up to the task of appreciating it. This is why a Zuo Tradition narrative will rarely close with a speech without giving at least some
indication of whether the principles or predictions stated in that
speech were appreciated by an extended audience and vindicated by
the events of history, the ultimate impartial judge.
When an official at court succeeds in winning and maintaining
power through a competent performance of Tradition before the
king, his resulting position of power inside the court is reflected
outside the court in his role as a delegate representing the king’s
interests through speech (diplomatic missions) and violence (war-
fare). The categories of oratores (“cultural” 文 scholars) and bellatores (“martial” 武 warriors) were not distributed evenly between two
different groups of people in the Eastern Zhou. Rather, members of
the elite ruling class were expected to be well versed in both disci-
plines. Tradition certainly encompassed both spheres. In the long
view, however, the scholarly frame of mind always prevails for the
simple reason that speech subsumes violence into its symbolic code:
actions can only be recorded, recalled, and represented through
words. Actions may speak louder than words, but words speak
longer. The Traditionalist thus seeks to define and justify his posi-
tion through the custodianship of words. Indeed, once his position
as a repository for relevant learning is established, he can maintain
his position at court (and its accompanying wealth) simply by being
what he is, thereby escaping the stigma of pursuing profit directly.
The Zuo Tradition was an important text for the Traditionalists because it demonstrated their efficacy even before they were insti-tutionalized as a civil bureaucracy. It stakes out a place in history for the Traditionalists because its narratives constitute the very mode of
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20
Performing the Tradition
legitimate history. Ultimately, the Traditionalists succeeded in
transmitting a social order in which they occupy the position of
transmitters of the social order.
If a custodian of words is to maintain respect and power,
his charge cannot be just any group of words. Those who would
seek to sway their superiors through words must carefully choose
both the particular words and their mode of delivery. In a society such as ancient China’s, whose fundamental rituals are based
on continuity with and worship of human and divine ancestors,
the surest way of stamping one’s words with authority is to derive
them from a Golden Age of antiquity. For the Traditionalists of
the Eastern Zhou, the Western Zhou—as the formative stage of
their own dynasty—was such a Golden Age, a source of exemplary
behavior and words against which all later ages could be measured.
Of course, any golden age is a retrospective construct created by
cultural agents seeking a means to interpret, judge, and exercise
some measure of control over events in the present. The universal
impulse to compare a deficient present to a better past is rooted
in anxieties over mortality coupled with the cognitive disposition
of human beings to seek out a semblance of order in the chaos
of daily existence. Once a segment of society has formed a funda-
mental set of values, the past can be construed to support those
values, which are themselves shaped by the past. For the ruling
class of the Eastern Zhou, the Western Zhou was golden because
it was an age in which the elite knew how to be the dominant
class and the people knew how to be dominated (and the members
of the dominant class knew how to reproduce this scheme on a
smaller scale, each person making obeisance to his superior, right up
to the Zhou king). The mark of decline in this Golden Age appears
when people lose their sense of the “natural” relationship between
inferior and superior and must begin talking about it explicitly.
Concern over the minutiae of sumptuary codes, promulgation of
laws in written form, debates over proper forms of ritual and ter-
minology: these are indications that people have forgotten how to
act properly and must be compelled to do so through external
strictures rather than their own sense of what is right. This is the
perfect environment for the rise of the Traditionalists, who take
it upon themselves to remind anyone who will listen what “right”
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Performing the Tradition
21
is, based on bodies of ancient knowledge over which they claim
mastery.
The irony inherent in the approach of the Traditionalists is that
the very practices in which they engage to restore the values of a
Golden Age are a symptom of the state of decline in their own age.
If the culture of the Western Zhou can be viewed as a continuous
fabric of beautiful patterning ( wen 文), encompassing right music, poetry, ritual, and speech, then the Traditionalists of the Eastern
Zhou rend that fabric and attempt to sew its luminous threads into
the dull cloth of the present. This only serves to heighten the con-
trast between the fragments of a perfect past and a degraded present
that can never be fully rectified. Mencius 孟子 (379–289 b.c.e.), who
lived at the very close of the Eastern Zhou, is cited in Mencius as saying, “With the demise of the wooden clappers of the former
Kings, the Poems came to an end. Only after the Poems had come to an end were the Spring and Autumn Annals composed” 王者之跡熄
而詩亡。詩亡然後春秋作 (4B.21). 4 In this statement, Mencius refers to a golden age in which dedicated officials circulated among the
people sounding wooden clappers to solicit and collect their songs,
forming a continually changing corpus of poems with which the
Kings could gauge the minds and hearts of their people and thus the
quality of their rule. 5 When this practice ceased and the corpus of poems reached a stable form, it signaled a transition from an age of
song to an age of history, from an age of unalloyed utterance to one
in which a representation of what people said and did was pur-
posefully fashioned. The only way to revivify proper values in this
context is to internalize them and to act them out—talking about
values at length, as the Traditionalists were wont to do, will not
—————
4. My translation of 跡 ( ji, “trace”) as “wooden clappers” is based on a widely accepted variant reading cited by D.C. Lau in his translation of Mencius (p. 131) of radical 162 辶 plus 丌, meaning “wooden-tongued clappers.”
