Daoist Identity
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As this example demonstrates, the fact that the same labels are applied over time to very different social entities complicates the task of historicizing early Chinese religious traditions. Therefore, the first step in refining the sociological understanding of religious traditions in early China must be to examine historical descriptions of these traditions and the circumstances of the composition of these descriptions.
What were the traditions in early China? The simplicity of this question is deceptive, because descriptions of the early Chinese intellectual landscape do not employ uniform terms and criteria. As mentioned above, many taxonomies of these traditions imposed labels on earlier periods in a post-facto manner. Some writers divided the landscape based on the content of a set of texts (e.g., zongheng), others on a “motto” or basic philosophical position (e.g., ming), and others on the putative authorship of, or central figure in, a set of texts (e.g., Mo).
Texts themselves may be grouped by their primary referents (i.e., what other text is quoted as canonical, e.g., the category of the “six attainments” [ liuyi ], generic [e.g., “military,” bing] or formal qualities [e.g.,
“poetry,” shi ]), the basic questions posed or the answers supplied to these questions (e.g., “law,” fa), or even the primary metaphors used to illustrate these questions and answers (e.g., dao). Finally, as in the case of the “classicists” (Ru), a social or official group might also be the basis of a category. In other words, there is nothing approaching a standard rationale for grouping individuals or texts. In the absence of such a rationale, scholars resort to the use of the widely varied types of category mentioned above for the simple reason that such categories hold historical precedence.
As a result, these varied categories are used as units of a common currency, and the differences between their particular natures are diminished or ignored. For example, when the suffix jia is affixed—as it routinely is to all but a couple of the cited examples—these groups are often used as if they were of the same sociological type. The use of such traditional categories has the potential to obscure the socio-
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logical differences among early traditions because the categories themselves are treated as similar in kind. Indeed, the early Chinese conception of what constituted a “tradition” was, to a large extent, con-tingent on when the judgment was being made.
This chapter will distinguish three stages in the construction of taxonomies that led to the orthodox bibliographical categories incorporated into the standard histories during the Han dynasty. The first was the existence of socially distinct institutions predicated on the transmission of practice during the Spring and Autumn period.
The second was the isolation of master–disciple transmission from its broader social context as part of a late Warring States effort to make an ideological point about inconsistencies inherent in that type of transmission. The third was the emergence of conventional identifications of social categories, in which projections of divisions that existed in government and society defined taxonomies.
These three progressive stages may be distinguished based on the nature of the criteria singled out to divide the intellectual landscape: institutional, interpretive, and generic. The sense in which these terms are used will become clear as each stage is treated specifically; they are never completely descriptive of each individual stage of taxonomy. However, they do reflect the reality that taxonomies were compiled for radically different reasons in different periods and also emphasize the need to examine the motives for their compilation critically. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that new categories are suited to the nature of this particular inquiry in the same way that the labels currently used for early Chinese traditions were suited to the interests of those who developed them.
The Communities of Confucius and Mozi
The prototypes for Warring States models of transmission were the master–disciple groupings of the Spring and Autumn period, specifically those of Confucius and Mozi. While there is considerable evidence that the groups around these two figures functioned as au-tonomous communities that distanced themselves from society, this seems not to have been the case for later social groups asociated with them. While the evidence indicates that one facet of the communities surrounding Confucius and Mozi was the master–disciple transmission of teachings, it was only one facet of what appear to have been complex and independent social organizations.
According to the information about Confucius in the Lunyu (Ana-
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lects) and later sources that describe the composition of the Mozi (Writings of Master Mo) or the dynamics of the “Mohist” community, both Confucius and Mozi constructed institutions that operated independently of the social structure. Confucius established a number of measures designed to separate his community of disciples from the customs and values of the broader society. One type of regulation that Confucius instructed his disciples to observe was economic. Just as Weber’s “prophet” eschews a regular salary, since “charismatic domination is the very opposite of bureaucratic domination,” and “rejects as undignified any pecuniary gain that is methodical and rational” (Weber 1946, 247), so too Confucius taught his disciples that value derived from ritual context. Thus Confucius accepted meat from the nobility that he served ( Lunyu 7.7) and cherished those who sought his coun-sel. “Even if it was a carriage and horses, if it was not sacrificial meat, he did not make a ritual bow” (10.23). In this way, the earliest Confucians sought to set themselves apart from ordinary society by suspending accepted economic criteria of value and replacing them with criteria derived from a ritual system of exchange (see also Csikszentmihàlyi 2001, 265–273).
The followers of Mozi formed what was possibly an even more distinct community. While his first- and second-generation followers were not so geographically centralized as those of Confucius in Lu, there are indications that the different groupings were strictly hierarchical.
