The Songs of Chu

by Gopal Sukhu

  Qu Yuan, the author of the poem, was reputed to have been at odds with his king, and this interested the emperor too, for being the ruler of a relatively new dynasty he feared that those who were not convinced of the legitimacy of his family might turn against him. And like all rulers, he was especially suspicious of certain members of the ruling clan itself.

  So he called in his uncle, the Prince of Huainan, who was not only an expert in literature, the culture of Chu, and the occult but also suspected of designs on the throne. When the emperor queried him on the meaning of “Li sao,” he produced a disquisition with extraordinary alacrity, praising the poem and extolling the virtues of its author, especially his loyalty to his sovereign. Both he and the emperor knew that the operating principle on this occasion was that articulated in the classics: 詩言志 shi yan zhi—that is, “poetry verbalizes intention.” In other words, what is in a person’s heart is appropriately, and sometimes inadvertently, expressed in poetry. During the Han dynasty this was doubly true of commentaries on poetry.

  We do not know what the Prince of Huainan had to say about the occult aspects of the “Li sao,” for only a fragment of his commentary survives. His literary works were no doubt partially proscribed when he was later accused of treason, for reasons unrelated to his commentary, and preemptively committed suicide.

  A certain dynamic between the reader and the “Li sao” was established by the prince’s commentary. The reader, like Emperor Wu, is attracted to the poem but does not quite understand it and wants to know more. The commentator promising access appears, armed with a key—to the life of Qu Yuan. Once the commentator gives a tour of that life, he delivers a homily about loyal dissent. The commentator assures the reader that he has provided access to what the poem means, but the reader nevertheless walks away still confused about what the poem says. The commentator will insist that what the poem says and what it means are not separate. And this brings us to the major problem in traditional “Li sao” scholarship: the conflation of the poetic persona with the author, which is also the problem of making no distinction between metaphor and metaphrand, allegory and referent, what is said and what is meant. Traditional scholarship in preventing the poetic persona from speaking as him- or herself blocks the sole mouthpiece in the poem through which the author might speak.

  I have already discussed in the introduction and elsewhere how and why Wang Yi interpreted the “Li sao” as he did.1 Here I discuss the allegorical structure of the poem that removal of Wang’s hermeneutical obstacles reveals. The story, in outline, is about a spirit, named True Norm, who descends from the sky attracted by the fragrances of flowers and herbs and desiring to be with the one who cultivates and wears them. That person is a ruler of a shaman kingdom named Spirit Adorned. In order to have a proper relationship with the shaman ruler, the spirit must inhabit the body of a female shaman. As their love affair proceeds, Spirit Adorned’s taste in personal adornment changes and he turns to the cultivation of foul-smelling weeds to wear. He also rejects True Norm. The fragrance-loving spirit now merged with the fragrance-loving shaman feels abandoned and hurt but cannot decide whether to leave or not. After much hesitation and consultation with diviners, however, the spirit-shaman decides to leave the shaman kingdom and departs traveling through the sky in a state of triumph mixed with sorrow.

  Clearly this is not the story of Qu Yuan that appears in the Shiji. It is a far more magical one. Yet it is not an entirely different story. If read as allegory, we might find something of the Qu Yuan story in it. But we must look elsewhere to find a story that might make it comprehensible on its own terms. Take, for example, the following passage:

  In the fifteenth year of King Hui [676–652 B.C.E.] of the Zhou dynasty, a spirit descended in the state of Xin. The king, asking Guo the court historian about it, said, “Why did this happen? Has it ever happened before?” The court historian answered, “It has happened before. When a state is on the rise, its ruler will be of consistent clarity, impartial and just, pure of spirit, benevolent and peace loving. His virtue will be such that it emits a pervasive fragrance, and his compassion will be such as to unify his people. If the spirits enjoy their sacrifices and the people are compliant—that is, if neither people nor spirits have cause for resentment—then a spirit descends to observe the merits of his government and to broadly spread good fortune on his kingdom. On the other hand, when a state is on the decline, its ruler will be greedy, perverted, given to excess, lazy, corrupt, and violent; his government will emit a foul odor, and no good fragrance will rise [to Heaven]. He will pervert the law and punish the innocent, and loyalty will stray away from the hearts of the important families. Then the spirits do not appear, and his subjects wish to be far from him—that is, both the spirits and the people bear grudges against the ruler—and they have no one to rely on. A spirit will then descend to observe the evil of his government and spread misfortune upon it. Thus spirits appear either when a state is on the rise or when it is in decline. So when Xia was about to rise, [Zhu] Rong [祝融] descended onto Chong Mountain.2 When it was about to fall, Hui Lu [回祿] resided for days in Qin Sui.3 When the Shang dynasty was on the rise, Tao Wu [檮杌] appeared on Pi Mountain.4 When it was in decline, Yi Yang [夷羊] appeared in cattle herds on the grasslands.5 When the Zhou dynasty was on the rise, the Yuezhuo [鸑鷟] phoenix sang on Qi Mountain. When it grew weak, Du Bo [杜伯] shot the king in Hao.6 Each of these apparitions is a matter of historical record.”

  The king asked, “What spirit has descended upon our kingdom?” The historian replied, “In the past King Zhao [of the Zhou dynasty] chose to marry a woman of the state of Fang. She became Queen Fang. She was in fact not a woman of strict virtue, taking very much after her ancestor Dan Zhu [丹朱].7 Dan Zhu, possessing her body, mated with him [King Zhao] and gave birth to King Mu. Indeed, this spirit oversees the activities of the descendants of the Zhou royal house, sometimes granting good fortune and sometimes sending disaster. Spirits are exclusive and do not move far away. The spirit who has appeared in this case is probably Dan Zhu.8

  This passage is from the Guoyu 國語, a Chinese historical work compiled probably between the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. It gives a glimpse of what might be termed pre-Confucian beliefs about the influence of spirits on statecraft and the kind of imagery associated with the beliefs.

  The passage is far more useful for understanding the “Li sao” as allegory than anything that appears in the commentarial literature. Here, as in the “Li sao,” spirits descend attracted by fragrances. The phrase used in the story is “the fragrance of virtue.” (Interestingly, Wang Yi uses the same phrase in his “Li sao” commentary. Could he have been making a veiled reference to the mythology represented in this story?) Conversely, a bad government in the Guoyu emits a foul odor—let us call it “the stench of corruption”—that drives away the good spirit, just as in the “Li sao.” Moreover, the spirit that King Hui is inquiring about once possessed a woman and through her had sexual relations with a ruler. As we shall see, the main spirit in the “Li sao” appears to do the same thing.

  If the “Li sao” is an autobiography, it is an allegorical one where the main character is a male spirit who descends, possesses a female shaman, and through her serves a shaman ruler. The imagery works perfectly in the Chinese cosmological system, where the ruler is classified in the yang category, which includes men, and ministers, generally men, are classified in the yin category, which includes women. The cosmological intergendering of ministers in early China is represented in the poem by the merging of the female shaman with the male spirit, a characteristic of Chu shamanism.

  I summarize in the following the allegory of the “Li sao” using the basic structure of the mythology represented in the Guoyu passage as a guide.

  In the first two stanzas (lines 1–8) the speaker of the poem introduces himself by way of announcing who his ancestors were. His distant ancestor is the divine forebear of a number of royal houses, including the house of Chu. His father
is another ancestral spirit of Chu, Zhu Rong, god of fire and the south. That makes the persona of the poem the son of an ancestral spirit, similar to the spirits that descend for good or ill in the cited Guoyu passage.

  He then gives the month and day when he descended from the sky and his names. The day of his descent and the day when Zhu Rong, the god of fire and the south, according to myth, ceded his position to his younger brother (see the relevant note to the poem) are the same. His first name indicates that he is the spirit of correct principles (正則zhengze). His second name indicates that he is also the spirit of fairness or justice. The strange thing about the second name is that it is a shaman name—its first syllable being ling 靈, meaning “spirit” or “shaman.” Why the persona is given a characteristically shaman name becomes clear in lines 9–10, where he dresses himself in some of the various fragrant plants that attracted him. This behavior is similar to that of female shamans in the Nine Songs who seek thereby to attract male spirits. Given his shaman name, we must therefore be prepared to understand the persona not as a single personality but as a blend of female shaman and male spirit. As the poem proceeds, it becomes clear that fragrant plants represent in the “Li sao” both virtue and those who possess it. Weeds, on the other hand, represent the opposite.