5. On this matter, the Zuo Tradition (Xiang 14) cites a passage from the
“Documents of Xia” 夏書 in the Documents 書. The passage is found in the section entitled “The Punitive Expedition of Yin” 胤征 and reads: “The runners circulated throughout the roadways with their wooden clappers” 遒人以木鐸徇於路. Music
Master Kuang makes the citation in a speech to the Marquis of Jin, in which he describes how the ancient kings relied upon di
scourse flowing to them from all levels of society to maintain the quality of their rule.
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22
Performing the Tradition
bring them back and runs the risk of boring one’s audience. 6 This is why competence was such an important issue for the Traditionalists:
they needed to employ their words in such a way that their audience
would not only pay attention, but also act on them.
II
It is an age of decline that engenders a need for competence. To
employ the term “competence” at all is to acknowledge that there
are those who are not competent, and thus to acknowledge that a
Golden Age of harmony in thought and action has passed. This
lesson is taught in the Zuo Tradition when the Duke of Song, the fiefdom of the descendants of the defeated Shang dynasty that preceded the Zhou, refuses to attack enemy forces until they have had a
chance to draw up their battle lines. As a result of the duke’s gallant
gesture, his army is routed, his personal guards are slain, and he is
wounded. The duke defends his decision by saying:
A true gentleman does not wound those who are already wounded, nor
does he capture those with graying hair. When the ancients employed their armies, they did not do so by trapping the enemy in a narrow spot. Although I may be all that is left of a ruined dynasty, I refuse to strike an army in disarray. (Xi 22.8)
君子不重傷。不禽二毛。古之為軍也。不以阻隘也。寡人雖亡國之餘。
不鼓不成列。
The duke’s War Chief makes the following rebuttal, which con-
trasts starkly with his master’s nostalgia for a golden age of gen-
tlemanly conduct in warfare:
Your lordship has never understood warfare. Should a more powerful
enemy find itself in a narrow spot in a state of disarray, this is Heaven coming to our aid. Why should we not trap them there and strike them?
Even in such a situation we should still be wary of them! In this battle, all the strength was with our enemies. We should have captured and taken
—————
6. Confucius, after a lifetime of talking about values, seems to have reached this conclusion in his famous statement that only at the age of seventy was his mind sufficiently conditioned that he could give it free rein without fear of moral transgressions ( Analects 2.4). Of course, few rulers in the Eastern Zhou had the will to pursue a lifetime of self-edification, and thus they tolerated the Traditionalists as a quick means to essential knowledge.
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Performing the Tradition
23
them all, right up to the elderly. Why make an exception for those with
graying hair? Understanding the shame [of a potential defeat] in teaching military tactics is simply a matter of seeking to kill the enemy. If you do not inflict a mortal wound the first time, why would you not wound
again? If you feel compunction over wounding again, it is as not wounding in the first place. If you feel compunction over those with graying hair, then it is as surrendering to them. Our three divisions should take every advantage. With the sounds of drums and gongs stirring our courage, we
should take the advantage of trapping them in a narrow spot. With the
surging sounds magnifying our resolve, we should strike them in their
confusion. (Xi 22.8)7
君未知戰。勍敵之人。隘而不列。天贊我也。阻而鼓之。不亦可乎。猶
有懼焉。且今之勍者。皆吾敵也。雖及胡耇。獲則取之。何有於二
毛。明恥教戰。求殺敵也。傷未及死。如何勿重。若愛重傷。則如勿傷。
愛其二毛。則如服焉。三軍以利用也。金鼓以聲氣也。利而用之。阻隘
可也。聲盛致志。鼓儳可也。
The rules of the game have changed. In Golden Age warfare there
were commonly accepted ground rules that resulted in consensus
amidst conflict. In an age of decline, however, adherence to a
common culture is not guaranteed, and one cannot simply ape an-
cient models of behavior and hope for the best. The goal now is to
kill the enemy by “taking every advantage” 利而用之. The defeated
duke lacks a practical sense of when it is appropriate to deploy his knowledge of the past. He is not competent in handling his cultural
legacy. This is precisely the breach into which the Traditionalists
thrust themselves: they claim competence in handling the Tradition
(one might call this “cultural competence”). They are not passive
receptacles of bodies of learning, mere human relays communicat-
ing words from the past. They are expert in applying knowledge of the past to present circumstances in order to produce a successful
outcome. In deploying their knowledge, they must select appro-
priate citations and then clearly illustrate the relevance of those ci-
tations to the matter at hand. 8 The Traditionalists must reconcile
—————
7. I have based my translations from the Zuo Tradition on the annotations of Yang Bojun ( Chun qiu Zuo zhuan zhu) and Kamata Tadashi ( Shunju Sashi den). For this particular passage, I also consulted Schaberg, Patterned Past, p. 2.
