by Livia Kohn
The author would finally like to acknowledge the support of the Jesse Ball duPont Religious, Charitable, and Educational Fund during the writing of this chapter at the National Humanities Center, and the helpful comments of Stephen R. Bokenkamp.
1. Recent writings by Qiu Xigui in China (1993, 249–255) and Ikeda Tomohisa in Japan (1993, 36–47) have argued that in the cases of the two texts introduced earlier, the labels being applied to them do not quite match the texts. For some primary sources, the following conventions are used: (1) references to the Standard Histories are to the Zhonghua punctuated edition published in Beijing, e.g., Shiji (1959) or Hanshu (1962); (2) references to the Thirteen Classics refer to the Zhonghua reprint (1979) of the Qing dynasty blockprint edition of Ruan Yuan’s (1764–1849) Shisanjing zhushu; (3) other collections cited frequently are the 1983 Beijing Zhonghua edition of Zhuzi jicheng. The exceptions are Zhuangzi and Lüshi chunqiu, which are referenced using Guo Qingfan’s Zhuangzi jijie and Chen Qiyou’s Lüshi chunqiu jiaoshi (see below). The numbering of the passages in the Analects follows D. C. Lau (1979).
2. What some have objected to as cultural essentialism was also, in terms of its assumption that structural differences between cultures may be expressed in religious forms, a valuable counterweight to the universalist approaches to religions inherited from evolutionary models popular in the late nineteenth century. For example, it was Weber, along with C. K. Yang, who first emphasized the diffuse nature of indigenous East Asian religions and contrasted them with the dominant European traditions possessing an organization separate from the social structure. See Weber 1951, 143.
3. This problem illustrates a limitation of the application of the Weberian conception of religion to early China. Because Weber’s discussions are for the most part restricted to independent and self-conscious movements, his perception of the “diffused” nature of early Confucianism leads him to view Confucius as primarily a “philosopher.” For a more detailed critique of Weber’s reading, see Csikszentmihàlyi 2001.
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4. Jiang summarizes the Mohist hierarchy: “Mozi certainly was the ultimate leader in his lifetime, but after his death the juzi became the leaders. Those who subsequently became juzi derived their authority from the previous ones”
(1985, 224). Jiang probably bases this statement about self-sacrifice on the story of Great Master Meng Sheng, who inspired his disciples to face death (Chen, Lüshi chunqiu, 1257–1258).
5. Note that the Mohists would be particularly deaf to giving a murderer special consideration based on a family relationship because of their doctrine of caring for all people equally regardless of kinship.
6. The Ru groups are named after masters Zi Zhang, Zi Si, Yanshi, Mengshi, Qidiao shi, Zhongliang shi, Sunshi, and Yueshi. The Mo groups are called Xiangli shi, Xiangfu shi, and Dengling shi. See Hanfeizi jijie 49, in Zhuzi jicheng 19.351.
7. Two groups are distinguished by practical as well as philosophical descriptions: (1) Mozi and his disciple Qin Guli; (2) Song Bing and Yin Wen.
Three groups are differentiated by doctrinal considerations: (3) Peng Meng and his student Tian Pian, and Shen Dao; (4) Guan Yin and Lao Dan; (5) Zhuang Zhou. A sixth figure is Hui Shi, but since the style of his description differs greatly from that of the others, it is not clear that he is really part of the taxonomy ( Zhuangzi 10b. 1065–1115).
8. These six groups are: (1) Tuo Xiao and Wei Mou; (2) Chen Zhong and Shi Qiu; (3) Mozi and Song Bing; (4) Shen Dao and Tian Pian; (5) Hui Shi and Deng Xi; (6) Zi Si and Meng Ke. Lu Wenchao notes that the last pair does not appear in the parallel text of the Hanshi waizhuan (Han’s Separate Transmission of the Poetry) and concludes that the passage condemn-ing them was added by Hanfeizi and Li Si ( Xunzi jijie 6, in Zhuzi jicheng 3.57).
9. This view is similar to the one expressed in the “Jiebi” (Explaining Un-worthiness) chapter of the Xunzi: “Those of partial learning observe a corner of the Dao, but cannot understand its totality” ( Xunzi jijie 21, in Zhuzi jicheng 15.262). According to the Xunzi, Confucius was the only one who was not partial in this sense.