  The names that we encounter in the poem suggest that the ruler and the important people at court are all shamans and that the subordinates are the plants that adorn them.

  In lines 13–24 the spirit expresses anxiety about the passage of time, evoking the changing seasons with plant imagery. This dovetails with his first complaint: that the ruler is neglecting the fragrant plants and allowing the fields where they grow to be overwhelmed by weeds, the first mention of that corrupting influence in the poem. Here the spirit offers his help, using the image of thoroughbred horses (symbols of good ministers) pulling a chariot (symbol of the state). Next he offers his opinion as to why the fragrant plants should not be neglected. It is an example from history—the variously identified Three Kings, whose “purity” depended on the proximity of various fragrant plants, clearly a metaphor for virtuous ministers. The image thus evoked is of shamans who purify themselves with fragrant flowers and herbs, as in the Nine Songs. In the next stanza, the ruler is reminded that there are two paths in statecraft—the good path represented by Yao and Shun, and the bad path, represented by Jie and Djou.9

  In lines 33–40, the “cabal” is mentioned for the first time. The members of the cabal, it becomes clear, are the same as those represented by the weeds. The chariot metaphor predominates here. The spirit then voices his second complaint—that the ruler has believed slander, presumably concocted by the cabal, about him. The ruler is addressed as Lure Leaf, clearly the main source of the fragrance that attracted the spirit. It should be remembered that Lure Leaf (荃 Quan) is the name of the elusive divinity addressed in “The Lesser Minister of Life Spans,” the sixth of the Nine Songs hymns. He is later called Spirit Adorned, a shaman name perhaps meaning that the ruler’s “fragrance of virtue” is such that it has attracted a good spirit (as well as good officers) who now constitutes his “adornment.” The names Lure Leaf and Spirit Adorned (靈修) occur in the sixth and ninth of the Nine Songs hymns, respectively. The spirits they name are both elusive and fickle lovers.

  In lines 41–48, the spirit tells the shaman ruler that the frank criticism that won him/her his disfavor was offered only out of loyalty. Then the spirit complains that the ruler has been unfaithful. Here the spirit seems to speak in a female voice, confirming that he inhabits the body of a female shaman.

  In lines 49–56, the spirit-shaman reports on his/her own herb fields (possibly a metaphor for his/her students or protégés), expressing fear that the weeds may overtake them too.

  In lines 57–64, (s)he describes the greed and hypocrisy of the “crowd” (= cabal = weeds). In lines 65–72, (s)he complains that (s)he is not getting enough spirit food (fragrant herbs) to eat, indicating that the “fragrance of virtue” that attracts and maintains beneficent spirits is decreasing. This may be a figurative way of saying not only that the virtuous are losing their positions at the Chu court but also that sacrifices to the spirits, involving fragrant plants, are being neglected. Nevertheless, (s)he does manage to make clothing out of a variety of strong and mild herbs, indicating that this raiment conforms to the ancient style of Peng and Xian, two shaman ancestors. Note that the two names Peng and Xian are usually joined and are traditionally assumed to be one person. There are reasons (given in my notes to the poem) to believe they are two: Wu (Shaman) Peng and Wu (Shaman) Xian.

  In lines 77–88, the spirit complains that it is his/her fragrant adornments (worn by the shaman he has merged with) that have gotten him into trouble because they are no longer in fashion. (S)he defiantly vows to continue to make and wear them nevertheless. (S)he again complains about the slander against him/her, again in the feminine voice. In lines 88–104 the spirit rails against the cabal, comparing them to bad craftsmen and buzzards.

