship between these chapters and the genre of military writings from the pre-imperial period, we find a number of unique features in these five texts. The structure of chapter 8 is clearly unusual and probably directly reflects the broader context within which the chapter was formulated and used in the Eastern Zhou era. It is seldom as easy to understand as we would like it to be, but it is if nothing else specific. If it is indeed a relic of the early tradition of miaosuan, calculations done before launching a battle to determine who holds the advantage, then it can really only be compared to the brief passages in the Sunzi and Huainanzi, our only other early descriptions of this process. Notably, the Sunzi’s presentation of miaosuan is both general and theoretical, like so many of the early chapters of that text. The Huainanzi passage is very specific about the categories of information to be compared in temple calculations, but it gives no specific details concerning how such calculations would be carried out. As we compare these five chapters of the Yi Zhou shu with other military texts, we discover again and again that concrete detail is one prominent feature that sets these chapters apart from most early military literature. The close descriptions of various aspects of siege are particularly vivid. Of course, the rhymed structure of chapters 7, 9, and 10 are striking also. Alongside the apparent intellectual coherence among all five chapters, one cannot help but sense that the last two chapters are closer to one another, and form a sort of pair, just as chapters 6 and 7 do. Those two chapters address the two major components of warfare as it is conceived throughout the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu: how to conquer and how to govern. The latter pair is characterized not by a separation of content, but rather by a shared format and a common theme: a description of how a state launches a campaign, rendered in rhyming verses that can be chanted and memorized. The titles of these last two chapters in the group suggest that they were indeed conceived of as a pair; whatever “greater” and “lesser” refers to in these chapter titles, the chapters are both named “illumination of the martial.”86 For these reasons, it is logical to assume that this group of five chapters could have circulated together before being incorporated into the seventy-one-chapter Yi Zhou shu. This helps to explain why, outside of the preface and the simple placement of these chapters within the larger



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framework of the text, there is no attempt within the text itself to connect these essays and poems to the historical context of the Zhou conquest of the Shang or to the larger historical narrative of the Yi Zhou shu. On the contrary, these five chapters appear to us very much a part of their own historical context, very much products of their own day. It may now be possible for us to examine with more accuracy just what that time was.

5

Dating and Language of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu

[The Yi Zhou shu] is composed of materials left over when Confucius compiled the hundred-chapter edition of the Shang shu. From the fact that scholars of the Western and Eastern Han cited this book, we can surmise that it did not first appear in the discovery of texts from the Ji tomb; this is clear. What a pity that later generations never again revered and respected this book! Over time, the text deteriorated and became corrupt. I obtained a copy from the home of Li Yan, replete with lacunae and corruptions. I then obtained the Chen Zhengqing edition and was able to compare these two and make many emendations. Nevertheless, there were still several chapters that cannot be read comprehensibly and many instances where lacunae or erroneous characters cannot be easily explained.1

The Antiquity of the Yi Zhou shu The preface to the Yi Zhou shu tells us that chapters 6 through 10 were composed during the reign of King Wen, in the decades leading up to the Zhou conquest of the Shang. We cannot be sure what the intentions of the compilers of the seventy-one-chapter Yi Zhou shu were when they laid out the work as we have it now, nor can we know whether they meant to imply the same narrative structure as we find in the preface. The earliest possible date of the preface itself is at precisely this moment, when the various texts now collected together in the book were first strung together into one more-or-less chronological work.2 That moment must have occurred sometime between the late third and the end of the second century BCE, since several chapters of the work are clearly quite 136



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late.3 Prior to that moment, much of the material now in the Yi Zhou shu must already have been circulating and was likely already considered to fall under the category of Zhou documents; as we have seen, passages from the text were already being cited under the name Zhou shu by the third and fourth centuries BCE. This genre of texts was undoubtedly much larger than we can now discern, and by the start of the third ­century BCE there were probably several different collections of such documents used by varying intellectual traditions.4 Yang Kuan, one of China’s foremost historians of the ancient period, has argued that alongside collections of such documents revered, edited, and transmitted by the Mohists (a Mohist Shu jing) and Confucians (largely equivalent to the transmitted Shang shu), the Yi Zhou shu represents a collection in this genre transmitted and used by “militarists.” 5 Aside from difficulties we might have identifying precisely who this group of militarists was, this argument helps us to begin to make sense of several aspects of the text that have long troubled commentators and scholars and to formulate preliminary answers to some of the most basic questions that still surround the Yi Zhou shu. One such question is fundamental to our examination: Why would these military chapters be associated with the genre of Zhou documents and incorporated into a larger work dominated by political and historical materials? Trying to explain this becomes all the more complex when one realizes that beyond these five chapters, similar material is found scattered throughout the work, sometimes in separate essays concentrating on military matters, other times set in historical contexts and worked into the narrative structure of the work’s chronology. We will have a chance to examine some of these other chapters of the Yi Zhou shu below. Yang Kuan’s proposal also helps explain why throughout the text, both in chapters primarily concerned with military matters as well as in chapters centered on historical events or speeches, we find open discussions of trickery, political machinations, bloodshed, and the details of warfare that seem elsewhere to have been largely erased from traditional accounts of China’s past. The texts that make up the Yi Zhou shu were likely transmitted throughout the Warring States period by groups of people who did not share the same biases and values of those we are used to calling Confucians, and who dominated stewardship of the canon during the Han dynasty. The label Confucian is in many ways

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appropriate, for we find in Mencius a perfect expression of this distaste for the brutal realities of China’s ancient history: Mencius said, “If asked to completely trust in the Documents, then I say it is better not to have the Documents at all. In the ‘Wucheng’ chapter, I find only two or three strips of material acceptable. The benevolent man has no enemies in the world! Now when the most benevolent man attacked the least benevolent man, how could the blood spilled have been sufficient to carry away staves as it flowed?” 6

Mencius could not accept the notion that when King Wu of the Zhou conquered the last Shang ruler, there was enormous bloodshed. He suggests that the Shang armies would not have engaged in the battle, but rather would have embraced King Wu as a liberator. The “Wucheng” chapter of the Shang shu must have recorded the event in a less idealized fashion, and we see that Mencius is eager to discard all but a few bamboo strips of the chapter as unimaginable. This chapter of the Shang shu indeed drops out of the work during the Han; the “Wucheng” extant today is a post-Han forgery. We can now be certain, however, that when he uttered these words, Mencius had in mind material that is today preserved in the Yi Zhou shu. No single chapter of the text has received as much critical attention as chapter 40, “Shifu” (The Great Capture). Gu Jiegang, Edward Shaughnessy, and others have presented detailed arguments showing that the “Wucheng” chapter of the Shang shu was basically the same as the “Shifu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu.7 A long passage of the “Wucheng” is quoted by name in the “Lüli zhi” (Treatise on Calendrics and Pitchpipes) of the Han shu, just prior to the disappearance of this chapter from the Shang shu in the early Eastern Han.8 Careful study of the dates and language used in these lines shows two things: first, that the “Shifu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu must be largely identical to the original “Wucheng”; and second, that this text must be an authentic early Western Zhou document. That authentic Zhou materials were abandoned by the classical tradition in favor of a more pristine if far less accurate portrayal of the past should be instructive as we approach the materials in the Yi Zhou shu.9 Here, under a different name, in a text ignored by the orthodox classical pedagogical and moral-political tradition, the



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same document has survived. It is fair to say that this discovery throws an entirely new light on the Yi Zhou shu. It has primarily been this discovery of the authenticity of the “Shifu” chapter, which purports to record in great detail the unfolding of the Zhou conquest over the Shang, that has generated new scholarly interest in the Yi Zhou shu over the past decade or two. In particular, its correspondence with the language and content of early Zhou bronze inscriptions has demonstrated the need to reassess the language and content of the work as a whole. Most scholars who have examined the text with any care have suggested a rudimentary division among chapters of the work: a handful of chapters that may date in full or in large part to the Western Zhou period; and a large remaining group of chapters that belong to the Eastern Zhou, particularly the Warring States period.10 Interest has focused on the former group, as reliable sources from the Western Zhou are scarce and therefore much sought after. Few scholars have tried to examine the larger group of later texts to separate layers by date or content.11 Some assign chapters to the Spring and Autumn period, but we have few criteria by which to determine if a text dates to this time, and most such assertions are based on little more than intuition, questionable premises, or simple faith.12 Nevertheless, we ought to be just as intrigued by the possibility that this work contains rich material on the Warring States period, hitherto largely overlooked by scholars of all ages, as we are at the prospect of finding a handful of authentic early Western Zhou documents. The military chapters examined in the preceding chapter of this work present us with a provocative challenge and an exceptional opportunity: If we can date these texts more accurately, they promise to shed light on the nature of the Yi Zhou shu and its composition over time, on the development of early military texts and specialized traditions of knowledge formation and transmission, and on problems emerging from the different values and practices that dominated the reproduction and later transmission of early texts during the imperial era. There can be no doubt that chapters 6 through 10 of the Yi Zhou shu do not date from the Western Zhou. Scholars and commentators over the centuries have been in general agreement on this point. The link between these chapters and Warring States–era military texts is readily apparent. Furthermore, unlike the “Shifu” chapter, the lan-

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guage of these five chapters does not conform to the language of early inscriptions. It is not, however, entirely clear to what period in the development of Eastern Zhou language they do belong. This situation is due in part to our own limited understanding of the features of classical language and how it changed during the Eastern Zhou, and in part to the special form that these chapters, particularly the rhymed pieces, take. Nevertheless, there are a handful of grammatical and lexical issues that emerge in these chapters that allow for the possibility that they were composed quite early, perhaps the fifth century BCE. If so, these five chapters may very well belong to the oldest stratum of Chinese military texts known.13 In that case, they ought to tell us much about the early development of what was to become one of the most sophisticated and dynamic fields of specialized knowledge in the ancient world. Little work has been done on differentiating the language of the pre-imperial period in any but the most rudimentary ways. In the broadest terms, we can distinguish between classical Chinese proper, roughly dating from the fifth or sixth century BCE down to the first century BCE, and preclassical Chinese, the language of the early inscriptions and authentic documents such as the “Shifu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu or the handful of “gao,” or pronouncement chapters, of the Shang shu, from roughly the eleventh to perhaps the ninth century BCE. We are struck at once by several problems with this broad division. First of all, each period is vast, and we would expect considerable change over the several hundred years of each period, especially the long classical age. Second, the classical age, at least, must have been marked by considerable geographic linguistic variation and development. Third, it is difficult to know when and how to conceive of the break between classical and preclassical, largely because of the lack of reliable source materials documenting the transitional Spring and Autumn period. This brings us to a fourth problem, unevenness of sources. Most of our texts are clustered in the fourth and third centuries BCE, making it difficult to trace even the broadest changes over longer periods of time. Many of the problems noted here are further compounded by a fifth issue: so many of the texts we have today passed to us through a series of “filters,” beginning at least in the Han, when authoritative versions of texts were being collected and edited, and continuing on down as copyists



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and commentators transmitted the texts to us across the centuries. It is hard to know how much this process might have altered the language of some of these texts.14 Certain sources available to us offer the opportunity to look at the transition from the preclassical to the classical age, or rather, to see the classical language in an early stage. Edwin Pulleyblank has done the most thorough and detailed work in this regard, looking at the grammar of classical and preclassical Chinese in relation to phonology, a tool that can greatly refine the sort of relationships discernible among early grammatical particles. Based on decades of research, Pulleyblank has suggested a stage he tentatively calls Early Classical Chinese, a language representative of the states on the north China plain during perhaps the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and to be found in the Zuo zhuan, some parts of the Guo yu, and perhaps the latest sections of the Shi jing (Odes). This notion of Early Classical Chinese may be of some use in examining chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, and it cannot be ignored when considering the military chapters. The Heterogeneous Language of the Military Chapters It must be noted from the start that the texts we are concerned with here amount to a very small linguistic sample, so we cannot actually expect to find any statistically meaningful data concerning what are after all a small number of relatively rare linguistic features anyway. The linguistic makeup of these chapters is further complicated by the fact that it appears to us to be heterogeneous. That is, we can identify a small handful of stylistic or grammatical features scattered throughout these chapters that look archaic to us, occurring side by side with structures and vocabulary that are typical of Warring States classical language. Between these two extremes, there are hints of Pulleyblank’s Early Classical Chinese. What should we make of this heterogeneity? In another context, shifts between archaic and standard classical language might suggest to the modern critical eye a late forgery, where the archaisms are conscious and sometimes clumsy. Evidence of the pre-Qin pedigree of these chapters (presented in chapters 3 and 4 above) is too strong to allow for the possibility that these texts were forged or even substantially modified during or after the Eastern Han (that is, in the common era). Scholars have to date paid little attention to the question of con-

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scious use of archaic language during the Eastern Zhou itself, but careful work on the Documents may someday have to address the possibility that Warring States authors or editors might have consciously or even unconsciously tried to imitate the phrasing and vocabulary of authentic archaic materials when reworking older texts or creating new ones modeled on older types, such as the genre of shu. Martin Kern has employed the notion of “ritual language” in his studies of the Odes and the Qin stele inscriptions, and it seems clear from the latter, which date to late in the third century BCE, that archaic phrases and constructions were a regular part of such formulaic writing even when they appear to have disappeared completely from other contemporary documents.15 Given all the difficulties that linguistic analysis of these chapters entails, any resulting conclusions about their date of composition will be tentative at best. We may be able to test such preliminary conclusions by recourse to other sorts of analysis, such as careful attention to the intellectual content of the texts or certain vocabulary items not related to grammar. Furthermore, we may want to consider the possibility that the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu present us with a unique set of texts. As was discussed in some detail in the preceding chapter, they may come to us in a form much more closely tied to actual traditions of early Chinese military praxis and training than the recognized military texts of the age, which often seem to us more theoretically and even philosophically oriented. If this is true, then any expectations we might have concerning linguistic homogeneity, intellectual context, vocabulary, or other stylistic features, expectations that emerge from familiarity with philosophical literature and not from technical, ritual, or other formulaic language, may be ill-informed. Surely the fact that three of our chapters employ rhymed prose has some impact on their grammar and vocabulary. The most striking linguistic feature of these rhymed chapters also turns out to be statistically significant in the study of early Chinese grammatical patterns generally. We find here a construction using a negative particle that is exceedingly rare outside of the Shi, or Odes. In fact, if we discount the Odes and citations from the Odes appearing in other sources, there are more occurrences of this construction in the Yi Zhou shu than in all other pre-Qin texts combined.16 The construction in question involves the use of the negative particle mi, always as part of a four-character phrase



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that included a double negative, the rhetorical effect of which is clearly intended to be emphatic. We see it first late in chapter 7: Superiors and subordinates will work together in harmony And there will be no enemy who does not fall.17

Very similar lines appear in chapter 9: No enemy will remain undefeated. None of the troops are not solid.18

Finally, in chapter 10 we have another example: There are no spirits that will not descend.19

In all these cases, the final word in the tetragraphic line is the rhyming word of a couplet. The prominence of this construction in these chapters suggests the possibility that they are as old as portions of the Shi jing, where this construction is found regularly. More likely, however, this sort of construction was a special feature of poetic language, known from the Shi jing but kept alive in special authoritative, formulaic language conventions that continued to be employed long after the poems of the Shi jing themselves were composed. In other words, taken alone, this handful of occurrences of the negative mi is intriguing but cannot reveal to us the true date of composition of the Yi Zhou shu’s military chapters. A Later Military Chapter of the Yi Zhou shu: Chapter 26, Gentle Martiality There is one other occurrence of this construction outside these core military chapters, in a brief chapter related to chapters 6 through 10 yet which takes the regular form of the “chronology” chapters of the work, purporting to record an utterance of King Wu at a specific place and time in early Zhou history. This is chapter 26, “Rouwu” (Gentle Martiality). It is one of the chapters outside of our core military group that some scholars consider a part of the military genre. A careful examination of this chapter will serve to demonstrate the complex relation-

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ship between the “core” military chapters translated above and the large majority of chapters from the Yi Zhou shu that take the form of dated speeches or records of other important events. At first glance, chapter 26 appears to be an unexceptional and brief example of the “chronological” chapters that give structure to the Yi Zhou shu collection. It is set in the opening days of King Wu’s first reign year, and it has obviously been consciously placed or crafted by the compilers of the work to fit their intended chronology. In spite of this, and even though the chapter records a brief speech by King Wu to the Duke of Zhou concerning how to maintain the governing ­principles of his father, the late King Wen, Liu Qiyu places this chapter in his list of military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. Liu has recognized that the closing lines of the chapter bear a close relationship to the core military chapters of the text. Yet the structure of chapter 26 as a whole is actually much more interesting than scholars have to date noticed. The chapter is composed of four distinct sections, one of which seems on first reading to be intrusive and is either a late interpolation or evidence of the composite nature of the entire chapter. This is suggested by the moral vocabulary and grammatical style of the passage, both of which are typical of late fourth- or third-century BCE texts, while the rest of the chapter is free of “Confucian” terminology and is written in a slightly more archaic style. That this third section has a different origin from the rest of the chapter is further supported by the fact that the preceding and following passages are rhymed while it is not. The first section is a typical introductory passage placing the chapter into the chronology of the text and describing the setting of a pronouncement by King Wu immediately following his ascension to the throne. We would not expect this opening passage to rhyme. As we will see, the precise way rhyming is used in sections two and four, together with obvious signs that the closing lines were consciously written to echo passages from the core of military chapters, reveal to us the complexity of questions surrounding the date and composition of the Yi Zhou shu and its intellectual integrity. These matters will be easier to address after looking at the chapter itself. To aid in analysis, the section divisions I propose are marked in the text of the translation.



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Chapter 26: “Rouwu,” Gentle Martiality I.  It was in the king’s first ritual year, in the first month, jishengbo. The king summoned Dan, the Duke of Zhou, saying, “Wuhu! Examining into the heritage of my late cultured father’s accomplishments, [I find that he] comprehensively prohibited the ‘five weapons’ [five kinds of behavior that create enemies or opportunities for enemies to attack]. If these ‘five weapons’ are not prohibited, then the people will be unruly.” 20 II.   The first is called: To build earthen towers oblivious to the season (*djәg) And as the government is destroyed to carry on with no worries (*njәg).21 The second is called: When prisons are crowded and punishments employed abusively (*bjiadh) And corrupt officials offer relief in the form of loans (*dәgh).22 The third is called: When music {ӨӨ} The fourth is called: When only to the powerful—these you offer support (*bjagx) And solely on prayers—these you rely (*gagx). The fifth is called: When you delight in aimless travels or find too much comfort in your residence (*kjag) And allow “branches and leaves” [your various allies and officers] to drop away (*glak).23 If these five we do not oppose (*glagx) Then from this will arise enemy troops (*ljagx).24 III. Therefore, it is essential to take virtue as the root, take righteousness as the technique, take up trust to set things in motion, take sincerity as the heart, take up decisiveness in carrying out plans, and take up restraint to attain victory. IV. Our duty lies in examining into the seasons, and fashioning from the guideline and net [of our administration] an order (*sdjagx). Bring peace and balance to the {Ө} and villages, in order to relieve distress and toil (*knagx).

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Encountering banditry, {Ө} the axes, and there will be no enemy who does not [submit] (*gragx).25 Defeating an enemy state is like transforming them; without sounding gongs and drums (*kagx)— Those who excel at battle do not need to skirmish, thus we call it “gentle martiality” (*magx). Throughout the four quarters, none oppose, and [we] broadly possess the whole realm (*gragx).26

There can be little doubt that this chapter as we have it now postdates the core military chapters and was composed by someone familiar with those chapters as a unit. While there is nothing specific in the language or content of this chapter to suggest a date as late as the second century BCE, it is nevertheless a distinct possibility that it was cobbled together by those responsible for the editing of the seventy-one-chapter collection, precisely in the late third or early second century BCE. It may also predate the compilation of the seventy-one-chapter text by a century or a bit more, but whatever the case, it must have taken its current form late, in this last century of the text’s formation. The archaic style of the opening lines may well have been produced consciously: the preclassical wei, jue, and probably zai, used in the sense of “to examine into,” would all have been well-understood features of the language of authentic documents.27 The language and style of the second section, however, is far more likely to be genuinely old. That so many of the passages in this section are obscure is the first clue, but more convincing are expressions and grammatical constructions that would likely have been harder to imitate accurately. The construction in the fourth entry is entirely accurate for early classical language; the exposed objects are introduced by the copula wei and then resumed by the object pronoun shi.28 Such constructions would not have been impossible for a Warring States author to produce, but there is no reason to believe Warring States authors would have been as conscious of the possibility of using such constructions as they would have been aware of the need to employ the copula wei in the opening lines (we might argue that this word is actually overused in this chapter) and the archaic pronoun jue somewhere in the text. Moreover, the line “allow branches and leaves to drop away” rings true; it is neither cliche nor anachronistic, and it



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employs a specialized metaphor seen elsewhere in the Yi Zhou shu but not common enough to catch the eye of an imitator trying to sound authentic. Moreover, we do not find any anachronistic language elsewhere in this section. In stark contrast, section three is set apart from the rest of the chapter in many obvious ways. First of all, it opens with the word gu, which was often used to introduce a summary or comment, sometimes almost parenthetically.29 Secondly, the precisely parallel tetragraphic rhythm of the passage is extraordinarily common in Warring States texts.30 On top of all this, the content and vocabulary alone might have been enough to alert us to the shift here. The series of parallel passages go just a step beyond the implications of the rest of the speech, explaining what is basically an exhortation to good government (i.e., “don’t misbehave in these five ways or you will become weak and vulnerable”) by means of a distinctly Warring States moral vocabulary (e.g., righteousness, technique, trust, sincerity). This vocabulary does not attract the critical attention of traditional commentators, who are inclined to be looking for this moral vocabulary anyway; in fact, they seem drawn to these lines as a distillation of the chapter’s moral essence. Yet if we recall that the chapter purports to be a record of King Wu’s actual speech, then the shift from the rhymes and more archaic language of section two to the easily understandable and morally charged language here, and then back to the rhymes of the closing section, makes this unrhymed portion of the chapter seem particularly awkward and out of place. Even viewed as a text, not a speech, these shifts are jarring. Section four, comprising the closing twelve lines of the chapter, are characterized by a single rhyme: the yang rhyme group in the level tone, *-agx.31 This alone suggests that sections two and four were not originally an integrated whole, later interrupted by the insertion of section three in the midst of the rhymed verse. The rhymes in section two come in pairs of rhymed tetragraphic lines, and while there are two general groups of closely related rhymes, the strict rhyming occurs in each pair.32 In section four, every eighth word rhymes, not every fourth. Not only is there but a single rhyme running over twelve lines (that is, six rhyming positions), but the rhyme is the same as the fourth and sixth rhymes in section two; if the two sections were read in conjunction, the effect would again be quite jarring, the asymmetry being so

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prominent as to be infelicitous. The two sections must have been written separately. Finally, the closing section is a mishmash of lines or expressions found scattered throughout the core military chapters, 6 through 10. The first of these we have mentioned already: “there are no enemies who do not submit.” The line is closely paralleled by several lines in chapter 9, e.g., “there is no enemy who is not defeated.” The very next line is found at the close of chapter 10: “defeating an enemy state is like transforming it.”33 The following line borrows a construction from chapter 8 to explain the title “Rouwu,” and the thesis of the entire chapter woven out of its disparate parts becomes clear. “Without sounding gongs and drums” implies victory without actual battle, and the next line, “those who excel at battle do not need to skirmish,” is a slight reworking of lines from the opening of chapter 8; in their context here the implication is that one skilled at warfare need not actually fight, and this is clearly the meaning of the title, “gentle martiality.” While the final line, “to broadly possess all under Heaven,” is clearly a stock phrase, it is surely not a coincidence that it occurs at the close of chapter 6, “Wucheng.” It seems, then, that the author of chapter 26 took a genuine fragment of an older document concerning the “five weapons” (our section two) and composed a setting typical of the chronological chapters of the Yi Zhou shu to introduce it.34 This same author probably also composed section three, or perhaps incorporated it from some other source—it is employed here as a sort of commentary on the “five weapons” that serves to tie the concerns of the older fragment to a newer moral and political vocabulary. Aware that section two rhymes, and intimately familiar with the core military chapters of the text, our author then cobbled together a conclusion in imitation of the most prominent feature of those chapters, rhyme. In so doing, he again reveals a disjuncture between his own values and the meaning of the core military chapters. He uses the line, “Without sounding gongs and drums, those who excel at battle do not need to skirmish,” clearly intending to echo the opening passage of chapter 8, “Dawu,” to fashion a message about psychological warfare and the ability to win without an actual battle that is at best only a peripheral concern of chapter 8. Let us pause now to reconsider briefly the sorts of evidence we have seen so far that might help in determining the date of the core military



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chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. First of all, there is every reason to believe that chapters 6 through 10 can be conceived of as a unit. The individual chapters themselves of course must have been written at different times, but such differences are not likely to be significant.35 Secondly, we have now seen both external evidence and evidence internal to the Yi Zhou shu that the content of these chapters was known to Warring States authors. They are cited in other texts and were drawn on by later authors and editors of material in the Yi Zhou shu. The discovery at Cili, Hunan, of manuscript copies of chapter 8 closely matching our received text provides verification that at least one of the military chapters of the work was in circulation no later than the end of the fourth century BCE. Without any further analysis we might suggest a date in the first half of the fourth or perhaps even in the fifth century BCE. Turning to the content of these chapters, there can be little doubt that they are Eastern Zhou texts and cannot be part of the earliest strata of the work, which probably include genuine Western Zhou materials. Yet we have seen that the language of the rhymed portions of these chapters share at least one distinctive feature with the Shi jing, and we are faced with the possibility that the core military chapters of the work may date to an earlier time, perhaps the fifth century BCE. This would certainly place these among the oldest military texts known from China. Formulaic Language, Archaic Forms, and Literary Conventions Continuing the analysis of the language of these core chapters, we find a few more examples of archaic usage scattered throughout them that reinforce the possibility that these chapters date slightly earlier than most Warring States texts, perhaps as early as the fifth or sixth century BCE, precisely that problematic period Pulleyblank has called Early Classical Chinese. It remains problematic to us because the language seems to be in a state of transition and because we lack sufficient sources to understand the parameters of that transition.36 Many features of regular Warring States classical language are already in place, but a small number of distinctive usages can be discerned. If we broaden our inquiry to investigate the date of other chapters from the text, then unquestionably one of the most important of these is the use of the pronoun shi, which Pulleyblank has shown is used in the Zuo zhuan to stand for the subject of a sentence when that subject is being singled out as impor-

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tant, new information, “constrasting it with other possible subjects.” 37 In some places, primarily several chapters of the Guo yu, the same function is performed by another word pronounced now shi b.38 The proper use of this pronoun is limited to texts that include material from the Spring and Autumn and very early Warring States periods, namely the Shi jing, the Zuo zhuan, and the Guo yu. Its distinct function standing for the emphasized subject, juxtaposed with the more common shi a, used for example to reduplicate an object when it is the object that is emphasized or supplies new material, was apparently already forgotten by the classical period proper.39 Among occurrences of the pronoun, most archaic may be the use, seen primarily in the Shi jing, of shi together with the preclassical copula wei, used to introduce noun predicates. An author consciously trying to imitate the language of earlier materials would not have been able to accurately reproduce this construction. When we find it used correctly, we can be confident we are looking at an authentic early text.40 Demonstrative Pronouns Used for Emphasis in Early Classical Chinese shi 實, “this,” used for the subject when it is contrasted with other possible subjects. shi a 是, “this,” used when reduplicating an object for emphasis. shi b 寔, “this,” used in place of shi 實 in the Guo yu. There are two occurrences of the pronoun shi in “chronological” chapters of the Yi Zhou shu that match the pattern Pulleyblank describes well. The first occurrence comes in the closing line of chapter 46, “Wuquan” (Five Scales). King Wu, nearing the end of his life, ends a speech delivered to the Duke of Zhou concerning preservation of the mandate over the coming generations with the following plea: You must attentively balance and adjust the “five scales.” It is balance, this that we employ, in order to preserve our heirs in their position. It is this that constitutes enduring stability! 41

The force of the closing sentence is clear: nothing else will do. It is precisely attention to what King Wu here calls the “five scales” that can



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ensure a long-lasting hold on the mandate to rule. The juxtaposition of the two emphatic constructions, one drawing attention to the object of the verb by exposing it and then using shia to resume it in front of the verb, the other using shiwei to single out the topic of King Wu’s speech as the focus of the conclusion, makes the accurate use of this archaic feature all the more apparent here. The second example comes in the opening lines of chapter 50, “Dajie” (The Great Warning). King Cheng addresses the Duke of Zhou, apparently concerning the need to examine the work of Zhou offices; the text at this point seems to be corrupt. In any event, the grammatical feature we are concerned with is unaffected by the possible lacunae preceding it: The king asked the Duke of Zhou, saying, “Wuhu! I have heard that it is the time to begin examining into the offices [of our administration]. It is not that this is unclear, rather that I do not understand.” 42

Here the construction is used to emphasize the juxtaposition between past traditions of government—which King Cheng as a young ruler dares not suggest to his regent, the Duke of Zhou, are unclear—and his own limited understanding of how to proceed. In both of these chapters, the pronoun shi is used just as Pulleyblank has identified, to direct attention to a specific subject among possible alternatives. These two examples should alert us to the possibility that the Yi Zhou shu contains materials dating not only from the Western Zhou (e.g., chapter 40, “Shifu”) and the Warring States period (e.g., chapter 32, “Wushun”), but to the intervening centuries as well.43 The heterogeneous language of the military chapters 6 through 10 and the prominent use of the negative particle mi both suggest to us the further possibility that these chapters may date to very late in the Spring and Autumn or very early in the Warring States period. Moreover, there is one occurrence of shi b wei in chapter 10 that, once we are familiar with the patterns of usage Pulleyblank has identified in early texts, strikes us as intriguing.44 To make sense of this construction, we must briefly summarize the historical development of the use of shi that Pulleyblank’s research has revealed. Pulleyblank has shown that the preclassical copula wei drops almost completely from use by the classical period proper, preserved only in special constructions. As this happens, the construction shiwei used to

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introduce noun predicates is briefly replaced, in some cases by shi alone and in others by shiwei a or even shi awei a.45 While the two occurrences of shi in chapters 46 and 50 of the Yi Zhou shu suggest a date contemporary with the Shi jing (perhaps in these cases the eighth or seventh century BCE at the earliest) or early material preserved in the Zuo zhuan (perhaps the sixth or fifth century BCE), the construction shi b wei—used accurately—might be more clearly identifiable as Early Classical Chinese, perhaps representing roughly the language of the fifth century BCE. The difficulty with the occurrence in chapter 10 is that it seems impossible to take shi b here as standing for the subject. The line reads: Take pity on orphans and the poor and oppressed. It is over them that you become ruler.46

Most commentators take the first word as a noun, meaning “pitiful ones” or, more precisely, “widows, those left alone.” This seems most likely, since the first two graphs are paired in Ode 260 with this sense, and then the entire four-character phrase becomes the topic “as for those resourceless ones and those with no one to turn to.” 47 The most straightforward way to understand the second half of the line is then to take shi b as simply shi, the common pronoun used to recapitulate the preposed object that has been exposed in the preceding four-character line for emphasis, thus giving the meaning: As for those resourceless ones and those with no one to turn to, it is them that we act as ruler over.

