The
Hundred Voices
Preface
The emergence of the unified Chinese Empire in 0221, out of a previous multi-state system which was created by the fall of the overlord Jou power in 0771, is one of the great events in world history. That unified state did not really stabilize itself intellectually until the time of Emperor Wu of Hàn, whose reign began in 0140. This book takes as its subject the six centuries of development leading from the one event to the other. This was the formative period of China: the period in which the China of later ages was created. It is also the earliest period of Chinese history for which something like consecutive text evidence is available. In this book, we will read the history directly from the text evidence, supplemented by such archaeological evidence as seems directly relevant.
The first half of our six-century span is called "Spring and Autumn" after a chronicle of the state of Lu which, by fortunate accident, happens to survive for that period. The second half of the span, when texts begin to exist in greater number, is called the "Warring States," after the escalation of interstate warfare which took place at that time. These three centuries are the classical period of China: its Golden Age of philosophy and the first flowering of its literature. Apart from the importance of the history to which they bear witness, many of these texts are still read simply for their cultural importance and for their capacity to give pleasure or provide moral guidance. We hope that the sampling of texts here given, representing the "high" tradition, will remain literarily enjoyable and personally meaningful, while also illuminating the history of the classical period. In addition, some texts previously unknown, and recently recovered by archaeology, shed light on "low" subjects such as law, administration, and medicine, which are little documented in the elite theory texts which the elite tradition itself has preserved.
Chronology. Our presentation is chronological: we take things as they happened, but in segments of between five and a hundred years' duration. Within each segment, beginning in the 04th century, we emphasize relationships between texts: the philosophical dialogue called "The Hundred Schools;" our title is derived from this phrase. In general, we find that books like the Analects of Confucius and Sundz's Art of War are not personal treatises, but rather compilations which took shape over decades, in the case of Sundz, or over centuries, in the case of the Analects: the Analects is actually the record of advocacy statements put out by the Confucian School of Lu between the death of Confucius and the end of his state of Lu, about 230 years later. Much the same is true of the other great compilations on which we will be drawing: the Gwandz, the Mwodz, the Dau/Dv Jing, the Dzwo Jwan, the Jwangdz, and a number of others. Such accretional texts are intelligible only if we take their constituents one at a time. We will thus be distinguishing between Jwangdz 4 and Jwangdz 20, and between Sundz 8 and Sundz 3. These text units typically come from different times or places, and they very frequently disagree with each other. That disagreement, or revision, or updating, is the whole point of many passages. It shows the separate school keeping up with the times, and adjusting its past self to suit its present needs.
The detailed arguments on which our conclusions about date and authorship rest cannot be reproduced here, and are largely taken for granted in this book; we pause only briefly to ask the philological questions, like What is the date of this text, and Who wrote it? Those wishing a more detailed discussion of dates and attributions will find references in the footnotes to our earlier studies. In this book, we concentrate instead on the next question, the historical question: When we align the text evidence in the manner suggested by those dates, what does early Chinese history look like?
Organization. At one level, then, this book is a detailed if implicit demonstration of the historical coherence of our research results; it uses the history question as a final test of the philology question. As such, it has its place in our argument for those results. That argument is addressed to the scholarly world at large, and we hope our colleagues will find it convincing as the last step in a proof whose first steps were taken elsewhere.
But this book is also meant to be intelligible as a first introduction to the history and thought of the classical centuries, and those readers have been kept in mind as well. Information which Sinologists do not need has therefore been given where it seemed helpful, and suggestions for further reading have been provided at the end of each chapter. Given the nature of the material and the rhythm of its development, it happens that we come out with 26 chapters. Teachers are cautioned, however, that these may not map well onto the standard 13-week semester. A different pace, or a reasoned sample, may be a better classroom strategy. The explanatory material is necessarily brief and suggestive rather than full and decisive; teachers will probably wish to supplement it according to their lights.
