The Most Venerable Book (Shang Shu)

by Confucius

  Finally we come to chapter fifty-eight. And here, frankly, we have the whole purpose of the Shang Shu summed up in two lines. Through all the ups and down that the Shang Shu records, for a period stretching over nearly two thousand years, this is what lies at the heart of the whole venture:

  A state can be brought down by just one man.

  It can also rise to glory, because of one man.

  Which brings us back to the issue of what happened when one man, the First Emperor, rose to glory and then brought it all down again.

  The Story of the Book

  Our main source for the accounts of book-burning and scholar-burying comes from the historian Sima Qian (c.145–86 BC), who makes clear his dislike of the First Emperor. The dramatic accounts of the scale of the persecution of Confucian scholars and destruction of the books under the First Emperor make for fascinating reading and have passed firmly into Chinese history and mythology. In recent years other versions of what happened have been put forward. For example, Mark Edward Lewis in The Early Chinese Empires – Qin and Han* argues that what the First Emperor did was somewhat different. He says the First Emperor forbade any private individual or group to have copies of the forbidden books and he collected them all together and kept them effectively under lock and key in the Imperial Library of the Academy founded under the First Emperor. Here, they could be studied under strict government control. The destruction of this sole collection of the books was a result of the burning of the capital during the wars which led to the rise of the Han, c.206 BC.

  There is a rather fine irony in the fact that there are various stories about what happened in the past to the Classic of Chronicles!

  In our journey through the Shang Shu above, I have explored the Book as it would have been seen by generations of Confucian students and indeed most scholars – as a coherent text consisting of ancient accounts of the great and the good and the not so good.

  But is this Book authentic?

  Today we find it almost impossible to enter a world where ancient documents were treated as authentic accounts of the time. We know too much about oral history; about the way ancient authors would lay claim to a great figure of the past to give credibility to their own thoughts and writings. For example, the Five Books of Moses in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are supposed to have been written by Moses himself. Yet they record his death. The creation of ‘histories’ or ‘chronicles’ which purport to tell the origins of a people but which were fabricated long after the events they are supposed to narrate can be seen in the Aeneid of Virgil and the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Virgil creates an entire saga of events from the Fall of Troy c.1000 BC down to the foundation of the city of Rome based upon a legendary figure, a grandson of the last king of Troy. This saga gave the emerging Roman Empire (Virgil was writing in the last half of the first century BC) a pedigree for the Classical world and a natural excuse for considering the Greeks (who of course conquered Troy by deception) as inferior and untrustworthy. A similar exercise in justifying a sense of special if not actually divine favour was sought by the Norman kings who in the eleventh to twelfth centuries were conquering lands from France and England to the Holy Land. This was provided by the very imaginative writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, who around AD 1120 wrote his History, a book which gave the British in particular a very special sense of also being descended from Troy.

  Shakespeare in his Histories has provided for many people the abiding images of the Wars of the Roses and in particular the image of Richard III as a tyrant. Shakespeare was in many ways a propagandist for the Tudors who had come to power by overthrowing Richard III. The great speeches of Shakespeare’s Histories, such as Henry V before Agincourt, have become the staple of what we imagine heroic kings to be and say. Yet these are the inventions of a playwright, written down up to two hundred years later. Their power is not to be denied, nor their insights into human nature. But we don’t think they are ‘authentic’ just because they were written down some centuries ago.

  The telling of tall stories in order to boost a national or cultural sense of superiority is not unknown today. In the 1960s, for example, Chairman Mao made up the (untrue) story that the only human-constructed edifice on the earth that could be seen by the naked eye from the moon was the Great Wall of China. He did this because his two greatest enemies, the USSR and the USA, were flying into space and clearly were going to land on the moon very soon.

  As we shall see in a moment, the authenticity of the various chapters has been challenged for over a thousand years. However, I think that this notion of authenticity is based upon a false assumption of what is authentic and what is not. No one was writing down exactly what was said or done during the Book of Yu’s era. Nor, probably, during the Book of Xia era.

  Was someone supposed to have sat down as King Wu launched his campaign and gave his great speech (chapters twenty-seven to twenty-nine)? Almost certainly not, so it was obviously constructed afterwards. Some chapters probably are exact records, such as chapter fifty, describing the funeral and the enthronement of the new king some time around 1000 BC. Other documents are accounts of the time, such as the Penal Codes and the Prince of Lu – chapter fifty-five. They do not depend for their authenticity on having been written at a specific time, but do seem to reflect values and attitudes commensurate with their supposed era.

  Even those chapters which are most regularly held up as forgeries of the third to fourth century AD probably contain within them shards of earlier texts, possibly even reworkings of poems that were known to be of the time or even about the specific event. For example, some of the chapters, such as chapter thirty-one, give very exact days, months and years – even telling us what stage the moon was at. This echoes the style of the Shang and Zhou bronzes, which often have an inscription giving the precise date and person for whom a vessel was made, where and why. These bronze inscriptions are contemporary with the events they describe and were known to later dynasties. Did the compilers of the chapters, when they sought to restore damaged or lost texts, turn to these records?

