Late
Warring States
17. Twilight in the East
0254-0249
Introduction. We here take up a period of only five years' duration, which marks in many ways the end of the old style of political thought (the "sayings" of a sage) and the beginning of the new (the more systematic presentation of a worldview). The old and the new overlapped in the person of Sywndz, who at first had been a philosopher, making pronouncements in a rather terse style, but who by 0257 had begun to compose at greater length and with more thematic rigor. In 0254 Sywndz made the transition from theory to practice. he became the virtual ruler of a territory newly conquered by Chu, just south of Lu. From his position of power in Lan-ling, he became the arbiter of orthodoxy in that part of the world. In 0249, following the Chu conquest of Lu itself, Sywndz simply shut down all of his rivals who were within his reach. Between those endpoints, there was a scramble among the Lu area philosophers to take up a survivable position. In the process, the Mencian schools in particular turned out some material of enduring importance.
Major events in the period covered by this chapter are:
0255
Chu begins conquest of former Sung territory, south of Lu
0254
0253f
0251f
0249Background. Chi had been driven from its Sung conquest back in 0285, but the state of Sung was not restored. The former Sung territory, the adjoining territory of Lu, and the small states along the borders of Lu, remained as a tempting zone of opportunity for the larger powers. In 0278, Chu had been forced out of its capital Ying, and had relocated to a recent conqust, the former eastern state of Chvn. From that year, Chu became an eastern power, and with that move it was freed from direct military pressure by expanding Chin. Chu could thus consider its own possibilities of expansion. Among the most attractive of those possibilities was the weak former Sung territory lying directly north of its new capital.
Besides land, Chu needed legitimacy. The Jou King, though his line had been powerless for centuries, still resided in the former Jou eastern capital at Lwoyang, and still commanded a certain respect. Then there was Lu, which had long claimed to preserve the real Jou culture, and which for centuries had been a center of Confucian text production, keeping alive the supposed Way of Jou. In 0270 the Analects group in Lu had openly spoken of creating "a Jou in the East" (LY 17:4). Here was another intellectual obstacle to Chu's unification of the Sinitic world. The problem and the opportunity lay in the same direction.
Both Chin, in the west, and Chu, now in the east, felt a need to get rid of these competing legitimacy sources, so that their own bids for supreme rule could prosper without Jou theoretical objection or Lu cultural competition. In the middle of the 03rd century, they acted in parallel to eliminate them. Chu attacked the territory south of Lu in 0255. By early 0254, it controlled the area which in 0286 had been conquered by Chi, and set up a government of occupation in Lan-ling. Chin responded by conquering the eastern half of the small Jou domain. After a pause for reorganization, Chu conquered and annexed Lu itself in 0249. In that same year, an army under the new Chin minister Lw Bu-wei overcame and absorbed western Jou. After these parallel conquests, there could be no more talk of Jou sovereignty, or of any sovereignty that was sanctioned by Jou. Jou, and the direct Jou heritage in Lu, no longer existed. The question of who was entitled to rule the coming Empire was now one which the armies alone would decide.
In 0254, as soon as the military effort had achieved its goal, the abrasive Sywndz was hired from Chi to be the governor of Lan-ling. From there, he not only controlled the former Sung territory, he also had considerable influence over the schools of thought in and around Lu. The end of his essay on Standard Names was a warning about the fate that awaited these people:
"[Quote]"
In the texts of the Lu-area philosophy centers, we can still read their responses to that threat. Short as this period was, there were several stages in those responses: first shock, then accommodation, then defiance, then (at least for some) back to business as usual.
Shock. The territorial threat to Lu was obvious. The Dau/Dv Jing people, who seem to have been advising the Lu government at this time, attempted to see a bright side to the loss of territory. They went back to an old idea of simple, self-sufficient communities as the best and also the most durable. This had been the line taken by the Jwangdz Primitivists shortly after the fall of Sung. The DDJ now adds to that idea the logical but perhaps risky notion that smaller, paradoxically, is better. This was to reduce the state to its simplest terms. A similar reduction of the person appeared among the northern Mencians. Achievement in the outer world had become uncertain, but the inward quest (for what, is not exactly specified) was still viable:
Appeal. The next thought in these threatening circumstances was to appeal for clemency to the new power. Such appeals were made by the Analects school and the northern Mencians. Each sought to establish a position from which an identity of viewpoint with Sywndz could be claimed, and from that identity, to argue that their own tradition (and in the Analects case, their own local sovereignty), should be preserved. The Analects phrased its appeal as a forged ancient document. The Mencians went back only fifty years, to an imaginary Mencius. This "ancient authority" style of argument had rhetorical advantages: it avoided the appearance of saying something in its own voice, and in the present tense, for present profit.