This is clearly the reading of the Qing scholar Chen Fengheng, who explains the line in this way: This means that when my enemy ensnares and neglects his people, I go and rescue them, thereby becoming the ruler over his people.48

Chen’s reading is certainly informed by the broader context of chapter 10. Tang Dapei offers an explicit explanation as well, but he may understand the passage in a subtly different way. His commentary reads:



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This follows from the preceding line about “extending kindness to those below.” Those downtrodden people with no one to turn to ought especially be the ones to which a humane government gives priority.49

This reading clearly takes the verb zhu in the sense of “to make most important,” “to give priority to.” Neither approach renders the grammar of the passage entirely transparent, and neither allows us to understand shi b here as a grammatical subject. Could the construction date to that time when the exact meaning and accurate usage of shi b/shi a was already fading from memory? Pulleyblank shows that there may be some ambiguity in the use of this pronoun arising out of an understanding that it was once employed to bring attention to the preceding topic by resuming it, and perhaps this is just such a case.50 On the other hand, we may have nothing more than an orthographic error here. Why exactly this error would have been transmitted intact for so long, apparently the only such example in all extant pre-Han sources, remains uncertain. There are still a few grammatical constructions worth our attention, but as with the patterns explored so far, we find nothing conclusive. Thus far, we have found in the language of these chapters only hints of a date earlier than the fourth century BCE. We find in all these chapters except chapter 10 the occasional use of the preclassical possessive pronoun, jue. In every case, however, we find it used in close proximity to the standard classical possessive pronoun, qi, which replaced it.51 We find, for example, the following line in chapter 6: Level out their (jue) dangerous terrain in order to destroy their (qi) military preparations.52

When we find such juxtapositions, we cannot seriously entertain the notion that an early forger consciously employed an archaic vocabulary word in the first half of a sentence but then forgot to use it again four words further into the line. Yet it is precisely this sort of linguistic amalgam that we encounter with these texts. It also seems unlikely that during the course of repeated copying and transmission, some of the archaic vocabulary would have been replaced while some of it was retained, again especially given the close proximity of both archaic and standard classical words and constructions to one another.

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A more likely explanation is that there are archaic expressions and passages woven into these chapters, and that when Warring States–era authors sat down to pen these pieces, drawing probably at times on older literary sources, they consciously chose to preserve the vocabulary and grammar of these earlier materials. They might have done so precisely because those passages were already well known and authoritative, at least within the circle of their own practical and intellectual tradition. Thus the expression “level out their dangerous terrain” may have been a stock expression, perhaps copied from a genuinely older text.53 When placed into the context of chapter 6, its archaic construction would have signaled its origins in venerated antiquity. If we could identify each example like this, we might set them all off in quotation marks to indicate something of the sense of authenticity and heritage such heavy borrowing from older textual traditions must have imparted to these pieces.54 This model of understanding the origins of the heterogeneous language of these military chapters allows other insights into the relationship between these pieces and the rest of the Yi Zhou shu as well. We have already seen that phrases or enumerative lists sometimes appear in two or more chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, and sometimes in chapters that are very different from one another in structure and content. I have suggested above, while analyzing the various lists in chapter 8 and comparing these to the many enumerative lists in other chapters of the work (including, for example, the intrusive enumeration that disrupts the poetic rhythm of chapter 9), that we might try to understand these lists as part of a set of conventions and habits involved in the transmission and creation of knowledge in early Chinese courts. If early literary and intellectual practices were themselves characterized by list making, the keeping of such records as chronologies, calendars, accounts, agendas, tallies, and registers of various sorts, then these practices might themselves become intellectual proclivities. The generation of categories and lists becomes a form of creating, organizing, assigning value to, and transmitting knowledge, and of course shapes the way communities and individuals within them experience and gain access to such knowledge. Moreover, in an elite community where all members have been socialized to these habits, the mention of a category or heading from a well-known list, or the citation of a concise passage



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from within one, might serve much the same purpose as the mention of a slogan or a famous literary allusion in other societies: to trigger a commonly held, deeply rooted identification or familiarity with a much larger tradition. We have considerable evidence to suggest that early Chinese elite culture was indeed marked by the propensity to generate such lists. The meticulous record keeping of ritual and calendrical specialists manifest in the oracle bone inscriptions of the late Shang and early Zhou period comes first to mind. Chronicles, lineage records, and the like seem also to have been a major preoccupation of early Chinese courts. Archaeological discoveries of the last two decades in China have revealed a much deeper interest in compiling and interpreting lists. One of the most popular genres of writing in the Warring States period, to judge by the sheer volume of excavated manuscripts of this sort, was something called “day books,” mantic lists of names, days, activities, etc., that were considered auspicious, threatening, profitable, and the like. Perhaps the enumerative chapters and passages of the Yi Zhou shu might be rendered more intelligible when viewed as products of such intellectual and literary habits. The implications of this approach to our study of the military chapters of the work are in part that we may not be able to arrive at a single solution to the date of these texts that will account for every prominent linguistic and intellectual feature we find in them. Viewed from an intellectual standpoint, the content of these chapters is undeniably of a Warring States provenance. They share several detailed features with such early military texts as the Sunzi bingfa and the Sima fa, and they actually fit easily into a broader picture of the development of military thinking in the Warring States era. Notions in these chapters of righteous war, including details of how to treat a conquered populace, agree well with other Warring States and early Han materials. Notably, while thirdcentury BCE texts present highly syncretic essays on righteous warfare that may build on the premises and approaches underlying the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, these chapters show no sign of familiarity with those later texts. A simple look at the sections from these chapters, the Sima fa, the Lüshi chunqiu, and the Huainanzi concerning the pronouncements and injunctions made by an invading army prior to launching an offensive campaign suggests a history of elaboration and

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a shift away from actual military objectives to moral polemics in these texts over time. While the authors of the third-century BCE essays on righteous warfare may have been familiar with the material in the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, the authors of these military chapters clearly were not familiar with the longer moralistic passages of those polemical works. In many respects, the intellectual world of these core military chapters seems remote still from the late fourth and third centuries BCE, when new habits of categorizing and systematizing emerged. The difference between these chapters and later Warring States works is particularly clear when we look at one of the two remaining military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, which clearly dates from the third century BCE, chapter 32, “Wushun” (Martial Compliance) (see the appendix for a complete translation). In a separate article I have argued that chapter 32 of the Yi Zhou shu is indeed one of the military chapters of the text but that it must date to quite late in the compilation of the work, probably the closing decades of the third century BCE.55 Rather than the simple enumerative lists so typical of most chapters of the work, chapter 32 uses more sophisticated numerological correspondences and systems to describe the organization of the military and ultimately the entire structure of the state as mirroring the structure of the human body and its various organically integrated systems of organs, limbs, etc. This metaphor became a powerful explanatory model during the second half of the third century BCE, as comprehensive cosmological theories were being constructed.56 The content, structure, and language of chapter 32 are all undeniably characteristic of a date considerably later than the core military chapters of the work; the opening lines place the entire discussion of the military and the state into a detailed cosmological scheme unknown prior to the third century BCE. We also find in this text the moral vocabulary of the third century BCE. Notions of the ritual and cosmological orientations of civil and martial actions corresponding to left and right, discussed in chapter 1, are further testimony to the late provenance of this chapter, as is the vision of universal monarchy that culminates the chapter, where the ruler extends his virtue, charisma, and political rule beyond the human world and to the realm of the spirits and the limits of the universe. The contrast with chapters 6 through 10 is striking. These core mili-



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tary chapters still reflect the old multistate system, and while their program for invading and annexing new territory was designed specifically to consolidate power into the hands of an ever-smaller number of everlarger and more centralized states, there is no hint that in their day the outlines of the coming empire could be discerned. Certainly there are no signs of the complex cosmological and numerological preoccupations of the third century BCE in these early chapters. Thus, comparing the military chapters of the work internally to other chapters of the Yi Zhou shu itself, we arrive at the same broad conclusions that we get from mapping them against general intellectual and other historical trends apparent from other sources: that they were composed early in the fourth or sometime in the fifth century BCE.57 There is one more variety of early text that can be profitably compared with the language, style, and content of the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu: the stele inscriptions composed and erected late in the third century BCE to commemorate the creation of a unified empire by the Qin dynasty. We have already had occasion to note how the formulaic language of these inscriptions, which also regularly employ rhyme, sometimes resembles the language of the rhymed military chapters we have examined in this study. The similarities in fact run much deeper. Like the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, the Qin stele inscriptions embrace the notion of righteous war and of employing the military to end all warfare.58 This is no surprise. We saw in chapter 2 above that the Lüshi chunqiu, compiled in the state of Qin during the decades leading up to the Qin creation of empire, marked the high point of the classical discourse on righteous war. The Qin inscriptions also employ the wen-wu pair in their rhetoric, in precisely the way we have seen it used in other third-century BCE texts to denote the two modes of state activity that operate in tandem to eradicate chaos and establish peace. If we had none of the early military texts or other sources that allow us to see the development of military, political, and cosmological thinking over the Warring States period, we might be so struck by the similarities between these military chapters and the Qin inscriptions as to assign them to the same time and place. But there are still significant differences between the two groups of texts. While the core military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu understand conquest in terms of older notions of expanding a state and possessing “the realm,” there is little indication

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that their authors envisioned anything like the universal empire that the Qin imagined it had created. In this respect, the inscriptions are closer in tone to chapter 32 of the Yi Zhou shu, where conquest of territory is but one step toward a grander political and religious goal, the establishment of a form of rule not bound by human political forms or this-worldly geography. The similarities between these two groups of texts, separated by roughly two and a half centuries, can be readily understood. Each employed a highly formulaic and ritualized style of language, drawn from a long tradition of authoritative literature and its conventions, that preserved phrases and vocabulary much older than either group of texts itself. Moreover, each group of texts was situated into a broader, long-standing discourse concerning the role of military force in history, a discourse analyzed in chapters 1 and 2 of this work. What would be surprising is if either group failed to reflect the broader discussions of the just use of war or the civil and martial conceptual pair that were unfolding around them. Rather than trying to collapse the history of this broader discourse into a specific moment, we ought to see the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu as an important link between late classical ways of thinking and writing about war, and earlier literary and practical traditions, be they poetic conventions of the Odes that clearly remained alive in ritualized uses of language over centuries, or a specialized body of technical military knowledge that must also have enjoyed a long history of its own. In this way, we restore these military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, so long obscured from our view, to their rich historical context. Conclusion In this study, we have traced the development of a range of intellectual trends in early China that centered on the relationship between political rule and military power, a relationship slowly given articulation over the fourth, third, and second centuries BCE through the rubric of the wen-wu dyad. This concept came to be used to express the comprehensive and dynamic nature of the various activities that constituted the state’s coercive power and ability to inspire awe and loyalty in its subjects. The wen-wu pair remained a powerful, productive conceptual framework well after the classical period proper, yet it eventually faded from the prominence it had achieved during the Han.59 By the Song,



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the ancient military works were canonized in the Wujing qishu (Seven Military Classics), but the effect was to excise them from the broader intellectual world, which would eventually come to be dominated by the Four Books, and relegate them to a literary backwater, removed both from actual military practice and from the curriculum of the best minds and most prominent leaders. It is perhaps not too strong an oversimplification to suggest that the fate of the wen-wu conceptual scheme falls as that of the Mencius rises. We have seen in the pages of this study that during the classical period proper, however, writers and thinkers of diverse positions often conceived of the relationship between the civil and martial aspects of state power in complex ways, ways that tended to be less homogenous and less sterile than the later tradition might have us believe. These men, living at close quarters with the violence of their times, were perhaps less inclined to deny a role for warfare than were those living under a consolidated empire in later centuries. In the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu we saw how the civil and martial components of rule were understood to function together as a dynamic and integrated whole. This formulation of the relationship between the state’s coercive apparatus and its administrative functions was quite morally and politically sophisticated, yet the text of the Yi Zhou shu as a whole was destined for obscurity. It had no clear position among the canonical works of the classical era, and no vision of empire and history was ever constructed around it in such a way as to make it indispensable to later ages. We are fortunate that it survived at all in a climate so hostile to its perceived intellectual inconsistencies and moral ambiguities. These features make the text all the more fascinating to us today, and in the case of the military chapters of the work, we find that there are materials preserved here the likes of which are unprecedented in other early sources.

Appendix Two Additional Military Chapters from the Yi Zhou shu

Aside from the “core” military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, chapters 6 through 10, there are a handful of chapters scattered throughout the text that are probably also best treated as belonging to the genre of military texts. We have already examined chapter 26, “Rouwu,” in chapter 5 above and have seen how it was at least in part derivative of the core military chapters. Certain stylistic features of chapter 26 show direct links to chapters 6 through 10, and various phrases in the closing lines of the chapter seem to mimic lines from the core military group. Other stylistic features of chapter 26 show links in other directions, to those chapters I have described as part of the fabric of the text’s overarching chronology. The text is set in a specific time and place early in the Western Zhou, and its content is portrayed as part of a dialogue between King Wu and the Duke of Zhou. There are many other “chronological” chapters in the text, many of which include mention here and there of military matters, but none of these other chapters makes military matters their main concern. Nor do any of them show the sort of direct relationship to the core military chapters seen in chapter 26. Yet there are two more chapters in the text that make military concerns their central theme. The first of these is chapter 32, “Wushun,” which has already been discussed in some detail in chapter 5 above. It is almost certainly the latest of all the military chapters in the text, and it may have been both composed and inserted into the text during the last two or three decades of the second century BCE. In the interests of comprehensiveness, and because familiarity with this chapter may make the relative antiquity of 161

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the core chapters all the more apparent, I include a translation of this chapter below. Yi Zhou shu Chapter 32, “Wushun,” Martial Compliance The Way of Heaven inclines to the right; thus, the sun and the moon move westward. The Way of the earth inclines to the left; thus, the Way of water is to flow to the east. The Way of humanity is to incline to the center; thus the eyes and ears are servants to the mind. The mind has four limbs, and if they are not harmonious, we call this “crippled.” The earth has five agencies, and when they cannot be carried through we call this “injurious.” Heaven has four seasons, and when they do not progress in a timely fashion, we call this “disastrous.” Heaven’s Way is called “auspiciousness,” earth’s Way is called “propriety,” and man’s Way is called “ritual.” If you understand what is auspicious then you will be long-lived. If you understand what is appropriate then you will be established. If you understand ritual then you can act. When rites and propriety are in accord with auspiciousness, we call this “propitious.” Propitious rites [i.e., civil rites] revolve to the left, complying with earth to benefit the root [agriculture]. Martial rites revolve to the right, complying with Heaven to benefit the military. The general resides at the center of the army, and complies with the people in order to benefit his battalions. When the people have a center, we call this the “Triad.” If they lack a center, we call this “Duplexity.” Two parts [duplexity] in contention we call weakness; three parts [triad] in harmony we call strength. A boy being born, the three is complete; a girl being born, the two is complete.1 These five complete a household. Households are completed and thereby the people are produced. The people are produced and thereby there is measure. The left and right hands each grasp five [fingers = soldiers], and the left and right feet each tread on five [toes = soldiers]. These we call the four limbs [five-man military groups]. The head is called the tip [an additional five-man group]. Five fives is twenty-five, and this is called the primary unit. One unit resides in the front, and is called the front guard. One unit resides behind, and is called the rear guard. To the left and right are one unit each, called the “gates.” These four units form a circle called an “elder.” For three “elders” there is one leader, called



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“assistant.” For three “assistants” there is a leader called “protector.” For three “protectors” there is a leader called “rector.” For three rectors there is a leader called “minister.” For three “ministers” there is a leader called “lord.” The lord must be enlightened. The ministers must be humane. The rectors must be wise. The protectors must be harmonious. The assistants must be reverent. The elders must be assiduous. The units must be strong. If the lord is not enlightened, there will be no means to take account of offices. If the ministers are not humane, there will be no means of bringing together the masses. If the elders are not assiduous, there will be no means of implementing orders. If the units are not strong, there will be no means to undertake training. All the units must be strong—well behaved yet not too intimate. If they are intimate then they will not comply. All the elders must be assiduous—working hard yet not dissenting. If they dissent then they will not unite. All the assistants must be united—reverent yet not tarrying. If they tarry, then they will have no accomplishments. All the protectors must be respectful—deferential yet without shame. If they are ashamed, then they will be unable to rise up. The lord must be Civil, and sagely like the measures. He puts loyalty first and elevates yielding, draws all together and extends care to all below, gathering and fortifying upright virtue. When perilous talk does not oppose this virtue, we call this rectitude. Extending rectitude to the spirits and the people we call the ultimate. When generation after generation is able to achieve the ultimate, we call this an emperor.2

This chapter, while concerned with military organization, is obviously very different from the core military chapters of the work. It shows no familiarity with details of military operation, and its depiction of the structure of the military is clearly entirely imaginative. As with those core chapters, however, there is no attempt in the body of chapter 32 itself to provide any historical context; only the placement of the chapter within the broader outline of the Yi Zhou shu’s chronological layout and the comments of the preface show any attempt to integrate the piece into the grand narrative framework of the text.3 The same holds true for chapter 68, “Wuji” (The Martial Guideline), the last of the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu. The chapter comes at

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the very end of the text, among some of the most problematic and clearly some of the latest pieces. Even the preface largely abandons any attempt to treat these final chapters as integral parts of the chronological layout of the text.4 Yet unlike the handful of chapters that surrounds it here in the closing juan of the Yi Zhou shu, this chapter’s content shows several significant links to prominent themes or positions found elsewhere in the work. One of these is a conception of the civil and martial components of the state as an integrated whole. Another is the level of detail this chapter provides concerning specific aspects of military planning; as we will see, much of the text is devoted to describing various scenarios that are or are not conducive to attacking an enemy state. Finally, the text’s willingness to discuss topics distasteful to the later classical mainstream, such as practical techniques of deception or reasons for destroying an enemy state, brings it in line with many other chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, be they focused on military matters or not. The language of this chapter cannot be described as heterogeneous, as we found with the core military chapters, but it nevertheless presents us with far more difficulties than those chapters. The text is clearly defective in some places, and in others its lines made no sense to even the best scholars of the Qing period. These difficulties never involve archaic or obscure grammatical constructions and probably reflect additional defects in the text, the exact extent and nature of which are not known to us. This is one of the chapters of the Yi Zhou shu that has come down to us without Kong Zhao’s third-century CE commentary, and so we are lacking a crucial source for evidence concerning where the text might be damaged and how to interpret obscure passages. In spite of the poor condition of the text, the grammar and vocabulary of the piece conform well enough to standard classical conventions to make it nearly impossible that the chapter is a third-century CE forgery.5 Some scholars maintain the notion that chapters from this work that lack Kong’s commentary may not be authentic pre-Han texts, but it is much easier to understand chapter 68 in the context of the Warring States era than to imagine why anyone would forge a piece like this centuries later. The detailed attention the piece devotes to matters pertaining to complex interstate relations, including the complicated dynamics of maintaining alliances and agreements with states of many different sizes and strengths, suggests that the chapter must reflect political and



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military concerns prior to the third century BCE. I therefore tentatively suggest a date toward the end of the second half of the fourth century BCE, making the chapter older than chapter 32 but probably not as old as the core chapters, which I believe date to the first half of the fourth century or even the fifth century BCE. Yi Zhou shu Chapter 68, “Wuji,” The Martial Guideline If with the arrival of silk betrothal gifts come duplicitous words and an ingratiating manner, affairs cannot be brought to completion. If in the midst of chariots and armor come duplicitous words and an ingratiating manner, affairs cannot be brought to victory.6 If with affairs of conquest {Ө} you have a martial countenance, you will inevitably dissipate your virtue. If you are not decisive when confronting a momentary shift in strategic advantage, you cannot avoid suffering disaster.7 {Without completion and} without victory, wisdom cannot be {Ө}. If you {Ө} in the face of insufficiency and combine this with an inopportune moment, then you will be remiss and slack; if the opportunity arises but you do not exert yourself, there will be no accomplishment.8 There are three kinds of defense of a state. Using humble words and lavish gifts of silk in order to submit to others is the defense of a weak state. Making preparations in order to await battle is the defense of an evenly matched state. Following the strategic configuration of the topography and fortifying it is the defense of a remote state. To attack one who submits is inauspicious. To attack one who is prepared for planned battle in the open field is perilous. To attack one who has the advantage of strategic terrain is difficult. Therefore, those who excel at attack do not attack these three kinds of defense. In attacking a state, there are six kinds of timeliness, five kinds of action, and four kinds of compliance. To gain entry where they have been lax; to press them where they are in doubt; to push them where they are imperiled; to annex them where they are weak; to take advantage of them when they are in decline; and to do violence to them when they are straitened— these are what we call the six kinds of timeliness. If you annex a territory yet they do not cede it; if you shake them yet they do not budge; if you enumerate their crimes yet they do not submit; if you attack them yet they do not change; if you awe them yet they are not afraid—in these situations the enemy cannot be attacked. These are what we call the five

166 Appendix

kinds of action. When holding them up may be harmful to us; when destroying them is of benefit to us; when conquering them is easy; or when annexing them is possible, then to attack them at that moment— this is what we call the four kinds of compliance. When holding them up does not harm us and destroying them is of no benefit to us, yet conquering them is easy and annexing them possible—then they can be attacked. If holding them up harms us, but destroying them is yet of no benefit to us, conquering them is difficult and they cannot be annexed—action can be initiated. Tend to their masses with peace, and do not use your strength to contend with them. If through your authority you cannot in fact hold on to them, and your virtue cannot be spread throughout the state, then, in this case, they can be destroyed.9 If their land is barren and order cannot be restored, virtue is on the decline and they have lost their allies, without inflicting any hardship on them they are already imperiled. If you use their [appropriate] Way to pursue them, {ӨӨ} all can be attained; if you employ them in their [appropriate] affairs, then everything can be accomplished.10 When you have made beneficial preparations, there will be no disastrous affairs. If the time arrives and you do not respond to it, the great reward will shift away; to delay it goes against the Way, and carrying out affairs will be difficult. Do not hatch petty {schemes} and set in motion great calamities.11 There are three kinds of deficient scheme. If you discard benevolence then your civil schemes will be deficient. If you discard courage then your martial schemes will be deficient. If you discard preparations then your logistical schemes will be deficient. The state has its root, its trunk, its balance of power, its ethical standards, and its pivot. The land is its root; the people are its trunk; engaging enemy states of equal strength gives rise to strategic balance of power; accord with and completion of governance and moral instruction constitute ethical standards; lord and officer in harmony and {Ө} form the pivot. If their land has not been carved away, their people have not been dispersed, the balance of power has not been tipped, and their ethical standards have not been shifted, then even if there is a deluded and chaotic lord, the state is not yet done for. If the state is on the verge of loss, and in residing there one cannot resist [opponents?], its structure is small.12 If you have not been reliable [in fulfilling obligations] to neighboring states, it becomes difficult to restore diplomatic



Appendix167

intercourse with them. If your borders have been eroded away, it is difficult to restore control over those territories. If you have lost the allegiance of submissive states, it is difficult to reinstate their support. When a great state does not nurture [its smaller neighbors], small states dwell in fear of [military] affairs. You must not increase strategic power and thereby lose relations among neighboring states. You must not bend what is straight and thereby lose relations among neighboring states. Do not wield the straight in order to make covenants. Do not destroy yourself with secrets.13 It is not permissible to calculate and then grasp, to scheme and then force into submission, to draw close to and then invade, to examine into and then fathom, to invite and then comply with. If you lose your virtue and cede lands to neighbors, this is to pay no heed to difficulties. If neighbors invade one another, this is to pay no heed to the balance of power. If peripheral regions are not settled, there is no means to support the people. If those who come together in alliances do not each achieve their proper positions, then none will stand in fear of disasters. If the hundred surnames suffer and strive, there will be no provisions stored up. If you allow the altars to the soil and grain to collapse, lose the ancestral temples, allow burials and graveyards to be dispersed, cause difficulties for ghosts and spirits, and tear apart lineages, there will be no reason to begrudge death. If [a small state] offers humble words of submission but [the enemy] does not listen; {Ө} resources but they have no limit; plan for battle yet it is {not} sufficient; report to neighboring states yet they pay no heed; report their faults but they show no remorse; request to submit to them but they do not allow it—then cut off good relations and seal off and guard gates, proceed along the dangerous terrain of the area, seeking the help of neighbors, letting the will of Heaven determine who will perish.14 As a rule, when there are military engagements, if you act as lord over the people, protecting the altars of soil and grain and ancestral temples, the ones who first fall into decline and perish are always the ones who lost ritual.15 Great [military] affairs cannot be carried out except in accord with the model. If it accords with the model but is not timely, it cannot be carried out. If it is timely but goes against ritual, it cannot endure. If it is in accord with ritual but there are no preparations, it cannot succeed. If you take up the materials [required for battle] but have not made preparations, and hope to {establish} great accomplishments through-

168 Appendix

out the realm, there has never been such a case.16 If you do not seek to exercise your power widely, or in initiating affairs you do not follow through, you will perish. Those who take military matters lightly yet seek to achieve rich accomplishments will perish. If within the state you lack the civil Way and outside the state you lack a martial record [you will perish]. Those who set out but do not return, and those who seek allies only after they have regrets, will perish.17 To bring great accomplishments without difficulty or expenditure—it has never happened, now or in the past. To uphold a good name and avoid sullying it, to act in response to things and never arrive at difficulties—only ritual allows this. To obtain something and never see it revert back, or to lose it and yet experience no calamity—only reverence allows this. To accomplish affairs without difficulty, or to array accomplishments without expenditure—only timeliness allows it. To exert effort and achieve results, or to expend resources yet not deplete them—only appropriateness allows it. To spread [one’s moral influence] and meet no opposition, or to bring [affairs] to completion and achieve a balance of power, and be able to {preserve it} and endure—only righteousness allows it. If you cannot be sure of the quantity to take or the amount to bestow, if you do not know the times for action and repose or the affairs of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness, if you are unaware of schemes for being bound up or breaking through—if you are in doubt about these five things, then you cannot initiate a great undertaking. If you rely on reputation you cannot endure. If you rely on [past] accomplishments you cannot be established. If you make empty pledges, [results] will not arrive. This is recklessly carrying out the inauspicious. The best [way of obtaining a state] is to be reverent and have them submit. Next is to want it and obtain it. Next is to grasp it and get it. Next is to compete over it and be victorious. Last is to launch a campaign and let superiors rely on the strength of the troops. As a rule, those who establish a state and rule as lords over the people, within their state engage in civil affairs and are uniting, and on the outside engage in martial affairs and are righteous. Their punishments are cautious yet deadly; their administration upright and fair. They root [their administration] in ritual, set [affairs] in motion according to the season, correct [faults] according to measure, lead [the army] by means of models, and complete it [all] with benevolence. This is its Way.18

Notes

Introduction 1.  臣以明君者必有實矣。明君之實，奚若哉？曰小則能為大，弱則能 為強，□□而能自尊也。此明君之實也。曰君奚得而尊？曰(戰)勝則君尊， 攻取地(則君尊。戰勝攻取)地者務在攻戰而止矣。是以賢士明君知其存攻 戰也。From the silk manuscript entitled Mingjun 明君 (The Enlightened Ruler), in Guojia wenwuju guwenxian yanjiu shi, ed. Mawangdui Hanmu bosho, vol. I (Beijing: Wenwu, 1980), p. 35. As is now conventional, in the Chinese text I use the symbol □ to indicate a single effaced or otherwise unreadable graph; I use the symbol {Ө} to indicate the same lacunae in the translation. The penultimate line in this passage actually contains one single-graph lacuna and one seven-graph lacuna: 曰□勝則君尊攻取 地□□□□□□□地者務在攻戰而止矣, but based on context, it is possible to restore the text as noted by the graphs placed in parentheses. 2. The manuscripts found at Mawangdui are believed to date from roughly the third century BCE; the tomb itself was interred in 168 BCE, but some of the many texts from this rich find were clearly copied several decades earlier, and the sources for those copies presumably date back further yet. For an introduction to these texts and debates over their date, see Yates, Five Lost Classics. Yates does not translate the Mingjun, and as far as I am aware there are no studies of this particular manuscript in any language, including Chinese. 3.  For works that offer a critical review of the common notion that Chinese culture is fundamentally pacifist, see Fairbank, “Varieties of the Chinese Military Experience,” and Mott and Jae Chang Kim, The Philosophy of Chinese Military Culture, chapter 1. Still, even recent works focused on the history of Chinese strategic traditions may embrace this platitude uncritically; see, inter alia, Feng, Chinese Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy DecisionMaking, 17. 4. The Zhou era was long, ca. eleventh to third centuries BCE, but already early in the eighth century the Zhou ruling house was in decline. 169

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Notes to Pages 2–5

Zhou culture, however, remained prominent even as the political fortune of the Zhou rulers was worsening; see, inter alia, Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” esp. pp. 450–453. 5.  Recent studies suggest that our notions of “schools of thought” in early China are in need of fundamental rethinking. See Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions,” pp. 59–99; and Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism,” pp. 129–156. Certain texts can unproblematically be identified as “Confucian” (e.g., the Mencius or Xunzi, or such texts as the Kongzi jiayu), but this does not mean we will find a single coherent philosophy in them. 6.  On the proliferation of translations of the Analects and a few other popular classical texts, see Schaberg, “‘Sell it! Sell it!:’ Recent Translations of Lunyu,” pp. 115–139; on the tendency for Westerners to identify with the Laozi and Zhuangzi, see Li Ling 李零, “Daojia yu Zhongguo gudai de ‘xiandaihua’” 道家與中國古代的 “現代化,” pp. 71–85, esp. p. 75. 7.  It has been late imperial scholarship, especially the “orthodox” curriculum of the Four Books, on which Western Sinology has been so uncritically reliant. 8.  See Giele, “Early Chinese Manuscripts,” pp. 247–337. 9.  “Ancient Script Rewrites History,” Harvard University Gazette, February 22, 2001, p. 7. It must be noted that the discoveries of texts from early China actually far outweigh the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the scope and nature of the revisions or additions they allow us to make to our understanding of the past. 10.  Several recent works are notable for their inclusion of newly discovered or previously underappreciated sources. See inter alia, Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China, 2006; Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 2001; Puett, To Become a God. 11. In the West, only Edward Shaughnessy, David Pankenier, and I have devoted concerted attention to the text. See Shaughnessy, “‘New’ Evidence on the Zhou Conquest,” pp. 57–79; Pankenier, “Astronomical Dates in Shang and Western Zhou,” pp. 2–37; Pankenier, “The Bamboo Annals Revisited,” pp. 272–297; and McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor for the Civil and Martial Components of Empire,” pp. 46–60. The text has been largely ignored by Japanese scholars; for an exception, see Yanaka Shinichi, 谷中 信一 “Itsu Shūsho no shisō to seiritsu ni tsuite—Saigakujutsu no ichikumen no kōsatsu” 逸周書の思想と成立について—齊學術の一側面の考察, pp. 1–16. 12. Anthropological theory concerning the emergence and consolidation of the state often posits the importance of the interplay between coercive power and ideology that naturalizes the rulers’ use of that power.