  Just to dismiss the various chapters as not having been written down at the exact time of the events they report is to fall into a trap of historical literalism, which frankly we now know is irrelevant. It certainly makes sense to try to discern what might reflect accurately attitudes, events and passions of the time, but to dismiss anything that shows signs of being finally composed years, even centuries, later is to demand of this Book a fundamentalism which does no credit to anyone nor to the integrity of the Book itself. It is, after all, a composition created over time by many hands. It is the same as the Bible, which is not the exact words of God dictated to someone at each historic event but a collection of works from different times by different hands which tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the events of history.

  The Rediscovery of the Shang Shu

  The edict of the First Emperor banning books such as the Shang Shu was not lifted until well into the next century, around 180 BC, under the new dynasty, the Han. This means that at least in theory, knowledge of the ancient forbidden books was still a criminal offence.

  Regardless of how severe or not the prohibition on private ownership of the forbidden books was, certain Confucian scholars hid their own copies of the books. In more than one case they did so by hollowing out the walls in their houses, hiding the books in the gap and then replastering the walls. So powerful is this story in China, it led to imitation millennia later. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, his fanatical young followers, the Red Guard, saw any object from the past as a sign that the owners or family were counter-revolutionary. Owning a family photo album showing life before Communism; having any antique; owning any books other than the works of Mao himself; owning records of pre-revolutionary music or, even worse, Western music – all these and many others were all denounced; and to be found in possession of any of them would lead to public humiliation at the least and possible beating to death
at worst. Mao modelled himself explicitly on the First Emperor.

  Knowing their history, people dug holes in the walls of their houses and hid their precious treasures – be they family photos, letters, jewels, statues of the gods or books. The great Tang Shan earthquake in 1976 killed around half a million people. One thing which surprised rescuers was how many substantial-looking and often older houses had collapsed. One reason for this was that the walls had been so hollowed out to hide family treasures, they had become weakened.

  The books were also hidden in another way. The Book of Songs and the Shang Shu arose from oral tradition – from reciting the songs and events at ceremonial occasions or in the evenings in the homes of the great as well as by the fireplaces of the ordinary people. As with scholars of the Qur’an today, the ability to recite an entire sacred book would have been considered a sign of great holiness or worthiness. So some of the texts survived in the minds and memories of the scholars who outlived the events of the First Emperor’s reign and its immediate aftermath – civil war followed by the rise of a new dynasty, the Han.

  The hero of this part of the story is Fu Sheng. He had been the Imperial Historian under the First Emperor – a rather dangerous occupation, to put it mildly. Forewarned of the planned ban on private ownership, he dug a hole in the wall of his house and hid books including the Shang Shu. He then fled into exile.

  Decades later, when it was safe to return, he dug the books out of the wall. But tragically only about a quarter of the Shang Shu had survived the nearly forty years of its immurement. Just twenty-eight chapters survived, and it was from these that he taught his disciples. The versions he had produced for teaching were written in the revised characters that had been brought in thirty or so years before in order to standardize the use of characters across a united China. For this reason, and very confusingly, this version, the oldest version of the Shang Shu, is called the New Version or Text. The texts he used probably dated back at least eight hundred years and in one or two cases such as chapter seven, even further. Lying behind many of them there may well be an even earlier oral history, a fact which is perhaps borne out most clearly in the use of sets of four-character sentences within many of the older texts. This could take us back to perhaps as long ago as the mid-second millennium BC.

  Around the same time as Fu Sheng’s discoveries, a further chapter, which is now in three parts and forms chapters twenty-seven to twenty-nine of the official text, was found – also hidden in a wall – and this was added to those found by Fu Sheng. However, it is possible that this was the first of the forgeries.

  Then another version appeared. During the renovation of the home of Confucius in Qufu, another immured text appeared. This one was written in the old style of characters. It was translated into the modern style by Kong Anguo, a descendant of Confucius. This version had fifty-eight chapters, including the twenty-eight that Fu Sheng had found. Because it was originally written in the old-style characters, it is called the Old Text or Version. Because it was a fuller text, it was this version which eventually gained greatest popularity and laid the foundations for what is now the Canonical Version.

  However, for a while the New Text was given greater status. For example, when the Emperor Ling Ti of the Han had the Classics carved on stone between AD 175 and 183, it was the New Text which was used. These stone classics were however destroyed very soon after, in the wars which brought down the Han dynasty.

  In the mid-third century the Classics were again carved on stone and this time the pattern was set for the future because it was the Old Text that was chosen. Yet once again these were destroyed in the fall of the Jin dynasty in AD 311. And once again it seemed the Shang Shu might disappear.

  When the Jin regained control in AD 317, the Court sought versions of the Classics in order to start again. It was at this point that a version was presented by Mei Ze which was called the Kong Anguo Shang Shu – named after the original finder and translator of the Old Text.

