The second section of the canto, another episode of 48 lines but in the form of an ode, is concerned with saving and renewing the abundance in a time of dearth. It opens with an empress fleeing a usurper to save her unborn son who will grow up to restore order and continue the Hsia dynasty, and with invocations of the exemplary virtues of former emperors; it will close with further invocations, and the line ‘seek old men and new tools’. It pivots upon the instigation ‘MAKE IT NEW’, the motto of Tching Tang, who founded a new dynasty when the Hsia had fallen through neglect of the people and of the spirits. There was drought, grain was scarce, and prices were rising, and so that what grain there was should be shared equitably Tching made copper coins ‘and gave these to the people | wherewith they might buy grain | where there was grain’; and he ‘prayed on the mountain’ to make rain after the seven years of sterility. For thus contending against scarcity and greed, and for his caring for the people and respecting the spirits, his name is added to the list of honoured emperors in the closing invocations.
The canto then cuts to the fall after 400 years of the dynasty he founded. Wasteful luxury, depraved orgies, and barbaric cruelty characterize the reign of its last emperor; order is restored by the enlightened rebel who defeats him in battle, and a new dynasty is established, that of the Chou which Confucius himself would look back to in admiration. The rest of the canto is devoted to their rise and fall, with their name in ideogram placed at the exact centre of the canto as the pivot of the whole. The founding Chou emperor, observing the li, ‘Dated his year from the winter solstice.’ The first thing he did upon entering the city was to give out grain ‘till the treasuries were empty’. He demobilized the army; set up schools—‘Kids 8 to 15 in the schools, then higher training.’ As a good ruler must, he kept down taxes and cared for the needs of the people. His son continued the good work, ‘kept lynx eye on bureaucrats | lynx eye on the currency’, and regulated weights and measures. There was peace in his reign, and his last will and testament was this, ‘Keep the peace, care for the people.’ That will was fulfilled under the third emperor by the wise counsellor Chao Kong, who is held to have brought about a golden age—
Honour to Chao-Kong the surveyor
Let his name last 3000 years
Gave each man land for his labour
not by plough-land alone
But for keeping of silk-worms
Reforested the mulberry groves
Set periodical markets
Exchange brought abundance, the prisons were empty.
‘Yao and Chun have returned’
sang the farmers
‘Peace and abundance bring virtue.’ I am
‘Pro-Tcheou’ said Confucius five centuries later.
With his mind on this age.
Chao-Kong died ‘on a journey he made for the good of the state’,
and men never thereafter cut branches
of the pear-trees whereunder he had sat deeming justice
deeming the measures of lands.
‘And you will hear to this day the folk singing’ about that—a song to be found in the Shih King, the Classic Anthology which Confucius is supposed to have edited as a monument to the Chou.
In the 500 years from the death of Chao-Kong down to Confucius’ lifetime there were good emperors and bad, good times and disasters, but overall a steady decline from peace and abundance towards a breaking down of the great empire into warring petty states. The fourth emperor ‘hunted across the tilled fields’ and died ‘to joy of the people’. His successor meant well but ‘fell into vanity’, though in old age he ‘wd/ have made reparation’ and did reform the criminal law. The tenth Chou was ‘avid of silver’, and had to be reminded of a prince’s obligation to see to it that ‘l’argent circule | that cash move amongst people’—or else, he was told, ‘The end of your house is upon us.’ By the time his son became ruler Tartar barbarians were raiding into China and he fought against them, with some success so long as he performed the rites and was not ‘rash in council’—two odes in The Classic Anthology celebrate his expeditions. He failed, however, to perform the spring rite as laid down in Li Ki and there were four years of famine with ‘the wild goose crying sorrow’; and when he called back his people they were reduced to dwelling amid reeds and pine trees. Thereafter the Chou empire fell into disorder: the ancestral tombs were neglected; its men would not stand together; there was much lawlessness, murders and treasons, ‘Wars, | wars without interest’; and there was disturbance in nature, earthquakes, eclipses, comets. That was the state of things when Confucius was made a minister, and though he had one evildoer beheaded, he could not persuade the ruler to rule responsibly and so retired from office and went off to edit the book of odes. He saved and passed on what could be saved in a time much like Pound’s own, a time of ‘Greed, murder, jealousies, taxes’, and of ‘armament racket, war propaganda’.