Notes to Pages 6–16

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Recent anthropological approaches to premodern war are critically examined in Vandkilde, “Commemorative Tales,” pp. 126–144. 13.  Mengzi 14B.3 “Jinxin xia,” 孟子卷十四盡心章句下; Xunzi 荀子15 “Yibing” 議兵. 14.  Chapters 1 and 2 below will draw on essays devoted to military matters from the Xunzi, Mozi, Huainanzi, Lüshi chunqiu, and other diverse texts. The importance of military thinking to intellectual history in the period has been acknowledged in a few recent studies, e.g., Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and Ames, Sun-Tzu: The Art of War. 15.  These peripheries need not all be geographic; they may be more abstract as well. Along China’s northern borders, cultural boundaries tended to merge or coincide with geographic and often political boundaries. Within China proper, similar political and cultural boundaries tended to follow the topography of the land; as late as the Qing dynasty, control over such “internal peripheries” was still a major political, cultural, and military issue. Popular stories about bandits in the hills simply mirrored the political reality that mountainous or otherwise remote regions often housed cults, organized criminals, or simply cultural cohesions that existed in some tension with imperial conceptions of the state. On the northern frontier, see Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, and Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies. 16.  Military texts enjoyed great popularity as a genre in the Han and well after, testifying to the continued perception that their strategies and lessons remained relevant long after the Warring States period. 17.  On the possibility of tracing such values back to before the life of Confucius, see Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought. Chapter 1:  Conquer and Govern 1.  文王以文治，武王以武功去民之菑。Li ji 禮記 23.9; Shisan jing zhu­ shu 十三經注疏, 1,590c. 2.  成王封伯禽為魯公，召而告之曰：爾知為人上之道乎？ . . . 夫有文無 武，無以威下，有武無文，民畏不親，文武俱行，威德乃成；既成威德， 民親以服，清白上通，巧佞下塞，諫者得進，忠信乃畜。Xiang Zonglu 向 宗魯, Shuoyuan jiaozheng 說苑校證, pp. 2–3. 3.  The text deserves more critical study than it has received. It is sometimes carelessly treated as a work directly reflecting Liu Xiang’s own thinking, other times as a hodgepodge with no intellectual coherence. Both approaches are faulty, and a better understanding of Liu Xiang’s particular style of building “essays” out of discrete anecdotes would probably reveal a great deal about the development of various essay styles in early China.

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4.  司馬法曰：國雖大，好戰必亡；天下雖安，忘戰必危。易曰：君子 以除戎器，戒不虞。夫兵不可玩，玩則無威；兵不可廢，廢則召寇。昔吳 王夫差好戰而亡，徐偃王無武亦滅。故明王之制國也，上不玩兵，下不廢 武。易曰：存不忘亡，是以身安而國家可保也。 Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiao­zheng, p. 365. The use of “above” and “below” in the passage to present the two aspects of a wise ruler’s approach to the military is a common rhetorical device employed to suggest comprehensiveness and might imply such pairs as “within” (the court) and “outside” (in the trenches), as well as simply “first” and “second.” We will examine the story of King Yan of Xu in more detail below. The same point concerning the importance of both the civil and martial spheres of government activity is made in a similar way in a late chapter of the Yi Zhou shu (probably third century BCE): 武不止者亡， 昔阪泉氏用兵無已，誅戰不休，并兼無親，文無所立，智士寒心，徙居至 于獨鹿，諸侯叛之，阪泉以亡 . . . 武不行者亡，昔者西夏性仁非兵，城郭 不脩，武士無位，惠而好 賞，財屈而 無以賞，唐氏伐之，城郭不守，武 士不用，西夏以亡 “Those who cannot curtail the martial will perish. In the past, the house of Banquan employed the military without end, punishing and doing battle without rest, annexing and absorbing territories without becoming close to the inhabitants. There was no place for the civil to take hold, and wise officers all felt their blood run cold. The Banquan relocated their capital to Dulu, and the feudal lords turned on them. In this way, the Banquan perished. . . . Those who cannot implement the martial will perish. In the past, the Xixia were by nature benevolent, and they rejected the military. They did not repair their city walls, nor give positions to martial officers. Their leaders, being kind, were fond of giving out rewards, but they exhausted their resources and had no means to bestow them. The house of Tang attacked them, but they did not defend their city walls, and martial officers were not employed, so in this way the Xixia perished.” See Huang Huaixin 黃懷信, Zhang Maorong 張懋鎔, and Tian Xudong 田旭東, Yi Zhou shu huijiao jizhu 逸周書彙校集注, chapter 61, “Shiji,” p. 1030, 1033. All citations to the Yi Zhou shu will be to this edition, hereafter abbreviated HJJZ (but see the notes to the full translation of the military chapters below concerning the various editions consulted). Banquan is the name given Chiyou’s ruling line, and the place name Dulu (Archaic Chinese *duk luk in Li Fang-kuei’s transcription) is clearly the same as Zhuolu 涿鹿 (*truk luk), also found written 濁鹿. I follow Yu Yue 俞樾 in omitting the graph wen at the head of the second passage文武不行者亡; both the meaning of the line and the parallel structure of the first passage show it must be an erroneous addition (see his comments in HJJZ, p. 1034). 5.  For the archaeological report, see Hubei sheng bowuguan 湖北省



Notes to Pages 20–22

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博物館, ed., Zeng hou Yi mu 曾候乙墓. The bells and their inscriptions are examined in, inter alia, Falkenhausen, Suspended Music, and So, ed., Music in the Age of Confucius, especially Robert Bagley, “Percussion” (pp. 35–63), and Lothar von Falkenhausen, “The Zeng Hou Yi Finds in the History of Chinese Music” (pp. 101–113). 6. I have examined the legend of King Yan of Xu in some detail in McNeal, “Returning to the Canon: A Review of Michael Nylan’s The Five ‘Confucian’ Classics.” 7.  王孫厲謂楚文王曰：徐偃王好行仁義之道，漢東諸侯三十二國盡服 矣！王若不伐，楚必事徐。王曰：若信有道，不可伐也。對曰：大之伐 小，強之伐弱，猶大魚之吞小魚也，若虎之食豚也，惡有其不得理？文王 興師伐徐，殘之。徐偃王將死，曰：吾賴於文德而不明武備，好行仁義 之道而不知詐人之心，以至於此。夫古之王者其有備乎？Xiang Zonglu, Shuo­yuan jiaozheng, pp. 366–367. 8.  古者文王處豐、鎬之間，地方百里，行仁義而懷西戎，遂王天下。 徐偃王處漢東，地方五百里，行仁義，割地而朝者三十有六國，荊文王恐 其害己也，舉兵伐徐，遂滅之。Hanfeizi 韓非子 ch. 49, “Wudu” 五蠹, 19.2a (the Sibu congkan text erroneously writes 大王 for 文王). 9.  徐偃王知仁義而不知時 Huainan honglie jie 淮南鴻烈解 13.12b. For translations and analysis of other versions of the story, see McNeal, “Returning to the Canon.” 10.  Xunzi, 15, “Yibing.” In this chapter, Xunzi’s interlocutor, the Lord of Linwu, stands in for militarists in general, but more particularly for the most prominent intellectual tradition among militarists, that of the Sunzi bingfa. Early in the chapter he is made to say 兵之所貴者埶利也，所行者 變詐也 “What is valued in the military is wielding advantage, and what is implemented is change and deception.” Xunzi responds with a long diatribe against the use of deception, arguing that it is unsuitable for those who wish to build an empire; the passage begins: 君之所貴，權謀埶利也； 所行，攻奪變詐也； 諸侯之事也。仁人之兵，不可詐也 “what you, my Lord, value is only plotting, scheming, and wielding advantage; what you implement is only siege, plunder, change, and deception. These are the affairs of feudal lords [not a true king]. The troops of a benevolent man cannot employ deception.” Xunzi, chapter 15, 10.2a–b. 11.  兵者詭道也 “Warfare Is the Way of Deception.” Yang Bing’an 楊丙 安, Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli 十一家 注孫子校理, p. 12. 12.  雖有文事, 必有武備 Chunqiu Guliang zhuan, Duke Ding, 10.1. The same story, given in slightly more detail, opens the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語, a text probably compiled in the Eastern Han from earlier materials (see Kramers, tr. K’ung tzu chia yu: The School Sayings of Confucius). There we have

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Confucius beginning his persuasion of the Duke of Lu with the lines 臣 聞有文事者， 必有武備．有武事者，必有文備 “I have heard that when there are civil affairs, there must be martial preparations, and when there are martial affairs, there must be civil preparations” (Kongzi jiayu, chapter 1.1, 1.2a). 13.  He is known as a scholar of the Gongyang interpretive tradition, not the Guliang, but material from the various traditions (including the Zuo) seem to have been readily available to scholars throughout the Han and, as is apparent from the previous note, may have often been available outside of such specific interpretive traditions as well. 14.  The chapter cites one passage from the Taigong bingfa 太公兵法, a text no longer extant, and also draws on other material associated with the Taigong liutao 太公六韜 in later encyclopedias. The Odes is cited as well, but the citation seems to be integral to a longer passage Liu Xiang has incorporated; citations from the Changes and the Chunqiu appear to reflect Liu Xiang’s own editorial decisions. 15.  春秋記國家存亡，以察來世，雖有廣土眾民，堅甲利兵，威猛之 將，士卒不親附，不可以戰勝取功。Xiang, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 369. 16.  臣所聞古之道，凡用兵攻戰之本，在乎壹民。弓矢不調，則羿不 能以中微；六馬不和，則造父不能以致遠；士民不親附，則湯武不能以 必勝也。故善附民者，是乃善 用兵者也。故兵要在乎善附民而已。Xunzi, chapter 15, 10.1b–2a. 17.  一曰道 . . . 道者�令民與上同意也。Yang Bing’an, Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli, pp. 2–3. 18.  公曰：用兵者，其由不祥乎？子曰：胡為其不祥也？聖人之用 兵也，以禁殘止暴於天下也；及後世貪者之用兵也，以刈百姓，危國家 也。Wang Pinzhen 王聘珍, Da Dai Liji jiegu 大戴禮記解詁, p. 209. The dates of the material in this work probably span at least the third and second centuries BCE, and may include some slightly earlier or later material as well. 19.  季孫謂冉有曰：子之於戰，學之乎？ . . . 對曰：學之。季孫曰：從 事孔子，惡乎學？冉有曰：即 學之孔子也。夫孔子者，大聖無不該，該 包文武並用、兼通，求也適聞其戰法，猶未之詳也。Kongzi jiayu, chapter 41.2, 9.15b. 20. Another passage in the text that portrays Confucius as embracing the wen-wu dyad shows clear signs of Han authorship, since the story revolves around the notion of Confucius as uncrowned king and associates him with the five classics; see Kongzi jiayu 39.2, where wen-wu means both Kings Wen and Wu and the virtues their titles represent. 21.  魯哀公問於仲尼曰：吾欲小則守，大則攻，其道若何？仲尼曰：若



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朝廷有禮，上下有親，民之眾皆君之畜也，君將誰攻？若朝廷無禮，上下 無親，民眾皆君之讎也，君將誰與守？Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 376. 22.  Even Mozi, known for his rejection of offensive warfare, was forced to acknowledge the role of punitive war in history. This topic will be taken up in the next chapter. 23.  聖人之治天下也，先文德而後武力。凡武之興為不服也。文化不 改，然後加誅。夫下愚不移，純德之所不能化而後武力加焉。Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 380. 24.  See, e.g., Shuoyuan jiaozheng, pp. 380–381. 25.  Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 380. 26.  政有三品：王者之政化之，霸者之政威之，彊國之政脅之，夫此三 者各有所施，而化之為貴矣。夫化之不變而後威之，威之不變而後脅之， 脅之不變而後刑之；夫至於刑者，則非王者之所貴也。是以聖王先德教而 後刑罰。Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 143. 27.  治國有二機，刑德是也；王者尚其德而希其刑，霸者刑德並湊，強 國先其刑而後德。夫刑德者，化之所由興也 . . . 故德化之崇者至於賞，刑 罰之甚者至於誅；夫誅賞者，所以別賢不肖，而列有功與無功也。故誅賞 不可以繆，誅賞繆則善惡亂矣。夫有功而不賞，則善不勸，有過而不誅， 則惡不懼，善不勸而能以行化乎天下者，未嘗聞也。Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 144. 28.  Additionally, reference to xing and de in any Han-era text must have played to some extent on prominent hemerological and esoteric traditions that centered on this pair of terms; see Kalinowski, “The Xingde 刑德 Texts from Mawangdui,” pp. 125–202. 29.  Cook, “The Debate over Coercive Rulership,” pp. 399–440. 30.  The word wen is the same that has been translated as “civil” throughout this study. In the original, the word usually encompasses at least the meanings “civil,” “patterned,” “cultured,” and “refined.” This chapter forms a pair with chapter 20, “Fanzhi” (Reverting to the Unadorned): when wen is paired with zhi the fundamental sense is “refined, adorned” versus “unrefined, unadorned.” This pair became charged with cosmological significance in the early Han as it was worked into a system of correspondences and cycles that were seen to operate in the progression of dynastic houses throughout history. When translating, we are usually forced to choose the single word in English that best captures the meaning the word takes in any specific context, but all these meanings ought to be kept in mind when reading the early texts. For two studies of how the term took on specific meanings in particular historical contexts, see Falkenhausen, “The Concept of Wen in the Ancient Chinese Ancestral Cult,” pp. 1–22; and Kern, “Ritual, Text, and the Foundation of the Canon,” pp. 43–91.

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31.  禮樂者，行化之大者也。孔子曰：移風易俗，莫善於樂；安上治 民，莫善於禮。是故聖王修禮文，設庠序，陳鍾鼓 . . . 所以行德化。 Shuo­ yuan jiaozheng, p. 476. 32.  天下有道，則禮樂征伐自天子出 Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 476 (see also Lunyu jijie 論語集解, chapter 16.2, 8.13b); the discussion of the rituals of left and right follows, pp. 479–480. 33.  版法者，法天地之位，象四時之行，以治天下。四時之行，有寒 有暑，聖人法之，故有文有武。天地之位，有前有後，有左有右，聖人法 之，以建經紀。春生於左，秋殺於右，夏長於前，冬藏於後。生長之事， 文也；收藏之事，武也；是故文事在左，武事在右，聖人法之。Guanzi, chapter 66, 21.2b–3a. Another chapter of the Guanzi expresses the link between the civil and martial in this way: 文武具，滿德也 “when the civil and martial are united, virtue is replete” (Guanzi, chapter 23, 9.8a). 34.  For an examination of this intellectual tradition, see McNeal, “The Development of Naturalist Thought in Ancient China,” esp. pp. 178–191. 35.  Whether or not some or all of these manuscripts are indeed equivalent to the Huangdi sijing 黃帝四經 mentioned in the Hanshu bibliographic treatise is difficult to discern. Equally problematic is the association made between these manuscript finds and the enigmatic Huang-Lao tradition of thought. No matter that Peerenboom accepts both arguments; his treatment of how patterns from the natural world form the moral framework of most of these manuscripts is useful. See Peerenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China. 36.  Edmund Ryden has produced a study and edition of these Mawangdui manuscripts in which he notes the importance of the wen-wu pair in the Jingfa. He points out that it clearly functions parallel to other sets of binary pairs used prominently throughout the other texts in this collection as well, such as ci-xiong (hen and rooster; female and male), and xing-de (punishment and virtue); among these Mawangdui manuscripts, the paired use of the terms wen and wu is limited to the Jingfa text only. See Ryden, The Yellow Emperor’s Four Canons, especially pp. 70–100. 37.  天有死生之時，國有死生之正。因天之生也以養生，謂之文；因 天之殺也以伐死，謂之武：文武并行，則天下從矣。Jingfa 3, “Junzheng,” Wei Qipeng 魏啟鵬, Mawangdui Han mu boshu Huangdi shu jianzheng 馬王 堆漢墓帛書黃帝書箋證, p. 24. 38.  Another section of the Jingfa makes this explicit: 始於文而卒於武， 天地之道也；四時有度，天地之理也；日月星辰有數，天地之紀也。三時 成功，一時刑殺，天地之道也 “To begin with the civil and end with the martial is the Way of Heaven and earth. The four seasons have their measure; Heaven and earth have their principles; the sun, moon, and stars have



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their regularities—this is the guideline of Heaven and earth. Three seasons are for accomplishing merit, and one season is for punishing and killing—this is the Way of Heaven and earth.” Jingfa 8, “Lunyue,” Wei Qipeng, Mawang­dui Han mu boshu Huangdi shu jianzheng, p. 78. 39.  君臣當位謂之靜，賢不肖當位謂之正，動靜參於天地謂之文，誅 禁時當謂之武。靜則安，正則治，文則明，武則強。安則得本，治則得 人，明則得天，強則威行。參於天地，合於民心。文武并立，命之曰上 同。Jingfa 5, “Sidu,” Wei Qipeng, Mawangdui Han mu boshu Huangdi shu jian­zheng, p. 43. Ryden translates the last line, “This is named ‘being one with the above’” (see The Yellow Emperor’s Four Canons, p. 79). He takes the expression shangtong here as equivalent to its usage in the Mozi (see, inter alia, Mozi, chapter 11, e.g., 3.2a), where it seems to be a special part of Mozi’s terminology. But the sense here is more likely to be that implementing wen and wu as a pair constitutes the highest form of integration, the greatest form of unity. Yates has it correctly (Five Lost Classics: Tao, HuangLao, and Yin-Yang in Han China, p. 73). This section of the Jingfa includes another interesting passage on wen-wu that we will return to in the following chapter. 40.  The terms ci and xiong are technical terms used to denote female and male, yin and yang, etc., but they probably have their own specialized meaning, perhaps evolving from a divinatory system where they stand for auspicious and inauspicious configurations. One of the Mawangdui manuscripts usually associated with the Yellow Emperor gives a fairly long discussion of the pair; see Ryden, The Yellow Emperor’s Four Canons, pp. 18–39. 41.  一世之間，而文武代為雌雄，有時而用也。今世之為武者則非文 也，為文者則非武也，文武更相非，而不知時世之用也。 Huainan honglie jie, 13.8b. 42.  See, for example, the text discovered at Mawangdui in 1973 titled by the editors of those manuscripts “Yi zhi yi” 易之義 (The Meaning of the Changes). This text is in part derivative of the “Xici” commentary to the Changes, but it is a separate essay that makes the yin and yang pair the core if its philosophy and moves through a series of other binary pairs that are presented as homologous to it, including wen and wu. For the transcription, see Chen Songchang 陳松長 and Liao Mingchun 廖名春, “Boshu ‘Er san zi wen,’ ‘Yi zhi yi,’ ‘Yao’ shiwen” 帛書 ‘二三子問’、‘易之義’、‘要’釋文, pp. 424–435. The application of “yin-yang” binary thinking to esoteric theories, divinatory systems, naturalist philosophy, or other intellectual and practical traditions was diverse and widespread by the Han and can by no means be construed as a single “school of thought.” 43.  For the term wenfa 文伐, see the Taigong liutao, 2.14. The Heguanzi

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鶡冠子 dates from precisely the same era as the Lüshi chunqiu (last half of the third century BCE) or perhaps a bit later (early second century BCE), and uses the wen-wu pair in precisely the same way, e.g., 設兵取國，武之美 也，不動取國，文之華也 “to set out troops and seize a state is the beauty of the martial; without making a move to seize a state is the splendor of the civil” (Heguanzi, chapter 17, 3.21b). On the date of the text, see Graham, “A Neglected Pre-Han Philosophical Text,” pp. 497–509. For a discussion of the textual history of the work and related issues, see Defoort, The Pheasant Cap Master (He guan zi), 1997, especially chapters 2 through 5. 44.  甯越可謂知用文武矣。用武則以力勝，用文則以德勝。文武盡勝， 何敵之不服？Lüshi chunqiu “Shenda,” 15.16b. Compare the discussion in “Yi zhi yi” on “being civil yet capable of victory . . . martial yet capable of peace” 文而能勝 . . . 武而能安 (Chen and Liao, “Boshu ‘Er san zi wen,’ ‘Yi zhi yi,’ ‘Yao’ shiwen, p. 430). 45.  故萬物必有盛衰，萬事必有弛張，國家必有文武，官治必有賞 罰。Hanfeizi 韓非子, chapter 20, 6.9a. 46.  凡賞者，文也。刑者，武也。文武者，法之約也。Shangjun shu 商 君書, chapter 14, 3.11a. Compare chapter 53 of the Guanzi: 賞誅為文武 “rewards and punishments constitute the civil and martial” (chapter 53, 17.7b). 47. Third-century BCE texts make it clear that Sunzi and Wuzi were well-known figures. Han Fei notes the widespread popularity of the texts attributed to them (chapter 49, 19.5a), and Xunzi treats them as representative of Warring States military thought (chapter 15, 10.2a). 48.  See Li Ling, Sima fa yizhu 司馬法譯注, pp. 1–3. 49.  Sawyer’s introduction to his translation of the text in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China provides an overview of the standard account of the text’s origins and history. The story comes to us from Sima Qian’s biography of Sima Rangju, Shiji 64.2157–60. Sima Qian’s account attributes the rise of the Tian clan in large measure to Sima Rangju, and the power of King Wei in particular to his revival of Sima Rangju’s teachings. In the opening lines of the biography, a contemporary, Yan Ying, is cited as describing Sima Rangju as follows: 其人文能附眾，武能威敵 “as for this man, through the civil he is able to bond with the people, and through the martial he is able to awe his enemies” (64.2157). 50.  The state-sponsored scholars of Jixia are perhaps another example of this; but see Sivin, “The Myth of the Naturalists,” on how we might finetune our understanding of patronage in the Warring States period. It is possible that the rise to prominence of military texts in the Warring States period can in large part be attributed to the conscious manipulation of



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historical memory in such places as Qi (the Sima fa, the Taigong texts, the Sun Bin bingfa) and the old territory of Wu and Yue (Sunzi bingfa and perhaps other early texts, e.g., a no longer extant text associated with Fan Li 范蠡—see Hanshu 30.1757 for the bibliographic entry in the “Yiwen zhi”). 51. The Shiji account associates the text with Sima Rangju (ca. sixth century BCE), but only anachronistically, saying that King Wei ordered the collection of material originating with this legendary general. The text now extant does not mention his name nor is it organized around purported sayings, discussions, or debates involving him, his imagined disciples, or other historical figures. 52.  See, e.g., Weiliaozi 尉繚子, chapter 9, 2.7a, and chapter 11, 3.3a and again at 3.3b. 53.  The military chapters of the Mozi, chock full of technical details and arcane jargon, are another kind of evidence that helps us understand the broader field of specialized military knowledge extant in the Warring States period. See Cen Zhongmian 岑仲勉, Mozi chengshou gepian jianzhu 墨 子城守各篇簡注. 54.  Hanshu 30.1709: 軍禮司馬法百五十五篇。 55.  Hanshu 30.1729: 太公二百三十七篇，謀八十一篇，言七十一篇， 兵八十五篇。 56.  Hanshu 30.1756: 吳孫子兵法八十二篇。齊孫子八十九篇。圖四卷。 57.  The exact number of chapters in the recovered manuscript of the Sun Bin bingfa is hard to determine, but in any case it is far smaller than the “Yiwen zhi” description. Conversely, the tomb text of the Sunzi confirms the centrality of the thirteen-chapter version we now have, suggesting that whatever other material accrued to (and then went missing from) the text may, from quite early on, have been recognized as tertiary. 58.  Taigong liutao “Wentao” 1, “Wenshi”; “Wutao” 13, “Wenqi,” and 14, “Wenfa”; “Quantao” 52, “Wufeng,” 56, “Wuche,” and 57, “Wuqi.” 59.  武王問太公曰：凡用兵為天陣、地陣、人陣，奈何？太公曰：日月 星辰斗柄，一左一右，一向一背，此謂天陳。丘陵水泉，亦有前後左右之 利，此謂地陣。用車用馬，用文用武，此謂人陣。Taigong liutao “Hutao” 32, “Sanzhen,” 4.29a–30a. 60.  The “Yiwen zhi” calls this category bing yinyang 兵陰陽, that is, yinyang military arts. See Hanshu 30.1759–1760. Some aspects of this way of conceiving of military matters, such as weather, might be considered “rational” today, while most involved astrology or other semimantic arts of determining auspicious “positioning.” 61.  The second category can be compared to the “Yiwen zhi” description of bing xingshi 兵形勢, or “form-and-configuration military arts” (Han­

