by Peter Watson
Sind, the Punjab and Bengal became the main centres of Sufism, the two most important orders being known as Suhrawardi and Chisht, the former named after the author of a manual on Sufism and the latter after the name of the village where the order began. Chishti Sufis led a life of poverty and asceticism, and practised a number of devices to assist concentration–pas-i-anfas (control of breath), chilla (forty days of hard exercises in a remote location) and, most extraordinary of all, chilla-i-makus (forty days of exercises performed with one’s head on the ground and the legs tied to the branch of a tree). These practices shocked more orthodox Muslims–and there were several unsuccessful attempts to stamp them out. Just as Buddhism was Sinicised in China, so Islam was Hinduised in India.67
Throughout 1,500 years in India, Buddhism and Hinduism had co-existed peacefully, borrowing ideas and practices from each other. Following the Islamic invasions, however, the number of Buddhist centres–Nalanda, Vikramasila, Odontapuri–was much smaller and suppression correspondingly more successful. Buddhism in India died out and was not resurrected until the middle of the nineteenth century.68
The eastward diffusion of religious ideas, from Mesopotamia to India, and from India to south-east Asia and Japan, was matched, of course, by the westward movement of Christianity and Judaism. The radiation of these big ideas from such a small area of the globe, is, in terms of lives influenced, probably the greatest shift in thought throughout history.
14
China’s Scholar-Elite, Lixue and the Culture of the Brush
To Chapter 14 Notes and References
The Greek name for the Chinese was Seres, from which the Latin word serica derives, meaning silk. The writer Pliny was just one who railed against the luxurious indulgences of his stylish contemporaries, complaining that enormous quantities of Chinese silk had entered Rome. Chinese textiles travelled west along the so-called Silk Roads from at least 1200 BC because, until AD 200, or thereabouts, only the Chinese knew how to process silkworms.* As late as the seventh century travellers, including monks, carried silk rolls to use as money in the case of medical emergencies. According to legend, the Chinese lost their monopoly on silk production when a Chinese bride smuggled a cocoon out in her hair when she travelled to marry a central Asian prince. Certainly, by the fourth or fifth centuries, silk was made in Persia, India and Byzantium, as well as China, though the Chinese kept their competitive edge because they produced more densely woven silks with more complex weaves.1
As this implies, by medieval times, the most intellectually sophisticated country in the world, and the most technologically advanced, was China. In fact, China’s pre-eminence was probably greater during the Song dynasty (960–1279) than at any other time. Joseph Needham (1900–1995), the Cambridge scholar who devoted his life to the study of early science in China, said in his massive history of the subject that ‘Whenever one follows any specific piece of scientific or technological history in Chinese literature, it is always at the Song dynasty that one finds the major focal point.’ However, as Endymion Wilkinson points out, this may have something to do with the fact that the development of printing (which we shall soon come to) ensured that more works survive from Song times than any period previously.2 One sign of the sophistication and success of China was her population, which was in excess of 70 million in the twelfth century and may have been 100 million a century later, almost double what it was in Europe.3
Since the marvels of the Han age, covered in Chapter 8, several other dynasties had come and gone. China had been divided by barbarian nomads and reunified, divided and reunified again, the great walls and canals that lined the countryside had been built by conscript labour and a measure of stability and brilliance achieved under the Tang dynasty (618–906), whose emperors had ruled, been deposed, and restored, thanks to their massive eighth-century horse-breeding programme for the cavalry, which provided the backbone of their army before the invention of gunpowder. During the dynasty of the two Songs (960–1234 in the north, lasting until 1279 in the south), China reached the edge of modern science and brought about a minor industrial revolution. ‘No country could compare in the application of natural knowledge to practical human needs.’4
A number of ideas and impressive technological inventions contributed to this sophistication of the Songs, the first of which was paper, which ultimately led to printing. The Chinese had writings as early as the Zhang dynasty (1765–1045 BC). These consisted of animal bones or tortoise-shells which had been cracked with red-hot pokers, for the purposes of divination, and on which written characters had been inscribed, interpreting the cracks in the bones. Around 3,500 different characters are found on these early scapulae and shells (modern Chinese has about 80,000 characters), which would on occasions be bound together. This practice gradually gave way to books made of bamboo slips, written on with a kind of stylus and using a form of varnish to write with. These too were bound together with strings or thongs. Confucius himself used books of this kind when he was studying the I Ching and he was apparently so earnest a pupil, so hard on his books, that he broke the thong three times.5 According to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, in their history of the book, the oldest Chinese books to survive were excavated at the beginning of the twentieth century in the deserts of central Asia, where they were found to consist of strips of wood and bamboo on which were written vocabularies, calendars, medical prescriptions and official records relating to the daily life of the garrisons guarding the Silk Road. Written in ink brush, they dated from AD 98–137. However, since then books of wooden slips have been discovered in ancient tombs dating from as early as the fifth century BC.