Canto 53, taken as a whole, has first refined de Mailla’s diffuse account of about thirteen hundred years of history into the Confucian foundation myth of the ideal state; and then, in its second half, given a summary account of the actual historical conditions under which and in response to which Confucius and his followers fashioned their reforming ideal. There is an exact balance between the early myth-making and the later critical accounts of how princes were behaving in the real world, with the clear imperative to good government poised against the evidence of how rarely and with what difficulty it was actually carried out.
The following eight cantos trace the vicissitudes of the Confucian paideuma through twenty centuries down to about 1776. Dynasties rise and fall one after the other as they follow or fail to follow the Confucian principles. The same fallings off recur, and the same recoveries of virtue—this history does repeat itself. Beyond that truism, though, each canto unfolds a new development in the story, and yields a further insight—there is progression both in the narrative and in the understanding of what has been and what might be. The overall structure is dramatic, much like that of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies: a pattern of civilized order is achieved in spite of enemies within and without through the first three of the ten cantos—is broken down into increasing disorder by those enemies through the middle cantos—and in the final three a new force overcomes the enemies and re-establishes right order. The constant measure is respect for the Confucian books, that is, for the History Book itself and for the Book of Songs.
Canto 54 begins with the fall of the Chou dynasty after eight centuries. A new emperor united all China and ‘jacked up astronomy’, but then ‘after 33 years burnt the books’, and his dynasty fell soon after. Then came the Han and an emperor who saw the need to restore the books and the law code and the record of the rites ‘as check on successors’, and who ‘brought calm and abundance’ so that ‘the men in the vaudevilles | sang of peace and of empire’. The Han enlightenment lasted over 300 years, and near their end an academy of scholars had the books ‘incised in stone | 46 tablets set up at the door of the college’. But by then the emperor ‘was governed by eunuchs’, there were ‘wars, taxes, oppressions’, and Taoists and Buddhists were subverting the administrations. The palace eunuchs, and the Taoists and the Buddhists, now figure as the enemy within, enemies even more threatening than the Tartar enemy without, the eunuchs as being irresponsible and self-seeking, the Taoists as preferring quietism and private pleasures to public service, and the Buddhists as considering ‘their own welfare only’, that is, for seeking individual salvation or nirvana while cultivating indifference to the affairs of this world. It is a telling moment when Buddhists break up the 46 tablets to get stone for a temple—then the empire rotted and ‘Snow alone kept out the tartars’. And when the last Han went Taoist, ‘sat late and wrote verses | His mandate was ended’. The Tang dynasty then rose, and, maintaining that ‘Kung is to China as is water to fishes’, turned out the ‘taozers’ and ‘the damn buddhists’, and for a time there was again justice and abundance throughout the empire. But then an emp
ress was run by Buddhists, ‘who told her she was the daughter of Buddha’; and ‘there came a taozer babbling of the elixir | that wd/ make men live without end’, and the peasants were complaining of being squeezed by taxes on top of tithes. Thus another 1,000 and more years passed, 279 BC to AD 805.
Through the first third of canto 55 things go on in much the same way for another century and a half, as in a repeating pattern in the fabric of time, until the rise of the Sung dynasty under whom China enjoyed both a renaissance and a fatal loss of will. ‘TAI TSONG brought out the true BOOKS’ about AD 978; there was a revolt against the greed of the mandarins and a demand for just distribution; ‘GIN TSONG cleaned out the taozers | and the tartars began using books’; then in the eleventh century came Ngan, the next great reformer after Confucius. He re-established the regulation of markets, that the right price of things be set daily, that a market tax should go to the emperor and the poor be thus relieved of charges, and that commerce be enlivened ‘by making to circulate the whole realm’s abundance’.