A later chapter of the Zhuangzi (Writings of Master Zhuang) says that the different divisions of the Mo lineage “took the ‘Great Master’ [ juzi ]
as their sage” (ch. 33, 10b.1079); it then describes several different groups of followers. The Great Master was able, in the words of Jiang Boqian, to inspire other Mohists to “go through fire and water” and even sacrifice their lives.4 One anecdote from the Lüshi chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lü) reveals that these communities maintained a separate legal code from the state within which they dwelt, executing a patricide despite the contrary ruling of the leader of the state of Qin (55–56).5 According to the Zhuangzi, among the other singular customs observed by the Mohists was the lack of ceremonies at birth and death (10b.1079). These different laws and practices certainly functioned to separate the followers of Mozi from their contemporaries.
These two models indicate that the early followers of Confucius and Mozi lived in communities founded on the maintenance of values different from those of the society at large, values that qualified them to fill a particular social role. Members of the Confucian community were
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often asked to serve as stewards ( zai) of the estates of wealthy landowners (e.g., Lunyu 6.5, 6.9, 6.14), but they were expected to continue to adhere to the alternative system of value, and in some instances this meant not following their employer’s wishes. So, for example, when a disciple serving as a steward helped the clan that employed him to collect taxes and added to their already exceptional wealth, Confucius expelled him from the Ru community ( Lunyu 11.17). Similarly, the values of Mohist communities were ideally suited to their particular role, that of military defensive specialists, in that absolute allegiance to a leader and a commitment to the equal distribution of resources were important in a city under siege. The emphasis on praxis was so strong in these communities that both groups in some way substituted a different set of relationships for
the biological ties of family.
Warring States Taxonomies
Late Warring States writers looked back to the Spring and Autumn Period as foundational, yet their accounts make it clear that social conditions had changed radically since then. While these later writers discussed the latter-day followers of Confucius and Mozi, they reduced the social equation to one variable: the transmission of teachings from one individual to another. This aspect was isolated and made the model for complex lines of crossgenerational transmissions of teachings as part of an attempt to diminish the authority of master–disciple transmission itself. Taxonomies of the intellectual landscape in three important late Warring States texts all use the names of individuals and differentiate these individuals by their teachings or their interpretation of earlier teachings. This may be seen from an examination of three taxonomies in late Warring States texts. The “Xianxue”
(Renowned Learning) chapter of the Hanfeizi (Writings of Master Han Fei) divides Ru and Mo learning into eight and three groups of descent, respectively, each associated with a particular Warring States figure.6 The “Tianxia” (The World) chapter of the Zhuangzi constructs five (or six) rather different divisions of non-Ru thinkers, each represented by one to three figures, based on criteria that vary from internal practices to philosophical positions.7 The “Fei shier zi” (Against the Twelve Masters) chapter of the Xunzi condemns six pairs of figures, which are differentiated according to their behavior, the content of their teachings, and their methods of misleading others.8 In each of these cases, little mention is made of the Spring and Autumn period communities surrounding Confucius and Mozi or of latter-day
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survivals of their customs or structures. Instead, the emphasis is on the names of individuals and on the fragmentation of the transmission over generations.
The reason for their emphasis on fragmentation has to do with the explicit rhetorical function that these three taxonomies perform. The Hanfeizi taxonomy is the first part of a rhetorical strategy to undermine truth claims based on appeals to the authority of the ancient sage kings.
After outlining the descent groups from Confucius and Mozi, the writer continues by observing that “what each (group) adopted and ignored (from their founder) was different and contradictory.” Thus the Hanfeizi taxonomy is in itself a stage in an argument about the in-applicability of past models to the present.
A similar assumption about the fragmentation of knowledge is basic to the Zhuangzi and is also the basis of the taxonomy in the
“Tianxia” chapter. There, the first five descriptions begin with a sum-mary of a particular subgroup of the “ancient methods and techniques” (Guo 10b.1069). Yet the understanding of moderns, as contrasted with the complete understanding of the ancients, is at best partial:
The people of the world each act on their preferences, and on this basis form their own method ( fang). It pains me that the hundred schools move along without looking back, and in this manner will certainly never unite. (Guo 10b.1069)
Because humanity has turned a collective back on the unity of knowledge, the best that may be hoped for is the use of a method that preserves one particular aspect of the methods of the ancients.9 The perspective of the Zhuangzi, like that of the Hanfeizi, is that fragmentation is an irreversible historical process that is linked to the inability of contemporary humans to nullify their desires. In turn, these desires lead individuals to focus on one particular aspect of the teachings of previous generations.
The taxonomy of the Xunzi is exceptional in that while it also emphasized the inevitability of interpretive variation, it alone posited the possibility of the correct transmission surviving across generations.