  In lines 105–28 defiance gives way to regret; here is the first hint that the spirit may decide to abandon this kingdom. (S)he wanders about the wild countryside in indecision near the plants sacred to him/her. Then, in even greater defiance than before, (s)he adorns him-/herself in more and more fragrant plants and scans the horizon considering the possibility of going elsewhere. Next (lines 120–44) a mysterious female, who is probably another shaman, Nü Xu, warns him/her against his/her conspicuous display of lofty integrity, symbolized by the garments made of fragrant plants. She begs him/her to go along with those who wear foul weeds, symbolizing corruption and corrupting influences. (From this point on I use the simple masculine pronoun, for the rest of the poem is primarily the spirit’s story.) The spirit is not convinced by her advice and decides to ask the spirit of the sage-king Shun, whose tomb is on Nine Doubts Mountain, what he should do. In lines 145–84 he explains to Shun the predicament the kingdom is in, comparing the fates of corrupt rulers with those of virtuous rulers of the past. His testimony ends in tears, at which point the spirit of Shun sends him a waking dream, or vision, in which he rises into the air on a large bird pulled by dragons. What follows is the spirit’s travel through both time and space, impelled by the power of Shun, in search of a bride.

  The spirit first tries to enter the gates of the sky but is denied entry, an event that may stand for the loss of his king’s favor or Heaven’s disapproval of his failing mission to improve the moral tone of the shaman state.

  He then goes on a journey back in time to find a bride among famous queens and princesses of the past, most of whom had kings for husbands. All his attempts at wooing them fail. There are many theories about what this section means, but the poem itself provides interpretations, interspersed at intervals in the description of the vision flight. I have put them in italics in the translation.

  At line 257, the vision, or waking dream, having ended, the male spirit Zhengze is reunited with the female shaman Spirit Fair Share, and as one entity they seek out Ling Fen. According to Ling Fen’s interpretation (lines 259–76), the vision indicates that departure from the kingdom is the appropriate course of action. The spirit, still unsure, seeks the interpretive services of one of the shaman ancestors he admires so much, Shaman Xian herself.

  Using examples of outcasts of the past whose virtues and talents were recognized by wise rulers, she encourages the spirit to leave the hopelessly corrupt kingdom (lines 285–312). The rest of the poem is a description of the departure. The last line indicates the ultimate destination of the spirit, the realm of the shaman ancestors Peng and Xian, whom he has just consulted, located, it seems, somewhere west of the Kunlun Mountains. What this and the other references to Peng and Xian seem to imply is that the kingdom the spirit has left has rejected the way of the shaman ancestors.

  This, I believe, is the allegory that has been suppressed for over two thousand years under layers of deflecting exegesis. Similar to allegory as it is practiced elsewhere, it
is based on metaphor, with one shaman standing for the king and another for his minister, with the beneficent possessing spirit standing for the virtue inborn in the minister (and the favor of heaven embodied in the minister), with fragrant herbs that attract beneficent spirits standing for those whose influence is conducive of rectitude, and rank weeds that repel beneficent spirits standing for those whose influence corrupts. What makes the allegory particularly complex is that its political message depends on the synecdochal relationship of its images to the political realities of Chu. I have referred to the site where the allegorical drama unfolds as a “shaman kingdom.” I have implied that it is a separate fictive realm for the sake of simplicity. In all probability, however, the shaman coven was the ritual core of the kingdom, connecting it to those celestial and ancestral powers on which its existence was thought to depend. In such a politico-ritual structure, ministers actually could be shamans, and the king being the chief officiant of the ritual order could in effect be the head shaman. The central complaint of the “Li sao” appears to be that the ritual order based on the traditions of Wu Peng and Wu Xian is being threatened by interlopers who claim other powers but whose influence will ultimately destroy the kingdom.

  The irony is that this radically new interpretation of the “Li sao,” while not figuratively rendering the story of Qu Yuan’s trials as related in the Shiji biography in every detail (the goal of much traditional commentary), it is not entirely incongruent with it. If this interpretive road had been taken during the Han dynasty, however, Han Confucian scholars would have had to admit that Qu Yuan wrote the “Li sao” not only out of love for his “shaman kingdom”—that is, Chu—but also to defend shamanism, a practice many of them despised. Moreover, as I have said before, given the importance of the minister in Warring States political theory and practice, it is easy to imagine that the spirit who descends from Heaven to aid a good king in the Guoyu story quoted earlier would make a perfect metaphor for the virtuous minister. It is also easy to imagine that a virtuous, but cautious, minister might want to avoid such a metaphor. The spirit in the Guoyu passage is an agent sent by Heaven to show its favor. A minister who used such a metaphor to describe himself would appear arrogant, if not seditious—especially during the Han dynasty.