haughtiness though rich. What do you think of that?” The Master replied,
“That is fine, but it would be better to be joyful though poor and to love propriety though rich.” Zigong said, “The Poems say,
As if cut, as if filed,
as if chiseled, as if polished. 10
Does this refer to what you are saying?” The Master replied, “Zigong, now I can finally speak of the Poems with you. After I told you something, you knew what it implied.” (1.15)
子貢曰。貧而無諂。富而無驕。何如。子曰。可也。未若貧而樂。富而
好禮者也。子貢曰。詩云。如切如磋。如琢如磨。其斯之謂與。子
曰。賜也。始可與言詩已矣。告諸往而知來者。
Zigong deserves praise not for memorizing the Poems (acquisition of such knowledge is a bare minimum for cultural competence), but
—————
10. Mao #55. After Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 37.
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26
Performing the Tradition
for being able to use poetic citation to give figural expression to the
crux of the matter under discussion: namely, that properly inter-
nalized moral precepts shape the person like a stone that is chiseled
and polished. Confucius’s statement that “I can finally speak of the
Poems with you” implies that simply having the knowledge is not
enough; one must know how to use it. In fact, speaking of the Poems
outside their application is pointless. When Confucius tells Zigong,
“After I told you something, you knew what it implied,” he is
praising Zigong’s performance, his ability to bring his knowledge to
bear on the matter at hand in a timely and appropriate fashion. He
has demonstrated cultural competence. That these passages in the
Analects are able to address matters of cultural competence explicitly is an indication that such practices were in place long before its
compilation. The figure of Confucius is portrayed in the Analects in two roles: as an exemplar of cultural competence, who is able to
handle bodies of received knowledge judiciously in his own debates;
and as a teacher of cultural competence, who enjoins his disciples to
do the hard work necessary to achieve fluency in certain bodies of
knowledge and in a certain set of practices. 11 He is not preaching a new doctrine so much as codifying a set of existing practices that
might help one to achieve distinction within the community and to
succeed in the service of one’s lord.
It is one thing to demonstrate cultural competence before your
teacher, where praise and censure are at stake, but it is another thing
in front of a ruler at court, where one’s livelihood (if not life) may
very well hang in the balance. The cultural competence of the an-
cient Chinese courtier comprises two skills similarly much prized
by the Renaissance courtier in Europe: sprezzatura, the appearance that one is speaking off the top of one’s head with wit and timing,
and mediocrità, a solid grounding in knowledge. In fashioning a style of speech that at once appears improvised and well supported
by knowledge of the past, the Traditionalists were endeavoring,
—————
11. Note that Confucius never attempts to explicitly teach his disciples how to frame a good argument, or how to use a poem well; he simply does it himself or tells them what they need to achieve, tests them, and gives his evaluation of their efforts. He realizes that cultural competence is something that can only be gained by each person through practice. (See Analects 1.1 and 7.8.)
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Performing the Tradition
27
through daily repetition of the practice, to establish their mode of
discourse as the only one acceptable at court. 12 The narratives of the Zuo Tradition are simply a powerful and enduring extension of that desire. The Traditionalist, through repeated citations from orthodox knowledge and insistence on proper protocol in performance of
ritual, attempts to control how and what the world means. He does this by constantly making reference to the golden standards of the
past, thus giving structure and meaning to chaotic events of the
present. He either praises events and behavior for being in accord
with received models, or shows exactly in what respect and by what
degree they fall short, shoring up a teetering society with threads of
“patterned culture” ( wen 文). In the Traditionalist view, cultural competence becomes a matter of survival for the entire state. 13
Cultural competence is not a set of skills that can be explicitly
taught by a teacher to a student; it is inculcated in a particular en-
vironment. Much like Wheelwright Bian in the Daoist parable
found in Zhuangzi 莊子 (chap. 13), who maintains that his skill in fashioning wheels is an innate sense derived from experience that
cannot be transmitted in words, the Traditionalist develops a sense
of fashioning utterances through experience. But where is a young,
aspiring Traditionalist to look for guidance? In the first instance, he
turns to his senior cohort, of whom Confucius eventually became
the ultimate representative. But there is another place: the guidelines
for competent deployment of the Tradition are already encoded
within the Tradition itself. Certainly, if a Tradition is to perpetuate
—————
12. The question of improvisation is vexed here. Officials often knew before-hand what sort of advice they might give or what behavior of the ruler they were attempting to rectify; so they would have had ample time to prepare their speeches.