Xunzi believed that the “footprints of the ancient sages” could be discovered by attending to the governance of the sage-emperors Yao and Shun and to the righteous acts of Confucius and his disciple Zi Gong.
Nevertheless, Xunzi did accept the basic thesis of the degradation of information that is the basis of the critique of Hanfeizi and Zhuangzi.
Each of the three examples of late Warring States taxonomy is
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presented as proof of the inevitability of the misinterpretation of classical teachings and, as such, is an argument for either the superiority of a novel system of government ( Han Fei), a natural innateness ( Zhuangzi), or a particular strain of Confucian fundamentalism ( Xunzi). As a result, their “interpretation” of a particular ancient teaching essentially differentiates the groupings that are central to these taxonomies.
Taxonomies in the Han Dynasty
During the Han, the criteria according to which previous writers were categorized shifted once more, and again the reason for the shift had to do with changes in the social situation. During the Spring and Autumn period, the terms Ru and Mo referred to communities bound by distinct social relations; during the Warring States period, different taxonomies were largely organized to illustrate differences in interpretation of teachings. For the Han, neither of these two explanations suffices to describe the complex situation. This is partly the result of centralization and the capacity for distribution of texts that the new empire created and partly the result of increased bureaucratization of earlier modes of transmission. The resulting taxonomies were primarily based on conventions surrounding both official and private learning and may be described as “generic,” even though they carried over elements of the earlier institutional and interpretive modes.
The most influential taxonomies of the Han period appeared in this atmosphere, as part of the standard histories Shiji and Hanshu (History of the Han Dynasty). Sima Qian’s record of his father Tan’s discussion of the “Essentials of the Six Schools” ( liujia zhi yaozhi) divides those who “work on behalf of government” into the following six groups: yin-yang, Ru, Mo, ming, fa, and daode (130.3288). Each of these groups is later discussed as a jia (with the daode group becoming the daojia) and are differentiated from each primarily by the methods ( shu) that might be used to govern, a use to which Sima Qian laments that his father was never able to put them (130.3293).10
The Sima taxonomy is similar to those of the Warring States period in that the groups are arranged primarily by maxims and methods. In no case is a group identified by its isolation from the social structure.
There are important differences, however, that mark this taxonomy as being substantially different from both types of predecessors. First, with the exception of the surname Mo, proper names are not used to describe the groupings, but instead, key methods are employed. That
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is, instead of referring to a founder figure, even when such a figure existed, the groups are described according to methods tied to rulership. A second difference is that group membership is not constituted by master–disciple transmission, but in the case of the Ru, at least, by allegiance to a common project: “Now, the Ru take the ‘six attainments’
as their models ( fa)” ( Shiji 130.3290). The Sima taxonomy is, therefore, tied to the bureaucracy, inasmuch as each group supplies a method for a specific aspect of governing.11
This relationship is also characteristic of the thirtieth chapter of Ban Gu’s (32–92 c.e.) Hanshu, the culmination of an earlier cataloging effort that began in 26 b.c.e. There, Ban divides the written materials that were the product of a survey into six categories, the texts of the
“six attainments,” the “various masters” ( zhuzi ), “poetry and rhyme prose” ( shifu), “military texts” ( bingshu), “algorithms and techniques”
( shushu), and “recipes and arts” ( fangji ). These categories confirm the trends present in Sima Qian’s taxonomy. Most evidently, the treatise is devoted not to a typology of names, or even methods of rulership, but to written materials. Officials collected these materials according to the nature of their position. The classics and “various masters” texts were co
llected and catalogued by the officials who would use these texts: for example, the “recipes and arts” texts were the responsibility of the physician Li Zhuguo ( Hanshu 30.1701). In this way, Ban’s bibliography was tied even more closely to the workings of the government than the Sima taxonomy.
The dominant rationale for taxonomies in the Western Han was the product of a different project than that of the late Warring States writers. As several recent examinations of the Han have emphasized, the three-way homology between the body, the state, and the cosmos was a dominant feature of Western Han intellectual life (see Sivin 1995). The taxonomies of Sima Qian and Ban Gu seek to organize the existing types of expertise in the image of the government itself. Like their Warring States predecessors, the Han writers assumed that original knowledge degraded but still held out the possibility that the parts could be reassembled to reach that original knowledge again. This stance may be seen from their use of the terms dao and shu “methods.”
For Sima Tan, the daojia was best able to select methods from each of the other groups and “cause human essence and spirit to be unified”
( Shiji 130.3289).12 As such, the Sima taxonomy may be seen as serving the same function as that of the Xunzi, to privilege one group as “complete” among a number of groups that are partially correct. Ban uses the same metaphor in his discussion of the “various masters”:
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The nine lineages [of the various masters] all arose when the kingly dao had already diminished, the feudal lords use strength to conquer.