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shu 30.1758–1759). The final category does not seem to correspond to any single rubric in the “Yiwen zhi,” but the tripartite division is common in early texts, e.g, the Huainanzi’s “Binglüe” chapter: 故上將之用兵也，上得 天道，下得地利，中得人心 “Thus, the way that the best generals employ the military is: above they attain the Way of Heaven; below they attain the Way of Earth; in between, they attain the hearts of the people” (Huainan hong­lie jie, 15.12a). We can also compare this tripartite evaluation of military arts to the five-part division used in the first chapter of the Sunzi: Sunzi’s first, fourth, and fifth categories, dao, the Way, jiang, the general, and fa, law, more or less correspond to the Taigong’s “Human Battle Formation.” Sunzi’s second and third categories, tian, Heaven, and di, earth, match the Tai­gong’s first two precisely. 62.  Taigong liutao “Longtao” 27, “Qibing,” 3.22b. 一喜一怒，一予一 奪，一文一武，一徐一疾者，所以調和三軍，制一臣下也 “now pleased, now angry; now giving, now taking; now civil, now martial; now slow, now swift—these are the methods of regulating the three armies and bringing unity and order to subordinates.” 63.  吳子曰：夫總文武者，軍之將也。Wuzi, chapter 4, 2.1a. 64.  兵者以武為植，以文為種。武為表，文為裏。能審此二者，知 勝敗矣。文所以視利害，辨安危；武所以犯強敵，力攻守也。Weiliaozi 23, “Bingling,” 5.4a. Another brief passage reads: 官分文武，惟王之二術 也。“Offices are divided between the civil and martial, and these constitute the king’s two arts” (Weiliaozi 10, “Yuanguan,” 3.1b). One passage echoes the usage noted above, in texts often categorized as Legalist, associating the civil with rewards and the martial with punishments: 夫禁必以武而成， 賞必以文而成 “prohibitions must be achieved through the martial; rewards must be achieved through the civil” (Weiliaozi, chapter 11, 3.3a). 65.  古者，國容不入軍，軍容不入國。軍容入國則民德廢，國容入軍 則民德弱。故在國言文而語溫，在朝恭以遜，修己以待人，不召不至，不 問不言，難進易退。在軍抗而立，在行遂而果，介者不拜，兵車不式，城 上不趨，危事不齒。故禮與法表裏也。文與武左右也。Sima fa, chapter 2, 1.4a–b. The prohibition against running on the city wall may have been to avoid throwing city residents into panic. All the other lines in this section of the passage clearly refer to kinds of etiquette normally observed in the civil sphere that are disregarded when in the army. Chapter 2:  Righteous Warfare 1.  兵所自來者久矣：堯戰於丹水之浦，以服南蠻；舜卻苗民，更易其 俗；禹攻曹魏，屈驁有扈，以行其教；三王以上，固皆用兵也。亂則用， 治則止。治而攻之，不祥莫大焉；亂而弗討，害民莫長焉。此治亂之化



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也，文武之所由起也。文者愛之徵也，武者惡之表也。愛惡循義，文武有 常，聖人之元也。譬之若寒暑之序，時至而事生之。聖人不能為時，而能 以事適時。事適於時者其功大。Lüshi chunqiu ch. 20.4 召類, 20.9b–10a. 2.  Peter Boodberg was the first to argue for this understanding of the term yi 義, particularly in relation to its counterpart, ren 仁, benevolence, humaneness; see Boodberg, “The Semasiology of Some Primary Confucian Concepts,” in Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg, especially pp. 36–39. While his proposed translations are too cumbersome and awkward to employ, and some of his arguments are quaint in hindsight (e.g., his explanation of the graphic form of ren by reference to the symbol found in inscriptions and now well known from Warring States–era manuscripts meaning “repeat the preceding graph”), he was insightful to discern the relationship between these two terms, ren and yi, arguing that the former is a moral standard applied without distinction to all people, while the latter implies a set of moral standards applied with particular attention to various distinctions among people. 3.  A quick examination of the term as it is used in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries makes this evident; one of the most common patterns of usage is in phrases describing the yi of lord and vassal or husband and wife (a great concern of the Guliang commentary), or the yi of feudal lords, Daifu, etc. Examples are too numerous to explore here. Elsewhere in the Lüshi chunqiu we find a brief passage that suggests the link between yi and hierarchical power relations well: 義也者，萬事之紀也，君臣上下 親疏 之所由起也，治亂安危過勝之所在也 “righteousness is the guideline for the ten-thousand affairs, and the origin of the distinction between lord and vassal, superior and subordinate, and intimacy and distance; bringing order to chaos, making the perilous safe, and achieving victory all reside in righteousness” (Lüshi chunqiu chapter 8.2, 論威, 8.3a–b). 4. On de 德, see David S. Nivison, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” in Loewe and Shaughnessy, eds., The Cambridge History of Early China, pp. 745–812, especially pp. 749–750. 5.  The classic study of this is Hsu Cho-yun, Ancient China in Transition. While advances in the field and archaeological discoveries spanning the decades since then have allowed us to move beyond some of the terminological and methodological shortcomings of this work, in many ways the general outline of Hsu’s argument has proven sturdy. For a more current, insightful, and concise discussion of the same issues, see, e.g., Yates, “Early China.” 6.  Yao’s battle on the banks of the Dan River is a fairly well-known narrative motif in early myth and legend, and the San Miao feature in numer-

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ous legends about the punitive campaigns of several of the early sage rulers. The laconic line about Yu’s military exploits is more obscure; only his defeat of the You-Hu (possessors of the Hu) is a common feature of early legend. The current edition of the Bamboo Annals mentions his campaign against the Caowei (see the entry for year 76 of emperor Yao’s reign, where Yu holds the office of sikong; it is ultimately unclear if this ought to be one or two state names), but nothing more is known about this story; see Wang Guowei 王國維, Jinben Zhushu jinian shuzheng 今本竹書紀年 疏證, p. 196. Our earliest commentator to the Lüshi chunqiu, Gao You (second century CE), seems to take the words chu ao 屈驁 as the name of another non-Chinese state that Yu conquered, but there is no other mention of such a state in any early source. Instead, I read chu in its normal verbal sense of “bend, submit,” but understand it to be causative here, thus, “bring to submission.” 7.  See the sources analyzed in Khayutina, “Host-Guest Opposition as a Model of Geo-Political Relations in Pre-Imperial China,” especially the section on hospitality versus hostility in the Western Zhou. 8.  凡兵之用也，用於利，用於義。攻亂則服，服則攻者利；攻亂則 義，義則攻者榮。榮且利，中主猶且為之，有況於賢主乎？故割地寶器， 戈劍卑辭屈服，不足以止攻，唯治為足。治則為利者不攻矣，為名者不伐 矣。凡人之攻伐也，非為利則固為名也。名實不得，國雖彊大 ，則無為攻 矣。Lüshi chunqiu 20.4 召類, 20.9a–b; the entire passage is closely paralleled in 13.2, 應同, 13.5a–6a (the Sibu congkan edition of the text has slightly different names for these subsections, but this need not concern us here). 9.  天下之於桓公，遠國之民，望如父母，近國之民，從如流水，故行 地滋遠，得人彌眾。是何也，懷其文而畏其武，故殺無道，定周室，天下 莫之能圉，武事立也。定三革，偃五兵，朝服以濟河而無怵惕焉，文事 勝也。Guanzi 20, “Xiaokuang,” 8.13b. The expression “putting the three types of armor to rest and bringing the five kinds of weapons to a standstill” was an idiom in the Warring States period for ending all warfare. The expression “crossing any river” was a metaphor for facing any challenge. Both the expressions “gazing from afar as if at one’s father and mother” and “following like flowing water” were also common expressions denoting the complete allegiance of the commoners. The entire passage is thus formulaic, a feature that tended to impart an air of authority, rather than of stilted artifice, in classical texts. 10.  武王以武得之，以文持之，倒戈弛弓，示天下不用兵，所以守之 也。Lüshi chunqiu 23.6, “Yuanluan,” 23.11a. 11.  武王勝殷，入殷，未下轝，命封黃帝之後於鑄，封帝堯之後於黎， 封帝舜之後於陳；下轝，命封夏后之後於杞，立成湯之後於宋以奉桑林。 武王乃恐懼，太息流涕，命周公旦進殷之遺老，而問殷之亡故，又問眾



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之所說、民之所欲。殷之遺老對曰：欲復盤庚之政。武王於是復盤庚之 政；發巨橋之粟，賦鹿臺之錢，以示民無私；出拘救罪，分財棄責，以 振窮困 . . . 然後於濟河，西歸報於廟；乃稅馬於華山，稅牛於桃林，馬 弗復乘，牛弗復服；釁鼓旗甲兵，藏之府庫，終身不復用。此武王之德 也。Lüshi chunqiu 15.1, “Shenda,” 15.2b–3b. I have omitted a brief section detailing both memorials King Wu dedicated to heroic Shang officers who had died under the tyranny of the last Shang ruler and appointments he made to reward those who served under him in the conquest. Sanglin was a sacred site for the Shang; legend has it that the dynastic founder, Cheng Tang, made a symbolic sacrificial offering of himself at this place to end a severe drought plaguing his people. Another section of the Lüshi chunqiu includes a brief reference to what is substantially the same story about King Wu: 顯賢者之位，進殷之遺老，而問民之所欲，行賞及禽獸，行罰不辟天 子，親殷如周，視人如己，天下美其德，萬民說其義，故立為天子 “(King Wu) made illustrious the position of worthies, and brought forward the surviving elders of Yin to ask them what the people desired; his granting of rewards reached even to the beasts and his implementation of punishments did not stop at the Son of Heaven; he regarded the people of Yin as if they were one family with the Zhou, treating others as he would himself. All under Heaven found his virtue admirable, and the ten-thousand people took delight in his righteousness. Therefore, they established him as the Son of Heaven” (8.3, “Jianxuan,” 8.6b). 12.  Or literally, “the graphs for ‘stop’ and ‘weapons’ make the graph for ‘martial’ 武.” This is the locus classicus for what was probably a fairly common folk etymology of the word wu, based on an explanation of the graph used to write it, which was understood to combine the graphs for “halberd” (or weapons more generally) and “to stop.” Yang Bojun notes that this is likely an anachronism, reading the philosophy of using war to end war back into the distant past, whereas the early paleographic evidence suggests that the two components of the graph actually meant something like “weapons” and “marching” or movement (see Yang Bojun, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, p. 744). 13.  潘黨曰，君盍築武軍，而收晉尸以為京觀。臣聞克敵，必示子孫， 以無忘武功。楚子曰，非爾所知也。夫文，止戈為武。武王克商，作頌 曰，載戢干戈。載櫜弓矢。求懿德。肆于時夏。允王保之。 . . . 夫武，禁 暴、戢兵、保大、定功、安民、和眾、豐財者也。故使子孫無忘其章。今 我使二國暴骨，暴矣。觀兵以威諸侯，兵不戢矣。暴而不戢，安能保大。 猶有晉在，焉得定功。所違民欲猶多，民何安焉。無德而強爭諸侯，何以 和眾。利人之幾，而安人之亂，以為己榮，何以豐財。武有七德，我無一 焉。何以示子孫。其為先君宮，告成事而已。武非吾功也。古者明王﹖伐

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不敬，取其鯨鯢而封之，以為大戮。於是乎有京觀，以懲淫慝。今罪無 所，而民皆盡忠以死君命，又何以為京觀乎 ﹖祀于河作先君宮﹖告成事而 還。Zuo zhuan Xuan 12, in Yang Bojun, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, pp. 744– 746. 14.  It is far more likely that Pan Dang’s views on war are more typical of the age; recall that the Lüshi chunqiu (15.6, p. 16B) records a story involving such a victory tumulus that Ning Yue thought was a strategic mistake; Ning Yue was purportedly active in the late fifth century BCE as an advisor to King Weilie of the Zhou (ruled 425–402 BCE). 15.  Mao 273, “Shimai.” 16.  武王將伐紂。召太公望而問之曰：吾欲不戰而知勝，不卜而知吉， 使非其人，為之有道乎？太公對曰：有道。王得眾人之心，以圖不道，則 不戰而知勝矣；以賢伐不肖，則不卜而知吉矣。彼害之，我利之。雖非吾 民，可得而使也。武王曰：善。乃召周公而問焉，曰：天下之圖事者，皆 以殷為天子，以周為諸侯，以諸侯攻天子，勝之有道乎？周公對曰：殷信 天子，周信諸侯，則無勝之道矣，何可攻乎？武王忿然曰：汝言有說乎？ 周公對曰：臣聞之，攻禮者為賊，攻義者為殘，失其民制為匹夫，王攻其 失民者也，何攻天子乎？武王曰：善。乃起眾舉師，與殷戰於牧之野，大 敗殷人。上堂見玉，曰：誰之玉也？曰：諸侯之玉。即取而歸之於諸侯。 天下聞之，曰：武王廉於財矣。入室見女，曰：誰之女也？曰：諸侯之女 也。即取而歸之於諸侯。天下聞之，曰：武王廉於色也。於是發巨橋之 粟，散鹿臺之財金錢以與士民，黜其戰車而不乘，弛其甲兵而弗用，縱馬 華山，放牛桃林，示不復用。天下聞者，咸謂武王行義於天下，豈不大 哉？Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 377; see Xiang’s notes on citations of this passage in the Qunshu zhiyao and other sources that attribute it to the Tai­gong liutao. 17.  文王欲伐崇，先宣言曰：予聞崇侯虎，蔑侮父兄，不敬長老， 聽獄不中，分財不均，百姓力盡，不得衣食，予將來征之，唯為民乃伐 崇，令毋殺人，毋壞室，毋填井，毋伐樹木，毋動六畜，有不如令者死無 赦。崇人聞之，因請降。Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, pp. 377–378. There was a series of stories about King Wen’s campaign against the state of Chong. See Zuo zhuan, Xi 19, for brief mention of a very different story, where King Wen’s first attack on Chong is unsuccessful (also closely mirrored in Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, p. 379). 18.  文公伐宋，乃先宣言曰：吾聞宋君無道，蔑侮長老，分財不中，教 令不信，余來為民誅之。越伐吳，乃先宣言曰：我聞吳王築如皇之臺，掘 深池，罷苦百姓，煎靡財貨，以盡民力，余來為民誅之。Hanfeizi, chapter 32, 11.6a. 19.  The concern with righteous war in the Lüshi chunqiu is the subject of a single article-length study by James Sellmann, “On Mobilizing the Mili-



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tary: Arguments for a Just War Theory from the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu,” but his analysis and conclusions are limited by the fact that he did not study the relevant sections of the text in relation to other early texts. He therefore treats the text’s position on warfare as an innovation, when it is clear that the Lüshi chunqiu actually documents a complex discourse on warfare in the third century BCE the participants of which spanned a wide range of intellectual positions. Moreover, Sellmann is more interested in the text’s position as philosophy than as intellectual history—that is, he wants to judge the truth value of the text’s position and evaluate its pertinence to the contemporary world. Edmund Ryden’s study Just War and Pacifism: Chinese and Christian Perspectives in Dialogue contains the single most comprehensive discussion in English of righteous war in early China; the study is similar to Sellmann’s in that it is primarily based on a single section of a single text (in this case the “Binglüe” chapter of the Huainanzi), and the focus of the study is also comparative, concerned mostly with extracting useful philosophical positions and applying them to the contemporary world. More synthetic, and historically oriented, is the brief treatment by Mark Edward Lewis, “The Just War in Early China,” in Brekke, ed., The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations, pp. 185–200. 20.  天子親率三公九卿諸侯大夫以迎秋於西郊。還，乃賞軍率武人於 朝。天子乃命將帥選士厲兵，簡練桀俊，專任有功，以征不義，詰誅暴 慢；以明好惡，巡彼遠方。Lüshi chunqiu 7.1, “Qiyue ji,” 7.2a. 21.  There is a single chapter in the Mozi devoted to the rejection of offensive war (in fact three closely related versions of this chapter, as is the case with much of the text: the “Feigong” 非攻 A, B, and C; see Mozi, zhuan 5, chapters 17–19), but in order to explain the widely accepted legends of sage heroes such as Yao, Shun, and Yu, who were held to have risen in part through military prowess, the Mohist author of the chapter is forced to acknowledge that righteous war is acceptable. Separately, there is the collection of chapters devoted to the defense of walled cities, which were surely a crucial part of the Mohist curriculum but which do not take the form of philosophical argumentation; they are instead rooted in practical traditions of defensive warfare (the “Bei chengmen” 備城門 chapters, juan 14; see Cen Zhongmian 岑仲勉, Mozi chengshou gepian jianzhu 墨子城守各 篇簡注). There are several important early texts that give detailed information about individual thinkers or groups, e.g., the “Tianxia” chapter of the Zhuangzi, the “Fei shi’erzi” chapter of the Xunzi, the “Xianxue” chapter of the Hanfeizi. None of these give us a clear or reliable picture of how the debate over the abolition of warfare actually played out: see Kidder Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism,” for a discussion of these sources.

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There is a single chapter of the Zhuangzi, largely unaccounted for by modern scholars who have tried to break that text into discrete groups of chapters representing different intellectual affiliations and time periods, which may be related to third-century advocates of the abolition of war: chapter 30, “Shuojian” (Discourse on Swords). 22.  See Lau, “A Study of Some Textual Problems in the Lü-shih ch’unch’iu”; and Knoblock and Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei, pp. 19–20, 27–32, on the three different sections and their relationships to one another. It is clear that the lan and lun sections often revisit themes from the ji section, so a complete study of the military material from the Lüshi chunqiu would have to collect related passages from all three divisions of the text and study them in concert. 23.  古聖王有義兵而無有偃兵。兵之所自來者上矣，與始有民俱。凡兵 也者，威也，威也者，力也。民之有威力，性也。性者所受於天也，非人 之所能為也。Lüshi chunqiu 7.2, “Dangbing,” 7.3a. 24.  夫兵不可偃也，譬之若水火然，善用之則為福，不能用之則為禍； 若用藥者然，得良藥則活人，得惡藥則殺人。義兵之為天下良藥也亦大 矣。Lüshi chunqiu 7.2, “Dangbing,” 7.4a. 25.  兵誠義，以誅暴君而振苦民，民之說也，若孝子之見慈親也，若饑 者之見美食也；民之號呼而走之，若彊弩之射於深谿也，若積大水而失其 壅隄也。Lüshi chunqiu 7.2, “Dangbing,” 7.4b–5a. 26.  See Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, chapter 1, for a detailed analysis of this point. See also Yates, “Early China.” 27.  當今之世，濁甚矣，黔首之苦，不可以加矣。天子既絕，賢者廢 伏，世主恣行，與民相離，黔首無所告愬。世有賢主秀士，宜察此論也， 則其兵為義矣。天下之民，且死者也而生，且辱者也而榮，且苦者也而 逸。世主恣行，則中人將逃其君、去其親，又況於不肖者乎？故義兵至， 則世主不能有其民矣，人親不能禁其子矣。 Lüshi chunqiu 7.3, “Zhenluan,” 7.5a–b. 28.  夫救守之心，未有不守無道而救不義也。守無道而救不義，則禍莫 大焉，為天下之民害莫深焉。Lüshi chunqiu 7.4, “Jinsai,” 7.6b. 29.  凡君子之說也，非苟辨也；士之議也，非苟語也。必中理然後說， 必當義然後議。故說義(議)而王公大人益好理矣，士民黔首益行義矣。義 理之道彰，則暴虐姦詐侵奪之術息也。暴虐姦詐之與義理反也，其勢不俱 勝，不兩立。故兵入於敵之境，則民知所庇矣，黔首知不死矣。至於國邑 之郊，不虐五穀，不掘墳墓，不伐樹木，不燒積聚，不焚室屋，不取六 畜。得民虜奉而題歸之，以彰好惡；信與民期，以奪敵資。若此而猶有憂 恨冒疾遂過不聽者，雖行武焉亦可矣。先發聲出號曰：兵之來也，以救民 之死。子之在上無道，据傲荒怠，貪戾虐眾，恣睢自用也，辟遠聖制，謷 醜先王，排訾舊典，上不順天，下不惠民，徵斂無期，求索無厭，罪殺不



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辜，慶賞不當。若此者，天之所誅也，人之所讎也，不當為君。今兵之來 也，將以誅不當為君者也，以除民之讎而順天之道也。民有逆天之道，衛 人之讎者，身死家戮不赦。有能以家聽者，祿之以家；以里聽者，祿之以 里；以鄉聽者，祿之以鄉；以邑聽者，祿之以邑；以國聽者，祿之以國。 故克其國不及其民，獨誅所誅而已矣。舉其秀士而封侯之，選其賢良而尊 顯之，求其孤寡而振恤之，見其長老而敬禮之。皆益其祿，加其級。論其 罪人而救出之；分府庫之金，散倉廩之粟，以鎮撫其眾，不私其財；問其 叢社大祠，民之所不欲廢者而復興之，曲加其祀禮。是以賢者榮其名，而 長老說其禮，民懷其德。今有人於此，能生死一人，則天下必爭事之矣。 義兵之生一人亦多矣，人孰不說？故義兵至，則鄰國之民歸之若流水，誅 國之民望之若父母，行地滋遠，得民滋眾，兵不接刃而民服若化。Lüshi chun­qiu 7.5, “Huaichong,” 7.9a–11a. 30.  It is now generally assumed that the Huainanzi broadly incorporates a basic political message at odds with the activist, expansionist agenda of the Han emperor Wudi and was in part intended as an ideological attempt to limit the powers of the imperial throne while enhancing the prestige and position of its sponsor, the ruler of Huainan; see Vankeerberghen, The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority. On the other hand, the Lüshi chunqiu is often treated as the ideological inspiration behind the first Qin emperor’s unification of the Warring States kingdoms into an empire; see Sellmann, Timing and Rulership in Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals. Yet the ideological system of the Lüshi chunqiu also placed great limits on imperial power, in large part by circumscribing acceptable actions of the throne through the promotion of a seasonal and ritual calendar that delineated and determined all state activities. 31.  古之用兵者，非利土壤之廣而貪金玉之略，將以存亡繼絕，平天下 之亂，而除萬民之害也。Huainan honglie jie, chapter 15, “Binglüe,” 15.1a. 32.  教之以道，導之以德而不聽，則臨之以威武。臨之威武而不從，則 制之以兵革。Huainan honglie jie 15, “Binglüe,” 15.1b. 33.  Another chapter of the Huainanzi makes reference to an early story about Shun bringing the Miao tribes to submission entirely through an accomplished ritual war dance: 當舜之時，有苗不服。於是舜脩政偃 兵， 執干戚而舞之 “In the time of Shun, the rulers of the Miao did not submit. Therefore, Shun repaired his government and disbanded his troops, and holding a shield and battleaxe, he performed a dance for them” (Huainan honglie jie 11, “Qisu,” 11.8a). 34.  See, inter alia, Graham, “How Much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write?” and Harold D. Roth’s arguments about the Primitivist voice in the Zhuangzi in his colophon at the end of A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu.

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35.  夫兵者，所以禁暴討亂也 . . . 所為立君者，以禁暴討亂也。Huainan honglie jie 15, “Binglüe,” 15.1b, 15.2a. 36.  In the case of a few phrases or words, the Huainanzi passage offers easier alternatives. This can be compared to the way sections of the Shiji, written and compiled during the same era, often parallel older materials but render the language easier to read. A comprehensive study of this phenomenon in Western Han texts would surely reveal subtle changes in the classical language over time. 37.  故聞敵國之君有加虐於民者，則舉兵而臨其境，責之以不義，刺 之以過行。兵至其郊，乃令軍師曰：毋伐樹木，毋抉墳墓，毋爇五穀， 毋焚積聚，毋捕民虜，毋收六畜。乃發號施令曰：其國之君，傲天侮鬼， 決獄不辜，殺戮無罪，此天之所以誅也，民之所以仇也。兵之來也，以廢 不義而復有德也。有逆天之道，帥民之賊者，身死族滅。以家聽者，祿以 家。以里聽者，賞以里。以鄉聽者，封以鄉。以縣聽者，侯以縣。剋國不 及其民，廢其君而易其政，尊其秀士而顯其賢良，振其孤寡，恤其貧窮， 出其囹圄，賞其有功。百姓開門而待之，淅米而儲之，唯恐其不來也。此 湯、武之所以致王，而齊桓之所以成霸也。故君為無道，民之思兵也，若 旱而望雨，渴而求飲，夫有誰與交兵接刃乎！故義兵之至也，至於不戰而 止。Huainan honglie jie 15, “Binglüe,” 15.2a–b. 38.  On the intriguing possibility that the Zhou actually collapsed under the pressure of many long-term internal and external difficulties, and that Qin, having maintained closer ties to the decrepit Zhou house than many other states, was able to step into the Zhou domain without having to conquer it, see Pines, “The Question of Interpretation.” 39.  See, e.g., Mengzi 14, “Jinxin xia,” 14.2a. 40.  子墨子曰：今若有能以義名立於天下，以德求諸侯者，天下之服可 立而待也。Mozi 5.19, “Feigong xia,” 5.13b. On the role of punitive war in the founding of dynasties, see the same chapter. 41.  It seems clear that both the Lüshi chunqiu and Huainanzi were envisioned by their sponsors as compendiums of all useful knowledge needed by universal rulers (that both texts have in recent times been understood as critiques of empire does not mediate the fact that they both envision centralized empire as the natural and proper form of government). Vankeerberghen, The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority, pp. 4–5, makes the point for the Huainanzi; in “The Development of Naturalist Thought,” I argue that the Guanzi collection as it came together in the Western Han was similarly motivated. 42.  I intend the term “Daoist cosmology” in the sense posed by such scholars as Harold Roth, John Major, and Robin Yates: a vision of the origins, structure, and function of the universe as emerging out of one organic



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Dao; see, e.g., Roth, Original Tao; Yates, Five Lost Classics; and Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought. I am aware of the recent debate over the appropriateness of the term Daoism and agree that for the Warring States period especially the term is problematic and in most senses anachronistic, but I think that Roth’s work in particular gives us useful ways to begin deciding when and where the term, now highly fine-tuned, might be useful. 43.  For complete translations and studies of Xunzi’s “Tianlun” 天論, see Machle, Nature and Heaven in the Xunzi; and Knoblock, Xunzi: A Trans­ lation and Study of the Complete Works, pp. 3–22. 44.  攻其國愛其民，攻之可也；以戰止戰，雖戰可也。Sima fa chapter 1, “Renben,” 1.1a. 45.  Li Ling 李零, Sima fa yizhu 司馬法譯注, “preface,” p. 1. 46.  先王之治，順天之道；設地之宜；官民之德；而正名治物；立國辨 職，以爵分祿。諸侯說懷，海外來服，獄弭而兵寢，聖德之治也。其次， 賢王制禮樂法度，乃作五刑，興甲兵，以討不義。巡狩省方，會諸侯，考 不同。其有失命亂常，背德逆天之時，而危有功之君，偏告于諸侯，彰明 有罪。乃告于皇天上帝，日月星辰，禱于后土四海神祇，山川冢社，乃造 于先王。然後冢宰徵師于諸侯曰：某國為不道，征之。以某年月日，師至 于某國會天子正刑。冢宰與百官布令於軍曰：入罪人之地，無暴神祇，無 行田獵，無毀土功，無燔牆屋，無伐林木，無取六畜、禾黍、器械。見其 老幼，奉歸勿傷。雖遇壯者，不校勿敵。敵若傷之，醫藥歸之。既誅有 罪，王及諸侯修正其國，舉賢立 明，正復厥職。Sima fa chapter 1, “Renben,” 1.1b–2a. For my translation, I have followed the textual notes in Li Ling, Sima fa yizhu, pp. 6–10. Chapter 3:  Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu 1.  焦竑以漢志周書入尚書為非﹐因改入於雜史類。其意雖欲尊經﹐而 實則不知古人類例。按劉向云周時誥誓號令也，蓋孔子所論百篇之餘則周 書即尚書也。 . . . 豈可尊麒麟而遂謂馬牛不隸走部﹐尊鳳凰而遂謂燕雀不 隸飛部耶﹖ Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠, Wenshi tongyi jiaozhu 文史通義校注, p. 1009. 2.  There are of course many other sources pertaining to early military thought and military history: archaeological finds, large sections of the Mozi devoted to military matters, chapters from various philosophical works that address military concerns, and information in such historical works as the Zuo zhuan and Shiji, to name a few of the most important materials. 3. There are now a handful of modern studies available in Chinese, all of which agree that at least a large portion of the text is authentic preQin material. Huang P’ei-jung’s黃沛榮 “Zhou shu yanjiu” 周書研究 posits a “core” of thirty-two chapters that Huang believes date to the Warring

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States era; his findings are summarized in Shaughnessy’s entry for the text in Loewe, Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, pp. 229–233 (the text’s title is Romanized I Chou shu). Huang Huaixin’s Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kaobian 逸周書源流考辨 includes a useful textual history arguing that all currently extant editions of the text derive from a single textual tradition, available to us in a Yuan dynasty manuscript but in all likelihood representing a Song dynasty text. Huang Huaixin’s conclusions about the authenticity of the text are generally less critically informed than those of Huang P’ei-jung. Better still is the new study by Zhou Yuxiu 周玉秀, Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi 逸周書的語言特點及其文獻學價值, which as the title suggests examines the grammar and language of the text, allowing for more nuanced and convincing conclusions concerning dating. This is the single best study of the text now available. Finally, Luo Jiaxiang 羅家湘 has produced a new study as well, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu 逸周書研究, which devotes considerable attention to the literary and intellectual qualities of the work. Luo’s positions concerning the dating of various portions of the text are, on the whole, more conservative and less well-argued than Huang P’ei-jung’s or Zhou Yuxiu’s, but the work is valuable nonetheless. Huang Huaixin was the lead scholar in the compilation of the HJJZ. Additionally, he has produced a translation into modern Chinese, the Yi Zhou shu jiaobu zhuyi 逸周 書校補注譯. There are two other translations into modern Chinese, both produced in recent years and both greatly indebted to his original publication: Zhang Wenyu 張聞玉, Yi Zhou shu quanyi 逸周書全譯; and Zhou Baohong 周寶宏, Yi Zhou shu kaoshi 逸周書考釋. None of the three have ever been widely distributed (the last is available only from the author himself and is basically unknown even by other scholars of the Yi Zhou shu), nor are any of them of much scholarly use. 4.  周書七十一篇。周史記。劉向云周時誥誓號令也，蓋孔子所論百 篇之餘也。Han shu 30.1705–1706. There is one more line that has sometimes been understood as a part of Liu Xiang’s note, but which more likely belongs to Yan Shigu’s commentary from the Tang dynasty; where we have notes of this sort from Liu Xiang, they have been passed down to us first via Ban Gu, who sometimes cites lines from Liu’s catalog, then via Yan Shigu, whose commentary must then be distinguished from content original to Ban or Liu (in most cases this is not problematic). Scholars over the past few centuries have been divided on how to best understand this case, and it may well be a crucial issue in unraveling questions about the transmission of the work. The line in question reads: 今之存者四十五篇矣 “Today only forty-five chapters are extant.” It is likely that this number, forty-five, is related to the fact that we have today only forty-two chapters extant with