Each chapter begins with a short list of major events, and introduces the reading selections against that background. It would be easy to crowd the book with a dizzying number of contemporary opinions and refutations. In the interest of intelligibility, we have chosen to follow a dozen major viewpoints, with others introduced more briefly and as local color enhancement of the main narrative. Each reading selection has its own short introduction, and includes notes on details that might be puzzling to a first reader, or perplexities that have aroused important controversies among the commentators. We do not imagine that these documents are self-explanatory, when encountered so far from their rhetorical context, but we have tried to keep our annotation to the minimum that will bridge that gap for the reader. Again, many of these explanatory points are susceptible of fuller statement and further development by individual teachers.
Conventions. The dates in this book are all "BC," but it is tedious to keep repeating that fact, and in any case, "BC" is a culturally parochial term that does not work well in other languages. For both reasons, we have used a leading zero on "BC" dates, so that 0479 = 479 BC, and so on.
Pronunciation of Chinese words has always been a problem. They are here spelled in a way which beginners have found to be more readily pronounceable than other systems in current use. Brief instructions, and a link to conversion tables for other systems (for convenience in consulting other works), are given on the Pronouncing Chinese page. There is also a brief Time Line for a first chronological overview.
Themes. In the chapter introductions, we have pointed to some main themes and issues in the readings; others will call attention to themselves simply by being there. Some of these recurrent motifs, such as the emphasis on ritual propriety or deportment, or the lack of public spaces in cities, are distinctively Chinese; readers familiar with ancient Greece will be surprised. Others are universal: the great issues of war and peace, of government expansion and popular protest, of right and wrong, and of how (or whether) undeserved suffering is to be set right. We have not imposed these and other questions, but have let them emerge from the period itself, in the words of the people who expressed them at the time, and have been content to follow them as they appear and develop, in their own way, over the centuries.
Tradition and Truth. We end with an important observation, which might be developed as a chapter; we give it instead four paragraphs. The observation is this: All traditions shape themselves as they grow, and Chinese tradition is no exception. Even while it was happening, and precisely because it was making something new in the world, the classical period felt a need to provide itself with precedents and pedigrees: to refer new ideas back to established names like Confucius, or to claim an origin in earlier centuries for new institutions like the power state and its legal system. They constructed documents in archaic language to give support to some new and controversial doctrine or practice, like virtue ethics or the new legal system. Further, in fighting for survival among the other Hundred Schools, Confucianism and its rivals not only took their own doctrines in different directions, they adapted other people's doctrines as seemed useful to them at the time. There is thus such a thing as Confucianism, but its doctrinal content is not constant over time. The same is true of major movements like the Micians; it is even true of individuals like Sywndz. In early China as everywhere else, everything changes, if it survives at all.
The result of these advocacy changes throughout the centuries of the classical period was that the Confucianism of the early Empire had become very different from anything that Confucius would have recognized. That is precisely why it was acceptable to the early Empire, a political situation which would also have been strange to Confucius. Nor does the story end there. The Empire continued to alter its received view of the classical period and its personalities: discarding minor characters or decorating the lives of the major characters with memorable if mythical stories (some of these, like the miracles attending the birth of Confucius, which we have noticed in their place, but as myths rather than as history). The separate traditions within Confucianism were eventually homogenized (the standard homogenized version is from the Sung dynasty; it is called Neo-Confucianism) making these originally diverse position papers speak with one voice. Some rivals of Confucianism (like the sub-elite Micians) died out altogether in later ages, and are largely forgotten in modern times. Others (like the Dauists) remained vital, but constantly evolved along with the general culture, including the general popular culture. This later history is all real in its own time, and it is important as an aspect of that time. But we are here concerned with the early history, and for that purpose, we ignore the shaping hand of later Chinese culture. As nearly as possible, we here present classical Chinese thought "as it really happened."
Since most accounts of classical Chinese history and thought reflect this later shaping, ours differs at many points. By way of orientation for readers new to the subject, here are some of the differences:
1. The Spring and Autumn centuries are traditionally seen as the time when the Chinese state strengthened itself, adopted a mass army to replace the elite chariot force previously used, and introduced social mobility. Those changes actually occurred centuries later. All Chinese statecraft thought arose out of those profound social changes, and cannot be understood unless seen against the background of those changes.
