Toward a Zeal for Classicism Intellectual Transitions from 74 BC to AD 9 China

Chapter 1 Toward a Zeal for Classicism Intellectual Transitions from 74 BC to AD 9 China ometimes we assume that we are more normal than we actually are, Sespecially when it comes to beliefs. Words like orthodox, heterodox, conservative, radical, and hater imply a spectrum in which we sit in the sweet middle spot and others fall on the less normal, and hence less cor- rect, range. Words like pagan, Pharisee, and zealot from biblical traditions embody this spectrum. Was Judas a good or bad person? The New Testa- ment Gospels and the Gospel of Judas would give you opposite answers.1 Nevertheless, both seek to convince you that their ideas are the norm; both compete over the middle spot in the spectrum. At the end of the first century BC in China, Liu Xin railed against his colleagues and insisted on adding several texts to the canon of the Five Classics. While his colleagues were still outraged by this extreme move, an incident added more fuel to the controversy: Liu’s enemy Li Xun 㛶⮳ (fl. 15–5 BC) convinced the emperor to depart from the classics in general. A similar spectrum seems to have formed: Liu Xin and Li Xun fell on two poles of the spectrum, and the others sat in the middle as the normal ones. But from the perspective of Li, was not everyone conservative, and from that of Liu, was not Li too radical and others too conservative? If so, how do we make sense of the different spectra in their minds? This chapter tells the story of radicals and conservatives in first century BC China, except they are more than radicals or conservatives. I see them as intellectual contenders who reacted to concerns of their contemporaries in the way that they thought was the best approach. Simply put: they lived to prove that their ideas were better than others’. This perspective emancipates us from the two notorious spectra, that of Confucianism and that of old script / new script texts. The first spectrum puts the original teachings of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi in the middle and judges the 1 © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 In Pursuit of the Great Peace literati by how faithfully they conformed to the middle point. The second divides the literati in two segregated, mutually hostile parties, one promot- ing a version of the classics written in contemporary script and the other supporting those in the ancient script. These kinds of views highlight the conformity to certain beliefs but obscure the driving concerns of and the agency of individuals. Moreover, our perspective reveals layers of thought as well as social connections invisible in these spectra.2 Therefore, this chapter tells the story in a more label-free way. Up to the first century BC, the classics started out as merely one of the weapons in the intellectual arsenal of literati. However, in the beginning of the first century AD, they became the paramount canon, disrespect for which could cost a person’s life. This turn paralleled a political turn: the Han empire was facing the consequences of overexpansion and needed a less aggressive state policy.3 Most literati during that time believed that the previously failed policies endangered the imperial house’s heavenly granted right to rule and put the empire at the edge of a precipice.4 A new policy might well be the last chance for the imperial house before Heaven shifted its mandate to someone else, so the court needed to choose this policy wisely.5 Since, to most of them, Heaven was the ultimate agent that would decide the fate of the Han dynasty, the literati extensively elaborated on Heaven’s will. The imagination of an ideal society, namely, the Great Peace (taiping ⣒⸛), emerged from this context. If Heaven evaluated human rulers based on their subjects’ welfare, the best policy to keep Heaven satisfied was the one that could bring the maximal degree of welfare to the people. There- fore, generations of scholars competed with each other to set out the right or the ideal way to rule. Most of them gradually turned their attention to following the steps of the ancient sage kings. And the classics became the focus as the records of these sage kings’ speeches and deeds. In this chapter, we will focus on the imagination of the Great Peace and examine the competing voices around it, which eventually led to the rise of classicism. From hindsight, classicism stood out in history, and classicists were certain to win the favor of the emperors. But after closely examining the debates between the literati, we can see that the promoters of the classics barely dominated, and they were constantly faced with challenges from rivals. Even the promoters themselves starkly disagreed with each other. This chapter thus not only introduces