And Ngan saw land lying barren
because peasants had nowt to sow there
whence said: Lend ’em grain in the spring time
that they can pay back in autumn
with a bit of increase, this wd/ augment the reserve,
This will need a tribunal
and the same tribunal shd/ seek
equity
for all lands and all merchandise
according to harvest and soil
Ngan’s thoroughly Confucian reforms worked for twenty years, yet they were not only complained about by the mandarins and rich merchants whose greed they were designed to constrain, but were argued against as too radical and impractical by a fellow minister, Ssé-ma Kouang, who had them rescinded. Yet Ssé-ma Kouang was the great Confucian scholar who put together the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government. When he died, ‘merchants in Caïfong put up their shutters in mourning’; but Ngan’s fate was to be driven from office, vilified by conservative Confucians as guilty of Taoist and Buddhist errors. Ngan protested, ‘YAO, CHUN were thus in government’, and Pound associates his reforms with ‘Reason from heaven [which] | enlighteneth all things’. On this occasion, though, the Confucian enlightenment was prevented by a Confucian who knew the books but would not carry them into action. Shortly after that the Sung ‘died of levying taxes’ and ‘state usury’; its last emperor, HOEï, ‘went taozer’, and surrendered to barbarian invaders.
The Mongols take over in canto 56 for an interval of 160 years. The terrible Ghengis Khan came in having heard something of ‘alphabets, morals, mores’, and being surprised to learn that it was more profitable to tax his new subjects than to exterminate them in his usual fashion; but Kublai Khan, who extended Mongol domination over all China, ‘was a buggar for taxes’ and his finance minister was ‘stinking with graft’; and though Gin Tsong honoured Kung with the rites ‘his son died of assassins’. Through the main part of this canto the movement is unsettled, scherzo-like, casting rapidly back and forth between occupying Mongol and weak Sung, touching on wars, taxes, and granaries, on bandits, pirates—and a treatise on the cultivation of silk worms. Under the decadent last of these Mongols there were again ‘At court, eunuchs and grafters | among mongols no man trusted other’, and that dynasty fell in confusion ‘from losing the law of Chung Ni (Confucius)’. This time it was the son of a poor labourer, Hong Vou, who rose up to defeat the failing rulers and restore order in the empire. ‘Once again war is over. Go talk to the savants,’ he said, under the ideograms naming Yao, Chun, and Chou; ‘To peasants he gave allotments | gave tools and yoke oxen’; and he ‘declined a treatise on Immortality | offered by Taozers’. His Ming dynasty lasted from 1368 down to 1644.
‘Ming’ in the Occidental mind is likely to be associated with exuberantly decorated porcelain and other works of fine art. There were major literary and historical writings too—including a gigantic encyclopedia consisting of ‘all major works in Confucian classics, history, philosophy and miscellaneous subjects, totalling 22,877 rolls and involving the work of 2,316 scholars’. That is noticed in canto 57—‘And YANG LO commanded a “summa” | that is that the gist of the books be corrected.’ Remarkably though, no other detail of this dynasty’s cultural achievements is mentioned. Pound’s concern, like that of the Confucian historians, is with the increasing corruption of government under the Ming. There is the key statement, ‘HONG VOU restored Imperial order | yet now came again eunuchs, taozers and hochang.’ There was famine, and wasteful expenditure on armaments—a thousand primitive tanks that ‘were never brought into action’; there was ‘a rebellion of eunuchs’; there were heavy taxes, and a young emperor’s chief eunuch was found to have salted away ‘gold bars 240 thousand…| 15 millions in money | 5 million bars silver’, and so forth. The next emperor ‘was a writer of verses | in fact he said he wd/ like to resign’; and in his time another court favourite was found to have hoarded up gold and silver, ‘not to count silk of the first grade, pearls | cut stones and jewels’. Private greed and luxury were at the heart of the later Ming government, and oppression and neglect of the people.