10. The implication is that to the degree Sima’s father Tan had a grasp of the whole spectrum of methods that conferred authority, he was qualified to do so.
11. That his disapproval over the bureaucratization of the Ru was one of the primary reasons that Sima Qian invented the category Huang-Lao and tried to lend prestige to its members is the contention of Mark Csikszentmihàlyi and Michael Nylan, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions in the Shiji” (unpublished manuscript).
12. The relationship between dao and shu is similar to the way in which, in Jia Yi’s (200–168 b.c.e.) Xinshu (New Writings), the dao is made up of a variety of specific shu. See Csikszentmihàlyi 1997.
13. Ban Gu also highlights the calculation involved in these techniques:
“Demolishing the great to make it into the small, paring down the distant to make it into the near, this is how techniques of the dao do their breaking and splitting, and are difficult to see” ( Hanshu 30.1767).
14. During the Han, perceived age increased the authority and value of a
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text. The fact is lamented by Liu Jia (fl. 157 b.c.e.) in the second chapter of the Xinyu (New Sayings). Lu argues that there is something that the present and the past have in common: “[The common people] mistakenly value those things that have been transmitted from ancient times and take lightly those made in the present” ( Xinyu jiaozhu in Zhuzi jicheng, 39).
15. Texts include Lunheng (6.12) and Shiji (12.468). See Yü 1964; Seidel 1969.
16. Zhuangzi 6.467; Shiji 12.467–468. See Csikszentmihàlyi 1994, 87–94.
17. Zhouyi zhengyi (Proper Interpretation of the Book of Changes), ed.
Shisan jing zhushu, 7.70. This text is probably a product of the third through first centuries b.c.e. See Petersen 1982.
18. Examples of such works in the bibliographic catalog of the Jiu Tangshu (Old History of the Tang Dynasty) are the Zhenzhong sushu (Pure Pillowbook) and the Bian Que zhenzhong bijue (Secret Pillowbook Formula of Bian Que).
See Jiu Tangshu 205.5198, 207.5306.
19. The earliest link with the state of Qi is the reference to Huangdi inscribed in the mid-fourth century bronze vessel called the Chenhou Yinzi dui.
For a discussion, see Csikszentmihàlyi 1994, 70–74. The Jijie commentary to the Shiji (80.2436) notes that some editions also read Yue Jugong for Yue Chengong, and Hanshu 37.1981 has Jugong for the same individual.
20. In 145 c.e. a person taking the title “Yellow Emperor” (Huangdi) led an insurrection in east-central China. It was suppressed, but three years later the “Son of the Yellow Emperor” and the “Perfected” led two nearby insurrections. The more-involved but not completely successful Yellow Turbans movement was an academy before it turned into a rebellion in 184. Its leader, Zhang Jue, according to the Hou Hanshu, “took the title ‘Great Worthy and Exellent Teacher’ and attended to matters with the Dao of Huang-Lao.” Even the term “Celestial Masters” is seen in the context of the Mawangdui materials from the late fourth or third century b.c.e., when a figure named such answers one of Huangdi’s questions. See Mawangdui Hanmu boshu 3.145.
21. Harold Roth has convincingly demonstrated, through a comparison of passages using meditative vocabulary in a variety of early texts, that common forms of meditation existed in the Warring States period (1991). These indigenous meditation practices were in some ways forerunners to later Daoist practice.
22. This episode in the history of Daoism also diverges in some important ways from the implicit precedent in the history of Christianity. First, Christianity is rarely conceived as being defined by its continuous form of social organization; rather, it is seen in terms of the recognition of the authority of a founder figure. This is not the case for later daojiao, especially in the light of Kobayashi’s point that the term jiao was used only in the late
Six Dynasties and then in the context of the comparison with Buddhism (1990, 512–521). Second, Strickmann’s claim that Daoism “continues under the aegis of its successors and derivatives to the present day” begs the question of what degree of variation in social organization is permissible in such a comparison. Not only was the transmission of Huang-Lao during the Han accomplished through passing on revealed texts, but it fit the pattern of “nuclear, not hierarchical” dissemination that Strickmann proposes. The early Celes-
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tial Masters tradition that grew out of the Five Pecks of Rice movement, then, should not necessarily be looked upon as an original social form that appeared out of the blue as “Daoism” in the second century c.e. Rather, it could just as well be examined as the most successful variation on a theme that started at least three centuries earlier.