8. Once the Traditionalist canon was reified into written textual form, these two practices—selection and application—would give way to editing and annota-This content downloaded from 130.111.46.54 on Sat, 03 Aug 2019 08:33:49 UTC
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24
Performing the Tradition
ideals from the past with the less than ideal conditions of the present; their constant search for a path to a better future routes them
through the muck and mire of an age of decline. This is not a grand
project, for it is carried out only through the quotidian reiteration
of a set of practices. The Traditionalist must engage in his practice at the appropriate moment while he has the attention of the appropriate person. These considerations of time and audience (which can
only be conveyed in narrative form) make the Traditionalist a sort
of performer, who must improvise his inherited repertoire of lines
to fashion a performance powerful enough to sway his audience.
The role of the Traditionalist is in a sense an implicit admission of
discontinuity and loss, as he is required to be a vessel for a world
that can no longer assert itself. His cultural competence is measured
by how well he can reanimate that world through performing its
vestiges.
A particularly important cultural vestige for the Traditionalists
of the Eastern Zhou courts was the corpus of three hundred poems
in tetrasyllabic meter known simply as the Poems 詩, which are
cited in the Zuo Tradition far more frequently than any other text.
Poetic competence—a facility for performing or quoting the right
poetic lines at the right place and time—is portrayed as the primary
skill in demonstrating that one has a broader sense of cultural
competence. The Poems are treated as “deeds of words, as linguistic acts, whose significance was intimately related to the particular
situation in which they were uttered.” 9
There are places in the Traditionalist canonical texts where one
can find explicit discussions of cultural competence, particularly
concernin
g the use of the Poems. The Analects 論語 is a rich source for such discussions, even though it took shape long after many of
the events described in the Zuo Tradition. Though one must exercise caution in reading the attitudes expressed in the Analects back into previous centuries, the text certainly retains its relevance as the end
—————
tion. This point is made by Van Zoeren in Poetry and Personality: “Confronted with [fixed texts] the necessary process of accommodating doctrine to new concerns and questions must be displaced from expansion and reformulation to interpretation” (p. 23).
9. Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality, p. 51.
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Performing the Tradition
25
result of a long period of evolution stretching back into those cen-
turies. In the Analects, Confucius is reported to have admonished his son to study the Poems more carefully, for “without studying the Poems one lacks the means to speak” 不學詩無以言 (16.13). Elsewhere, he states that the Poems are useless to a man who “is unable to respond independently when sent on missions abroad” 使於四方
不能專對 (13.5). And he claims that to have not studied the Poems is akin to “standing face-to-face with a wall” 正牆面而立 (17.10). Exhorting his disciples to study the Poems, he lists all the benefits such cultural competence encompasses:
The Master said, “Little ones, why do you not study the Poems? Through the Poems, one may incite, one may observe, one may keep company, one may express resentment. Near at hand, one may serve one’s father. At a
farther remove, one may serve one’s lord. And there is much to be known
in them about the names of birds, beasts, plants, and trees.” (17.9)
小子。何莫學夫詩。詩。可以興。可以觀。可以群。可以怨。邇之事父。
遠之事君。多識於鳥獸草木之名。
But simple knowledge of the Poems is not enough; one must know
how to apply them properly. Confucius appraises this skill in the
following passage from the Analects:
Zigong said, “To be without obsequiousness though poor and without
Words Well Put Page 4