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Kong Zhao’s 孔兆 third-century CE commentary. There are many possible ways to explain the discrepancies among these two numbers and the total number of chapters we now have (sixty), all in relation to the seventy-one chapter titles that make up the complete work. As discussed below, there may have been two editions of the work known in the Sui and Tang period, possibly one with and one without Kong’s commentary. It seems likely that the version with Kong’s notes either never exceeded forty-five chapters (of which forty-two are still extant) or was badly damaged and by the Tang had been reduced to this number. But other chapters may well have survived intact in the other edition(s) without his commentary or may have circulated separately. In any case, with only one exception, the chapters we are concerned with in this study all include Kong’s comments and can therefore be considered separately from the issues of authenticity and transmission that this mention of forty-five chapters raises. However we explain the other material in the text, the forty-two chapters with Kong’s third-century CE commentary are surely authentic early materials (see chapter 5 below for a translation and study of a chapter without the Kong commentary). I believe that most if not all of the remaining chapters are authentic, but I must leave to another study the complex issues related to those chapters without Kong’s comments. 5.  Xu Shen uses the title eight times, but he was probably not consistent, elsewhere citing the text as simply Zhou shu; see the entry for Yi Zhou shu in Ma Zonghuo 馬宗霍, Shuowen jiezi yin jing kao 說文解字引經考, pp. 269–277. This may be related to his habits of citation more generally: either his citations from the text are loose paraphrases or he was working from a version of the work that differed substantially in phrasing from the version we know. See HJJZ, p. 1245, for Ding Zongluo’s discussion of this problem. Guo Pu’s third-century commentary to the Erya also uses the title Yi Zhou shu once (Erya, 17, 3.11a), but the passage cited is not found in the text today. 6.  汲冢周書; the edition in the Sibu congkan, as an example, is listed under this name. 7.  See chapters three and four of Shaughnessy, Rewriting Early Chinese Texts, for a detailed discussion of the Bamboo Annals 竹書紀年, their discovery, and many of the other texts from the same find. Critical scholarship on these materials is largely in agreement that the tomb was not a royal tomb. 8.  周書十卷: 汲冢書，似仲尼刪書之餘; Suishu 33.959. 9.  汲冢周書十卷 . . . 孔晁注周書八卷; Xin Tang shu 58.1463. 10.  The Ming Wanli era (1573–1619) Mishu jiu zhong 秘書九種 edition of the text is divided into six juan, but this was clearly an innovation; Huang

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Huaixin, in Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kao, notes that aside from the division into six juan, this edition is identical with the Guang Han-Wei congshu 廣漢魏 叢書 edition, also from the Wanli period (Huang, Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kaobian, pp. 134–135). Most scholars who have worked on the text from the Ming on have rejected the connection between the Yi Zhou shu and the Ji tomb finds, although a detailed, convincing explanation of just how the conflation between this text and manuscripts from that tomb library ever happened has never been presented. To date, the most comprehensive and thoughtful examination of the composition and transmission of the text, with due attention given to such issues as the relationship to the Ji tomb and the origins of the chapters with no commentary, is Zhou Yuxiu, Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi. Luo Jiaxiang, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu, includes the intriguing notion that chapter 70, “Qifu,” is nothing more than a list of the tomb furnishings in the Wei tomb, confused for an ancient Zhou text pertaining to sumptuary laws; see Luo Jiaxiang, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu, pp. 50–58. As promising as this idea is, Luo’s analysis falls short of conclusive evidence, and later in the work (pp. 80–86), when he turns to the broader question of the relationship between the Yi Zhou shu and the Ji tomb texts, he falls back on the arguments of previous scholars and does not pursue any new possibilities. If he is right about chapter 70 originating in the Ji tomb, we are still left wondering if there is any further link between that cache of texts and the extant Yi Zhou shu. 11.  There is no clear indication of the original extent of Kong’s commentary, and the question turns on how many chapters of the Yi Zhou shu were extant in his day. Many have been tempted to link the number given in Yan Shigu’s commentary to the “Yiwen zhi,” which records that only fortyfive chapters were extant, with the number of chapters now carrying Kong’s commentary, which is forty-two (e.g., Shaughnessy, in his treatment of the text in Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, and Luo Jiaxiang, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu). Whether the record that there were only forty-five chapters was original to Liu Xiang and reflected the state of the text in the Han (and thus the text that Kong Zhao would have had at his disposal), or was made by Yan Shigu himself and thus reflected an edition he had available to him in the Tang, remains an issue of some debate; Zhou Yuxiu, Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi, contains, to my eye, a convincing argument that this must be a description of the state of the text known to Yan Shigu in the Tang. 12.  The obvious possibility, that the several chapters now extant without the Kong commentary were recovered from this tomb and combined with those already known to Kong Zhao, turns out to be highly unlikely. See the discussion in Huang P’ei-jung, “Zhou shu yanjiu”; see also the entry in



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Zhang Xincheng 張心澂, Weishu tongkao 偽書通考. Zhou Yuxiu also rejects any connection between the Ji tomb finds and the Yi Zhou shu; see her meticulous presentation of the evidence in Zhou, Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi, pp. 52–64. The conclusions of these three modern scholars are in agreement with many of the best traditional scholars who examined this issue over the past several centuries (see the discussion of traditional accounts below). It is likely that there was an unrelated text among the Ji tomb manuscripts, occasionally cited in later works as the Guwen Zhou shu古文周書, which from such citations looks to have been a collection of stories about fabulous events during the reigns of the early Zhou kings (see Shaughnessy, Rewriting Early Chinese Texts, pp. 179–181, for a translation of two citations from Li Shan’s commentary to the Wen xuan). This text seems not to have circulated widely, and it is not clear how late it was still extant, but knowledge of its name, association with the Ji tomb library, and the ambiguous bibliographic entries from the Sui-Tang period may be largely responsible for the application of the title Jizhong Zhou shu to the Yi Zhou shu. In a discussion of the legendary sage ruler Shun and his purported death in the south, the Tang literary genius Han Yu mentions a “bamboo text Zhou shu” 竹書周書, which he says includes a passage on this event; nowhere in the extant Yi Zhou shu do we find mention of this story or anything like it (see Zhu Wengong jiao Changli xiansheng ji 朱文公校昌黎先生集, “Huangling miao bei” 黃陵廟碑, 31.5b–6a). It is almost certain that Han Yu means by this title the Zhou shu found in the Ji tomb, further supporting the notion that said text was not related to the Yi Zhou shu. 13. The relationship between the “preface” and the rest of the text is treated in a preliminary fashion in my article “The Body as Metaphor.” While its placement at the end of the text argues against calling it a preface, the chapter is simply a collection of prefatory statements about each chapter of the text; it is easy to imagine that such material might have originally, or in some alternative editions, been placed at the head of each chapter. 14.  This is not unusual; Sima Qian does not normally cite his sources. 15.  As will be discussed below, in his biography of Su Qin, Sima Qian refers to a text that may be related to the Yi Zhou shu. Later in the same chapter, he has Su Qin citing a line from the Zhou shu that is found in chapter 34 of the Yi Zhou shu, “Hewu” (Shiji 69.2256). More important are the numerous parallels between his “Zhou benji” chapter (chronology of the Zhou house) and two chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, 36, “Ke Yin,” and 44, “Duoyi,” which are basically incorporated in full into his work. That the “Ke Yin” and “Duoyi” chapters were authentic pre-Qin texts used by Sima Qian, not later recreations based on his work, is suggested by a close look at how

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Sima Qian subtly updated the language of these two chapters to make them more easily readable to his contemporaries in the Han, a common trend in his citation of passages from the Documents; Liu Qiyu has noted this phenomenon (see his Shangshu xueshi, p. 93). There is a remote chance that he may have been drawing from a separate work which recorded similar materials; there may have been a text associated with a disciple of Mozi called the Sui Chaozi 隨巢子 that duplicated much of the same material pertaining to the conquest of Shang; see the Suoyin note, Shiji 4.130. 16.  For a preliminary discussion of an important parallel between these two works, see my article “The Development of Naturalist Thought,” pp. 187–188, note 61. 17.  Qianfu lun 潛夫論, chapter 22, “Qiubian,” and 24, “Shibian,” 5.13a, 5.18a; Zheng’s commentary to Zhouli 周禮 “Qiuguan sikou xia,” 10.16a, mentions the “Wanghui” chapter. His notes to the Yili 儀禮, 5.38b, cite simply Zhou shu. 18.  Cai Yong may actually have said the Zhou shu numbered seventy-two chapters. The line in his “Mingtang-Yueling lun,” in Cai Zhonglang wenji 蔡 中郎文集, 10.6a, now reads 用書七十二篇， 而月令第五十三 “using [sic] Documents in seventy-two chapters, the ‘Yueling’ is number fifty-three.” The graph 用 (yong, using) must be an orthographic error for 周 (Zhou). Ma Rong’s commentary is preserved in He Yan’s 何晏 Lunyu jijie 論語集解, chapter 17, 9.8b. 19.  Evidence of the text’s transmission from the end of the Han down to the Song is plentiful but complex, given the confusion with the Ji tomb texts discovered and circulated during this period. Treating this material in any comprehensive manner requires a separate monograph. Huang Huaixin’s textual history (Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kaobian) and Zhou Yuxiu’s recent study (Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi) can both be consulted on this matter; Zhou’s work is careful and critical, and it accounts well for many of the problems the text poses. Some of the evidence that bears on the form and content of the work in the post-Han era is explored below in the context of works related to the Tai Gong. 20.  Citations from Zhou shu (generically, Zhou documents) in early literature are complex, since they may come from the Shang shu, from the Yi Zhou shu, or be otherwise unknown to us in our transmitted sources. Moreover, some citations are extremely laconic, while others only paraphrase passages now found in the Yi Zhou shu. The citations are treated in Shaughnessy, “‘New’ Evidence on the Zhou Conquest,” pp. 31–67. Luo Jiaxiang, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu, pp. 63–64, has a useful chart listing the pre-Qin citations. A citation from one of the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu appearing in



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the Zhanguo ce is treated below in chapter 4. For the Mozi citation, see my discussion in “The Body as Metaphor.” 21.  Guo Moruo 郭沫若 called attention to the “Shifu,” “Ke Yin,” and “Shangshi” chapters of the work in 1947 by comparing their language and vocabulary to inscriptions from bronzes and bones; see Guo Moruo, Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu中國古代社會研究, originally published in 1947. Gu Jiegang’s “Yi Zhou shu ‘Shifu’ pian jiaozhu xieding yu pinglun” 逸周書世 俘篇校注寫定與評論 carried this analysis further; Edward Shaughnessy, in “‘New’ Evidence on the Zhou Conquest,” updates Gu’s work. Even more recent is Wei Cide 魏慈德, “Yi Zhou shu ‘Shifu,’ ‘Ke Yin’ liang pian yu chutu wenxian huzheng shilun” 逸周書世俘、克殷兩篇 與出土文獻互證試論. Li Xueqin 李學勤 has presented the most comprehensive analysis of other chapters of the work that are likely to be of Western Zhou date; see his series of articles, “‘Shi fu’ pian yanjiu” 世俘篇研究, “‘Shang shi’ pian yanjiu” 商誓篇研究, “‘Chang mai’ pian yanjiu” 嘗麥篇研究, and “Zhaigong Moufu ji qi delun” 祭公謀父及其德論, in Li Xueqin, Gu wenxian conglun 古文獻 叢論, pp. 69–102. A problem seldom addressed, however, is the difficulty in demonstrating when in the Western Zhou a text was written. With the “Shifu” chapter, there is sufficient evidence to say that the document was penned very close to the time of the events it portrays—probably in the last half of the eleventh century BCE. None of the other potentially genuine early chapters of the Yi Zhou shu present us with nearly as strong a case for authenticity as the “Shifu,” and while some of the phrases and grammatical usages in these chapters suggest they were written, at least in part, during the Western Zhou period, they could still very well date from one or even two hundred years after the events they purport to record. 22.  For the most recent and easily accessible information, see Zhang Chunlong 張春龍, “Cili Chu jian gaishu” 慈利楚簡概述 (Preliminary report on the Chu manuscripts from Cili). 23.  See McNeal, “Body as Metaphor.” 24.  文王立，西距昆夷，北備獫狁。謀武以昭威懷，作武稱。武以禁 暴，文以綏德。大聖允兼，作允文。武有七德，文王作大武，大明武，小 明武三篇。Chapter 71, “Zhou shu xu,” HJJZ, pp. 1198–1199. 25.  It is not particularly important to know which text was earlier; in any case, the Zuo zhuan is likely alluded to here because of its position of authority, which was presumably achieved late. This suggests that the preface itself may be quite late, but we cannot say decisively based on just this point. One might wonder if the preface could have originally written “seven systems,” the “seven virtues” having been a later copyist’s error. This is unlikely since it is hard to see how an original line “the martial has seven systems”

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could have been felt by the authors of the preface to sum up the content of chapters 8, 9, and 10. It is only by reference to a well-known speech in a canonical work that the author of the preface can try to use such a short and otherwise not at all self-explanatory line to make a statement about the deeper meaning of the diverse content of these three chapters. 26.  For Liu Qiyu’s arguments, see his Shangshu xueshi, pp. 93–97. For Huang Huaixin’s arguments on the military chapters see Huang, Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kaobian, pp. 95–97. For Luo Jiaxiang’s discussion of military thought in the text, see chapter 7 of Luo, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu. 27.  Some passages of the text include elaborate information on the Five Phases, which are likely to be late, and stylistically the prose throughout the text is consistent with a date at the very end of the Warring States or early in the Han. 28.  蘇秦聞之而慚，自傷，乃閉室不出，出其書遍觀之。曰：夫士業 已屈首受書，而不能以取尊榮，雖多亦奚以為！於是得周書陰符，伏而讀 之。期年，以出揣摩，曰：此可以說當世之君矣。Shiji 69.2241–2242; cf. Nien­hauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records vol. VII, p. 97. Nienhauser renders the line 期年以出揣摩 as “After a year had gone by, he went out with it to plumb [men’s intentions] and plan [his responses]” (p. 97), but the parallel from the Zhanguo ce makes it clear that the phrase chuaimo 揣摩 refers to a process that Su Qin himself goes through while studying this text and that prolonged study of the text resolves his conundrums. I find it unlikely that Su Qin was ever portrayed as actually traveling around to different courts with the book itself in tow. 29.  乃夜發書，陳篋數十，得太公陰符之謀 “(Su Qin) thereupon brought out his books and laid out a satchel of several tens of volumes; he found the strategies of the Secret Talisman of the Taigong” (Zhanguo ce jiao zhu 戰國策校注, Qin ce, 3.4b). 30.  Xiao Dengfu 蕭登福, Huangdi yinfu jing jinzhu jinyi 黃帝陰符經今註 今譯, includes a detailed study of the many extant versions of this work. Xiao explicitly links this work to the titles Taigong yinfu and Zhou shu yinfu associated with Su Qin in the third century BCE, but he presents no evidence to support this connection. Few scholars in the imperial period made this connection, as is clear in Xiao’s own work (see especially his appendix II, pp. 174–201) and in the work of scholars in the Ming and Qing who compiled fragments of various works related to Taigong Wang under various bibliographically attested titles; see Sun Qizhi 孫啟治 and Chen Jianhua 陳建華, eds., Gu yishu jiben mulu: fu kaozheng 古佚書輯本目錄, pp. 226–228. 31.  Suishu, “Jingji zhi” 34.29. Both titles may have existed. The Zhou shu yinfu is listed among well over a dozen other military texts associated



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with the Taigong, including a 太公陰符鈐錄 (The Seal Inscription of the Taigong’s Secret Talisman). 32.  周書陰符太公曰好用小善不得真賢也。Liu chen zhu Wenxuan 六臣 註文選, 40.30b. Li Shan cites the Zhou shu yinfu a total of three times in his commentary. The first citation is otherwise unknown: 周書陰符曰四輔不存 若濟河無舟矣 “The Zhou shu yinfu says ‘if the four supports are not there, it is like trying to cross a river without a boat’” (15.4b). The last, like the line cited above, purports to be a quotation from the Taigong: 周書陰符 太公 曰春道生萬物榮秋道成萬物零 “In the Zhou shu yinfu, the Taigong says, ‘the Way of spring is to give rise to the myriad things and allow them to flourish; the Way of autumn is to bring completion to the myriad things and then cause them to decline” (42.33a). These lines are closely paralleled by a passage in the extant Taigong liutao, “Wentao: Shouguo,” 1.8, 1.6a–b . 33.  Xiang Zonglu, Shuoyuan jiaozheng, chapter 1, “Jundao,” 13. 34.  Taigong liutao, “Wentao: Juxian,” 1.10, 1.8a–b. 35.  周書太公曰同惡相助同好相趨 Liu chen zhu Wenxuan 35.31b. Similar lines appear in Yi Zhou shu 8, “Dawu,” 27, “Da kaiwu,” and 38, “Wenzheng.” 36.  Taigong liutao 2.13 “Wutao: Faqi,” 2.10b; the Qunshu zhiyao also cites it as belonging to the “Wutao” section of the Taigong liutao: Qunshu zhiyao 羣書治要, 31.10a. 37.  Taiping yulan 太平御覽, 827.7b; the comment actually reads 周書丗 紀同, but the “thirty (year) record” may be erroneous. On the other hand, this may be a citation from the Guwen Zhou shu discussed above, recovered from the Wei tomb in Ji commandery. The Qunshu zhiyao attributes this story to the “Wentao” section of the Taigong liutao; see 31.9a. 38.  See the discussion and citations in HJJZ, p. 1255; the Suishu bibliographic treatise lists a Taigong jingui太公金匱 in two juan under military texts (34.1013). 39.  Beitang shuchao 北堂書鈔 10.1a; Taiping yulan 76.5a. The line reads 至于伏羲氏、 神農氏，教民而不誅; 黃帝、堯、舜，誅而不怒 “Coming to the time of Fuxi and Shennong, they instructed the people and never executed them; the Yellow Emperor, Yao and Shun used execution, but never harbored anger (towards criminals).” The line is part of a longer citation from the Taigong liutao, no longer extant in our version, which discusses the sage rulers of antiquity. This line or a paraphrase of it is found in many early texts. The Zhanguo ce and the “Zhao shijia” chapter of the Shiji both record the story of a group of nobles in the Zhao court trying to convince the Zhao king Wuling not to adopt the dress of the Hu (non-Chinese horsemen of the steppe; he does anyway, in order to engage them in battle on horseback). The king responds with a long speech, which includes the line

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in slightly abbreviated form (Zhanguo ce 6.21b; Shiji 43.1810). It is not identified as a citation from an old book, but if one takes the story at face value, arguably, the king must have heard or read the story somewhere, so there is the implication that here (and throughout his speech about historical precedents) he is referring to well-known texts. The line also appears in the first chapter of the Shangjun shu, “Gengfa” (1.2b), where like the king of Zhao, Lord Shang takes it as a precedent for change. 40.  Beitang shuchao 80.1b; Chuxue ji 21.500; Taiping yulan 523.5a and 610.1a. The precise wording of the passage differs in each citation, but it is clear that we are looking at a single passage. 41.  Tongdian 通典 159, “bing 12,” pp. 4075–4076. 42.  周書曰將欲敗之，必姑輔之。將欲取之，必姑與之。Zhanguo ce “Wei ce,” 7.1a–b; Hanfeizi, chapter 22, 7.6a; the line is closely paralleled in Laozi 36: 將欲奪之，必固與之 “if you want to grasp from your enemy, you must certainly first give to him” (Laozi Daode jing 老子道德經, 1.18a). 43.  右周志二十八國, Pelliot # 3454; see Zhang Zhenglang 張政烺, Wu Shuping 吳樹平, and Lü Zongli 呂宗力, eds., Bingjia baolan xinzhu xinshi 兵家寶藍新注新釋, pp. 891–897; cf. HJJZ, chapter 61, “Shiji” 史記. The expression “passage on the right” is a common way of demonstrating the link between a comment on a preceding section of texts and the text itself, which would have been physically situated to the right of the comment. The “Guo­ming ji” 國名紀 (Record of State Names) chapter of Luo Mi’s Lushi 路 史 (fourteenth century CE) says explicitly that it draws from the Zhou shu, “Shiji” chapter, and from the “Zhou zhi” chapter of the Taigong liutao (Lushi 3.29); see also HJJZ, pp. 1006–1007. Luo also notes that these texts include entries for a total of thirty states, similar to the twenty-eight noted in the Dun­huang manuscript. Throughout the “Guoming ji” chapter, Luo Mi follows the Yi Zhou shu but notes where the Taigong liutao apparently available to him has variants. The Beitang shuchao 北堂書鈔 (113) attributes a line about the demise of the Banquan lineage known to us from the “Shiji” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu to the Taigong liutao. The line is translated above in note 4, chapter 1. The Beitang shuchao citation is an almost word-for-word match to the “Shiji” line, but the lineage name is rendered Fanhou 煩厚氏, which must be a variant of 阪泉氏; fan is clearly a phonetic error or loan for ban, while hou is clearly an orthographic error for the structurally similar quan (see HJJZ, pp. 1030–1031). 44.  Jingyi kao 經義考 75.415a –418a. 45.  夫子定書爲百篇矣。孟子於武成取其二三策﹐謂血流漂杵等語近於 誇也。今所謂汲冡周書多誇詡之辭﹐且雜以詭譎之說。此豈文武周公之事 而孔孟之所取哉﹗然其間畏天敬民﹐尊賢尚徳﹐古先聖王之格言遺制尚多有



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之。至於時訓明堂﹐記禮者之所釆録﹔克殷度邑﹐司馬遷之所援㩀。是蓋 有不可盡廢者 . . . 推之則非始岀於汲冡也明矣。惜乎後世不復貴重﹐文字 日就舛訛。Jingyi kao 75.415b. Ding Fu’s丁黼 full comments are available in HJJZ, p. 1278, and also at the front of the Sibu congkan edition of the text. 46.  周書今七十篇﹐殊與尚書體不相類﹐所載事物亦多過實﹐無所質 信。Jingyi kao 75.415a. By seventy chapters Hong Mai 洪邁 means of course seventy content chapters, leaving off the preface. 47.  其紀録失實 . . . 書多駮 . . . 荒唐夸誕不近人情﹐非止於駮而已。See Liu Kezhuang’s 劉克莊 full comments in Jingyi kao 75.415b. 48.  Fang Xiaoru 方孝孺 has attracted considerable scholarly attention; see Peter Ditmanson, “Fang Xiaoru: Moralistic Politics in the Early Ming,” in Hammond, The Human Tradition in Premodern China, pp. 127–141, and the list of suggested readings there. 49.  劉向謂其書為周書﹐即孔子刪定之餘者﹐則非也。何者﹐其事有 可疑也。畧舉其大者言之﹐武王之伐殷﹐誅其君弔其民而已。其世俘篇 乃曰馘魔億有十萬七千七百七十有九﹐俘人三億萬有二百三十。夫殺人之 多若是﹐雖楚漢之際、亂賊之暴﹐不若是之酷。而謂武王有是乎！所誅以 億萬計﹐天下尚有人乎？周公之用人﹐不求偹於一人﹐其官人篇乃曰醉之 以酒﹐以觀其恭；縱之以色﹐以觀其常；臨之以利﹐以觀其不貪；濫之以 樂﹐以觀其不荒。以詐術陷人而責人以正﹐雖戰國之世、縱横權數之徒所 不為﹐曾謂周公而以此取人乎？王者之師﹐禁亂除暴﹐以仁義為本﹐其大 武篇則曰春違其農﹐夏食其榖﹐秋取其刈﹐冬凍其葆。不仁孰甚焉？其大 明篇則曰委以淫樂﹐賂以美女。不義孰甚焉？此後世稍有良心者不忍為﹐ 曾謂王者之用兵乃若是乎？Jingyi kao 75.416a. 50.  及載武王伐商之事﹐往往謬誕﹐與書不合。由此觀之﹐决非周書﹐ 謂孔子刪定之餘者﹐非也。 Jingyi kao 75.416a–b. 51.  See, e.g., chapter one of Henderson’s Scripture, Canon, and Commentary. 52.  Many questions remain to be addressed. Were there prejudices and assumptions similar to these late imperial notions of the profundity of the classics already operating in the Han, and does this help in part to explain why so many early texts associated with the genre of Zhou documents were neglected and left to perish, while a small number of them were celebrated as canonical and passed on to us across millennia? Chapter 4: Translation and Study of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu 1.  因天時，伐天毀，謂之武。武(刃 =) 牣 而以文隨其後，則有成功 矣。Jingfa, “Sidu,” 1.5.7 (numbering of passages from the Mawangdui Jingfa text refer to juan, chapter, and paragraph, as found in the following work),

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in Wei Qipeng 魏啟鵬, Mawangdui Han mu boshu Huangdi shu jianzheng 馬 王堆漢墓帛書黃帝書箋證, p. 51, hereafter cited as Huangdi shu. There are a number of alternatives concerning the reading of 刃; I follow Wei in taking it to mean 牣, “full, complete.” 2.  See McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 3.  We might suppose that the early Zhou court would have been concerned with such matters as how to properly conduct state ceremonies when faced with drought or other seasonal shortages, but there is nothing in the language of chapter 5 to suggest that it is one of the authentic early documents in this collection. 4.  Note that these opening lines suggest a historical setting sometime prior to the third century BCE, when small states had long since been annexed and the remaining large states were competing for total dominance. 5.  These passages are laconic, but the general sense, grasped by most commentators over the centuries and condemned by many moralists, is clear: prey on your enemy’s weaknesses. The same principle governs the following passage as well, where immoderation is probably to be encouraged in your enemies to strategic advantage. 6.  Emending the text with Wang Niansun: 美女破(舌=)后 (HJJZ, pp. 93–94). 7.  The same line is found in chapter 8 with minor differences in wording and is quoted in the Shang jun shu (Shangzi, chapter 15, 4.3a; see McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor,” p. 49, for a more detailed discussion on the possibility that the line is cited by chapter name there). It is tempting to emend the final line concerning winter to match the passage in chapter 8, since the line as we have it here is hard to understand. Liu Shipei thinks fu, “clothing,” is here a loan for bao, “to conceal” and therefore “what is stored away” (HJJZ, p. 97), which is what the passage in chapter 8 has in its place; on phonetic grounds, this suggestion is not impossible, but the two are not a close match. A better solution is to take fu 服 *bjək as a loan to write bei 備 *bjəgh (preparations, supplies), as seen in early inscriptions: see, e.g., Ma Chengyuan 馬承源, ed., Shanghai bowuguan cang Zhanguo Chu zhushu 上海 博物館藏戰國楚竹書 vol. 4, p. 182. I suggest the same emendation in the closing lines of this chapter as well. 8.  The first line is likely erroneous as it reads; I tentatively follow Ding Zongluo in taking 恪 as an orthographic error for 略, “to plunder.” The solution is less than ideal. It is possible that whatever the original word here was, the final word in the next line (格) was introduced here as a copyist’s error, replacing it. Based on the close parallel in chapter 7 of the Sunzi