how devotion to the classics became a good idea to most of the literati, but also how seemingly opposite or outlandish ideas could result from the same context. Behind these ideas, we will see the patterns of intellectual innovation in first century BC China. © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany Toward a Zeal for Classicism 3 We will start with the intellectual atmosphere in Emperor Xuan’s court (r. 73–49 BC), for it disclosed a concern, namely, anxiety about Heaven’s will, which shaped the changes of literati thought on the classics for the rest of the Western Han dynasty. The literati and the emperor openly expressed their anxiety about Heaven’s will and sought means of dealing with it. Dominant literati like Wei Xiang 櫷䚠 (?–59 BC) and Bing Ji ᷁⎱ (?–55 BC) brought the classics, or chunks of classics, into this conversation not as manuals for moral cultivation but as one expeditious way of fulfilling the urgent need to restore the disturbed cosmological order. The next generation of dominant scholars, including Liu Xiang ∱⎹ (77–6 BC) and several disciples of Hou Cang ⎶呤 (fl. 72 BC), searched for a way to relieve the intensified anxiety. The government of the ancient sage kings, or the Kingly Way, became the paragon for the Han dynasty to follow, for it was in harmony with Heaven. The classics, putatively written by the sage kings to record the ideal government of the Golden Age, became the media for the literati to imagine and realize sagely rule in their own troubled times. The latent sparks of the two preceding generations fueled the dramatic changes in the last years of the Western Han. The desire to harmonize with Heaven was the foundation for further intellectual innovations, which had an impact throughout the first two centuries AD. Building on the focus on the classics, two different paths of innovation cast doubts on the existing transmission lines of the classics. Liu Xin, on the one hand, suspected that the received versions of the classics were not the complete, original classics of the sage kings. Accordingly, he combined obscure and ignored versions of classics and commentarial traditions to restore the classics. Li Xun 㛶⮳ (fl. 15–5 BC) and Xia Heliang ⢷屨列 (?–5 BC), on the other hand, emphasized Heaven’s will in an effort to depart from the sages and overrode the classics with the revealed text, the Scripture of the Great Peace. These two ways of innovation—combination in order to complete the old material and a shift to new material—marked the last years of the Western Han dynasty. They also prepared the ground for the apocrypha, a corpus of commentaries that reveal heavenly secrets hidden in the classics. The Search for Heaven’s Will in Emperor Xuan’s Period In 78 BC, a bizarre incident attracted the court’s attention: a dead willow tree in the imperial garden revived itself with words on its leaves: “Gongsun © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 In Pursuit of the Great Peace Bingyi ℔⬓䕭⶚ will be established.”6 A scholar called Sui Hong 䛕⻀ (?–78 BC) reported to the court about the implication of this omen: 㻊⭞⟗⼴炻㚱⁛⚳ᷳ忳ˤ㻊ⷅ⭄婘ⶖ⣑ᶳ炻㯪䳊岊Ṣ炻夊ẍⷅỵ侴徨ˤ冒 ⮩䘦慴炻⤪㭟␐Ḵ䌳⼴炻ẍ㈧枮⣑␥ˤ7 The Han house is a descendant of Yao, and it has the fate to pass down the throne. Now the Han emperor should search in the world to seek out a worthy and abdicate the throne to him. Then he should retreat and grant himself a fief of a hundred square li like the descendants of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, in order to conform to the mandate of Heaven. The court was outraged by this blunt claim: the mandate of Heaven had moved away from the Han dynasty. This speech was particularly dis- turbing because the dynasty was suffering from the policy of overexpansion from the previous emperor, Emperor Wu, and the current ruler was a young boy being manipulated by Huo Guang 暵⃱ (?–68 BC). During this troubling time, the mandate of Heaven was a sensitive issue; for people in the first century BC, a dynasty’s destiny desperately hung on the favor of Heaven.8 The current difficulties of the empire inevitably aroused literati’s anxiety about the mandate. Four years later, when Emperor Xuan succeeded the throne, his announcements and policies continuously reflected this anxiety. After the political instability and the backfiring of Emperor Wu’s previous aggressive policies, Emperor Xuan needed to turn the empire in another direction.9 However, no one knew what this transition would bring to the empire. The uncertainty of the future overlapped with the uncertainty of Heaven’s will. What if the Han dynasty had already lost Heaven’s favor and the new direction only worsened the situation? As a successor to the Han throne, our new emperor was also anxious about his position.

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