by Li Feng
Not only did Dong squarely borrow the concepts of yin and yang from the Naturalist tradition and use them to further explain a whole range of human relations such as that between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife, but he also adopted the concept of the “Five Elements,” interpreting them as the five highly esteemed Confucian values: benevolence, righteousness, rite, wisdom, and trustworthiness. Embracing all these is the concept of “Prime” (yuan) which he picked up from the Spring and Autumn Annals where the term is used to mark the first year of a ruler. But in Dong’s theory, “Prime” gained a much more cosmologically conceived meaning as the origin of all things and the beginning of the universe. Confucianism before Dong Zhongshu remained essentially an ethical system, and it was Dong who had given the various Confucian values a cosmologically based framework that was initially developed in the Huang-Lao tradition. On the other hand, Dong continued the discourse on human nature which leads to the core of Dong’s theory. According to Dong, “Human Nature” (xing) is the substance of a life, and “Emotion” (qing) is its desire. Human nature can be benevolent and can also be wicked, and only strict modeling and hammering can guide it to accomplishment; even so, it still cannot be perfectly good. Therefore, virtuous teaching is not only preferred to punishment, it is simply unavoidable.
Empire, in Dong’s view, is the necessary institution set up for the purpose of educating the people to be good, and the emperor is the principal of the human university and the earthly embodiment of the cosmological “Prime” who, through correcting his own heart, corrects the officials who in turn would correct the nature of the people. In answering a question posed by an imperial edict that draws a distinction between the alleged non-activist governments of Emperors Yao and Shun, and the activist government of King Wen of Zhou (analogous to the profound political–philosophical change that was taking place at the Han court), Dong, without missing the real point, argued that the difference is only in time; as for their worrying about the welfare of the common people, seeking for virtuous men to serve the empire, and being cautious about the use of punishment, they were all the same. In Dong’s view, emperorship is more a responsibility than a privilege. Furthermore, as the hardest-working and most worried man in the whole empire, the emperor was not only responsible to his people, but also stands to the call of Heaven in a relationship that Dong described as the “Interaction between Heaven and man” (Tian ren gan ying). For Dong, strange astronomical occurrences are warnings from Heaven; failing to heed the warning will lead to large-scale natural disasters such as floods and droughts which are the punishments inflicted by Heaven.
Dong Zhongshu’s philosophy has long been characterized in Western sinology as “syncretism” or “eclecticism.” It is true that he borrowed concepts from the pre-existing philosophical traditions, particularly Naturalism, or perhaps more directly from the Huang-Lao school, but his historical role was more than just a synthesizer. Instead, he built the concepts of various origins into a coherent system of thought in which Confucian values gained their basis in the cosmological order and both empire and emperor acquired their moral and legitimate roles. In other words, Dong was much more sophisticated and powerful, as is shown in his memoranda submitted to the throne. As recommended by Dong in his last memorandum copied into the official history of the Western Han Dynasty, Emperor Wu subsequently banned officials of all other philosophical affiliations from service in the central government and established Confucianism the sole guiding ideology of the Han Empire, and thereafter of all major dynasties in Chinese history.
Certainly, Confucianism as a scholarly enterprise was not just about Dong Zhongshu, but has a much longer history in the Han Empire. From the Warring States to the Han Empire China had experienced one of the most dramatic changes in her cultural history – the standardization of the Chinese writing scripts by the Qin. What was even more was that the First Emperor of Qin was reported to have systematically destroyed books particularly those Confucian texts such as the Book of Documents and Book of Poetry. So, the process by which the ancient texts were transmitted through Qin to early Han is one of the fundamental questions in Chinese history. It should also be noted that through this complicated process, Confucianism was itself transformed from a philosophy to a scholarly pursuit focused on the exposition of the meaning of the early texts, which laid the foundation for the long tradition of scholarship in China.
There were some intellectuals who apparently outlived the Qin Empire. The most famous was Fu Sheng, an Erudite of the Qin Empire who is said to have taught the Book of Documents in the Shandong region after the founding of the Han Empire. The Han court sent Chao Cuo, an imperial secretary, to learn from Fu Sheng and brought the text, evidently newly written in Han cleric scripts, to the imperial court in the west. Soon, the Han court carried out an empire-wide book campaign, and stories of discovery of ancient texts began to be circulated as books continued to flow into the imperial library in Chang’an. The most famous case was the discovery of a large number of books hidden in the wall of Confucius’ home in Qufu, the previous capital of the state of Lu in Shandong, excavated when the local king incorporated a part of the original residence into his own palace. Another local king was also reported to have submitted texts which he had gathered in his territory in present-day Hebei Province.