Under the last Ming emperor, with decadence at court and disorder in the state, the hordes on the northern borders were uniting under the Manchu and driving back the Ming armies—
And the lord of MANCHU wrote to the MING lord saying:
We took arms against oppression
and from fear of oppression
not that we wish to rule over you
He wanted peace, he declared, according to the Manchu history, and took laws and letters from China for his own people, ‘set exams in the Chinese manner’, and ‘Chose learning from Yao, Shun and Kungfutseu, | from Yu the leader of waters’. As he raided toward the capital he wrote to the governor of a nearby city,
If children are cut off from parents
if wives cannot see their husbands
if your houses are devast and your riches carried away
this is not of me but of mandarins
Not I but yr/ emperor slaughters you
and yr/ overlords who take no care of yr/ people
and count soldiers as nothing.
The Manchu lord might have said that he was destroying China in order to save it, and he did ruthlessly kill and purge its corrupt elements, and impose peace and sound government. So the enemy without overcame the enemy within—the emperor himself and his mandarins being now identified with the latter—and the mandate of heaven to care for the people was assumed by the former barbarian invaders.
The first line of canto 59 is in Latin, ‘De libro CHI-KING sic censeo’, that is, ‘concerning the Book of Odes I think as follows’. The Latin is from a Jesuit’s version of the preface by the third Manchu emperor to a translation of the Confucian Odes into Manchu in 1655. The emperor was affirming the fundamental importance of the Odes for good government—
all things are here brought to precisions
that we shd/ learn our integrity
that we shd/ attain our integrity
Ut animum nostrum purget, Confucius ait, dirigatque
ad lumen rationis 2
That this book keep us in the due bounds of office
the norm
show what we shd/ take into action;
what follow within and persistently
Thus the Manchu re-established the Confucian basis of Chinese civilization; and Lacharme, the Jesuit translator, conveyed the Odes, and that idea of their function, into Europe’s language of the learned.
Now the threat to China’s Confucian culture came from Europe, in the form of Jesuit missionaries seeking converts, and from Portuguese and Dutch merchants. This canto and the next are much concerned with the interactions of the Europeans and the Chinese, more especially with Jesuit–Chinese relations. At issue is how great a presence and how much influence the Europeans are to be allowed. Kang Hsi who reigned from 1662 to 1723 had the Jesuits at his court, de Mailla among them, busy tran
slating and exchanging the science and technology and the intelligence that each had to offer the other. The Jesuits’ astronomy was welcomed—‘(Galileo’s, an heretic’s)’—and their founding of cannon, ‘which have served us in civil wars’, and their mathematics and science; as missionaries, however, they were not to build churches nor to convert any Chinese. This emperor was all for the advancement of learning, but was careful at the same time to safeguard China’s own traditions and culture.
Both the son whom he appointed to succeed him, and that emperor’s successor, were exemplary Confucian rulers, so that the Histoire générale, and Pound’s ‘China Cantos’, conclude upon an affirmative note. Yong Tching honoured his forebears and the spirits of fields and of heaven, and actively ‘sought good of the people’. He reformed the laws—‘No death sentence save a man were thrice tried’. The Christians were put out, for ‘disturbing good customs | seeking to uproot Kung’s laws’. Graft was put down, and the cheating of the poor. The distribution of rice was controlled, to maintain a just price and provide against famine. The history books were updated and reverenced. The emperor ploughed his ceremonial furrow, ‘as writ in LI KI in the old days’. And as the population increased new land was opened up and there were tax exemptions for bringing it under cultivation. Thus the Confucian paideuma once again brought peace, justice, and abundance to China. Meanwhile in Europe and in America violent revolutions were preparing against the oppressions of their rulers.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 41