Accommodation. The second thought of the Confucian groups was to emphasize their agreement with Sywndz's policies, as a way of arguing for their own continued existence. The Analects people added to their text a passage which updated their early version of the "standard names" theory, and insisted on it as the only right theory of administration. The southern Micians emphasized a different point of overlap: the Sywndzian philosophy of social differences. They picked up an earlier Mencian model of taxation and elaborated it into the "well-field" model. In passing, they also took a shot at the DDJ 80 idea of the simple state. They also attacked the Micians, Sywndz's old enemies on the issue of elaborate funerals, another point at which the Mencians and Sywndz were in substantial agreement.
Attack. Sywndz's social policy was at bottom an economic policy, as the Mencians were well aware. And not everyone was inclined to go along with Sywndz's economic policy. Several Jwangdz groups adopted the MC 7A9 tactic of "advising the advisor," but with more force. They used vivid human and animal metaphors to denounce a theory which claimed to produce social order, but infact only produced poverty and crime. Sywndz insisted on social differences, and felt that a modest economic standard would do for the lower social orders. The lower orders attacked this at several points. They found Sywndz's rigid justice to be a violation of natural right. They felt that Swyndz's differential economy simply generated robbery. They found Sywndz, the self-styled Great Ru with his prized classics the Shr and Shu, as teaching the elite how to steal from the people. And they found Sywndz's promise of an adequate living for the lower orders (SZ 18, a policy paper of only a few years earlier) to be too far in the future to be worth anything:
10. The Criminal of Chi (JZ 25:8)
11. The Grave Robbers (JZ 26:4)
12. The Fish in the Rut (JZ 26:2)These last two passages are among the funniest in Jwangdz. Fine. But we do not properly appreciate the fun, the incongruity, unless we know that there is real pain behind the fun.
Defiance. As time passed, and as the various text-producing enterprises in the zone of Sywndz's influence continued to exist, they too came to feel (perhaps stimulated by the dangerous example of the Jwangdzians) that stronger opposition was possible. Some of the resulting writings, like the extended satire in Analects 19, were subtle, in the same carefully coded way that all samizdat literature is subtle: it hopes to make its point while evading the censor. Others, coming from the Mencian camp or the DDJ headquarters, were more overt:
13. Against Compromise (MC 3B1)
14. Against Sywndz (DDJ 81)The Mencius Issue. Sywndz might be right or wrong, but his success was a theoretical problem, especially for the Mencians. Confucius's myth by this time showed him as received by various rulers, but it die not claim that he had actual power in any of their states. The case of Mencius was even more difficult: Mencius had left Chi in disgrace after the Yen fiasco in 0313, and held no position of consequence afterward, and everybody knew it. Sywndz himself had left Chi in a swirl of controversy, but had gone on to a better job: no mere theorist, but a wielder of power. The southern Mencians dealt with this by evolving an apologia for Mencius, avoiding mention of Yen, and stressing that ritual scrupulousness had prevented Mencius from serving the King of Chi. But to salvage the reputation of Mencius in this way contained an implicit criticism of Sywndz, the ritual expert. Must he not have compromised his principles to have served the ruler of Chu?
15. On Not Serving (MC 3B2)
16. On Not Going (MC 3B3)
Positions. In the time left to them, the two Mencian schools strove to articulate the distinctive Mencian position against its rivals, not only Sywndz, but also and more openly the Yang Ju or individualist school (by which they meant the Jwangdz people), and the ever-present Micians. It is notable that the basis for the ideal state, in both northern and southern Mencian theory, is now economic. This too is an old Mencian idea, now further developed. The "artifice" that was central to Sywndz's idea of civilization, and his doctrine of expediency ("bending" oneself and straightening out later), were easy targets. A sort of ethical purism, natural enough as a reaction to declining conditions, is also noticed in a story from the Jwangdz, which is not really disagreed with by the inward-turning northern Mencians:
17. Instinctive Knowledge (MC 7A15)
18. Enriching the People (MC 7A23)
19. Against Rigid Views (MC 7A26)
20. The Scruples of Lyedz (JZ 28:9)
21. The Scruples of Chvn Jung (MC 7A34)Further Positions. We may notice a few more Mencian position papers, ending with a pair of readings in which the southern Mencians take up the Chvn Jung question, but reach a quite different result than did the northern Mencians in MC 7A34. Some pieces oppose doctrines not in detail, but by the cover labels Yang and Mwo. "Yang" (the philosopher of self, Yang Ju) here stands for the Jwangdz people, who were the chief advocates of self in this period. "Mwo" is the ever-present Mwodz group. For themselves, the Mencians had adopted Sywndz's term Ru, thus bringing both of them together as Confucians.