The fundamental problem is that many of these rediscovered texts were written in archaic scripts of the Warring States period that had become no longer readable to the Han people. These texts were thus referred to as the “Ancient Texts,” in contrast to the “Modern Texts” that were presumably passed down through a process of oral transition and then written down in Han clerical script. It is hard to trace the transmission of each text through the period, but for most known texts, two forms were simultaneously available by the end of the Western Han and they frequently differed from one another. Thus, clarifying the difference between the two textual traditions had been one of the fundamental issues in Han scholarship, but not fully accomplished in the next 2,000 years even down to modern times. In the case of the Book of Poetry, for instance, three lineages of transmission acquired official recognition in early Han, each based on a “Modern” version; besides, there was also the “Ancient” text transmitted by Master Mao, which is the text we have today but which was little recognized during Western Han. In 1977, archaeologists recovered another version of the Book of Poetry from an early Han tomb in Anhui Province, representing still another previously unknown tradition probably popular in the former Chu region.
In general, the “Modern Texts” had a clearer history of transmission and thus were officially endorsed by the Western Han Empire. In 136 BC, one position of Erudite was established in the imperial university for each of the five books: the Book of Changes, Book of Poetry, Book of Documents, Book of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals, all based on their “Modern” versions. About ten students were assigned to study with each of the five masters, altogether called the “Erudites of the Five Classics” (Wujing boshi), and Dong Zhongshu was the instructor for the Spring and Autumn Annals. The event not only marked the establishment of a strict Confucian curriculum in the Han Empire, but also the canonization of texts transmitted from the pre-Han times. The imperial university where the five Erudites conducted their lectures then became the center of learning and scholarship in the Han Empire. By the end of the Western Han, the position of Erudite was increased to more than ten and enrollment expanded to some 300 students in the same grade. By the second century AD, the imperial university, relocated to Luoyang, enjoyed an enrollment of some 30,000 students (Box 14.1), squarely matching the enrollment of many modern top universities in the Western world.
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Box 14.1 The Stone Classics
The creation of stone classics was an important moment in Chinese cultural history. The reasons behind the creation of the stone classics were relatively simple – to stabilize the texts in the face of continuing distortion and corruption that were indeed
inevitable as the result of hand-copying in the long process of textual transmission. However, the meaning of stone classics must be understood in the wider context of proliferation of Confucian scholarship and the canonization of certain core texts by the imperial state. By engraving a selection of texts on stone set on the campus of the imperial university in the capital, excluding all other texts, the imperial state not only proclaimed the authority of these texts over others, but also asserted its own political and cultural agendas in a very prominent way.
The first set of stone classics, the “Xiping Stone Classics” (Xiping is the reign title of Emperor Ling), was carved in AD 175–183. The set comprised forty-six stone slabs on which were engraved seven texts beginning with the Book of Poetry and concluding with the Confucian Analects. The texts were carefully edited by a small group of famous literati led by Cai Yong and written in standard Han clerical script. The stones were covered with roof tiles and placed in front of the lecture hall of the imperial university in Luoyang (Fig. 14.1). However, during the chaos at the end of Eastern Han and particularly due to the burning of Luoyang by the tyrant Dong Zhao, the stone classics were completely destroyed. When the empire was reorganized under the Wei Dynasty, another set of stone classics was commissioned by the Wei emperor in AD 241. Since the texts in this set, including only the Book of Poetry and Book of Documents, were engraved in three calligraphic styles, the great seal, small seal, and the Han clerical script, it was also called the “Three-style Stone Classics.”
Figure 14.1 Fragment of the Xiping stone classics found in Luoyang: front (left), Book of Documents, Chapters “Gaoyao,” “Yiji,” and “Yugong”; back (right), Chapter “Qinshi” and the “Preface.”
After the Song Dynasty, fragments of the Xiping stone classics were collected and recorded. After centuries of effort, some 520 pieces of stone fragments carrying some 8,000 characters were systematically published and studied by Ma Heng in 1975. In addition, eight new pieces were found in the 1980s by the archaeologists who had also identified fourteen stone bases of the original slabs at the site of the imperial university in Luoyang (Fig. 14.1).
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Gradually, the intellectual trend began to change, and scholarly interests shifted from the “Modern Texts” to the “Ancient Texts.” By the middle of the Eastern Han, the scholarship based on the “Ancient Texts” began to yield some important results. Around AD 100, a major scholar named Xu Shen (AD 58–147) compiled China’s first dictionary, the “Explaining Characters” (Shuowen jiezi), which systematically explains 9,000 characters and gives also their archaic forms that appear in the various “Ancient Texts.” The book provides a key for modern scholars who strive to read and interpret inscriptions and manuscripts from before the Qin Empire, for instance, the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou period and the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, not to mention the various bamboo manuscripts from Warring States tombs. A scholar of his younger generation, Zheng Xuan (AD 127–200), synthesized the learning of previous scholars and produced systematic commentaries on the “Ancient Text” versions of the Book of Changes, Book of Documents, and Book of Poetry. It is well known that because Zheng Xuan chose to comment on the “Ancient Text” versions of these books which were then considered orthodox in medieval China, the “Modern Text” versions of these core texts were subsequently lost to history.
