POEMS OF DEPRAVITY : A TWELFTH CENTURY DISPUTE ON THE MORAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK OF SONGS

BY

WONG SIU-KIT AND LEE KAR-SHUI

University of Hong Kong

I

"To sum up the character of the three hundred poems in the Shijing [I should say that in them] there is no improper think- ing." This, according to the Analects was one of Confucius' key pronouncements on the Poetiy Classic. The expression si wu xie ("there is no improper thinking") came from a Shijing poem jiong *1 (Mao no. 297; Waley no. 252)2 about horse breeding and originally had nothing to do with poetry at all. Confucius was, in the manner of his times, quoting out of context and giving an en- tirely new meaning to an old expression. But the expression was an elegant summary and promised to become a judgement to which one could say yea or nay. And what does si wu xie mean? One commentator Bao Xian suggests that it means gui yu zheng i.e., going back to the proper (or correct).3 This may well sound tautologous, but in this explanation there is a clear recognition of the essential dualism of Confucius' and later Confucian thinking. And in the twelfth century dispute with which we are concerned, there too, there is a great deal of dualistic thinking. Before we plunge into that dispute, let us go over the theories that have been put forward in regard to the role Confucius played in the transmission of the Shijing text, rehearse the more important ones among the other remarks he made about the text, and hope to locate the ambiguities and the potential sources of controversy. One theory has it that there were three thousand odd poems available to Confucius, out of which he selected three hundred and 210

eleven to make up the Shijing.4 Another theory says Confucius did not compile the text, but merely "rectified" its "music".5 While there isn't sufficient evidence for us to accept these theories, we do know from the Analects that Confucius admired the Shijing poems. A later tradition represented by the Liji inf orms us, in a similar vein, that the Master was of the opinion that in states in which the Shijing was used as a principal text in education the people tended to be "honest and gentle" Thus he appropriated the Shijing as one of "the six arts" a term which initially referred to "the six subjects" but in the latter half of the Warring States period came to mean "the six classics".7 But Confucius' affection for the Poetry Classic may not have been so purely unalloyed. The Analects records him as saying, "Away with the music of Zheng 11); let's have nothing to do with wicked men. The music of Zheng is excessive/lewd (Zheng sheng yin wicked men are dangerous."8 Elsewhere in the Analects he explains : "One loathes the music of Zheng because it threatens the orderliness of classical music."9 9 Among the Guo feng R)R poems of the Shijing one of the fifteen sections gives the poems from the state of Zheng. This Zheng feng section is sometimes regarded as "depraved" because it con- tains a significant number of poems that we would refer to simply as "love poems". When Confucius talked about the music (sheng %) of Zheng, did he have £heng feng in mind? Or was Zheng sheng quite different from zheng feng? If Zheng sheng and Zheng feng were interchangeable, then, given that £heng feng was a portion of the Shijing, Confucius would have been contradicting himself to proclaim both si wu xie about the Shijing and Zheng shengyin about a part of the anthology. The possible contradiction between the two Confucian pronounce- ments was the root of the twelfth century controversy over the moral