It was also in the interest of those repeating (and eventually transcribing) the narratives found in the Zuo Tradition to make their confreres seem as competent as possible; embellishment, polishing, and even fabrication certainly occurred after the fact. Nevertheless, the speeches were always meant to appear as improvised utterances, however that appearance might be achieved.
13. Haun Saussy, in The Problem of the Chinese Aesthetic, identifies this impulse to view the Tradition as a restorative force in the Mao prefaces to the Poems (or Odes):
“the tradition reads the Odes as the description of a possible ethical world. It reads them in the performative mode, as narrating, in the form of history, the model actions that its own reading must second in order to make them actual” (p. 105).
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28
Performing the Tradition
itself, especially in the absence of a widespread form of durable
transcription, it requires a group of people who will memorize it
and utter it repeatedly. This is not enough, however—in order to
justify its continuing preservation and transmission, a Tradition
must be made relevant to an ever-shifting present moment at the
locus of political power, the only place with the means to support a
class of people with enough leisure time to study and practice tra-
ditional bodies of knowledge. In short, the Tradition needs the
Traditionalist to justify its continuing existence just as much as he
needs it to do the same. Knowledge and person are bound in an
inextricable symbiotic relation
ship. 14
It should come as no surprise, then, that the bodies of knowledge
inherited from the Western Zhou were not transparent to their re-
cipients in the Eastern Zhou and subsequent eras. They exhibit the
very lacunae, inconsistencies, and ambivalences needed to provide
space for a class of people to interpret them and to allow those
people the latitude to apply them to a wide variety of circumstances.
In addition to providing this space, they bear encoded guidelines for
their use. For example, the Changes is a divination manual for interpreting the operations of the cosmos that takes the form of a se-
ries of interpretations nested one within the other; the Documents is largely a collection of important speeches that is used as a rhetorical
resource in speeches; the Poems contain a variety of encoded guidelines, including how to deduce an interior state of mind from am-
biguous external evidence (Mao #65, 76), how to fashion a song of
praise for your superior (Mao #235, 240, 260), how to use meta-
phorical language to veil satirical intent (Mao #113, 155), how words
may be used to enact and preserve ritual (Mao #245, 272, 282, 283),
and a host of other skills necessary for a Traditionalist to demon-
—————
14. This symbiosis is akin to the one between human beings and genes. Do our genes encode the pattern of life necessary to perpetuate our existence, or are we simply the means by which genes perpetuate their own existence, as Dawkins argues in The Selfish Gene? The answer, of course, is “both.” Remove one element and the other perishes; attempts at separating them only lead to paradox. Certainly, the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty 秦始皇帝 realized the nature of this relationship when, in 213 b.c.e., he ordered both books and scholars to be destroyed during the
“Burning of the Books and Burying of the Traditionalists” 焚書坑儒.
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Performing the Tradition
29
strate his cultural competence. 15 The Chinese Tradition is perpetu-ated through the very sorts of practices (namely, interpretation and
application) for which it stands as a model. Even this overarching
principle is encoded within it. One of the Poems tells us: “Hew
an axe-handle, hew an axe-handle, / The model is not far off” 伐柯
伐柯/其則不遠. 16 This recursive quality means that the Tradition constantly expands to include all later acts of interpretation and
application, even as it preserves a kernel of originary knowledge at
its core.
The Eastern Zhou, as it is depicted in the Zuo Tradition, is an era of transition from a time in which the core bodies of knowledge in
the Tradition were accessed through ritual reenactment to a time in
which they were treated as a rhetorical resource for speechmaking.
In either case, Traditional knowledge in the Eastern Zhou is still
something to be performed with a measure of cultural competence. 17
The two modes of performance—reenactment and speechmaking—
are clearly manifested in two types of practice common at court:
“offering poems” 賦詩 and “citing poems” 引詩. 18 Both practices embody what might be called poetic competence, a specific and essential component of cultural competence in general.
The difference between offering a poem as a form of ritual re-
enactment and citing a poem in a speech is a difference in the mode
—————
15. Arthur Waley in The Book of Songs organizes his translation of the Poems along such lines.
16. Mao #158. After Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 103.
17. With the imperially sanctioned transcription of the Traditionalist canon in the Han dynasty, the stage was set for cultural competence to move into the arena of written composition. Advancements in writing technologies, territorial expansion of the empire, and the increasing complexity of its bureaucracy (and eventually the advent of the imperial examinations) placed a premium on interpreting and applying Traditional knowledge as writing in writing.