The Writing of History
Even in an age when archaeology has provided the essential pool of information for Early China as has been fully shown in this book, our understanding of China’s early history, especially the 500 years before the Christian era, still cannot leave aside the great historical works produced during the Han Dynasty. Most important among these works are The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shiji) by Sima Qian (135–86 BC), and the official History of the Western Han Dynasty (Hanshu) by Ban Gu (AD 32–92). The former author lived through the most glorious decades of the Western Han Empire and died one year after the death of its heroic Emperor Wu, and the latter author lived in the first century after the empire was restored by Liu Xiu. Sima Qian created the first ever universal history of China, and Ban Gu consolidated a style that has since been accepted as the orthodox form of dynastic historical writing in China.
Sima Qian was a son of the Grand Scribe whose role was akin to that of an astronomer in the court of Emperor Jing and early Emperor Wu. According to the accounts in his own autobiography, Sima Qian began to study ancient texts when he was only ten and set out on journeys when he was twenty that took him to almost every corner of the Han Empire. With his knowledge and extensive travel experience, Sima Qian became an attendant at the imperial court and participated in Han campaigns into present-day Yunnan Province in 111 BC. Returning from the campaign Sima Qian was met with the death of his father, the Grand Scribe, who in his last words told him to succeed him as Grand Scribe and, while in office, not to forget the book his father had wanted to write. Three years later, Sima Qian was officially appointed to the office at the age of twenty-eight. However, in 98 BC, after the revelation that the general Li Ling whom he had recommended had defected to the Xiongnu after a disastrous defeat, Sima Qian received the punishment of castration and was driven out from his office. Suffering from the humiliating punishment, Sima Qian lived on to accomplish this great work of history which in his own words would properly define the boundaries between Heaven and men and synthesize the changes from ancient times to the present. Among the many questions we can ask about this great work two are most important: (1) What makes The Grand Scribe’s Records different from all written works before it? (2) Why did a work like The Grand Scribe’s Records appear at the time it did? In order to answer the first question, we must first look at the contents of the book.
The whole book comprises 130 chapters, running to many volumes even in its modern punctuated paper version. Heading the book are twelve basic annals that provide the chronological framework for the book from the earliest time in history, the five legendary emperors, to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han. This is supported by ten chronological tables that provide concordance between political figures and historical events for the entire history covered by the basic annals. Following the tables are the eight treatises each synthesizing the whole range of human knowledge in one specific field of study including astronomy, measurement, calendar, rites, music, sacrifice, irrigation works, and economy. For later generations, these treatises provide the best field-specific introduction to early Chinese civilization. A large part of the book is then taken by thirty genealogical accounts of hereditary houses or lineages in China down to the Han Dynasty; these accounts are both histories of the aristocratic families and regional histories of China. They are followed by sixty-nine biographies of more than 100 eminent statesmen, military generals, scholars, and merchants. Included in this part are also accounts of foreign peoples and lands. The book is concluded by Sima Qian’s own autobiography in which he narrates the history of the historian and explains the circumstances that gave rise to this monumental work of history.6
There can be no doubt that Sima Qian was not writing about a part or a period of the human experience but was writing about the totality of human history in the world known to him. As a universal history, Sima Qian created a system to present and analyze information that is much more sophisticated than the simple narrative of Herodotus (c.484–425 BC), as Sima Qian was better equipped as a scholar and more centrally placed in his own culture to produce such a work. Recent scholarship on Sima Qian has tried to determine the specific personal motives behind the creation of this monumental work. One such study sees the book as the manifestation of the joy and sorrow of the historian’s personal life and suggests that by completing such a work Sima Qian intended to establish metaphorically for himself a historical role similar to that of Confucius.7 However, we should not turn away from the much larger picture of the time which gave rise to the work or misunderstand the real political–intellectual inspirations for the book, together with the historica
l role of Sima Qian. The simple fact is that the project had already been initiated or at least planned by his father, and by the time of the Li Ling incident Sima Qian had already been working on the book for some years. Reading Sima Qian’s autobiography and his famously emotional letter to his friend Ren An, there are basic points that explain the purpose of writing The Grand Scribe’s Records. First, Sima Qian had the clear understanding that rather than philosophy, the minute recording of historical events is the best way to illustrate the great principles, as exemplified by Confucius’ writing of the Spring and Autumn Annals. Second, Sima Qian, and his father too, were well aware of the fact that they lived in the greatest time of the historically most accomplished empire ruled by its most enterprising and sometimes unpredictable emperor, and that they were writing from such a historical height that would allow them to understand fully the roles of the many great individuals who had contributed to this historical process. Being in such a position, he certainly had an intellectual ambition that goes far beyond his personal promotion or even the promotion of his family’s social standing, and a heartfelt responsibility for his time and for the empire. In Sima Qian’s own words, it would be a failure if not a crime for the historian not to be engaged in such a work.
The second great work of history, the History of the Western Han Dynasty was written a century after the death of Sima Qian. Its author, Ban Gu, was from a famous family of literati, and an older brother of Ban Chao, the long-time Han governor in Central Asia. Similarly prompted by his father who had already completed a few chapters, Ban Gu continued to write the book with the clear purpose of supplementing The Grand Scribe’ Records which stopped at the end of Emperor Wu’s reign. The family also produced the first female historian in Chinese history, Ban Zhao, younger sister of Ban Gu, who was responsible for the compilation of several tables in the book.8
