The Songs of Chu
Page 2
A good part of this somewhat shorter text is also a list of questions in verse covering some of the same subjects as in “Tian wen.” It is even more of a mystery than “Tian wen” because scholars are unsure not only about the meaning of many of the individual characters and phrases but also about the order of the questions, for the bamboo strips on which it was written fell out of order long ago. I have translated a short excerpt from it in the “Tian wen” section of this book.
The Qinghua daxue cang zhanguo zhujian 清華大學藏戰國竹簡 manuscripts also contain examples of Chu verse other than those that appear in the Songs of Chu. Of particular interest are texts such as “Zhou gong zhi qin wu” 周公之琴舞, or “The Duke of Zhou’s Qin Dance,” that feature the luan 亂, a moral, or summary appended at the end of a longer poem, often translated as “envoi” or “epilogue,” a characteristic feature of “Li sao” and other Songs of Chu pieces. The excavated examples promise to clarify the nature of the luan, whose exact function, whether musical or poetical, has never been entirely clear.10
We are fortunate to be living in a time when so many texts and artifacts are emerging from the tombs, affording us a clearer picture of the literary and cultural background of the Songs of Chu. This is especially important because the Shiji 史記 (Records of the grand historian) biography of Qu Yuan provides us very little to go on and, as modern research has shown, is a very suspect text. It is nevertheless the unavoidable beginning of all research into the life and career of Qu Yuan.11
The biography of Qu Yuan tells the classic story of the virtuous failure, whose advice if taken would have saved his feckless king. Qu Yuan was no outsider. He was from a cadet branch of the royal family. His intellectual skills won him entry into the king’s inner circle of policy makers. He was charged with diplomatic duties as well, becoming the main spokesman of the king. His specialty, however, was law.
Being the foremost in ability and the king’s favor, Qu Yuan naturally attracted envy. One of his colleagues of equal rank and similar responsibilities, a certain Shangguan Dafu (Hawkes’s “Lord High Administrator”), noticing that the king had given Qu Yuan a special legislative assignment, tried to steal some of Qu Yuan’s work. When Qu Yuan prevented him from taking it, he went to the king and told him a false story, according to which Qu Yuan bragged whenever he drafted a successful decree for the king, saying that without him the king could never do it. Believing the slander, the king grew angry and soon excluded Qu Yuan from his inner circle and demoted him. Shocked and dismayed by the king’s sudden and unjustified hostility, he wrote the “Li sao.”
This is where the story becomes controversial in the modern history of Songs of Chu scholarship. Clearly Sima Qian believed that the “Li sao” was composed shortly after Qu Yuan lost favor with his king and certainly before the latter’s death. According to the earliest extant complete commentary on the Songs of Chu, the Chuci zhangju 楚辭章句, by Wang Yi 王逸 (d. 158 C.E.), which is as fundamental to the traditional understanding of the “Li sao” as the biography, Qu Yuan composed the poem during his exile.12 But according to the biography, Qu Yuan was not exiled under King Huai; he was exiled under his successor, King Qing Xiang. King Huai did send him to Qi on a diplomatic mission, but, technically speaking, a diplomatic mission is not exile. Did Wang Yi take it as such? Was he working from a different version of the biography? Complicating matters as well is Wang Yi’s claim that in the envoi (luan) at the end of the “Li sao,” Qu Yuan figuratively declares his resolution to commit suicide, which the biography tells us happened not during the reign of King Huai but during the reign of King Qing Xiang.13
In addition, modern scholars by and large do not accept the Shiji version of when the “Li sao” was written. Reasoning entirely from their reading of the contents of the poem, especially those passages that express concern about the approach of old age, they claim that Qu Yuan was too young to have written the “Li sao” when the biography said that he did. Modern consensus therefore places its composition either at the end of King Huai’s reign or the beginning of King Qing Xiang’s reign. This is the main instance where scholars have used their understanding of the poetry to contradict the claims of the biography.