Specifically, the deep reflection demanded of the sage resembles the type of meditation that scholars since Marcel Granet have theorized was the ex-periential base of texts like the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Liezi. While the connotations of the expression “to attend to one’s solitude” are not well established, Shimamori Tetsuo’s examination of six texts that use the phrase highlights the solitary nature of this approach to self-cultivation in the Wuxing pian (1979). On the surface at least, this is not incompatible with the practice of
“concealing oneself in a remote place to model the form within oneself [ nei-xing],” as recommended to the Yellow Emperor. According to the Mawangdui narrative, prior to his decisive military victory, Huangdi withdrew for three years to a scenic mountaintop to carry out the practice ( Mawangdui hanmu boshu 1.65). These methods are at least partially echoed in the Wuxing pian.
Bibliography
Asano Yuichi. 1997. Koshi shinwa. Tokyo: Iwanami.
Chen Qiyou. 1984. Lüshi chunqiu jiaoshi. Shanghai: Xinhua.
Csikszentmihàlyi, Mark. 1994. “Emulating the Yellow Emperor: The Theory and Practice of Huang-Lao, 180–141 b.c.e.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
———. 1997. “Jia Yi’s ‘Techniques of the Dao’ and the Han Confucian Appropriation of Technical Discourse.” Asia Major 10.1–2:49–67.
———. 2001. “Confucius.” In The Rivers of Paradise, ed. by D. N. Freedman and M. McClymond. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Daniélou, Jean. 1964. The Theology of Jewish Christianity. Chicago: H. Regnery, 233–308.
Elman, Benjamin. 1984. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Guo Qingfan. 1961. Zhuangzi jijie. Beijing: Zhonghua.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ikeda Tomohisa. 1993. Baotai kanbo hakusho gogyohen kenkyu. Tokyo: Kuko shoin.
Jiang Boqian. 1985. Zhuzi tongkao. Zhejiang: Guji.
Kobayashi Masayoshi. 1990. Rikucho dokyoshi kenkyu. Tokyo: Sobunsha.
Kondo Hiroyuki. 1997. “Maotai kanbo kankei ronsha mokuroku.” Chugoku shutsodo shiryo kenkyu 1:251–258.
Li Ling. 1993. Zhongguo fangshu kao. Beijing: Renmin zhongguo.
Pang Pu. 1980. Boshu wuxing pian yanjiu. Shandong: Zilu shushe.
Peterson, Willard J. 1982. “Making Connections: ‘Commentary on the At-
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tached Verbalizations ’ of the Book of Change.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42:67–116.
Roth, Harold D. 1991. “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51:599–650.
Seidel, Anna K. 1969. La divinisation de Lao Tseu dans le taoïsme des Han. Paris: Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient.
———. 1983. “Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments: Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha.” In Tantric and Taoist Studies, ed. by Michel Strickmann, 2: 291–371. Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises.
Shimamori Tetsuo. 1979. “Shindoku no shiso.” Bunka 42.3–4:1–14.
Sivin, Nathan. 1995. “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries b.c.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55:5–37.
Strickmann, Michel. 1978. “The Mao Shan Revelations: Taoism and the Aristocracy.” T’oung Pao 63:1–64.
Turner, Bryan S. 1981. For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1951. The Religion of China. Trans. by H. H. Gerth. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
———. 1963. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. by E. Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press.
Yates, Robin. 1997. Five Lost Classics. New York: Ballantine Books.
Yü, Ying-shih. 1964. “Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han-China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25:80–112.