18. Both Yang Xiangshi ( Zuo zhuan fushi yinshi kao) and Zeng Qinliang ( Zuo zhuan yinshi fushi zhi shijiao yanjiu) collect and annotate all instances of offering and citing found in the Zuo Tradition. Schaberg ( Patterned Past, pp. 72–80, 234–43) discusses both practices, while Tam’s dissertation (“Use of Poetry in Tso Chuan”) is on offering, which he terms “chanting.” Lewis ( Writing and Authority, pp. 155–63) also briefly addresses the practice. In what follows, I will discuss only a few salient examples of each practice as they relate to the notion of poetic competence.
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30
Performing the Tradition
of discourse during performance. Each mode has its appropriate
context and demands a certain type of response from its audience.
To cite a poem—as is suggested by the Chinese character yin 引
“to draw a bowstring”—means to “draw in” or to “intromit” the
marked language of the Poems into one’s own discourse, usually a formal speech made before a peer or a superior at court. The Poems
are but one rhetorical resource to be exploited during the per-
formance of a speech; other bodies of Traditional knowledge, such
as the Documents and Changes, are also cited, though not with the same frequency as the Poems. It is the performance of the speech as a whole that commands the attention of its audience, and, if properly
deployed, wins the heart and mind of the listener. 19 The citation of poetry is just one rhetorical practice that goes into fashioning a
successful speech, but it has a profound influence on the evolving
concept of poetic competence, for it is through such practice
that the Poems are continuously applied and interpreted in an
explicit fashion.
To offer a poem—as suggested by the Chinese character fu 賦 (“to
remit, to give over”), cognate with fu 敷 (“to spread”)—means to
“display” a selection from the Poems through performance, usually as part of ritual protocol at a banquet. As a form of reenactment, it
revivifies the poem in its primordial role as a form of marked dis-
course (that is, singing, chanting, or intoning) distinct from every-
—————
19. The Zuo Tradition tells of a Zheng official, named Zichan, who protests against the cramped conditions in the lodgings that the state of Jin provides for visiting dignitaries. He makes a finely crafted speech that shames Jin into correcting the problem. In appraising this speech, a Jin minister, Yangshe Shuxiang, says, “The impossibility of doing away with words ( ci 辭) is surely exemplified here. Because Zichan had a capacity for words, the feudal lords benefited by him. So how could we ever dispense with words? The Poems say:
The harmony of the words
is the concord of the people;
the kindness of the words
is the tranquility of the people. (Mao #254.
After Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 214)
Zichan surely knew this.” (Xiang 31.6) 辭之不可以已也如是夫。子產有辭。諸侯
賴之。若之何其釋辭也。詩曰。辭之輯矣。民之協矣。辭之繹矣。民之莫
矣。其知之矣。
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Performing the Tradition
31
day speech articulating what i
s on the mind of the performer. 20 Such a use of the Poems demonstrates the power of the Tradition to assert its continuity through reenactment: “we do this as it has always
been done.” 21 The audience in this case is required to participate in the ritual by making the appropriate obeisance in acceptance of the
poem and possibly by offering another in response. The application
of the poem is in its moment of performance; its interpretation is
left unspoken, but may be inferred from the response of the audi-
ence. As the timeline of the Zuo Tradition progresses, descriptions of the practice of offering poems become increasingly scarce until
they dwindle away altogether in later texts, suggesting a gradual
transition in attitude toward the Tradition from ritual reenactment
to rhetorical resource. This is a clear mark of decline: from a time
in which the efficacy of Traditional knowledge was manifest in
its unalloyed performance into a time when such efficacy must
be bolstered by subordinating it to the practice of speechmaking.
It is a shift from the implicit, with its assumption of stable and uniform understanding, to the explicit, with its assumption of a lack of understanding. As it is written in Mencius, “Only after the Poems had come to an end were the Spring and Autumn Annals composed” (4B.21).
III
Many cases of offering poetry depicted in the Zuo Tradition are
what might be called “protocol offerings” 例賦. 22 At the formal banquets convened to receive diplomats from other states or to host
—————
20. The explicit formulation of this “primordial” role of poetry is found in the
“Canon of Shun” 舜典 in the Documents 書: “The poems should articulate intent, singing should intone the words, notes should correspond with the intonement, and modes should harmonize the notes” (Ruan Yuan, Shisan jing, vol. 1, p. 45).
21. Note that this principle too is encoded within the Tradition. “She Bore Our People” 生民 (Mao #245) is a liturgical text detailing the origins of agricultural practices and rituals with the ancestor of the Zhou people, Lord Millet (Hou Ji 后稷); its closing lines read “Hou Ji initiated the sacrifice / and the multitude has given no offence nor cause for regret / unto the present day” (Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 202). Performing the same poem in the same way as the ancestors did is its own assertion of continuity in the Tradition.
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