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bingfa, we might speculate that the first line ought to read either 追戎無迫 “in pursuing troops do not press them,” or perhaps 追戎無遏 “in pursuing troops don’t cut them off” (see the discussion of the relevant Sunzi passages below). 9. The final word in the line 爵位不謙 must be an error. Most commentators read it as a loan for qian 歉, “a deficiency,” which they then take in the sense of jian 減, “to diminish” (see the notes by Lu Wenchao, Chen Fengheng, Zhu Youzeng, Zhu Junsheng in HJJZ, p. 101; Yu Yue’s comments there are also particularly useful, as is so often the case). 10.  Lu Wenchao emends fu to read wu: 以毀其 (服=) 武; Kong’s commentary cites this phrase while glossing it, and his note reads huiwu 毀武, suggesting that this may have been the original. Lu also notes that when thus emended, this and the preceding three lines are rhymed (HJJZ, p. 101). The rhymes, rendered according to Li Fang-kuei’s reconstructions of Archaic Chinese, are: fu 服 *bjək with de 德 *tək; and zu 阻 *tsrjagx with wu 武 *mjagx. Unfortunately, the final two four-character lines do not rhyme; oddly, each line as they stand would rhyme with one of the preceding pairs: “All within the four quarters will fear and submit (服 *bjək), and you will broadly possess all under Heaven (天下 *thin *gragx). As we will see, rhyme is used prominently in three of the following four military chapters. While a rhyme or two can be found here in chapter 6, the repetitive phrasing used to give structure to this piece (the formula A, B, C . . . 武之 X 也) took precedence over all other rhetorical devices. Setting aside the question of rhyme, a better emendation to the line would be 以毀其 (服=) 備. As noted above, we find bei 備 *bjəgh used as a loan to write fu 服 *bjək in the Shanghai Museum manuscripts. Although we cannot decide with full confidence which emendation is finally called for, it turns out that both result in basically the same meaning, which I have reflected in the translation as the ambiguous “military preparations.” 11.  大國不失其威，小國不失其卑，敵國不失其權，岠嶮伐夷，并小 奪亂，□強攻弱而襲不正，武之經也。伐亂、伐疾、伐疫，武之順也。賢 者輔之，亂者取之，作者勸之，怠者沮之，恐者懼之，欲者趣之，武之用 也。美男破老，美女破舌，淫圖破□，淫巧破時，淫樂破正，淫言破義， 武之毀也。赦其眾，遂其咎，撫其□，助其囊，武之間也。餌敵以分，而 照其儲，以伐輔德，追時之權，武之尚也。春違其農，秋伐其穡，夏取其 麥，冬寒其衣服，春秋欲舒，冬夏欲亟，武之時也。長勝短，輕勝重， 直勝曲，眾勝寡，強勝弱，飽勝飢，肅勝怒，先勝後，疾勝遲，武之勝 也。追戎無恪，窮寇不格，力倦氣竭，乃易克，武 之追也。既勝人，舉 旗以號，命吏禁掠，無敢侵暴，爵位不謙，田宅不虧，各寧其親，民服如 化，武之撫也。百姓咸服，偃兵興德，夷厥險阻，以毀其服，四方畏服，

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奄有天下，武之定也。HJJZ, pp. 93–101. For convenience, I will cite page numbers for the HJJZ only, but I have used the Sibu congkan edition of the text (there named Jizhong Zhou shu 汲冢周書; dated 1543) as my base text, relying on the HJJZ for its copious collation and commentary notes collected from many hard-to-find sources. Additionally, I have consulted Zhu You­zeng 朱右曾, Zhou shu jixun jiaoshi 周書集訓校釋; Cheng Rong’s 程榮 Han-Wei congshu 漢魏叢書 edition; Wu Guan’s 吳琯 Gujin yishi 古今逸史 edition; and Lu Wenchao’s 盧文弨 collation (Sibu beiyao edition), which drew on eight earlier editions (including the versions now collected in the Sibu congkan, the Han-Wei congshu, and the Gujin yishi, as well as other Ming editions no longer extant) and incorporated collation notes from an additional eleven scholars, none of which survive today separately from his citations of them. 12.  See McNeal, “The Development of Naturalist Thought.” 13.  以近待遠，以佚待勞，以飽待飢，此治力者也。Yang Bin­g’an, Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli, p. 151; 歸師勿遏，圍師必闕，窮寇勿迫，此用兵之法 也。Yang Bing’an, Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli, pp. 157–160. 14.  之部上聲. Throughout this study, I employ the transcriptions as given by Li Fang-kuei, and generally made available in Schuessler, A Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese; I maintain some of the simpler orthographic conventions of Li for convenience, e.g., *-ng instead of *-ŋ. Li’s reconstructions are used not because I find his system the most sophisticated. The two most sophisticated systems for transcribing the Chinese language of this early period are those of William Baxter and Edwin G. Pulleyblank. Unfortunately, the two systems differ significantly, and I am not prepared to enter into the debate over which is preferable. Each has its strengths. For our purposes, each also suffers from a single drawback—difficulty of access. Precisely because these two systems are relatively more sophisticated than Karlgren’s or Li’s systems (which are very close), their authors are continuously modifying and updating them so that there is not a single reference readers and scholars can turn to for an explanation of the rules and conventions behind the reconstructions. On the other hand, specialists, who will be the only readers apt to quibble over the choice of systems, can readily follow the line of development from Karlgren’s and Li’s systems toward the more complex arguments of Pulleyblank or Baxter if needed. Therefore, I intend the phonetic values employed in this study as a mere baseline, used to indicate the basic rhyme structure of these chapters or occasionally to examine phonetic similarities among individual words. As it turns out, I will resort to Baxter’s analysis to solve some problematic rhymes in this chapter, but to Pulleyblank’s analysis to examine special grammatical



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features of the Yi Zhou shu in chapter 5 below. Their respective works will be cited where employed. I have benefited from private communications with both Baxter and Pulleyblank during the course of my research on these chapters of the Yi Zhou shu, as well as from private communications with Zev Handel, and am indebted to all of them. 15.  The graph that is a glaring exception to the rhyme but seems to be correct is 聽; the rhyme group is 耕部平聲. 16.  魚部上聲. 17. The final line reads 是故天下一旦而定有四海. We might amend the final line to read 奄有四海, following Ding Zonglu, Tang Dapei, and Zhu Youzeng (HJJZ, p. 111; the commentators are not primarily guided by an understanding of the rhymes and seem unaware or uninterested in the poetic structure of the piece). For rhythmic purposes, the phrase 是故天 下 would then have to be considered as separate from the four-character structure, introducing the conclusion and allowing the final rhyme ending in *-əgx. It seems more likely that simply the 是故 (line 23) should be treated separately, punctuating the poem and introducing the concluding line. We then need only treat the grammatical particle 而 as unstressed (a reasonable assumption) to preserve the regularity of the piece. 18.  The use of banners or pennants was crucial in ancient Chinese military operations. They were the symbols that generals used to command their troops on the field. Their position on high chariots or hilltops, highly visible to the troops during battle, signaled the center of authority. Their variety, and the swiftness and accuracy with which the troops responded to manipulations of different colors or arrangements of them, signaled the highly trained and disciplined nature of the army. Readers will find that they are mentioned repeatedly in military texts. 19.  While we cannot dismiss the possibility that there are two four-character phrases missing in front of this and the next rhymed line, it is more likely that the authors of this piece chose to double the rhyme here. 20.  The transmitted text has bu 布, clearly an orthographic error; shi 市, market, makes better sense and is a perfect rhyme (following Zhu Junsheng and Sun Yirang; see HJJZ, p. 105). 21.  The text indicates a graph missing just prior to the rhyme word, but the graph now ending the line must be an error, since it does not rhyme. Our easiest solution is to assume that the missing graph is actually the rhyming word. 22.  As noted in the diagram of the rhymes above, this word in rhyming position here clearly does not rhyme. Some commentators in the Qing had begun, in only preliminary ways, to develop an awareness of the importance

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of rhyme in these chapters, but only Zhu Junsheng (1788–1858) suggests emending this graph, and his emendation does not result in either a rhyme or a more coherent phrase (HJJZ, p. 108). The word seems to be a conscious departure from the poetic structure of the piece. 23.  The graph wu 無 must be an error. Several commentators realize that the line does not make sense as it stands, but some suggest emendations that infelicitously destroy the rhyme (HJJZ, p. 110). 24.  思靜振勝，允文維記。昭告周行，維旌所在。收武釋賄，無遷厥 里。官校屬職，因其百吏。公貨少多，賑賜窮士。救瘠補病，賦均田布。 命夫復服，用損憂耻。孤寡無告，獲厚咸喜。咸問外戚，書其所在。遷 同氏姓，位之宗子。率用十五，綏用□安。敎用顯允，若得父母。寛以政 之，孰云不聴。聴言靡悔，遵養時晦。晦明遂語，于時允武。死思復生， 生思復所。人知不棄，愛守正戸。上下和恊，靡敵不下。執彼玉珪，以居 其宇。庶民咸畊，童壮無輔。無拂其取，通其疆土。民之望兵，若待父 母。是故，天下一旦，而定有四海。HJJZ, pp. 103–111. 25.  The association with Shang Yang may be anachronistic; there is no mention of “fives and tens” in the extant text. It is Sima Qian’s biography of Shang Yang that makes the link: 令民為什伍 “[Shang Yang] caused the people to organize into groups of tens and fives” (Shiji 68.2230). The phrase 什伍 occurs, referring to military organization in the “Jiyi” 祭義 chapter of the Liji and referring to units of social and military organization repeatedly in the Guanzi. The occurrences in the Yi Zhou shu (here written 十五, elsewhere as 什伍) are among the earliest in classical literature; the term appears also in chapter 11, “Dakuang” 大匡 and chapter 10, “Xiaomingwu” 小明武. Elsewhere, the term is found in the military texts Wuzi and Sunzi bingfa, and in other texts concerned with social organization such as the Zhou li 周禮 and the Hanfeizi. 26. Zhang Chunlong’s discussions concerning the text focus on this point; see Zhang, “Cili Chu jian gaishu,” pp. 4–11. It should be noted here that some of the enumerative lists in this chapter occasionally employ rhyme, but the use is so infrequent and unsystematic that it cannot be relied on as a clue to reading difficult passages. For this reason, and because the state of the text would make it cumbersome to do so, I do not note rhymes in the translation. This occasional, unsystematic use of rhyme is common in enumerative sections of chapters throughout the work and will be explored in more detail in the following chapter. 27.  The transmitted text says there are only six formulae, but this must be a late emendation reflecting the fact that later in the line one of the seven items had become obscured or dropped out, presumably during the Tang or after; the Beitang shuchao lists seven. As the lists unfold throughout



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the rest of the chapter, we find passages belonging to this seventh item that remained even after the opening line had been emended to match the shortened list. Note that the preface, by linking this chapter to the Zuo zhuan speech about the seven virtues of the martial, further suggests that the original must have included seven items. The transmitted text differs from other testimony concerning the first item of the list. Whereas it gives zheng 政, “governing,” the Beitang shuchao uses the variant zheng 征, usually understood as “punitive campaign.” Kong Zhao’s third-century CE commentary to the line shows that his version matched the transmitted text, but he then glosses it with reference to “punitive campaign” (HJJZ, p. 113): 政 者, 征伐之政 “here zheng means policies of punitive campaigns.” The two graphs were generally used interchangeably, but in this instance it would be preferable to know precisely which term was intended, or if, as Kong seems to suggest, there was a fundamental overlap in the two meanings implied. Evidence external to the text suggests that the list may very well have been headed by the term “governing.” A similar line appears in the Guliang zhuan 穀梁傳, under year eight of Duke Zhuang: 善為國者不師， 善師者不陳，善陳者不戰，善戰者不死，善死者不亡 “those who excel at governing a state do not need to field armies; those who excel at fielding armies do not need battle formations; those who excel at battle formations do not need to engage in planned battle; those who excel at engaging in planned battle do not need to die; those who excel at dying will not perish” (Zhong Wenzheng 鍾文烝, Chunqiu Guliang jing zhuan buzhu 春秋谷梁經 傳補注, p. 164). Also, this list links battle formations and planned battle 陳/戰, in support of the Beitang shuchao reading for the next line, where the transmitted text has bo 搏, to strike, rather than zhen 陳, battle formations; I follow the transmitted text in reading the fifth item in the list as bo (Zhu Youzeng emends to match the Beitang shuchao). The zhen-zhan 陳/戰 pair was quite conventional, so a corruption from the less common bo 搏 to the graphically similar and more familiar zhen 陳 is far more likely to have occurred than a corruption from a familiar phrase to an uncommon one. In any case, Zhang Chunlong’s public discussions of this line in the Cili manuscripts make it apparent that they support the transmitted text in this instance. 28.  The transmitted text is more laconic, reading, for example, “in governance there are four forms of marital relation and five kinds of harmonizing,” while leaving out mention of the nine reliances. Internal evidence (the nine reliances are mentioned later in the text after giving a description of the four forms of marital relation and five kinds of harmonizing) and the Beitang shuchao parallels allow the reconstruction of this fuller version.

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Finally, in the transmitted text, the closing line is badly damaged, and even after comparison with other testimony remains unclear. Zhu follows the Beitang shuchao and emends 六庠五虞 to六廣五虞. Lu Wenchao notes the mention of “five auguries, six encirclements and seven enticements” 五祥六 衛七厲 in a list appearing in “Fengbao,” chapter 21 of the Yi Zhou shu, and, based on the similarity of these two lists, reads xiang 庠 as xiang 祥 (they are homophones; HJJZ, p. 116). Unfortunately, it is possible that the graph 祥 in that chapter is an error, since it is the only item in a longer list that does not rhyme (cf. Yu’s note, HJJZ, p. 211). The line in chapter 21 begins a long section of enumerative lists there, and rhyme figures in many of them. The line reads: “Within (the state) prepare the five auguries, the six encirclements, the seven enticements, the ten defeats and the four vines” 內備五祥六衛七厲十敗四葛. With the exception of xiang, all the items on this list are words from the yue rhyme group 月部; wei, li, and bai are all in the departing tone, while the final item, ge, is in the entering tone, giving 衛 *gwjadh, 厲 *ljadh, 敗 *dradh, and 葛 *kat. Xiang, on the other hand, is from the yang rhyme group 楊 (level tone). Yu thinks it is an orthographic error for da 達, based on the form 羍 (usually used to write ta). The former is in the yue rhyme group, entering tone, giving Archaic Chinese *dat; probably all five were considered rhymes despite the different final seen in two of the cases (a reflection in our transcription system of a distinction that eventually developed into tonal differences). His is a good solution for the line in chapter 21, but as it turns out, there is no indication from the context of chapter 21 that this list and our list from chapter 8 ought to be related; the descriptions of these lists that follow in each chapter are completely different. Furthermore, none of the proposed readings particularly contributes to the clarity of the passage. Until publication of the manuscript finds (which may or may not shed light on this particular passage), we might better try to arrive at the best possible reading for each of the two variants, and then choose provisionally from these. If we follow the transmitted text, we might read the graph in question as the transmitted text has it, but understand xiang 庠 in the sense of “to examine in detail, with care,” usually written 詳 (the two are homophones). This at least produces a meaningful pair of terms (I tentatively opt for this reading and follow the transmitted text, in hopes that the publication of the Cili manuscripts will help finally solve this problem). If we follow the Beitang shuchao, on the other hand, a straightforward reading of 六廣 is not meaningful. We might better take 廣 *kwangx as a loan for 迋 *kwjangx, “to deceive”; or, looking at the list that follows, where the verb ming 明 figures prominently, as a loan for 光 *kwang, “bright.” The meaning of the term ke 客, which heads this final entry in the



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list, is unclear (cf. Wang Niansun, HJJZ, p. 130); I tentatively follow Zhu in glossing it as qi 奇, “unorthodox” (Zhu Youzeng, Zhou shu jixun jiaoshi, 2.5a–b). 29. Wang Niansun emends tongli 同里 to read tongmeng 同盟, “those who have sworn a blood covenant with each other,” following the Beitang shuchao (HJJZ, p. 117). 30.  For this list we find an interesting parallel in another chapter of the Yi Zhou shu that is clearly related to our material. Chapter 27, “Dakai Wu,” purports to record a discussion between King Wu and the Duke of Zhou in the first year of King Wu’s reign that includes the following statement: 王拜 曰：允哉！余聞國有四戚、五和、七失、九因、十淫，非不敬不知 “King Wu bowed [to the Duke of Zhou] and said: ‘Indeed! I have heard that the state has four forms of marital relation and five kinds of harmonizing; seven infelicities; nine reliances; and ten overindulgences. It is not that I do not revere these, only that I do not understand them’ (HJJZ, p. 276). The passage implies that the nine reliances are here considered a separate list from the four forms of marital relation and the five kinds of harmonizing. The Duke of Zhou’s answer enumerates each category for the king, and indeed the nine reliances are a separate category bearing no resemblance to material in chapter 8. The details of the four forms of marital relation and five kinds of harmonizing, however, are worth our attention: 四戚： 一內同姓，二外婚姻，三官同師，四哀同勞。五 和：一有天維國，二有地 維義，三同好維樂，四同惡維哀，五遠方不爭 “[The Duke of Zhou said:] The four forms of marital relation are: one, within, those of the same clan; two, without, relations by marriage; three, among offices, those from the same patron; four, in the midst of grief, those who share the same toil. The five kinds of harmonizing are: one, take having heaven to constitute the state; two, take having the earth to constitute righteousness; three, take sharing interests to constitute joy; four, take sharing dislikes to constitute sorrow; five, do not contend over distant regions” (HJJZ, pp. 278–279; emending the opening line from 內同外 to 內同姓 with Fan Zhen, Ding Zonglu, and Zhu). While there can be little doubt that the enumeration of these two lists in these two chapters is closely related, it is difficult to determine which list might be taken as more accurate. The emendation made above to the opening line is not entirely necessary, but it does seem likely that the first occurrence of the graph 外 is a corruption based on the following line. Beyond this, Yu Chang amends the description of the five kinds of harmonizing in chapter 8 to match chapter 27 more closely, so that the entries move from “having Heaven” to “having earth,” rather than to “having the people,” as chapter 8 has it (HJJZ, p. 117). The next two items in

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the list, concerning shared likes and dislikes, are likely to differ intentionally. In chapter 27, where the concern is not military affairs specifically but governance more generally, the two items are defined vaguely. In chapter 8, however, the phrasing is more specifically appropriate to military affairs. Moreover, this particular passage appears in the extant Taigong liutao with only minor graphic variation. See chapter 2 above, where the line and its various citations are discussed; it is cited elsewhere in early literature at least two separate times, once as belonging to the Taigong liutao, once attributed to the Tai Gong but cited from the Zhou shu. There is, finally, the chance that the final item in the list (“treat generously those who reside far off”) in chapter 8 is cited in later literature, but the matter is by no means clear, and the possible later citation does not add to the clarity of the line nor does it help us decide if the phrasing of chapter 27 is preferable (see HJJZ, p. 118, for details; the possible citation is attributed to the Shi, or Odes, not the Documents). 31. The passage allows for two general interpretations. It may mean “one should attack when one has the advantage of the season and the position of celestial bodies,” etc., or it may mean “if you attack an enemy who has the advantages of the season and the position of celestial bodies [then this will constitute a calamity].” There is no general agreement among commentators, and in any case the underlying message is the same. This is one of the frustrating difficulties presented by such enumerative lists: their brevity comes at a cost to precise comprehensibility. 32. The text appears to be damaged toward the end of the passage. Comparison with a line from chapter 38, “Wenzheng,” suggests that the brief entry for the second item under the three kinds of accumulation, 工 次, ought to be read as 工資, although it is likely that this is still incomplete (HJJZ, p. 399). More problematic is that from this point on, the relationship between the various items making up each list and the general heading for each list, e.g., incursion, planned battle, etc., is almost never apparent. Why, exactly, such items as “men and women form a pair” or “treat the death of the people as a grave affair” are subsumed under incursion, and not any of the other categories, is not easy to answer, again in part because the laconic nature of such lists often leaves us wondering about the precise meaning of many passages. As noted above, if we are to make sense of this chapter, we will have to find approaches to explain how such enumeration could have conveyed more meaning than is apparent to us now. 33.  See the close parallel in chapter 6 of the Yi Zhou shu and the notes there on the different endings to this line. 34.  The text is certainly corrupt. Commentators suggest various emen-



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dations, but none is able to render the line entirely comprehensible; the original text has 一勝人必羸, but Zhu and most commentators emend the text to read ying 贏/嬴 instead of lei 羸 (I follow Zhu). I propose reading the last line 殯厥親 rather than 擯厥親. Finally, I follow Kong’s commentary in taking the three lines to refer to the condition of one’s enemy. 35. The commentators Fan Zhen and Chen Fengheng are the only brave souls who make an earnest attempt to understand these lines in the context of pardons and warfare (both Yu Yue and Sun Yirang are sufficiently troubled by these lines to suggest major emendations). Basically, it seems likely that these lines relate to conditions under which one may “pardon” a strike by an enemy, that is, conditions under which it may be strategically advantageous to ignore such an offense by an enemy. In any case, the lines are too laconic to be easily interpreted. See the comments of Yu, Sun, Fan, and Chen in HJJZ, pp. 124–125. 36.  The term li 厲 is used throughout this list in the sense of “to train, to incite to” and, standing for 勵, “to encourage.” The two are close cognates, the underlying meaning of which is “apply pressure to.” The opening two or three passages dictate the use of “encourage,” although the final three clearly take on the sense of “train.” 37.  Sharpening weapons may of course be taken literally or metaphorically, in the sense of training the troops. The final list of five considerations presents many difficulties to commentators, and there is little agreement on how to interpret most of the items. In item four, the sense is likely that the local officers in charge of managing the resources of uncultivated lands will know the terrain best; they may also have been involved on a regular basis with military engagements. Most commentators try to avoid reading nien 撚, “to twist,” in its normal sense, but a line from the “Binglüe” chapter of the Huainanzi suggests that it should be taken literally here: 前後不相 撚, 左右不相干 “the front and the rear do not become entwined with one another; the left and right do not block one another” (Huainan honglie jie 15.8b). 38.  武有七制：政、攻、侵、伐、搏、戰、鬥。善政不攻，善攻不侵， 善侵不伐，善伐不搏，善搏不戰，善戰不鬥，善鬥不敗。政有九因，因有 四戚五和；攻有九開，開四凶、五良；侵有七酌，酌有四聚、三斂；伐有 七機，機有四時、三興；搏有七來，來有三哀、四赦；戰有十一振，振有 六厲、五衛；鬥有十一客，客有六廣、五虞。四戚：一內姓，二外婚，三 友朋，四同里。五和：一有天無惡，二有人無郄，三同好相固，四同惡相 助，五遠宅不薄。凡此九者，政之因也。四凶：一攻天時，二攻地宜，三 攻人德，四攻行利。五良：一取仁，二取智，三取勇，四取材，五取藝。 凡此九者，攻之開也。四聚：一酌之以仁，二懷之以樂，三旁聚封人，四

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Notes to Pages 115–119

設圍以信。三斂：一男女比，二工次，三祗人死。凡此七者，侵之酌也。 四時：一春違其農，二夏食其穀，三秋取其刈，四冬凍其葆。三興：一政 以和時，二伐亂以治，三伐飢以飽。凡此七者，伐之機也。三哀：一要不 羸，二喪人，三擯厥親。四赦：一勝人必嬴，二取威信復，三人樂生身， 四赦民所惡。凡此七者，搏之來也。六厲：一仁厲以行，二智厲以道，三 武厲以勇，四師厲以士，五校正厲御，六射師厲伍。五衛：一明仁懷恕， 二明智輔謀，三明武攝勇，四明材攝士，五明藝攝官。凡此十一者，戰之 振也。六廣：一明令，二明醜，三明賞，四明罰，五利兵，六競竟。五 虞：一鼓走疑，二備從來，三佐車舉旗，四采虞人謀，五後動撚之。凡此 十一者，鬥之客也。無競惟害，有功無敗。HJJZ, pp. 112–130. The final line is rhymed and may be a stock phrase: 害 *gadh with 敗 *pradh. 39.  Lau and Ames, Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare, pp. 43–45. 40.  The etymology of qin 侵, incursion, makes this clear: the Shuowen jiezi defines it in terms of other words meaning “to slowly soak,” and the cognate word “to inscribe,” both of which imply the spatial sense of “just breaking the surface.” See Duan Yucai 段玉裁, Shuowen jiezi zhu 說文解字 注, p. 374b. 41.  Zuo zhuan Xuan 12, in Yang Bojun 楊伯峻, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu 春秋左傳注, pp. 744–746. 42.  言廟勝也 HJJZ, p. 113. 43.  See the collected comments following Kong’s line in HJJZ, pp. 113– 114. 44.  夫未戰而廟算勝者，得算多也；未戰而廟算不勝者，得算少也；多 算勝少算不勝，而況於無算乎？吾以此觀之，勝負見矣。Yang Bing’an 楊 丙安, Shiyi jia zhu Sunzi jiaoli, p. 20. I follow Li Ling in treating bu sheng 不 勝 in the line 多算勝少算不勝而況於無算乎 as erroneous; the Yinqueshan manuscript and numerous later citations all read 多算勝少算 (Li Ling, Sunzi bingfa yizhu, p. 5; the matter does not alter the interpretation of the actual calculations using strips). Griffith interprets the expressions 多算 and 少算 as if they refer to the number of calculations done, an error that contributes to his unease with the passage (Griffith, The Art of War, p. 71). Sawyer is closer to the mark, having accepted the notion that “counting sticks” were used and are referred to by the term suan 算 (The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, p. 437, note 21), but chooses to translate in such a way as to obscure the use of these instruments on the premise that a simple tally of strips would not allow for the weighing of factors that clearly had different degrees of importance. There is no reason to assume that such differences were not accounted for by the manipulation of the strips themselves, and we are better off to translate the passage as accurately as we can. An important point this passage is making is that temple calcula-



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tions consist of only rational analysis, carried out by the manipulation and counting of strips. The numbers do not lie, the author tells us. I suspect that this assertion was part of the author’s attempt to rid this practice (and the conduct of war in general) of any older, religious or mantic elements associated with divination or communication with the spirits. Notice that the practice of such temple calculations seems not to be at issue here; the author assumes they will be carried out. The emphasis here is instead on the limited scope of these calculations and how victory or defeat emerges only out of assessments made of rational factors such as are presented in the chapter. 45.  凡用兵者，必先自廟戰：主孰賢？將孰能？民孰附？國孰治？蓄積 孰多？士卒孰精？甲兵孰利？器備孰便？故運籌於廟堂之上，而決勝乎千 里之外矣。Huainan honglie jie 15.6b–7a. 46.  We know that the interplay between odd and even numbers was a crucial element in manipulating the symbols of the Yijing for divination or numerological purposes. 47.  The work of piecing together the two manuscript texts from the bamboo strip fragments was not complete when I viewed them in 2002, and yet enough work was done to demonstrate the close match between these finds and the transmitted text. Therefore, although the manuscript cache from Cili contains many more inscribed bamboo slips, many of these only fragmentary and some surely bearing lists or numbered entries, it is unlikely that substantial new material belonging to this chapter will emerge from this cache. These observations were reconfirmed when I was able to view the preliminary transcriptions of the entire Cili cache in 2007. 48.  It is worth noting that amending the text to match the Beitang shu­ chao for the fifth entry, as Zhu does (reading zhen, “battle formation,” rather than bo, “swift strike”), does not render the list any more understandable. 49.  For a brief treatment of enumeration in the Yi Zhou shu, see McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 50.  It is not clear now whether the opening lines were once rhymed also or not; they may be corrupt. The rhymes in the final four couplets of the text present some difficulties. 51. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, ch. 1. It would clearly be a mistake to try to completely separate the various kinds of training and socialization processes that troops went through from the notion of ritual; the training and prebattle preparations even of modern armies are marked by an array of peculiar customs, ritual behavior, and semireligious or overtly religious ceremonies aimed at fostering unity, obedience, bravery, and a sense of purpose. Surely such behaviors are not recent innovations.