Let us return to the summary of its contents. While Qu Yuan was out of favor, the state of Qin decided to attack the state of Qi but hesitated because Qi was an ally of Chu’s. Qin sent an ambassador, Zhang Yi, to promise certain territorial concessions to convince Chu to break its alliance with Qi, which King Huai promptly did. Qin, however, reneged on its promises after it attacked Qi. Chu then attacked Qin but was defeated and lost territory. Chu attacked Qin again, this time with its whole army. Meanwhile, the state of Wei, seeing a rival now vulnerable because its forces were busy elsewhere, attacked Chu. The army of Chu, in alarm, returned empty-handed from Qin to repel Wei.
All these military maneuvers are described elsewhere in the early Chinese historical record. The histories go on to tell how Qin offered to give back the Chu territory it had conquered, and how King Huai rejected the offer, demanding instead that Qin turn over Zhang Yi, the ambassador who had deceived him into breaking the alliance with Qi. The ambassador was sent to Chu presumably to face execution, but by bribing powerful parties at court and influencing the Queen of Chu, he managed to get himself pardoned and returned unscathed to Qin. In the Shiji biography, we are told that the demoted Qu Yuan was at this time on a diplomatic mission in Qi, and that he returned to Chu having been informed about Zhang Yi’s escape from punishment. In another place in the Shiji, “The Hereditary House of Chu,” there is no mention of demotion, but Qu Yuan’s voluntary return from his diplomatic mission to criticize the king is described in much the same way.14 In yet another place in the Shiji, “The Biography of Zhang Yi,” however, neither demotion nor diplomatic mission are mentioned; Qu Yuan simply states that he thought the king had called Zhang Yi back from Qin with the intention of executing him by boiling him to death. He goes on to criticize the king for allowing himself to be duped into letting him escape.15 In this version of the story the king believes that Zhang Yi will do as he has promised (return land to Chu). In “The Hereditary House of Chu” and the biography, however, the king is convinced by Qu Yuan that he has made an error and orders an ultimately futile attempt to recapture Zhang Yi.
The biography and “The Hereditary House of Chu” both tell us that after the departure of Zhang Yi an alliance of states harried the borders of Chu, defeating it many times, and that King Zhao of Qin managed to persuade King Huai, who was related to him by marriage, to travel to Qin for negotiations. According to the biography, Qu Yuan advised against the trip in the following terms: “Qin is a kingdom of tigers and wolves; they cannot be trusted. It would be best not to go!” “The Hereditary House of Chu,” describing the same scene, put the same statement in the mouth of someone else. Both the biography and “The Hereditary House of Chu” tell us that Zilan, one of the king’s sons, urged King Huai to go, that the king went, that Qin forces kidnapped him on the way, and that he, after unsuccessful attempts at escape, was detained in Qin. According to the biography, King Huai dies in Qin, his body is sent back to Chu, and then his oldest son becomes King Qing Xiang, while Zilan becomes prime minister. According to “The Hereditary House of Chu,” however, the son becomes king before the father’s death in Qin; neither Qu Yuan nor Zilan are mentioned again. At this point the biography becomes somewhat muddled, for right after describing Qu Yuan’s return from Qi, his unsuccessful attempt to dissuade King Huai from going to Qin, the king’s kidnapping and death in Qin, and Qu Yuan’s consequent hostility toward Zilan, it tells us that Qu Yuan maintained his loyalty even while in exile and never gave up his hope that King Huai would realize his mistake and recall him, but in the end he was never recalled.
Up to that point the biography never mentioned that Qu Yuan was sent into exile. Even if we consider the unlikely possibility that Qu Yuan’s mission to Qi was a kind of exile, how could Qu Yuan have returned from it without
permission—that is, without royal recall—to advise the king not to accept the invitation to travel to Qin? In ancient China one did not return from exile whenever one wished. Moreover, the text clearly states that he was never recalled.