  It is now that doubt enters in. While the New Text chapters are all there and seem to have the ring of authenticity, the other chapters have long been suspected of being reworkings or even downright inventions of Mei Ze. It is these that are seen as fourth-century forgeries.

  The final stage in this extraordinary saga is that, early in the Tang dynasty, a final authorized edition was published in 653 and carved on stone stele by imperial order in 837. This set of stone carvings from which all subsequent copies have come – including the one I have used for this translation – still survives to this day. It can be seen in the Forest of Steles Museum in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China. It is the Kong Anguo Shang Shu presented by Mei Ze in the fourth century AD. Interestingly, it is titled ‘Shang Shu’, not ‘Shu Jing’, though the sign in front of it for visitors calls it the ‘Book of History – Shu Jing’.

  In recent years archaeology has added to our knowledge of what survived. Tombs in Jingmen, Hubei Province dating to the third to second centuries BC have yielded bamboo books including sections of the Shang Shu. In some of these, entirely new texts have been found – presumably part of the 100 chapters that we know Confucius wrote about, of which only twenty-eight survived for Fu Sheng to rediscover. Other texts, such as chapter seventeen, We are both Straightforward Virtuous Men, and chapters twenty-one to twenty-three – ‘The Mandate of Yue, parts I to III’ – are not there in these early texts.

  Below is a now established list of what are seen as the earliest texts from Fu Sheng’s twenty-eight chapters and what are seen as later texts from Mei Ze’s text.

  Chapters of the Shang Shu

  A. Earliest Texts, possibly as old as c. fourteenth century BC to sixth century BC

  Chapters:

  1 18–20 37 46

  2 24 38 47

  3 25 39 50

  4 26 40 51

  5 30 41 55

  6 32 42 56

  7 34 43 57

  10 35 44 58

  B. Later Texts – Possibly contain early material but may have been recomposed in the third to fourth centuries AD

  Chapters:

  3 13 31 49

  8 14–16 33 52

  9 17 36 53

  11 21–23 45 54

  12 27–29 48

  Critical Study of the Shang Shu

  What is truly remarkable about China is that respect for the authenticity of books such as the Shang Shu was challenged so very early on. Doubts were being expressed by the sixth century AD, and a full-scale assault on the authenticity of the Shang Shu was mounted by scholars in the twelfth century. For example, the great Neo-Confucian scholar Wu Yu in the first half of the twelfth century dismissed large sections of the Shang Shu as forgeries. Critical exploration of ancient and especially sacred texts in the West only really started – for example, with the Bible or Homer – in the early nineteenth century.

  The origin of such critical studies lies partially in the desire of these scholars to find the true history of ancient China and in part was also a response to the uncritical way the Shang Shu was being studied and applied by conventional Confucians. In particular, these critical studies arose from the Neo-Confucian School associated with Zhu Xi (AD 1130 to 1200), which sought to revive a serious study of the past in order to revitalize the moral energy of the Confucian tradition, not least in response to the growth of other religious and philosophical traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism.

  The critical study of the Shang Shu was also a major feature of the intellectual debate surrounding the revival of the Five Classics under the foreign invader dynasty of the Qing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century AD. The Mongol Qing were keen to appear to be the legitimate heirs of ancient Chinese tradition and quoted the Mandate of Heaven as part of their justification for invading and conquering a corrupt Ming dynasty (1644). To bolster their position, they ordered a reissue of the major Classics and funded this venture magnificently. By doing so they hoped to show that they were more respectful of Chinese tradition and culture than the
previous, ethnically Chinese, dynasty.

  This provoked fury and outrage amongst some in the Chinese elite and renewed the critical, even dismissive, attitude towards these ancient Classics, building on the work of the twelfth-century Neo-Confucians.

  The introduction of Western influences in the second half of the nineteenth century brought a further round of cynicism and scepticism. The Confucian Tradition was seen by radical young Chinese as a block to the modernization of China and as remnants of a discredited imperial past. Even before the 1911 Revolution which overthrew the last dynasty, the old order of Imperial Exams based on the Confucian Classics was thrown out and indeed viewed as obscurantist. They viewed the exams, with their focus on repetition of key sections of the Classics as the root of all problems, as holding back intellectual development in China. Problems which were set in the exams could only really relate to issues explored in the Classics and whilst moral and philosophical topics could be examined in this way, contemporary issues of modernization and the collapse of the older structures of Chinese society under the massive changes of the dying days of the Qing Dynasty were thought to be far beyond the reach of the Classics and their rote-learning by students.

  Throughout much of the twentieth century, Confucius and the traditions and texts surrounding his name were simply rejected out of hand or made the target of mass campaigns: for example, the ‘Criticize Lin: Criticize Confucius’ Campaign launched in 1973, which lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Lin was the disgraced former Prime Minister of China who reputedly died in a plane crash in Mongolia as he fled to the Soviet Union. His being linked with Confucius emphasized the attack on treacherous advisors.