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Notes to Pages 124–126

52.  On the formation of the canon, see, inter alia, Nylan, The Five ‘Confucian’ Classics. 53.  Huang Huaixin 黃懷信, Yi Zhou shu yuanliu kaobian 逸周書源流考 辨, pp. 81–86. In the revised edition of his translation of the Yi Zhou shu into modern Chinese, he has added a long preface that incorporates and updates material from this earlier work, and at one point he clearly notes the sudden shift to enumeration (which he takes as evidence of a commentarial insertion) in the middle of chapter 27, “Da kaiwu,” which is similar to the enumeration found here in this chapter. But the fact that he has not paid attention to rhymes throughout the military chapters of the text may be partly why he takes no notice of the more obvious intrusion here. See Huang, Yi Zhou shu jiaobu zhuyi (xiuding ben) 逸周書校補注譯 (修訂本), p. 42. 54.  The prominence of enumeration in the Yi Zhou shu must be examined from this perspective as well. Lists may have been some of the first things to have been recorded and transmitted from generation to generation in early Chinese courts. Over time, as oral transmission of the broader contexts of such lists faltered, or as the needs and dispositions of those using them changed, additional textual material might be generated and accrue or be disposed of over time. These possibilities will be explored in a future study of the Yi Zhou shu. 55.  As they appear in Schuessler, A Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese. For words not listed there, I follow the same conventions. 56.  The first graph is 方, the rhyme group is 平聲陽部, *-ang. One graph seems to be missing from the end of one line in this section. 57.  I read fu 輔 where the transmitted text has zhuan 轉, which does not rhyme and is less comprehensible. There is a relatively straightforward emendation that resolves the remaining exception to the rhyme scheme. The rhyme group is 上聲魚部, *-agx. 58. I settle on the ge rhyme group (歌部平聲) because it is the best solution to the next three rhymes. No solution I can find allows all four couplets to rhyme, and I have not been able to suggest an emendation to the rhyming word in this first couplet that produces a meaningful sentence. The final rhyme of the chapter is a word in the wei rhyme group, but ge and wei rhyme groups (here, 微部平聲) are known to interrhyme; see details in note 69 below. 59.  Ding Zongluo wants to emend the text to read 夫作武修戎兵, which eliminates any sense of cosmogony and gives simply “In any case of initiating warfare and cultivating troops and weapons . . .” (see his arguments in HJJZ, p. 132). Either reading works well enough, but in any case these opening



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lines are probably corrupt, since the strict rhythm of eight-character couplets is not adhered to at all. If we assume that the text was modified and additions were made after awareness of the poetic structure of the piece had faded, then purely as a scholarly exercise we can attempt to reconstruct what the original opening section might have looked like. The following is intended as no more than a suggestion, based on the minimum number of simple changes that can be made to restore the rhyme pattern and preserve the meaning of the lines; one graph is moved and four more are deleted: 畏嚴大武，曰維四方 (*pjang) 畏威乃寧，作武脩兵 (*pjang) Deleting 天 and 戎, assuming they were added later. 助義正違，以順天行 (*grang) Moving 以 from the front of the first line to the front of the second. 官候厥政，謂有所亡 (*mjang) Removing 五官, assuming it is a later addition. 城廓溝渠，高厚是量 (*ljang). 既踐戎野，備慎其殃 (*?jang). Such emendations do nothing substantive to change the meaning of these lines except remove the cosmological sense that Ding Zongluo already independently suspected was a later modification. 60.  Where we would expect four graphs, the last from the yang rhyme category, we have instead only 乃戰赦. The rhyme word is clearly missing, and the third graph makes little sense without the missing context. 61.  Following the lacunae at the end of the previous line, there may very well be a missing four-character line. Without it, the pattern is disrupted. As noted in the next note, the addition a few lines later of a long, unrhymed explanatory passage may have disrupted the content and rhyme pattern of these lines. 62.  This line breaks the rhythm of eight-character stanzas and does not rhyme. A few lines down, the poem is interrupted by the list of the ten arts and the ten reliances, and I suspect that the extra line here introducing the ten reliances was added at the same time the lists were. Whether the ten reliances should have been a part of the original poem is unclear; note that they are mentioned after the lists are given in a line that does conform to the poetic rules of the piece. 63.  With Sun Yirang, taking 敗 as an error for 取 (=聚); see HJJZ. 64.  Some editions read 枝 here, others 杖; the sense is probably 仗. 65.  I amend the text to read 日夜不暇. The graph jie 解 (*krigx) in the

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rhyming position must be an error, since it does not rhyme. Zhu reads it as xie 懈, to be idle, which fits the context well but does not rhyme either. Examination of early texts shows that there were several variations of a stock phrase similar to this line in common use, some employing xie 懈 and ­others employing xia 暇 (*gragh), which is in the correct rhyme group (魚 部) for the rhyme sequence found here (it is in the departing tone, but this seems to be acceptable in these chapters). See the use in the Mao Shi zhengyi 毛詩正義 (Mao 234): 朝夕不暇 (13–1.195b); the usage is paralleled in the Qin imperial inscription at Mount Langye; see Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang, p. 29; see also, e.g., the Lüshi chunqiu “Guyue” 5.5 (5.10a) and “Guidang” 24.6 (24.11a) for the expression 日夜不懈. Liu Shipei is the only commentator troubled by the fact that the word does not rhyme (HJJZ, p. 141). 66.  I follow the note in Lu Wenchao’s edition, taking 俄傳 as a graphic variant of 蛾傅 = 蟻附, “to swarm like ants,” a metaphor used in military texts (see Sunzi bingfa, 3 “Mougong”; Mozi, chapter 63, “Bei yifu”). 67.  I follow Sun Yirang here in reading quan 權 as guan 灌 (HJJZ, p. 144). The final graph presumably ought to begin a new rhyme, but this word (probably read xi or qi 溪 = 谿) is in the zhi 支 rhyme group, while the rest of the words in rhyming position in the final lines of the poem are probably either from the ge 歌 or wei 微 rhyme groups, which can interrhyme; see note 69. 68.  The transmitted text now reads 其謀乃難, but the final word needs to rhyme with something else in this final section of the chapter. I follow Lu Wenchao, who understands nan 難 (*nan, level tone in yuan rhyme group 平聲元部) as a mistake for li 離, which usually means “to disperse, separate” (*ljar, level tone ge rhyme group 平聲歌部), which rhymes with the following line. I further suggest reading li 離 in its sense of li 罹, “to become ensnared, entangled, in trouble.” Alternatively, Ding Zonglu proposes reading nan 難 as ni 臡, “meat sauce” (level tone, zhi rhyme group 平聲脂部), which rhymes with the final character of the chapter, after the next couplet. He seems to think that the line then makes clear sense, by means of a metaphor whereby meat sauce refers to complete destruction. 69.  畏嚴大武，曰：維四方，畏威乃寧。天作武，脩戎兵，以助義正 違順天行，五官官候厥政，謂有所亡，城廓溝渠，高厚是量，既踐戎野， 備慎其殃，敬其嚴君，乃戰赦。十藝必明，加之以十因，靡敵不荒，陳若 雲布，侵若風行，輕車翼衛，在戎二方，我師之窮，靡人不剛。十藝：一 大援，二明從，三餘子，四長興，五伐人，六刑餘，七三疑，八閒書，九 用少，十興怨。十因：一樹仁，二勝欲，三賓客，四通旅，五親戚，六 無告，七同事，八程巧，九□能，十利事。藝因代用，是謂強輔，應天順



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時，時有寒暑，風雨飢疾，民乃不處，移散不敗，農乃商賈，委以淫樂， 賂以美女，主人若杖，□至城下，高堙臨內，日夜不解，方陳並功，云何 能禦，雖易必敬，是謂明武。城高難平，湮之以土，開以走路，俄傅器 櫓，因風行火，障水水下，惠用元元，不侮其寡，旁隧外權，隳城湮溪， 老弱單處，其謀乃難，既克和服，使眾咸宜，竟其金革，是謂大夷。HJJZ, pp. 131–145. The final word is level tone, wei rhyme group 平聲微部. With the exception of the rhyming word in the preceding couplet, which we found reason to emend, each word in rhyming position in these final four lines of the chapter makes good sense. Baxter has shown that there is a certain amount of interrhyming seen between the wei and ge rhyme groups; see Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, pp. 417–418, 452–454. While we do not find the word 夷 itself rhyming with ge-group words in the Shijing, we do see other wei-group words with the same vowel and coda (final consonant in this case) rhyming with ge-group words, including yi 宜. See, e.g., the last four rhymes of Mao 303, “Xuanniao,” “Dark Bird”: 來假祁祁 (*-әd) 景員維河 (*-ar) 殷受命咸宜 (*-ar) 百祿是何 (*-ar). Baxter reconstructs the coda of both these rhyme groups as *-j, a clear improvement over Li’s system, which obscures the apparent similarity between them. We know that under normal circumstances, yi 夷 would rhyme with qi 祁, so there is no problem assuming that in the final lines of Yi Zhou shu chapter 9, yi 夷 would rhyme with yi 宜. It would be helpful to know if this sort of interrhyming between wei- and ge-group words represented a regional feature, but we do not have sufficient evidence to discern this. It is likely that it does represent a change over time (the two possibilities are not exclusive): certainly this chapter of the Yi Zhou shu is a Warring States document, and the poem “Xuanniao” is likely to be not a genuine ancient Shang hymn but an Eastern Zhou invention of the Song ruling house, projected back to the time of the Shang mythical founding. This leaves only the first word in rhyming position in these last four couplets unexplained. I have been unable to find any phonetic or orthographic solutions to the problem so far. I am indebted to both Zev Handel and Bill Baxter for looking at some of the rhymes in these chapters, and particularly for making suggestions concerning these final lines of chapter 9. 70.  This is the word yong 勇 in the dong rhyme group 東部. 71.  The first word in rhyming position is one of these two exceptions; it is in the 之部. Perhaps the opening line is not intended to rhyme. The other exception comes in stanza 5, the hou rhyme group, 侯部. 72.  魚部上聲. 73.  See, for example, the various comments in HJJZ, pp. 148, 152. 74.  大開 and 小開.

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Notes to Pages 131–133

75.  大開武 and 小開武. The reversal of the order is suggested by the citation in the Shi lu and the arguments of Sun Yirang (see HJJZ, p. 272). “Inception” in these and other chapter titles of the Yi Zhou shu refers to the “opening up” of plans or policies, that is, the initial creation and presentation of a model of the dynasty’s approach to government. 76. See HJJZ, p. 225. Unfortunately, the formula does not work for chapters 22 and 23, but commentators may be correct in suggesting that chapter 22 is now badly damaged and is missing a substantial number of graphs. 77.  Naming conventions also help us discern some of the broader intellectual and structural ties among these and other chapters of the work. See McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 78.  The first word in what ought to be rhyming position has the right final consonant, but the vowel does not rhyme. The phrase “accord with Heaven’s seasons” is a stock expression, and there is no obvious way to emend the line to restore the rhyme. 79.  There is no obvious emendation to the text, either here or in the next departure from the rhyme scheme, that preserves the meaning of the text. We cannot rule out the possibility that the text is corrupt here, since the usage of shiwei 寔為 in the same line is awkward; see the discussion of this grammatical pattern in chapter 5 below. 80. Emending zhiye faxing 枝葉伐興 to read zhiye daiju 枝葉代舉, with Lu Wenchao, to match the rhyme scheme of the text. The sense is “if you make the five teachings the most fundamental concern, then all other matters can be dealt with one after another, as they emerge.” The five teachings are not made explicit. 81.  Taking the third graph as the rhyme; there is a graph missing from the line, but it is not likely to be the final word, as the transmitted text now indicates, as that is a perfect match with the other rhyming words. 82.  Liu Shipei suggests reversing the order of these lines so that they read “Do not take property or accept bribes; do not invade private residences. Secure main routes and attack along alleyways; in attacking employ crossbows and bows” (HJJZ, p. 151); this reorganization preserves the rhymes. 83.  The line ends with qi 旗, *gjəg, which is in the zhi rhyme category. Several commentators want to emend the graph to some more technical term designating much more specific kinds of war pennants, but none seems to recognize the need for the rhyme to be in the yu rhyme category, so none of the suggestions is convincing. In the list of specialized war pennant terms, however, there is one they have neglected that fits the constraints



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of the piece very well: yu 旟 *rag (yu rhyme category). It is often translated “falcon pennant”: tradition holds that it was decorated with birds. 84.  The rhyme is irregular, but there is no obvious emendation available. 85.  凡攻之道，必得地勢，以順天時，觀之以今，稽之以古，攻其逆 政，毀其地阻，立之五教，以惠其下，矜寡無告，寔為之主，五教允中， 枝葉代興，國為偽巧，後宮飾女，荒田逐獸，田獵之所，游觀崇臺，泉 池在下，淫樂無既，百姓辛苦，上有困令，乃有極□，上困下騰，戎遷其 野，敦行王法，濟用金鼓，降以列陳，無悗怒□，按道攻巷，無襲門戶， 無受貨賂，攻用弓弩，上下禱祀，靡神不下，其行衝梯，振以長旗，懷戚 思終，左右憤勇，無食六畜，無聚子女，群振若雷，造于城下，鼓行參 pp. 呼，以正什伍，上有軒冕，斧鉞在下，勝國若化，故曰明武。HJJZ, 146–153. 86.  We cannot be sure when the titles of these chapters first appeared. In any case, the chapter titles here, as in many places within the Yi Zhou shu, reflect an understanding of many of the intellectual ties among chapters. Chapter 5:  Dating and Language 1.  孔子所論百篇之餘也。以兩漢諸人之所纂記，推之則非始出於汲冡 也，明矣。惜乎後世不復貴重，文字日就舛訛。予始得本於李㢲巖家，脫 誤為甚。繼得陳正卿本，用相參校修補頗多，其間數篇尚有不可句讀，脫 文衍字亦有不容强解者。 Jingyi kao, 75.415b. These are part of Ding Fu’s 丁 黼 comments on the text. 2. It is not the only possibility, however, and the preface may not in every case represent the ideas and understandings of the text’s compilers. The relationship between the preface and the chronology of the text is examined in McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 3. See, e.g., chapter 32, translated and studied in detail in McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 4. The Han shu bibliographic treatise lists eleven entries under the genre shu, plus one entry Ban Gu adds that was not in Liu Xiang’s original list; several of the traditions are clearly related (Ban himself considers them to amount to only nine separate traditions). Hanshu 30.1705–1706. 5.  See Yang Kuan 楊寬, “Lun Yi Zhou shu” 論逸周書 appendix to his Xi Zhou shi 西周史, pp. 857–870. 6.  孟子曰：盡信書，則不如無書。於武成，取二三策而已矣。仁人無 敵於天下。以至仁伐至不仁，而何其血之流杵也？Mengzi chapter 7b, “Jin­ xin xia,” 14.2a. 7.  See chapter 3, note 21, for complete citations to studies by Shaughnessy, Gu, and others; the conclusions discussed in the following paragraph

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are based on Shaughnessy’s arguments, which took Gu’s 1964 study as a point of departure and drew on new inscriptional materials. 8.  Hanshu 22b.1015–1016; the chapter by this name now extant in the Shang shu has long been treated as a later forgery. 9.  Notice that in Mencius’ own day, such material was apparently easy to come by. The social and intellectual context that brought about the constriction of materials deemed acceptable as part of the documents genre did not take shape until sometime during the Han. 10.  See, for example, Zhou Baohong 周寶宏, Yi Zhou shu kaoshi 逸周書 考釋. It must be noted that scholars have by and large avoided the thorny issue of what precisely a Western Zhou date means—our tools for analyzing linguistic development in early Chinese sources are not currently precise enough to allow us to distinguish between early (eleventh and tenth centuries BCE) and late (late ninth and early eighth centuries BCE) Western Zhou materials. While the prevailing tendency of mainland scholars who have studied these texts is to assume that evidence of Western Zhou provenance confirms, for these chapters, the traditional dating as given in the preface to the work, there is no compelling historical or linguistic basis for such an assumption. Shaugnessy, Gu, and others argue that the “Shifu” chapter contains precise, verifiable information concerning the details and chronology of the events surrounding the conquest of Shang, information that must have been recorded contemporaneously with the events described. Furthermore, certain linguistic features of the text can be fully understood only with recourse to Shang oracle bone inscriptions. This sort of evidence allows us to pinpoint the dating of this chapter with considerable accuracy, but the “Shifu” is an anomaly in this respect. So far, there is no indication that the other texts in this “Western Zhou” group are susceptible to such accurate dating. 11.  There are of course exceptions, e.g., Huang P’ei-jung 黃沛榮, Zhou shu “Zhouyue” pian zhucheng de shidai ji youguan sanzheng wenti de yanjiu 周書 周月篇著成的時代及有關三正問題的研究; my article on chapter 32, “The Body as Metaphor.” Zhou Yuxiu, Yi Zhou shu de yuyan tedian ji qi wenxianxue jiazhi 逸周書的語言特點及其文獻學價值, is the most critically informed and comprehensive study so far; I differ from her in the dating of some of the military chapters translated above, where she tends to take problems in rhyme never as signs of a defective text but always as signs of changes in the sound system of Old Chinese. This means that when a long, rhymed text such as chapter 9 or 10 exhibits one or two problems in the rhyme scheme, she is inclined to push the date of authorship of the entire chapter very late, sometimes into the Eastern Han, to a time when she might find that



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the erroneous graph in rhyming position has in some instances begun to rhyme (or become closer to rhyming) with the rhyme words around it. I have found no other compelling reason to date these chapters so late (in fact the notion strikes me as highly unlikely) and prefer to look for obvious ways the text may have become corrupt. Luo Jiaxiang, Yi Zhou shu yanjiu, is more influenced by traditional notions of authorship when assigning dates to chapters of the Yi Zhou shu and tends generally to arrive at earlier dates for most chapters. 12.  One such questionable premise holds that since some chapters of the text are quoted in the Zuo zhuan, in settings going back to the sixth century BCE, those chapters at least must date to the Spring and Autumn period or earlier. This premise is based on the belief that the speeches and narratives recorded in the Zuo zhuan are accurate records of words and actions, free from anachronism or other later editorial prerogative. We cannot say with certainty that this premise is wrong, but neither can we take a citation or two from the Zuo zhuan as all the proof we need to establish the date of the Yi Zhou shu. See Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought, on the possibility that we can discern change in language and intellectual position across the chronological narrative of the Zuo zhuan (his approach is promising, but the Zuo zhuan is an exceptionally complex text, and much more work needs to be done to assess the various issues involved in unraveling the nature of its composition). Based on a preliminary inquiry into certain grammatical features found in the text, I will argue that some chapters of the Yi Zhou shu may date from the Spring and Autumn period. 13.  There is still no widespread consensus concerning the precise dates of the early military texts, but the Sunzi bingfa and the Sima fa may have originated in the fifth century BCE; see Li Ling, Sima fa yizhu 司馬法譯注, and Li Ling, Sunzi bingfa yizhu 孫子兵法譯注. 14.  To a certain extent, new manuscript finds hold out much promise in this endeavor, and preliminary research suggests that the transmitted tradition was faithful to many grammatical and orthographic conventions that reflect the language of a particular time (keep in mind that the Cili manuscript versions of chapter 8 of the Yi Zhou shu, “Dawu,” match the transmitted text extraordinarily well). We might think of this as the “micro scale.” When viewed from the perspective of the organization and scope of textual materials (the “macro scale”), discovered manuscripts have complicated our understanding of early practices. As noted earlier, the Yinqueshan manuscripts included a body of material related to the Sunzi bingfa much larger than anything we could have imagined. On the other hand, we also often find that smaller textual units were circulating in the War-

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ring States period; individual “chapters” (that is, texts we now recognize as chapters) seem to have been the most common kind of text. Finally, when considering how the early transmission of texts might have changed their content, grammar and language, or structure and organization, there is a further complication: if material now known to us in, for example, the Zuo zhuan or some chapters of the Yi Zhou shu in fact originated in the Spring and Autumn period, this material itself may already have been altered by transmission through the hands of Warring States literati, long before scholars in the Han had their chance to reshape or otherwise influence the way these texts were handed down. 15.  The Qin imperial stele texts can be compared fruitfully with the military chapters of the Yi Zhou shu in several ways; we will return to them below. 16.  Xunzi seems to be the only Warring States author to use the word (in this structure) outside of citations from poetry. It appears in the Shuo yuan, but may be a citation from a lost ode there. It also occurs twice in the Qin stele inscription on Mount Tai: see Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-Huang, pp. 23, 47; only the former occurrence perfectly parallels the standard formula employing a double negative. 17.  The graph is 靡; the line in chapter 7 is 上下和協，靡敵不下. 18.  靡敵不荒; 靡人不剛 19.  靡神不下 20.  It seems likely that the quotation marks ought to extend to the end of the chapter and that the entire piece is intended to be a speech by King Wu. Since I intend to draw attention to other stylistic and structural features of the chapter, I limit the use of quotation marks to this opening section of the text, the only one that is itself obviously written to be reflective of speech. 21.  The lines that make up the first three descriptions of the “five weapons” are all problematic and appear to be, to one degree or another, corrupt. In this first rhymed line, the opening four graphs are obscure. First of all, I follow Lu Wenchao and the vast majority of textual critics and commentators in preferring the variant 土觀幸時 over 王觀幸時; the former is well attested (HJJZ, p. 267). More problematic is how to understand the second half of the line. Sun Yirang argues that xin 幸 is a graphic error for wei 韋, which itself stands for 違, “to oppose.” The alternative is to understand 幸時 as meaning something like “to spend one’s time indulging in pleasure” (see HJJZ, p. 267). Sun’s reading is the more felicitous, but it is entirely speculative. In any case, since the rhymes have clearly not been disturbed, at least we can be confident that the final graph is correct. Note



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that it is possible to read 匱, “deficient, exhausted,” as 潰, “to be destroyed”; the two were homophonous and are clearly cognates. 22.  Bi 蔽, “to conceal,” is sure to be erroneous since the word in this position ought to rhyme with 貸 *dәgh. Unfortunately, I find no easy orthographic variations by which to arrive at a word that would rhyme; the commentarial tradition is silent on the matter, since the rhymes in this chapter have gone unnoticed by all major scholars who worked on the text (and the situation is not improved by looking at the likely orthographic variants of dai 貸 to see if that rhyme is erroneous). We are forced to try to make sense out of the corrupt text as it stands, in hopes that the corruption might at least have its own logic. The line is ambiguous enough to allow for many approaches, but I break with the general trend among commentators, who tend to take 讎 in 獄讎 in the sense of “enemy,” and instead suggest understanding it in its sense of “pressed together side by side.” It is then possible to assume a parallel construction in the remaining phrase, 刑蔽, by reading the second graph as standing in for 弊, “abusive.” I understand the second line of the rhymed pair to mean that corrupt government officials were using resources intended for relief to make loans, presumably at usurious interest rates. 23.  The rhyme here is imperfect, but the line is not likely to be corrupt; the vowels rhyme and the finals are homorganic (note that ju 居 in the Shi jing rhymes with both *-ag(h) and *-ak; see Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Appendix C, “The Rhyme Words of the Shijing,” p. 769). Furthermore, the rhyming word describes the falling of leaves, playing on the metaphor used elsewhere in the Yi Zhou shu (see chapter 10, HJJZ, p. 148) of “branches and leaves,” referring to allies. 24. Notice that the six rhymed couplets are divided into two broad groups: the first three rhymes each differ only slightly from one another; they employ the same vowel and homorganic final consonants. The next three rhymes adhere to the same pattern. 25.  The line reads 靡適無□, but the rhyme scheme of these final lines and the fact that several passages of the closing lines of this chapter are closely mirrored by lines from the core military chapters allow us to be confident in amending the second graph to 敵 and supplying the missing 下 to close the line and complete the rhyme: 靡敵無下. All other examples of this construction in the Yi Zhou shu use bu 不 where this chapter has wu 無. 26.  柔武: 維王元祀一月既生魄，王召周公旦曰：嗚呼！維在文考之緒 功，維周禁五戎，五戎不禁，厥民乃淫。一曰：土觀幸時，政匱不疑。二 曰：獄讎刑蔽，姦吏濟貸。三曰：聲樂□□，飾女滅德。四曰：維勢是輔， 維禱是怙。五曰：盤游安居，枝葉維落。五者不距，生戎旅，故必以德為

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本，以義為術，以信為動，以成為心，以決為計，以節為勝，務在審時， 紀綱為序，和均道里，以匡辛苦。見寇□戚，靡適無□，勝國若化，不動金 鼓，善戰不鬥，故曰柔武。四方無拂，奄有天下。HJJZ, pp. 266–271. 27.  Wei 維, jue 厥, and zai 在. 28.  維勢是輔，維禱是怙. 29.  故. 30.  That is, while section two is also characterized by tetragraphic passages, there is no grammatical parallelism governing all those passages. Section three, however, employs only one grammatical pattern: “take X as Y.” 31.  陽部平聲. 32.  We might represent the first general rhyme *-әG, where the final -G stands for any of a number of homorganic consonants; the three pairs, insofar as we can ascertain from the condition of the text, are *-әg, *-әgh, and *-әk. The second general rhyme is *-aG; the three rhymes are *-agx, *-ag/k, and *-agx again. 33.  勝國若化; there is also a close parallel late in chapter 6, 民服如化 “the people submit as if transformed.” 34.  The introductory lines may themselves be authentic as well. Chapter 35, “Wuchuang,” makes an interesting comparison to this chapter. Liu Qiyu considers it a military chapter as well, but it is clearly not organically related to the core military chapters. Warfare forms an important theme of this chapter because it celebrates the conquest of the Shang, not because of any concern with the details of battle, strategy, or the relationship between politics and warfare in general. The chapter is also brief and opens with two pairs of rhymed tetragraphic lines. It may belong to one of the earlier strata of the text, but there is little evidence to help us date it precisely one way or the other. Whatever its date, it stands in contrast to those chapters that show clear signs of later editing and textual manipulation, and it appears to us pristine. The fact that rhyme is only briefly employed in this chapter is also more typical of the chronological and enumerative chapters of the text than the military chapters, some of which we have seen make much more consciously crafted use of rhyme over long portions of text. 35.  The three rhymed chapters probably share the closest relationship. Chapter 6, we have just noted, employs ru hua 如化 where elsewhere in this group and in chapter 26 we have ruo hua 若化, “as if transformed”; this sort of distinction was considered by Karlgren to indicate a difference in dialect. I hesitate to rely on a single occurrence of an incompletely understood feature such as this to make broad generalizations about the date or provenance of a text (the distinction, if it is real, may just as well represent one of time and not geography). Finally, as argued above, chapter 8 is likely to



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be a textual relic of a different practical tradition than the other chapters. My concern when considering them as a related unit is with understanding how they came to be a part of the Yi Zhou shu, grouped together and portrayed there as a coherent unit. Beyond this, there is considerable evidence that they were generated under much the same conditions and represent a fairly coherent perspective on warfare. 36.  Of course, all languages are always in a state of transition, but we understand the language of the Western Zhou and the Warring States periods each better than the language of the intervening period, making the transition of the Spring and Autumn period more apparent to us. 37.  實; Pulleyblank, “Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” p. 42. 38.  寔; see Pulleyblank, “Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” pp. 37–67; and Pulleyblank, “The Morphology of Demonstrative Pronouns in Classical Chinese,” pp. 1–25; because the two words were not homophonous, Pulleyblank cannot simply assert that these are two different graphic forms for the same word. He finds some evidence to suggest that the difference is one of dialect (see Pulleyblank, “Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” p. 61). 39.  This is the commonly used 是. 40.  維; the significance of this construction has not been widely grasped by those trying to date the composition of the Zuo zhuan and Guo yu. Its frequent use in the Zuo zhuan does not mean that entire text was written in the fifth or sixth century BCE, but it certainly is important in understanding the origins of the material in the text, which are likely to be complex. 41.  汝慎和稱五權，維中是以，以長小子于位，實維永寧。HJJZ, p. 530. 42.  王訪于周公曰：嗚呼！朕聞維時兆(正)厥工，非不顯，朕實不 明。HJJZ, p. 600; I tentatively follow Wang Niansun in supplying the verb 正, “to correct,” based on Kong’s commentary to the line (兆﹐始。工﹐ 官。言政治維是始正其官), and follow his commentary on the overall meaning of the passage as well (see HJJZ, pp. 600–601). In fact, it is not necessary to take 工 as 官; we might just as easily take it to mean “work” or “accomplishments” (功). The line is not unreadable as it stands and can be understood to mean “it is now that we must initiate their work.” In any case, what is important for us is the rhetorical force of the passage: the young King Cheng has “heard” about the need to implement some accepted administrative procedure, but he is unclear about its details. 43.  On chapter 32, “Wushun,” see McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 44.  Here the graphs are 寔為. 45. Pulleyblank, “Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” pp. 46,

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Notes to Pages 152–154

51–52. 實維 is the older construction, shiwei a 實為 replaces it; occasionally we find shi awei a 是為. 46.  矜寡無告﹐ 寔為之主. 47.  The pair is 矜寡. The alternative, reflected in the translation, is to understand the first word verbally, “Show pity to those resourceless ones and those with no one to turn to.” This spoils the parallelism, resulting in an infelicitous phrase, but it may help solve the grammatical problem the pronoun 寔 poses; see below. 48.  Thus treating 寔 as 是. Chen’s explanation reads 謂彼陷溺其民而我 往救之﹐則我為彼民之主矣. HJJZ, p. 147. 49.  此承上惠下言之，無告之窮民，尤仁政所當先者也. HJJZ, pp. 147– 148. 50. Pulleyblank, “Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” p. 47. There is one last, contrived way to read these lines and take shi 寔 here as the subject. If we read the first word, jin 矜, as a verb, then the first four characters are a full sentence: “Show pity to those resourceless ones and those with no one to turn to” (as suggested in note 47 above). This would allow us to take the following shi 寔 to stand for this action as the subject of the next sentence: “This constitutes ruling them.” We would of course expect something like 寔為主之, not 寔為之主, as we have, but the rhyme pattern requires that the line end on zhu 主, so the object is then preposed. I do not think this reading is plausible; spoiling the parallelism of the first four lines seems uncalled for, and the final construction, with both subject resumed by the pronoun shi 寔 for emphasis and object preposed by zhi 之 to preserve the rhyme scheme, seems far too obfuscating. 51.  厥/其. 52.  夷厥險阻，以毀其(服=)備. HJJZ, p. 101. 53.  This is strongly supported by the occurrence in one of the Qin stele inscriptions, which are themselves replete with archaic passages and formulaic stock phrases, of the line 夷去險阻, where the archaic grammatical particle has been replaced. See Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-Huang, p. 43. 54.  Of course we cannot be certain of every example. Some grammatical constructions strike us as genuinely archaic, e.g., the line 于時允武 in chapter 7 (HJJZ, p. 109); Pulleyblank (“Studies in Early Chinese Grammar, Part I,” p. 57) has shown that as an object, the pronoun shi 時 is never preceded by yu 於, only by yu 于. We also find patterns of preposing objects for emphasis that conform to both preclassical and classical rules. In chapter 6, we find the lines: 賢者輔之，亂者取之，作者勸之，怠者沮之，恐者懼 之，欲者趣之 “As for the worthy, assist them; as for the chaotic, grasp them.