Here is the clearest evidence that the biography, as some scholars have observed, is a patchwork of fragments from other texts. Hawkes, following the lead of He Tianxing and other Chinese scholars who have critically analyzed the text of the biography, believed that this passage—which seems to require the possibility of two Qu Yuans, one in exile and the other at court advising the king—is a fragment from the commentary on the “Li sao” commissioned by Emperor Wu of the Han (r. 140–87 B.C.E.) and written by Liu An 劉安, Prince of Huainan (179–122 B.C.E.).16
After a moralizing summary of King Huai’s tragedy, the text goes on to say that after Zilan heard something unspecified about Qu Yuan, he plotted with Lord Shangguan to turn the new king, Qing Xiang, against Qu Yuan. The angry king then banished Qu Yuan to the south, where, in frustration and despair, he drowned himself in the Miluo River. After that, Chu rapidly declined and was eventually destroyed by Qin.
I have greatly simplified the narrative that is given in the Shiji biography, but the question of when Qu Yuan was sent into exile emerges even on first reading of the original. Other things that strike one on first reading, and which I leave out of my summary, is the fact that a section from the Chuci, the story titled “The Fisherman,” is inserted into the biography to describe the immediate circumstances of Qu Yuan’s suicide, and another Chuci piece, the poem “A Bosom Full of Sand” (懷沙 “Huai sha”), is presented therein as Qu Yuan’s swan song, or suicide note, composed or recited before he hurls himself into the river. To the modern reader the fictional nature of these sections of the biography is readily apparent, but they were not considered suspect by traditional scholars until the twelfth century.
What is not readily apparent about the biography, except perhaps to the stupendously learned, is what Galal Walker has called “the almost wholly derivative nature of the text.” Even during the Han dynasty it was noticed that parts of the biography, especially the parts that appraise “Li sao,” are made-up of fragments of a commentary that Emperor Wu ordered the Prince of Huainan to write during the second century B.C.E. Modern scholars, such as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and He Tianxing 何天行 (fl. mid-twentieth century), first noticed that the same passage where Qu Yuan refers to Qin as a nation of tigers and wolves occurs almost verbatim elsewhere in the Shiji, in the biography of Zhang Yi, but with someone other than Qu Yuan uttering those words.17 Other parts of the biography seem to have been plagiarized from other parts of the Shiji and other sources, such as the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (Intrigues of the warring states). According to Walker’s calculations,
approximately fifty percent of the text (possibly much more) is verbatim repetition from other sources still extant. Furthermore, if portions of the biography that repeat information from the source texts in noticeably similar language were to be included in our calculations, then the entire biography could very nearly be constructed to its present condition today. If Qu Yuan’s biographer, two thousand years closer to his subject than we, did not demonstrate an access to resources which are significantly greater than those available to us now, his authority cannot be assumed. We can assume that the Qu Yuan story was as scarce on information for Sima Qian as it is for us today.18
In other words, little was known, other than legend, about the life of Qu Yuan even during the Han dynasty, and the Shiji biography was a makeshift attempt to fill in the gaps. Willy-nilly it became the first guide to reading the early poetry of the Chuci. Yet inadequacies of the biography were recognized early on, which is why the poems themselves became the secondary biographical source. This at best resulted in circular logic.
A third source for biographical information, mostly discounted these days, is the Wang Yi commentary with its clearly fabricated stories and unintended hilarities (such as his claim that the Nine Songs hymn “Earl of the Yellow River” simply recounts a fantasy that Qu Yuan had about meeting and befriending that god of the main river in the north while he was exiled in the region of the Yangtze River in the south.) Both Arthur Waley and David Hawkes thought that Wang Yi’s absurdly forced interpretations, especially of the Nine Songs and “Li sao,” had something to do with some peculiar deficiency in his commentarial skills. My own research suggests that was not the case. Wang Yi’s exegetical methods were in fact typical of his time. His was the basic method taught in the Imperial Academy, a pseudosystem for decoding (or creating) hidden codes based on such things as correlative cosmology, numerology, and word placement, very similar to late classical allegorical readings of Homer and the biblical hermeneutics of the early Christian fathers and modern evangelical conspiracy theorists.