Silk sometimes replaced bamboo–it was lighter, stronger, more resilient, and it could be wrapped around a rod, saving space. In this way, the Chinese word for ‘roll’ became the word for ‘book’ (as happened with volumen in Latin). But silk wasn’t cheap and the Chinese were always on the look-out for alternatives. By a process of trial and error, using at first silk waste, then other forms of refuse (linen rags, old fishing nets, hemp, mulberry bark) they arrived at a paste which, when dry, would take writing. It was the practice then to attribute all innovations to the emperor’s court and so the invention of paper was formally awarded to the director of the imperial workshops, the eunuch Cai Lun (d. AD121). He it was who wrote the report to the emperor in AD 105 in which the invention of paper is first mentioned, but it must have been in use for some time by then, after being developed by some lesser soul whose name was never recorded.6
As it replaced silk (for all but luxury books), paper was produced in sheets about 24 cm × 45cm(9½ × 18 in). The sheets were glued together to form long strips which could be rolled around rods. But the practice was cumbersome: if some specific passage were sought, the entire book had to be unrolled. This probably accounts for the division of books into leaves, though many of the sacred books of India had been written on palm leaves, bound together with twine, so a model was to hand. In an ancient Chinese library excavated at Dunhuang, where 15,000 manuscripts dating from the fifth to tenth centuries were found, different types of book were discovered walled up together. Besides rolls there were what the Chinese called ‘whirling books’. These had their vertical edges glued together and they were stored like the folds of an accordion, and opened out in zig-zag formation. This arrangement is still used for calligraphy, certain sacred Buddhist or Taoist texts, and books of paintings, but the edges tore easily and so the next step was made–to fold the sheets down the middle and sew the spines together. This left the leaves free to flutter at will, and gave these books their Chinese name–‘butterfly books’.7
With the coming of paper, so the invention of printing was not far behind. By the time paper arrived, it had long been the practice in China, as elsewhere, to engrave classical texts on great slabs of stone–stelae–in order to preserve the texts as accurately as possible, as well as making them accessible to the public. This led to a practice of carving the texts in reverse so that pilgrim/tour
ists could take away rubbings. This was of course printing in all but name. But it was in fact the development of the seal engraved in relief which led most directly to the printing of books. By the beginning of the first century AD, it had become the fashion in China for the pious to have seals engraved in relief, often containing lengthy religious texts, prayers and even portraits of the Buddha. These seals sometimes adorned the cells of Buddhist monks but the important breakthrough seems to have come from the capacity for paper to take an impression, something that didn’t happen with silk. Such impressions would have provided people with the reverse images needed to produce proper printed pages that could be read. Experimentation proliferated and, from discoveries made, the earliest woodblock engraved in relief and in reverse is a small portrait of the Buddha discovered by Paul Pelliot, the great French prehistorian, near Kuche in Sinkiang, and dating from the mid-eighth century AD. The oldest printed book in the world is now in the British Library, a long roll printed by a xylographic (woodblock) process in 868. It is a Buddhist text and has a beautiful frontispiece, of such quality that it suggests the technique was already advanced. A book recently discovered in Korea may be older, but for the moment scholars cannot decide whether its origin is Korean or Chinese.8
Block printing seems to have emerged along the banks of the Yangtze river, from where it spread, mainly by religious authorities to preserve canonical writings. In AD 932, Feng Dao prepared a report for the emperor, in which he recommended the use of block printing to preserve the classics because the dynasty then in power did not have the financial means to do the job in the traditional way–namely by engraving a series of ‘classics on stone’. The new project was very successful, encouraging literacy, and between 932 and 953 most of the existing literature was put into print. This sanctified the new technology, and Feng Dao was credited with the invention of printing. As before, with Cai Lun and paper, other, earlier anonymous souls were really responsible.