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As for those who wish to rise up, encourage them; as for those who are corrupt, destroy them. As for those who are apprehensive, make them fearful; as for those who harbor desires, indulge them” (HJJZ, p. 93). Here, as is most common in the classical language of the Warring States period, the object can be preposed for emphasis, but it is then retained in its normal syntactical position when resumed by the pronoun zhi 之, following the transitive verb. Yet in chapter 9, we find the preclassical pattern: 高厚是量 “Their height and thickness, these we measure” (HJJZ, p. 133): here the pronoun that resumes the preposed objects is itself moved ahead of the verb for further emphasis. In this latter case, we cannot be certain that the phrase is itself archaic or if the constraints of the rhyme pattern required exposing the object so that the verb could be placed into the rhyming position. 55.  McNeal, “The Body as Metaphor.” 56.  Sivin,“State, Cosmos, and Body,” pp. 5–37. 57.  The final military chapter in the Yi Zhou shu makes an interesting comparison itself. It seems likely that it is not as old as chapters 6 through 10, but probably predates chapter 32. It is translated and discussed in the appendix below. 58.  Examples are too numerous to cite exhaustively. See, for example, Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-Huang, pp. 31, 39, and 41. 59.  Tze-ki Hon has argued that during the opening generations of the Northern Song, in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries CE, the Song emperors and administrators consciously designed the Song state and its infrastructure to promote civil governance and civil values over military rule, which had emerged in the late Tang and the intervening Five Dynasties period as the dominant political and cultural orientation. He also notes how this early Song emphasis on civil culture helped set the stage for the emergence of several enduring social and cultural institutions, such as “Neo-Confucianism” and the new local gentry, that themselves reinforced the dominance of civil over martial values and practices. See “Military Governance versus Civil Governance,” pp. 85–105. Appendix 1.  The text is defective at the point “a girl being born (x) is complete,” but all commentators from the third century on understand this to be a reference to numerology, not the actual number of people in a house; I follow Lu Wenchao and others here in supplying it. The male is yang, oddnumbered, represented by three. The female is yin, even-numbered, represented by two (presumed to be the missing graph). Together, they make

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five, and from their union people are born. That the numerology that governs this passage implies the male/strong vs. female/weak configuration of yin and yang (and the productive power of their union) is testimony to the chapter’s third-century BCE date. 2.  天道尚左，日月西移。地道尚右，水道東流。人道尚中，耳目役 心。心有四佐，不和曰廢。地有五行，不通曰惡。天有四時，不時曰凶。 天道曰祥，地道曰義，人道曰禮。知祥則壽，知義則立，知禮則行。禮義 順祥曰吉，吉禮左還，順天以利本，武禮右旋，順地以利兵，將居中軍， 順人以利陳。人有中曰參，無中曰兩，兩爭曰弱，參和曰強。男生而成 三，女生而成兩，五以成室，室成以生民，民生以度。左右手各握五，左 右足各履五，曰四枝，元首曰末。五五二十五曰元卒，一卒居前曰開，一 卒居後曰敦，左右一卒曰閭，四卒成衛曰伯，三伯一長曰佐，三佐一長曰 右，三右一長曰正，三正一長曰卿，三卿一長曰辟。辟必明，卿必仁，正 必智，右必肅，佐必和，伯必勤，卒必力。辟不明無以慮官，卿不仁無以 集眾，伯不勤無以行令，卒不力無以承訓。均卒力，貌而無比，比則不 順；均伯勤，勞而無攜，攜則不和；均佐和，敬而無留，留則無成；均右 肅，恭而無羞，羞則不興。辟必文，聖如度。元忠尚讓，親均惠下，集 固 介德。危言不干德曰正，正及神人曰極，世世 能極曰帝。Chapter 32, 武 順, HJJZ, pp. 326–338. 3.  The placement of the chapter suggests that the compilers of the final chronological narrative intended to date its composition to the early years of King Wu’s reign. The preface links this and the next chapter, “Wumu,” in a single entry, but the two chapters are considerably different in style and content; “Wumu” is a typical chronological chapter marked by generous use of enumeration. This entry in the preface is part of a group of entries covering a total of six chapters all presented as pieces authored on the eve of the conquest of the Shang (HJJZ, pp. 1205–1207). 4.  The chapter is preceded by chapters 66 and 67, “Yinzhu” (Invocation of the Yin [Shang]) and “Zhouzhu” (Invocation of the Zhou), which unquestionably date to the latest stratum of the text and which themselves imply disregard for the chronology. 5.  There are a couple of grammatically suspect constructions, but these are far more likely to have been introduced as the text became corrupt than reflect the language of the third century CE. 6.  The first of the three expressions was probably conventional and was used here to introduce the second, an obvious play on the first, which now shifts the topic to the military. The expression chejia 車甲, “chariots and armor,” was an idiom standing for the military, probably starting no earlier than the fourth or third century BCE. 7.  This specialized sense of quan as strategic advantage is an innovation



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of military treatises. There is a passage in the Taigong liutao that expresses the same sentiment: 用兵之害，猶豫最大；三軍之災，莫過 狐疑 “Of things harmful in the employment of troops, indecision is the greatest; of disasters in the three armies, none exceeds doubt” (Taigong liutao 3.26 “Longtao: Junshi,” 3.21b). I follow Zhu Youzeng and others in reading li 離 as equivalent to li 罹, “to suffer, to become entangled in” (HJJZ, p. 1148). 8.  The passage as it stands is difficult to follow, in part because of the many lacunae in this section of the text and because it may be otherwise damaged as well. I follow Lu Wenchao, who emends the text from 幾而弗克 to 幾而弗免 based on several editions at his disposal that read 免 instead of 克; I then follow Sun Yirang in taking 免 as 勉. His emendations to the rest of the line render the most sense out of the obscure passage, and I have followed each of them: 則(殆=)怠而弛 for 則始而施 (HJJZ, p. 1149). 9.  All commentators struggle with these lines, perhaps in part because they find it hard to accept that the text advocates destroying a state that cannot be incorporated into one’s own administration (see HJJZ, pp. 1153–1154). 10. Taking 而時無不成 as 而事無不成, following Zhu Youzeng (HJJZ, p. 1154). 11.  I follow Tang Dapei in supplying 謀 where a graph is missing, based on the following line and the parallel in chapter 60, “Zhai gong”: 汝無以小 謀敗大作 “you must not destroy great accomplishments with petty schemes” (HJJZ, p. 1000). 12.  The line makes no sense, and none of the traditional commentators proposes any useful emendations or readings to improve the situation. My translation is virtually a word-for-word rendering, but I suspect the text is corrupt here. 13.  These four lines are difficult. I follow Ding Zongluo and Zhu You­ zeng in supplying 鄰 where we have a missing graph in 失□家之交, based on the occurrence of 鄰家 in the very next line and in a line preceding this passage; I follow Chen Fengheng in taking 本權 as an error for 大權 (HJJZ, p. 1159). I am not sufficiently confident in either choice, but I find no better solutions. The second and third lines in the passage seem to contradict one another. Both must employ the notion of “straight” to denote upright, direct, honest, etc., but then the third line seems to contradict both what immediately precedes it and what immediately follows it. The parallel structure of the third and fourth lines in the passage means that we cannot alter the wording of line three to arrive at a more felicitous reading without destroying the clearly felicitous parallelism. 14.  I take the words wuwei 無為 as an interpolation from the preced-

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Notes to Pages 167–168

ing lines, where it appears once and may have originally appeared repeatedly (see HJJZ, p. 1162), leaving 以天命是定亡矣, literally, “taking Heaven’s command, this, as deciding who will perish.” 15.  This line suggests that this long passage, which I have treated as a single paragraph, has been fundamentally about a code of behavior applying to states of different sizes and strengths. It is tempting to treat many of the passages as explanations of the various categories that open the section, e.g., the state has a root, a trunk, etc., and several of the commentators do just this, but the text is itself not nearly clear enough on this point to allow us to be sure how to understand the relationships among different lines. 16. Commentators vary on how to fill in the missing graph, but the range of choices amounts to roughly the same meaning in the end. My translation follows Tang Dapei in supplying 立. 17.  There may be one or two missing occurrences of 亡 after any of these lines, depending on how one wants to break up the passage. The two lines juxtaposing the civil and martial are clearly a pair, so I treat the next two lines as a separate pair also. 18.  幣帛之閒，有巧言令色，事不成。車甲之閒，有巧言令色，事不 捷。克□事而有武色，必失其德。臨權而疑，必離其災。□□不捷，智不可 □。□於不足，并於不幾，則始而施，幾而弗克無功。國有三守，卑辭重幣 以服之，弱國之守也。脩備以待戰，敵國之守也。循山川之險而固之，僻 國之守也。伐服不祥，伐戰危，伐險難，故伐善者，不伐三守。伐國有六 時、五動、四順，閒其疏，薄其疑，推其危，扶其弱，乘其衰，暴其約， 此謂六時。扶之而不讓，振之而不動，數之而不服，暴之而不革，威之而 不恐，未可伐也，此謂五動。立之害，毀之利，克之易，并之能，以時伐 之，此謂四順。立之不害，毀之不利，唯克之易，并之不能，可伐也。立 之害，毀之未利，克之難，并之不能，可動也。靜以待眾，力不與爭，權 弗果據，德不肆國，若是而可毀也。地荒而不振，德衰而失與，無苦而危 矣。求之以其道，□□無不得，為之以其事，而時無不成，有利備，無患 事。時至而不迎，大祿乃遷，延之不道，行事乃困，不作小□動大殃。謀 有不足者三，仁廢則文謀不足，勇廢則武謀不足，備廢則事謀不足。國 有本，有幹，有權，有倫質，有樞體。土地，本也，人民，幹也，敵國 侔交，權也，政教順成，倫質也，君臣和□，樞體也。土地未削，人民未 散，國權未傾，倫質未移，雖有昏亂之君，國未亡也。國有幾失，居之不 可阻體之小也。不畏鄰家，難復飾也。封疆侵淩，難復振也。服國從失， 難復扶也。大國之無養，小國之畏事，不可以本權失□家之交，不可以枉 繩失鄰家之交，不據直以約，不虧體以陰，不可虞而奪也，不可策而服 也，不可親而侵也，不可摩而測也，不可求而循也。施度於體不慮費，事 利於國不計勞，失德喪服於鄰家，則不顧難矣。交體侵淩，則不顧權矣。 封疆不時得其所，無為養民矣。合同不得其位，無畏患矣。百姓屈急，無



Note to Page 168

229

藏畜矣。擠社稷，失宗廟，離墳墓，困鬼神，殘宗族，無為愛死矣。卑辭 而不聽，□財而無枝，計戰而不足，近告而無顧，告過而不悔，請服而不 得，然後絕好于閉門，循險近，說外援，以天命無為，是定亡矣。凡有事 君民守社稷宗廟而先衰亡者，皆失禮也。大事不法弗可作，法而不時弗 可行，時而失禮弗可長，得禮而無備弗可成。舉物不備而欲□大功於天下 者，未之有也。勢不 求周流，舉而不幾其成，亡。薄其事而求厚其功， 亡。內無文道，外無武迹，往不復來者，有悔而求合者，亡。不難不費而 致大功，古今未有。據名而不辱，應行而不困，唯禮。得之而無逆，失之 而無咎，唯敬。成事而不難，序功而不費，唯時。勞而有成，費而不亡， 唯當。施而不拂，成而有權，久之而能□，唯義。不知所取之量，不知所 施之度，不知動靜之時，不知吉凶之事，不知困達之謀，疑此五者，未可 以動大事。恃名不久，恃功不立，虛願不至，妄為不祥。大上敬而服，其 次欲而得，其次奪而得，其次爭而克，其下動而上資其力。凡建國君民， 內事文而和，外事武而義，其形慎而殺，其政直而公，本之以禮，動之以 時，正之以度，師之以法，成之以仁，此之謂也。HJJZ, pp. 1147–1173.

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Index

Bamboo Annals/Zhushu jinian, 77, 181n 6, 191n 7 Banners/flags, 47, 100, 106, 114, 133, 203n 18, 216n 83 Battle calculations. See Miaosuan/temple calculations Beitang shuchao, 90, 111, 114, 121, 124, 197n 39, 198n 40, 198n 43, 204n 27, 205n 28, 207n 29, 211n 48 Cessation of war/war to end war, 13, 45–50, 56, 183n 12 Chronology: in Yi Zhou shu, 84–85, 97, 122, 136, 137, 144, 148, 150, 161, 163–164, 217n 2, 219n 12, 222n 34, 226nn 3–4 Chuxue ji, 90, 198n 40 Cili manuscripts, 81, 111, 149, 195n 22, 204nn 26–27, 205n 28, 211n 47, 219n 14 Confucius: and editing of Documents, 73, 76–78, 92–95, 136–137; and moral vocabulary, 41; and official position, 26–27; and position on warfare, 2, 22, 24–25, 174n 20; and ritual, 28 Conqueror as liberator, 47, 57–58, 59 Conquest of Shang: as archetypal story, 6, 13–15, 46–52, 64; and Taigong, 34, 50, 90; and Yi Zhou shu, 75, 81, 83–84, 87, 93–95, 107, 135, 136, 138–139 Cosmology, 5, 9, 31–33, 39, 54, 55, 57, 62, 65, 67, 73, 75, 97, 156–157, 175n 30, 212n 59 De/virtue: as civil virtue, 20, 25–26, 32; as Confucian moral term/good behavior, 41–42, 93, 100, 145; paired with

punishments in parallel to wen and wu, 15, 38, 62, 64, 101, 165–166, 167, 176n 33, 176n 36; seven virtues, 49, 85, 116–117, 195n 25, 204n 27; virtue of an ideal ruler, 47, 49, 60, 66, 68, 156, 163, 174n 20, 182n 11; virtues of the people/talents, 68, 113 Economy, 17, 61, 103, 108 Empire: challenges to, 7; and conquest/ military power, 5, 16, 18, 64, 66; ­emergence and consolidation of, 2–3, 7, 14–17, 27, 32, 40, 64–65, 69, 74–75, 129, 157–158; idealized/Confucian view of, 2, 3, 27, 159, 173n 10; and Naturalism/cosmology, 28–29, 65, 67, 75, 187n 30, 188n 41 Enumeration, 98, 111–112, 114, 117, 122, 123–125, 154, 207n 30, 208n 32, 211n 49, 212nn 53–54, 226n 3 Forgoing spoils of war, 48–51, 53, 55 Grain, 42, 59–60, 63, 68, 94, 100, 108, 113, 167 Gu Jiegang, 81, 83, 138, 195n 21 Guanzi (figure and text), 4, 28, 29, 30, 45, 176n 33, 178n 46, 188n 41, 204n 25 Guwen Zhou shu, 192n 12, 197n 37 Hanfeizi: author/text, 20–21, 53, 178n 47; on civil and martial, 33; Heguanzi, 177n 43; on schools of thought, 185n 14; and Yi Zhou shu, 80, 91 Huainanzi: and military, 62, 74, 102, 108, 119, 134, 155, 171n 14, 179n 61, 184n 19, 187n 33; and Naturalism/timing,

243

244 Index 21, 30–31, 61–62; similarity to Lüshi chunqiu, 61–63, 64, 187n 30, 188n 36, 188n 41; and Yi Zhou shu, 79, 209n 37 Huang Di/Yellow Emperor (figure and texts associated with), 3, 29, 42, 46, 57, 89, 176n 36, 177nn 39–40, 197n 39 Huang Huaixin, 86, 124, 172n 4, 189n 3, 191n 10, 194n 19, 212n 53 Huang P’ei-jung, 189n 3, 192n 12, 218n 11 Hunting, 68, 123, 132 Incorporating enemy territory, 42, 48, 97, 101–102, 128–129 Jingyi kao, 92, 198n 45, 199nn 46–47, 199nn 49–50, 217n 1 King Wen (of Zhou): and battle with Chong, 51–54, 184n 17; and chronology of Yi Zhou shu/authorship of Yi Zhou shu, 84–85, 136, 144; and civil benevolent behavior, 13, 20–21; in dialogue with Taigong, 89 King Wu (of Zhou): on behavior at conquest/ending war, 13, 23, 46–49, 50–51, 94–95, 116, 138, 182n 11; and chronology of Yi Zhou shu, 143–144, 226n 3; in dialogue with Duke of Zhou, 150–151, 161, 207n 30; in dialogue with Taigong, 37, 50–51, 90 King Yan of Xu, 16, 20–21, 22, 173n 6 Kongzi jiayu, 24, 25, 170, 173n 12, 174n 20 Li Ling, vii, 67, 170n 6, 210n 44 Liji, 204n 25 Lineage, 64, 106, 109–110, 155, 167 Liu Qiyu, 86, 144, 193n 15, 196n 26, 222n 34 Liu Xiang: as Confucian, 22; and imperial bibliography, 73, 76, 78–80, 94, 190n 4, 192n 11, 217n 4; and the Shuoyuan, 15–16, 25, 89, 171n 3, 174n 14; and “Zhiwu” chapter, 16, 19–23, 25–26, 50–52 Livestock, 59, 63, 68 Lunyu/Analects, 2, 28, 80, 170n 6, 176n 32, 194n 18

Luo Jiaxiang, 86, 189n 3, 191n 10, 192n 11, 194n 20, 196n 26, 218n 11 Lushi, 198n 43 Lüshi chunqiu: as eclectic/syncretic text, 4, 32, 54–55, 64–65, 188n 41; on origins of war, 40, 43; on righteous war, 44, 45–46, 56–61, 108, 155, 181n 3, 184n 19; on seasonality of war, 55–56, 187n 30; and Yi Zhou shu, 80 Mawangdui manuscripts: manuscript finds, 3, 41, 74, 169nn 1–2; and Naturalism, 29–30; and wen-wu pair, 29–30, 32, 175n 28, 176n 36, 176n 38, 177n 40, 177n 42, 199n 1 Mencius: and empire, 66; position on military, 6, 25, 50, 66; position on Zhou conquest of Shang, 66, 92–93, 138; as representative of Confucianism, 2, 159, 170n 5; and ruler’s care for subjects, 109; on transmission of Documents, 93, 138, 218n 9 Miaosuan/temple calculations, 9, 44, 118–119, 121–122, 123, 134, 210n 44 Military chapters of Yi Zhou shu: authenticity and date, 4, 9, 137; as group or unit of texts, 82–87; incorporation of enemy population, 100, 103, 106–107, 128–129; interest in genre, 18–19; mobilization, 109–110; purpose of conquest/war, 48, 53, 61, 69, 129, 133; restoration of social order, 101, 102, 107–108, 128; and seasonality, 101, 127, 132; and wen-wu pair, 39, 97, 103, 108, 134 Military texts: association with Yi Zhou shu, 82–89, 97, 101, 139, 140, 155, 161; shift from praxis to theory in, 19, 33–36, 142; survival and popularity of, 18–19, 171n 16, 178n 50 Multistate system, 7, 18, 34, 65, 67–69, 157 Music, 17–18, 27–28, 68, 94, 100, 128, 145 Naturalism, 55, 62, 67 Ning Yue, 32, 184n 14 Pan Dang, 48, 116

Paternalism, 8, 107, 109, 110 Plunder, 58, 69, 100, 173n 10, 200n 8 Punishments: criminal punishment, 8, 26, 68, 90, 114, 121, 133, 145, 168, 182n 11; and Heaven, 60, 63; and rewards, 33, 176n 36, 178n 46, 180n 64; and seasons, 30, 41, 176n 38; and war, 24, 26–27, 29, 40, 43, 45, 52, 54, 56–57, 60, 62–63, 68–69, 127, 133, 172n 4 Qianfu lun, 80, 194n 17 Qunshu zhiyao, 184n 16, 197nn 36–37 Ritual: and announcements to ancestors, 83, 117, 187n. 30; and calendar, 55–56, 145, 155; and Confucius, 22, 25–28; and cosmology, 156, 162; and formulaic or ritual language, 157; in military chapters of Yi Zhou shu, 9, 103–106, 123–130, 134, 140, 142, 201n 10, 203n 17, 203nn 19–22, 204n 23, 209n 38, 211n 50, 212n 53, 212nn 56–59, 213nn 60–62, 213n 65, 214nn 67–69, 215nn 70–71, 216nn 78–83, 217n 84, 218n 11, 220n 21, 221nn 22–25, 222n 32, 222nn 34–35, 224n 50, 224n 54; rhyme in chronological chapters of Yi Zhou shu, 144, 147–148, 149, 202n 14, 203n 15, 204n 26, 205n 28; rites of Zhou, 45, 65, 69, 122, 167, 168; ritual and law/ government, 39, 43, 51, 67–68, 127; ritual language, 142, 158; ritual texts, 35, 80, 90, 93, 98; rituals of war, 46–47, 49, 51, 53, 60, 123, 187n 33, 211n 51 Salary and rank, 60, 64, 68, 100 Seven virtues of the martial, 49, 85, 116–117, 195n 25, 204n 27 Shang shu/Documents: and archaic language, 107, 140, 142, 146, 193n 15; as a category, 75, 76–77, 80, 86, 137; comparison with/relation to Yi Zhou shu, 73, 93–95, 138, 194n 20; and preface, 79, 94; and question of editing by Confucius, 73, 76–78, 92, 94–95, 136 Shangjun shu/Book of Lord Shang, 33, 178n 46, 197n 39

Index245 Shaughnessy, Edward, 81, 83, 138, 170n 11, 189n 3, 191n 7, 192nn 11–12, 194n 20, 195n 21, 217n 7 Shiji: and language, 188n 36; and Sima fa, 178n 49, 179n 51; and social organization, 204n 25; as source of military history, 189n 2; and Yi Zhou shu, 88, 90, 193n 15, 196n 28, 197n 39 Shi/Odes/poetry: and archaic language, 141–143, 149–150, 152, 213n 65; citation by classical authors/speakers, 16, 49–50, 174n 14, 207n 30; and preface, 79; rhymes, 214n 69, 221n 23 Sima fa, 4, 16, 22, 34, 35, 38, 67, 69, 102, 108, 124, 155, 219n 13 Sima Qian, 79, 80, 93, 178nn 49–50, 193nn 14–15, 204n 25 Sun Bin, 36, 88, 115, 178n 50, 179n 57 Sunzi (figure and text): and categories of military arts in Taigong text, 179n 61; comparison to/parallels with Yi Zhou shu, 102, 114–115, 121, 134, 155, 200n 8, 204n 25, 210n 44, 214n 66; date of, 219n 13; and deception, 21, 173n 10; and general category of military text, 4, 7, 18, 33, 124; and manipulation of local sentiment, 178n 50; popularity of, 18, 33, 178n 47; and temple ­calculations, 118–119, 134, 210n 44; and theoretical sophistication, 118, 124; and tomb manuscript, 3, 36, 179n 57, 219n 14; and unity of people, 23–24 Taigong (figure and texts associated with), 34, 37, 50, 57, 87–91, 124, 174n 14, 196nn 30–31, 197n 32, 198n 43, 207n 30 Taiping yulan, 90, 197n 37, 197n 39, 198n 40 Tens and fives, 110, 204n 25 Tongdian, 90, 198n 41 Weapons: abstract/standing for war generally, 2, 16, 49, 62, 126, 128; and armor, 23, 42, 47, 119, 128; five kinds, 45, 145, 148, 182n 9, 183n 12; storing

246 Index away or stopping of, 48–49, 102–103, 106, 108, 116–117, 128 Weiliaozi, 38, 88, 180n 64 Wen and wu: as civil or diplomatic and military arms of state, 5, 19, 21, 32, 36, 74, 85, 108, 157, 158–159, 177n 43; as conceptual, philosophical pair, 9, 13, 14–15, 22, 31–32, 75, 176n 36, 177n 39, 177n 42; and “Confucianism,” 22, 24, 174n 20; and “Legalism,” 32–33; and legitimate use of force, 13, 31, 45, 54; and military texts, 37–38; and punishment, 8, 26; in Qin stele inscriptions, 157; and question of who is enemy, 7–8; and seasons, 28, 29–31; and social organization, 8–9 Widows and orphans, 60, 64, 107, 128, 152 Xin Tang shu, 77, 191n 9 Xunzi: moral vocabulary/values of Confucianism, 67, 170n 5; position on military, 6, 21–23, 25, 171n 14, 173n 10, 178n 47, 185n 21; ritual language/ archaic language, 220n 16 Yi Zhou shu chapters: “Da mingwu,” 85, 123–129; “Dajie,” 151–153, 222n 34; “Dakai,” 131; “Dakai Wu,” 207n 30, 212n 53; “Dakuang,” 84; “Dawu,” 82, 85, 110–122; “Duoyi,” 93, 193n 15; “Fengbao,” 205n 28; “Guanren,” 94; “Hewu,” 193n 15; “Ke Yin,” 93, 195n 21; “Mingtang,” 93; “Qifu,” 191n 10; “Rouwu,” 86, 143–148; “Shangshi,” 195n 21; “Shifu,” 81, 94, 138–139, 195n 21, 218n 10; “Shiji,” 172n 4, 198n 43; “Shixun,” 93; “Wanghui,” 194n 17; “Wenzheng,” 86, 208n 32; “Wen­zhuan,” 81; “Wucheng,” 84–85, 103–110; “Wuchuang,” 86–87; “Wuji,” 86–87, 163–168; “Wujing,” 80; “Wumu,” 86; “Wuquan,” 150; “Wushun,” 86, 156, 162–163; “Xiao mingwu,” 85, 129–135; “Xiaokai,” 131; “Xiaokai Wu,” 131; “Yinzhu,” 226n 4; “Yueling,” 80, 194n 18; “Yunwen,” 85, 103–110; “Zhaigong,” 227n 11; “Zhou

shu xu,” 78, 195n 24; “Zhouzhu,” 226n 4 Yi Zhou shu text: authenticity and date, 73, 75–82, 136–141, 189n 3, 190n 4, 191n 10, 219n 12, 219n 14; chronological structure, 84–85, 98, 135, 163–164, 217n 2; and Cili manuscripts, 81–82, 111, 219n 14; and enumeration, 98, 111–112, 114, 121–122, 123, 124–125, 156, 207n 30, 212nn 53–54; and Jizhong Zhou shu, 77–78, 92, 192n 12; language, 93, 140–144, 146–155, 157, 164, 193n 15, 195n 21, 224n 54; moral prejudice against, 91–95, 124, 138, 199n 52; and Taigong texts, 89–91; and Zhou shu, 73, 76–77, 79–80, 89–90, 91, 191n 5, 193n 15, 194n 20, 198n 43; and Zhou shu yinfu, 88–90, 196nn 30–31, 197n 32 Yili, 194n 17 Yinqueshan manuscripts, 3, 36, 210n 44, 219n 14 Yin-yang, 9, 31, 98, 177n 40, 177n 42, 225n 1 “Yiwen zhi”/Han shu bibliographic treatise: and authenticity of early texts, 35, 76; and Documents, 217n 4; and Mawangdui manuscripts, 176n 35; and military texts, 35–37, 77, 178n 50, 179n 57, 179nn 60–61; and Yi Zhou shu, 73, 93, 192n 11 Zhang Chunlong, viii, 204nn 26–27 Zhanguo ce, 80, 88, 91, 194n 20, 196nn 28–29, 197n 39, 198n 42 “Zhiwu” chapter of Shuoyuan/“Exhibiting the martial.” See Liu Xiang Zhou Yuxiu, 189n 3, 191n 10, 192n 11–12, 194n 19, 218n 11 Zhouli, 194n 17 Zhushu Zhou shu, 192n 12 Zuo zhuan: and archaic language/Early Classical Chinese, 141, 149–150, 152, 223n 40; dating, 219n 12, 219n 14; and parallels to Yi Zhou shu, 81, 116–117; speech on seven virtues, 48–50, 116– 117, 195n 25, 204n 27; and war 189n 2

About the Author

Robin McNeal received his PhD in ancient Chinese history from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2000. He also studied paleography and archaeology at Peking University and UCLA. He is currently associate professor of premodern Chinese literature in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Conquer and Govern is his first book.

Production Notes for McNeal/Conquer and Govern Jacket design by Julie Matsuo-Chun. Interior design and composition by Josie Herr with text and display type in New Baskerville. Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House Opaque, 500 ppi.

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DzDivided by a Common Language‹•‘‡ ‘ˆƒˆ‡™˜‡”›†‡–ƒ‹Ž‡†ƒ†˜‡”›…ƒ”‡ˆ—ŽŽ› †‘…—‡–‡†ƒ†”‡•‡ƒ”…Š‡†•–—†‹‡•–Šƒ– ˆ‘…—•‡š…Ž—•‹˜‡Ž›‘’‘Ž‹–‹…ƒŽ”Š‡–‘”‹…Ǥ Š‡„‘‘ƒ†‹–•‡š–‡•‹˜‡Ž‹–‡”ƒ–—”‡ Ž‹•–ƒ‡ƒ’Ž‡ƒ•—”ƒ„Ž‡”‡ƒ†ƒ†™‹ŽŽ „‡ƒƒ…ƒ†‡‹…ƒ••‡–ˆ‘”’‘•–‰”ƒ†—ƒ–‡ •–—†‡–•ƒ†•…Š‘Žƒ”•‘ˆ’‘Ž‹–‹…ƒŽ”Š‡–‘”‹… ‹‹’‡”‹ƒŽŠ‹ƒ‹‰‡‡”ƒŽƒ†–Š‡‘‰ †›ƒ•–›‹’ƒ”–‹…—Žƒ”Ǥdz —H-Net Reviews

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS

jacket illustration: Stone carving from the base of a column in a Wen miao, or Temple to Confucius, in Northern Hunan. Photo by the author. jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun

ISBN 978-0-8248-3120-2 90000

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