CHAPTER ONE Wang Yi and Han Dynasty Classical Commentary David Hawkes in his Th e Songs of the South wrote, “Th e Later Han was an age of great scholars and exegetes, but Wang Yi was emphatically not of their number.” Hawkes was not alone in his judgment.1 Th e philosopher Zhu Xi began challenging Wang Yi’s work as early as the Song dynasty. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Chinese words for “strained”, “arbitrary”, and “mis- taken” pullulated in the sub-commentaries to Wang Yi’s Chu ci Commentary. Th ose who sought to correct Wang Yi of course often disagreed with each other, but on one point virtually everyone agreed: the fourth line of the Li sao spoke of the birth of Qu Yuan. Below is Hawkes’ translation, refl ecting the traditional interpretation, of the fi rst four lines of the poem: 帝高陽之苗裔兮，朕皇考曰伯庸。 攝提貞於孟陬兮，惟庚寅吾以降。 Scion of the high Lord Gao Yang Bo Yong was my father’s name When She-Ti pointed to the fi rst month of the year On the day geng-yin I passed from the womb.2 What Hawkes translates as “I passed from the womb” in the fourth line trans- lated literally reads simply “I descended.” Th e verb for “descend” is jiang 降. Without indication of where from or where to, jiang usually means to descend from the sky. A reasonable translation of the line would be “I descended from the sky on the gengyin day.” Wang Yi, however, gives jiang a literal meaning it never had before; according to him jiang in this line means “I was born.”3 Hawkes like almost everyone else has followed his gloss by translating “I passed from the womb.” He is thus following Wang Yi very closely, as we shall see. 39 © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany 40 Th e Shaman and the Heresiarch Wang Yi equated the verb jiang with the verb xia 下, a near synonym in that it means to descend; however, it never refers to human birth. Wang Yi nevertheless says that it does, but the only example he gives of xia occurring in that meaning is from the Xiao jing 孝經 (Classic of Filial Piety): “Gu qin sheng zhi xi xia 故親生之膝下.” Th e standard interpretation of the line is: “Th erefore the feeling of kinship is born when one is still a toddler at one’s parent’s knees.” Wang Yi, however, appears to interpret it diff erently, something like: “Th e mother gives birth to it below the knees.”4 But even if interpreted according to Wang Yi, the word xia in this passage means “below”, not “gives birth” or even “descend.” Th e word for “gives birth” in the line is not xia but the usual sheng 生. Wang Yi seems to believe that the proximity of the two words somehow makes them synonymous. Since xia does not mean to be born in this passage, it can- not be used as the synonym that justifi es claiming that jiang means to be born. Besides, as I have said before, during the Warring States period neither xia nor jiang literally meant to be born, at least when referring to humans. How Wang Yi’s strange gloss passed muster under the critical gaze of David Hawkes and other modern scholars is explainable either by a desire to avoid controversy or an unwillingness to look too closely at the goings on inside the sausage factory of Han commentary. Th e same may well be true of Zhu Xi and the kaozheng scholars, but they have the additional excuse of still being in the thrall of a tradition that required that Qu Yuan act as the patron saint of loyal dissent; many of these same scholars, Zhu Xi included, partici- pated in the creation and re-creation of that saint as they drew consolation from him in times of need. Moreover, despite their railing against the Han commentarial tradition, neither Zhu Xi nor kaozheng scholars ever critically dissected its methods to expose its failings. Th ey therefore never fully recov- ered from Han hermeneutic infl uence. For both the traditional scholars in the post-Song era and modern Western scholars, Wang Yi’s absurdities are the result of the misapplication of an essentially sound method, a method not very diff erent from the one they themselves subscribe to. Th e Chinese scholars see it as the Han method, the foundation of all classical scholarship, whereas the Western scholars think that it has something to do with philological methods as they are generally practiced in modern times. When Hawkes passed judg- ment on Wang, he was using the standard of modern philological practice to distinguish Wang Yi from the “great scholars and exegetes.” But how was Wang Yi judged by his Later Han dynasty contemporaries? It should be recalled that some of the greatest of