Wang Yi wrote his commentary while serving as imperial librarian during the reign of Emperor An 安 (r. 106–125 C.E.), but that ruler was not the one who commissioned it. For most of his reign he was emperor in name only, for his aunt, Dowager Empress Deng Sui 鄧綏 (81–121), acted as regent when he inherited the throne as a boy but jealously prevented him from seizing the reins of power even after he came of age. Her reason for this was that he displayed from childhood two tendencies she abhorred. One was boorishness and the other was utter disdain for learning. The latter attitude did not make him unique among young contemporary Han aristocrats. The Imperial Academy had been established many generations previously to put a Confucian face on Emperor Wu’s autocratic policies. After the usurpation of Wang Mang 王莽 (ca. 45 B.C.E.–23 C.E.), which had many supporters in the Imperial Academy, that institution and the imperial family were at odds. The friction soon intensified over a new ideology that arose among unorthodox scholars after the restoration of the Liu family to power. Its fundamental theory held that the Liu family were not mere mortals but descendants of the sage-king Yao and therefore had a right to rule no matter the personal qualities of their individual emperors. Accordingly, no one had the right to oppose them in any way. Heredity trumped merit. Loyal dissent was an oxymoron.
The new doctrine had been formulated mainly outside the Imperial Academy by adherents of the Zuozhuan, an alternative—which is to say unofficial—interpretation of the quasi-sacred Spring and Autumn Annals. Opposing this view were adherents of the orthodox Gongyang commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals who dominated the Imperial Academy. They subscribed to the old Confucian view that Yao had manifested his sagehood mainly by choosing to cede his throne to the best man for the job—that is, Shun—rather than his own son, who displayed none of the wherewithal to rule effectively. For the imperial academicians, loyal dissent was not only possible but even necessary to maintain a stable, well-governed empire. The imperial family, in the end, came to prefer the irony of a theory that simultaneously assigned them descent from Yao and affirmed the principle of hereditary, rather than meritocratic, rulership. Accordingly, they shifted their patronage to the Zuozhuan scholars and withdrew favor from the Imperial Academy, where Zuozhuan scholars were not welcome.19
The academy gradually slipped into desuetude, and the education of imperial youth suffered. Dowager Empress Deng Sui, who did not subscribe to newfangled theories, took it upon herself to revive old-fashioned learning by building special schools for young aristocrats and renovating the Imperial Library. Her purpose in undertaking such projects, aside from a real Confucian belief in the transformative power of the classics, was to please those Confucians in the academy who, aside from feeling beleaguered in the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere at court, might otherwise have objected to a woman withholding power from the rightful, though untutored, imperial heir. She took special interest in the Chuci because its main author was famous for righteously endeavoring to enlighten his benighted king. By glorifying his project she sought to justify her own.
But there was one problem. The advocates of the genealogy that traced the imperial family’s bloodline back to Yao considered Q
u Yuan’s behavior treasonous. No less a figure than Ban Gu 班固 (32–92 C.E.), son of the author of The Destiny of Kings (王命論 Wang ming lun), the unorthodox faction’s manifesto, had written a critique of “Li sao” accusing Qu Yuan of “denying the validity of government by law and the teachings recorded in the classics and commentaries.”20 By “government by law,” he of course did not mean that of the lost state of Chu; he was referring to the government of the Han dynasty. By “teachings recorded in the classics and commentaries,” he was not referring to anything studied in Chu, nor even to what was taught in the Han Imperial Academy. He was referring to those interpretations of the ancient literature, such as the Zuozhuan, that supported the doctrine of the Liu family’s descent from a sage-king and the concomitant authoritarian ideology. He was deploying a very ancient Chinese strategy: using the past to criticize the present. By impugning Qu Yuan’s loyalty, he was impugning the loyalty of those who opposed the doctrines of his authoritarian faction.
Deng Sui in choosing Qu Yuan as her model of loyalty was choosing a controversial figure in the debate between those who claimed that loyalty and dissent could coexist in the same person and those who claimed that it could not. The task that she assigned Wang Yi was not only to maintain Qu Yuan as a hero of the supporters of the concept of loyal dissent but also to show that there was nothing in his work that deserved the kind of criticism opponents of that concept, such Ban Gu, had leveled. The riskiness of that undertaking had its analogue in the political project she was defending, but, being a scholar herself, she knew that Wang Yi was well trained in the exegetical methods of the Imperial Academy, which had demonstrated over and over that even the simplest text could be made to reveal unanticipated messages in the hands of the right exegete.21