22. The Chicken Thief (MC 3B8)
23. Against Yang and Mwo (MC 7B26)
24. Against Yang and Mwo (MC 3B9)
25. The Error of Chvn Jung (MC 3B10)The three-way Yang/Mwo/Ru scheme does blur some differences: indeed, it was advisable for the Mencians by blur any differences between themselves and Sywndz. But it does give a useful if rough idea of the main philosphical rivals of the day. It is sometimes claimed that the notion of "schools of thought" does not fit the realities of Chinese intellectual history. We can only say that something like such divisions seemed perfectly real to people who were making that history, as of the middle of the 03rd century.
Jau in 0250 was hard pressed by the armies of Chin. The least Chu could do was to offer some expert advice. Their deputation consisted of Sywndz and one of the regular Chu generals. In a sort of symposium held before the King of Jau, Sywndz gave his views on Confucian warfare. In a later addendum to that transcript, we meet Sywndz's prize pupil Li Sz, who will figure importantly in later events.
26. Syndz on War (SZ 15A)
27. Li Sz on War (SZ 15C)The End came in 0249, when Chin made an end of what was left of Jou, and when Chu also made its second move, occupying the whole of Lu, and eliminating the ruling house of Lu. The Lu capital became a Chu city: archaeology is still recovering from its streets the distinctive "ant-nose" bronze coins of Chu. Some text-producing groups, like the southern Mencians, were able to add a carefully considered last paragraph to their texts in progress. As for the peaceable Micians of Lu, they regretted that their contribution to the earlier safeguarding of Sung had gone unappreciated, in a poignant chapter which could only be filmed by someone with the sensibilities of a Kurosawa.
28. The Unappreciated Mencius (MC 7B34)
29. The Unappreciated Mwodz (MZ 50)Sywndz. The question now arises: Just how dumb do we think Sywndz was? Will he not have been able to decode the subtle satires against him? Will he not have noticed that the initially supine Analects and Mencius people had gone back on that seeming agreement, and had reverted to their original positions? As it happens, we do not need to guess the answer: we can read it in Sywndz's own files. In SZ 14:5, under the general title Attracting Scholars, Sywndz had laid out a three-year plan for the introduction of new policies and the attraction of holders of contrary opinions to accept those policies. He had thus planned to give people a certain time in which to comply with the inevitable. To his old chapter entitled Against Physiognomy (SZ 5), he now appended two paragraphs on the question of doctrinal differences. The second of these explains how to deal with those who seem to agree, but later go back on that agreement: in other words, with the situation which confronted him after three years or so in Lan-ling:
30. Death to the Incorrigible (SZ 5:10)
And in fact, after 0249, the schools he here had in mind simply ceased to exist.
(The devastation was not quite complete. Some of the Mencians took a combined Mencius text with them to Chi, where four additional chapters were added. Some Analects students went to Chi with a memorized version of that text, and added two more chapters to it before Chi itself was overthrown by Chin in 0221. (The leader of the Analects school had hidden the master copy in the wall of Confucian headquarters, plastered it over, and left for Ngwei, where he became a high minister). The ethical Micians vanished; but the military branch continued textually active after 0249. Some of the Jwangdz groups fell silent after 0249, but others went on to new things in the following period).
Chu planners, encouraged by the recent success in gaining northern territory, were already preparing to rule an eventual Chu Empire which would include the north. As part of those preparations, they had arrived at a religion policy. Like the Romans in a later age, they reasoned that it would be difficult to extirpate local cults. Instead, they put together an inclusive pantheon. Chu religion was shamanistic; it featured travels of shamans to various sponsor-deities. The official Nine Songs (one for each part of the 3x3 grid into which theorists of the time liked to divide the Chinese world), some of them shamanistic and some merely descriptive, honor in turn the accepted Nine local deities of the future Empire. Here are two of them:
31. The Lord of the River (Nine Songs #8)
32. The Great Unity (Nine Songs #1)That Chu empire was never to be, but this fact was not known at the time. Meanwhile, no one can say that Chu had failed to do their thinking in anticipation of success.
Philosophy after 0249 would be different. The Analects, the Mwodz except for its military branch, the Dau/Dv Jing, and the Mencius, were no longer active texts. Other players would hold the stage. Sywndz in Chu filled out and consolidated his more or less consistent system, built in part out of other people's ideas. In the west, a diverse group working under the Chin minister Lw Bu-wei would complete an openly eclectic philosophy of empire. The remaining Jwangdz people went on to grand notions of their own. Those three systems are the chief subject of the next chapter.
The Hundred Voices is Copyright © 1994- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
12 June 2007 / Contact The Authors / Exit to Contents Page