the scholars to whom Hawkes alludes, also wrote commentaries (now mostly lost) on the Li sao, e.g., Ban Gu, Jia Kui 賈逵 (30‒101) and Ma Rong 馬融 (79‒166). Yet the commentary of Wang Yi, an obscure man from the provinces, eclipsed them all, and even launched him on a brilliant career at court.5 It would appear then that Wang Yi was counted a good scholar, if not a great one, by Later Han standards. Th is means, at the very least, that none of Wang Yi’s commentarial methods, © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany Wang Yi and Han Dynasty Classical Commentary 41 including that which he deployed to arrive at his gloss on jiang, were consid- ered defective by the general scholarly community. To get a better perspective on what was considered acceptable commen- tarial method during the Han dynasty, let us sample the work of scholars who are unequivocally ranked among the great. Th e best place to start is with one of Wang Yi’s contemporaries, He Xiu 何休 (129–182), who was called by Jacques Gernet “the only important representative of the jinwen traditions in the Later Han.”6 He Xiu wrote a very famous subcommentary to the Gongyang commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. Th e passage in the Annals that would prove to be one of the most important in debates concerning the meta- physical basis of Han imperial power is its last and most mysterious entry: 十有四年。春。西狩獲麟。 Fourteenth year [of Duke Ai], Spring: In the west he went hunting and caught a unicorn.7 Th e year is 481 BCE; the place is the western part of the state of Lu. Th e person hunting is not made clear, though it was probably the reigning Duke Ai. Nothing in the text suggests this except the special word for hunt, shou 狩, which usually indicates that a royal personage is hunting. “Unicorn” is the common but inaccurate rendering of the Chinese word lin 麟, which is a fabu- lous one-horned animal whose appearance scholars of the Gongyang tradition thought to be the harbinger of a sage king’s appearance in the world. During the Former Han, offi cial Gongyang scholars thought that the sage king “prophesied” in the Annals was in fact Confucius and by extension his legitimate scholarly heirs, meaning of course the Gongyang scholars. During the Later Han, the imperial family exerted pressure on the Gongyang scholars to interpret the appearance of the unicorn as presaging Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty. He Xiu was one of the scholars who bowed to that pres- sure. Th e following is from his subcommentary on the passage: Th e fact that it [the unicorn] was captured during a hunt in the west shows that the king who would reign over the west would come from the east. But the east is under the cyclic sign mao 卯. Th e west is ruled by jin 金 [metal]. To say that the unicorn was captured calls to mind a dao 刀 [weapon]. All of which shows that someone with the name Liu 劉, which character is made up of mao, jin, and dao would conquer the world.8 Here He Xiu tells us that the last entry of the Annals records an event in which is encoded a prophecy. Th e decoded prophecy spells out, as it were, the family name of the founder of the Han dynasty. Th e direction to which the hunters go is ruled by the cyclic sign mao, the direction from which they came © 2012 State University of New York Press, Albany 42 Th e Shaman and the Heresiarch is ruled by jin (metal), and metal is what weapons are made of. Th e elements taken together compose the character for Liu, the surname of the founder of the Han dynasty. Th ose who have been to an astrologer, tarot reader, and certain other fortune-tellers will immediately recognize the divinatory logic of this commentary. Th ose who are familiar with Biblical hermeneutics will see here something very like typological allegory. Th e assumption behind such exegetical practice is that whatever Confu- cius wrote must pertain to the fate of the empire since he, according to the Gongyang scholars, had received the mandate (ming 命) from Heaven. Th e Annals, thought to be edited or written by him, therefore, must contain a secret code just below its dull lapidary surface. In point of fact, however, the decoding method creates the code, and it was a diff erent code depending on the method and the commentator. Th e oldest method that we know of was the “praise and blame (bao-bian 褒貶)” method, according to which Confucius revealed his judgment of a person or his reaction to an event indirectly through his choice of words or even their placement or omission.