2. The traditional Chinese view is that cultural differences in the classical period, some of which persist in modern times, arose by divergence from an original purely Chinese (or "Sinitic") cultural center. Instead, the multi-state system of Spring and Autumn comprised some Sinitic states, and others which were non-Sinitic in culture, beliefs, and language. The latter tended to be located along the Pacific coast and the Yangdz River; that is, on the east and south of the Sinitic home area in the Yellow River valley. Other non-Sinitic peoples, not organized into states, lived north and west of the Sinitic core. By the end of the classical period, cultural assimilation had brought about a surface Sinicizing of all the major states, but some non-Sinitic elements in that mix still survive among the "minority peoples" of modern China. China, then, arose from the convergence of an originally disparate mix of cultures, and not the other way round.
3. It is usually thought that a series of ba or "hegemons" exerted power on behalf of the weak Jou King, with his official permission. In reality, the stronger states simply exerted power on their own behalf, and the weaker ones made do as best they could. The concept of the ba was important in legitimizing the efforts of Warring States rulers, who were operating without higher political authority, though sometimes in the name of a higher virtue. Virtue arguments in early China tend to involve not individuals but rulers, and this is one of the reasons why.
4. The standard view is that Confucius was the writer or editor of the texts that eventually became the Chinese Classics. In fact, he taught out of his own experience and authority, and the Chinese Classics only came to be accepted as such many centuries after Confucius's death. Confucius's teaching makes no sense as a set of footnotes to the Classics. It makes very convincing sense as the remarks of a transitional figure, helping his protégés to make their own transition from landed to salary status while keeping alive the core values of the old military tradition: the tradition out of which Confucius himself came.
5. Legend places some famous names (the general Sun Wu, the mystic Lau Dan) as much as several centuries before they actually lived and wrote; this hopelessly complicates the historical picture. These and other dislocations are silently corrected in the present work. Neither the tactical advice of the Sundz nor its counsels on winning the obedience of troops makes any sense except as memoranda about a new military experience which itself was only possible in an age of full resource mobilization: the replacement of Spring and Autumn elite warfare by Warring States total warfare. Evidences of that resource mobilization are first visible in the texts of the 04th century. Consistently with that evidence, the first firmly known battle between new-style armies also took place in the 04th century.
6. Scholars are in the habit of trusting the Shr Ji, a Han historical work, for information about the classical period. But the Shr Ji has its own theory of history which it imposes on the facts; for example, it is hostile to the major figures of the Chin period. It invents or exaggerates facts in support of its theory. Where possible, we have gone to better sources. We have, in fact, gone to the primary texts of the various schools of thought. We have followed Ranke's dictum that the documents themselves (interpreted with appropriate tact and experience) tell a truer story than does a processed account of the time embodied in some work of historical interpretation. The Shr Ji is interesting as an example of an 02nd century master theory of Chinese history. It is dangerous if used as a general encyclopedia.
In the view which has become more or less standard in textbooks, the intellectual history of classical China is scaled down to a few big names. But it takes more than a few people to create a culture, and we have tried to let some other voices be heard. Readers of this book will be introduced to something like a hundred of them, in the hope that together they may constitute something more like the actual chorus of antiquity; the antiquity that really was.
Envoi. The reformers at the end of the Ching (Manchu) Dynasty, when China as a society seemed somehow to have run out of steam, looked back to the classical period for inspiration and renewal. Said Lyang Chi-chau about the Warring States period, "Personalities were bigger in those days." The roads not taken by the main development of Chinese civilization were then still visible, among the roads which were taken. The Warring States period was the part of the Chinese past which seemed, in retrospect, to offer the late Chinese reformers the best possibilities for conceiving alternative futures for China. Those in charge of no particular civilization but interested in civilization in general, or in the possibilities for individuals within a given civilization, will also find here much food for thought.
Such is the currency, and the timelessness, of the classical period. We hope that readers of these pages will gain a sense of the freshness and vitality which the statesmen of a century ago perceived in it, and which has sustained many individuals in the later ages of China, and that they will also find moments of personal inspiration in what has now become a part of the world heritage.
The Hundred Voices is Copyright © 1994- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
22 Sept 2007 / Contact The Authors / Exit to Contents List