Experimentation continued but early attempts at copper engraving and the use of movable type were not successful. The first real attempts to make movable type came in the eleventh century and are attributed to Bi Sheng, a blacksmith and alchemist who used a soft paste to make the letters, which he then hardened in fire. They were then attached to an iron plate with a glue made of wax and resin which congealed when cold. By reheating, the letters could be detached and rearranged for a new text.9 Hard woods, lead, copper and tin were also tried as founts for the letters but were never very successful. In one treatise of the time it was suggested that the characters be stored according to sound: that is, characters which rhymed would be boxed together.10
It is now clear, however, that printing with movable type went ahead fastest in China’s neighbour, Korea. This was due to the intervention of a benevolent ruler, King Sejong, who in 1403 issued an extraordinary decree, which sounds enlightened even today and must have been extremely so at the time. ‘To govern well,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books, so as to satisfy reason and to reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained. Our country is in the east beyond the sea and books from China are scarce. Wood-blocks wear out easily and besides, it is difficult to engrave all the books in the world. I want letters to be made from copper to be used for printing so that more books will be made available. This would produce benefits too extensive to measure. It is not fitting that the people should bear the cost of such work, which will be borne by the Treasury.’ Some 100,000 sorts (letters) were cast as a result of this edict, and ten more founts were made during the course of the century, the first three of which (1403, 1420 and 1434), we now know, preceded the invention of printing by Gutenberg.11 But neither the Korean nor Chinese system seems to have travelled west quickly enough to influence the invention of printing in Europe.12
Though a good deal of the Song renaissance depended on the wider availability of texts, the Chinese themselves never regarded printing as the revolutionary process it was considered in Europe. One important reason for this was that the Chinese language did not possess an alphabet; instead it consisted of thousands of different characters. Movable type did not therefore confer the same advantages. Furthermore, Europeans in China during Renaissance and Reformation times noted that woodblock carvers could engrave a page of Chinese characters just as quickly as a European compositor could set up a page of, say, Latin text. And there were two other advantages to woodblock printing: the blocks could be kept and stored, for later editions; and they could be carved just as easily for illustrations as for text. Chinese books therefore had illustrations, and in colour, several hundred years before books in the West.13
Printing raises the issue of writing and language. The Chinese language, and script, are based on rather different ideas from, say, the Indo-European languages. Although there are many dialects of Chinese, Mandarin–the native tongue of north China–comprises about 70 per cent of what is spoken today. All its characters are monosyllabic so that, for example, in Mandarin ‘China’ is Zhong guo, which literally means ‘middle country’. Moreover there are only about 420 syllables in Mandarin, as compared with, say, 1,200 in English, and because there are about 50,000 words in a Chinese dictionary there are many words pronounced using the same sound or syllable. To obtain the diversity of meaning that is needed, therefore, all syllables may be pronounced in one of four tones: high, high-rising, high-falling, low-dipping. To use the English example given by Zhou Youguang, think of the way English-speakers say ‘Yes’ under various circumstances–for example, when answering a knock on the door while immersed in a task, or when agreeing to something doubtful while still questioning it in one’s head. Such differences in tone completely change the meaning of Chinese words. Ma, for instance, can mean ‘mother’, ‘horse’ or ‘scold’ according to the tone in which it is pronounced.14 More complex still, there are forty-one meanings of the Chinese character yi pronounced in the fourth tone, including ‘easy’, ‘righteousness’, ‘difference’ and ‘art’. Meaning must be inferred from context.
Because Chinese is a non-inflectional language, words do not change according to number, gender, case, tense, voice or mood. Relationships are indicated either by word order or the use of auxiliary words. Take for example this sentence as it would be delivered in Chinese: ‘Yesterday he give I two literature revolution book.’ ‘Yesterday’ indicates that ‘give’ means ‘gave’ (as we would say in English). Word order indicates that ‘I’ means me, and ‘two’ indicates that ‘book’ means ‘books’. The most difficult interpretation in this sentence is ‘literature revolution’. But the word order indicates that it must mean ‘literary revolution’ and not ‘revolutionary literature’. And so the full sentence means ‘Yesterday, he gave me two books on [the] literary revolution.’15 Auxiliary words like le indicate a completed tense of a verb and ‘I’ followed by wen means ‘we’. Words are also classified as ‘solid’ or ‘empty’. Solid words have meaning in themselves, while empty ones are used in a grammatical sense, to fulfil prepositional, connective or interrogative functions. ‘You are an Englishman ma’, for example, means ‘Are you an Englishman?’16
In the same way that the Chinese language is based on a different set of ideas from the Indo-European languages, so its script is very different from the Western alphabets. It recalls much more the early pictographs used in Mesopotamia at the birth of writing. All Chinese dialects use the same script, on which others such as Korean and Japanese are based. According to tradition, Chinese script was invented by Cang Re, an official at the court of the semi-mythical emperor, Huang Di, who lived at the beginning of the third millennium BC, though there is no archaeological evidence for the Chinese script older than 1400 BC on oracle bones and bronze vessels. The script is based on four ideas. The first is pictorial representation. The sun, for instance, was first written as a circle with a dot inside. This was later schematised as a rectangle with a short stroke in the middle. Three peaks stood for a mountain. (See Figure 11 o
verleaf for several examples.) The second principle was the use of diagrams. Numbers, for example, were simple strokes and the concepts ‘above’ and ‘below’ were represented by a dot above and below a horizontal stroke (again, see Figure 11.) The third principle was suggestion (and a certain sense of humour). ‘Hear’, for example, was shown by an ear between two panels of a door, and ‘forest’ was two trees side-by-side. The fourth principle is to combine signification and phonetics. For example, the character for ‘ocean’ and ‘sheep’ are both yang, with the same tone. So ocean became yang plus the character for ‘water’. This is only a beginning, of course. Chinese characters are classified in dictionaries according to 214 ‘radicals’, or identifying roots. These indicate the general characteristics of meaning, on which various embellishments have been added.17
Chinese script, traditionally written with a brush, rather than a pen, exists in various styles–such as the regular style, the running style, and the ‘grass’ style. In the regular style, each stroke is separate, comparable to manuscript writing in English or Latin. In the running style, separate strokes tend to merge into flowing lines, much more so than cursive script in English. The grass style is much abbreviated, like shorthand. For example, the character li (ritual, propriety) is written with seventeen strokes in regular style, nine in running style and just four in grass style.18 The regular style is used in formal writing but running style is preferred in art, which includes calligraphy.