5
Material Culture and the Dao
Textiles, Boats, and Zithers
in the Poetry of Yu Xuanji (844–868)
Suzanne Cahill
Yu Xuanji, a poet, courtesan, and Daoist nun, lived a short and violent life near the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907 c.e.). Executed in 868 for murdering her maid, she gained a reputation in later history and literature as a disruptive woman who defied social convention, sexual and intellectual norms, and, ultimately, the law. Fifty of her poems, probably less than a quarter of her total output, survive today in the Quan Tangshi (Complete Tang Poetry), abbreviated QTS. Biographical accounts of her life first appeared within a few decades of her death. The sources agree on the bare outlines of her life.1
Born to common people in the capital city of Chang’an, she was married as a secondary wife to a student named Li Yi ( zi: Zi’an). He passed the imperial examination after about two years’ residence in the capital. Yu Xuanji accompanied him when he returned home to take up an official position. Li’s primary wife, waiting at home all this time, was unable to tolerate Yu Xuanji, so Yu moved out. Eventually, she returned to the capital, where she lived in reduced circumstances, working as a courtesan. Soon she took holy orders as a Daoist nun and moved to a convent known as the Belvedere of Universal Propriety (Xianyi guan). Her convent was located close to the courtesans’ quarter in town, southwest of the imperial palace. All her adult life she wrote poetry and corresponded with other authors. In 868, accused of stran-gling her maid, Luqiao, in a jealous rage, Yu was jailed, tried, and executed by decapitation.2
Yu Xuanji has always been a controversial figure: admired for her talents and damned for her choices. Her story, linking sex, violence, religion, and talent, has fascinated writers and readers from the late Tang to the present. She appears in literature as the model of evil wom-102
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anhood that proper young ladies must avoid and reject. Tradition teaches us that because she chose what to do with her own intellect and sexuality, Yu Xuanji came to a terrible end. The 1984 movie Tangchao haofang nü (A Wild Woman of the Tang Dynasty), made by the Shaw Brothers’ Studio in Hong Kong, agrees with her major ninth-century biographer Huangfu Mei in taking this message from her life.
Critics have assumed that her Daoist vocation was insincere, disguis-ing at best a broken heart and at worst a promiscuous life. Even Robert van Gulik, who portrays the poet sympathetically in his 1968 Judge Dee mystery, Poets and Murder, does not take her career as a Daoist nun seriously. Most editors of her works arranged the poems to tell the story of a poor but gifted young girl, hurt by her lover’s rejection, who turns for escape first to religion and then to debauchery. Her notorious reputation as an executed criminal makes it difficult to assess her contributions to literature, Daoism, or women’s history in China.
If we want to know something about Yu Xuanji, her thought, and her accomplishments, we cannot do better than to study h
er actual writings in the context of her time. Many people consider the Tang dynasty to be the golden age of Chinese poetry because of the quality and ubiquity of poetic expression during that era. Tang people from all walks of life expressed themselves in verse on any occasion, private or public. The many surviving Tang poems provide a wonderful resource for exploring medieval Chinese life, but they also have limitations as primary sources. Sometimes the exact circumstances that prompted a poem can no longer be discovered; in such cases, our interpretations rely partly on inference. Conventions of language and topic further restricted poems. Finally, they alluded to a long tradition of past literature, not all of which is recoverable today. Yu Xuanji’s poems in particular have often been preserved with no information or with misleading information about the events that elicited them.
She adheres, although often ironically, to Tang codes of subject and style. She also draws, in a sophisticated and purposeful manner, upon the writings of the past. Despite limitations that force us to speculate about specific facts and situations, and despite constraints created by convention and allusion, her poems disclose a wealth of information about the world of her thought. Her works reveal a startling intellect, an original voice, and a heart longing for the Dao. She expresses her intellect, voice, and feelings within the conventions of Tang poetry.3
This chapter investigates three images from Tang material culture that recur in Yu Xuanji’s poetry: textiles, boats, and zithers. I link her use of these images with ideas about herself, female roles, the Dao,
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communication, and companionship. In exploring her use of images from material culture, I hope to bypass Yu Xuanji’s seductive notori-ety and move right to the heart of her world of thought.
It is a commonplace of Tang poetry that the description of a woman’s clothing reveals the state of the woman; that a small boat represents the wandering soul; and that the zither refers to attempts to express oneself. However, Yu Xuanji uses these conventions in many unconventional ways. In her poetry, images of textiles, boats, and zithers express new and personal meanings, connected to her experiences as a poet and as a Daoist nun. This paper examines her images to open a window into her world. When her poems are arranged according to her use of these images, they tell a new tale: the story of a poor but gifted young woman, disappointed in marriage, who turns to the consolations of poetry, Daoist contemplation, same-sex eroticism, and friendship. The multiple meanings of clothes, boats, and music in the poetry of Yu Xuanji can also illuminate medieval Chinese Daoism, material culture, and women’s culture. Let us turn now to the poems, looking first at textile images.