The Chinese Sense of Self and Biographical Narrative: an Overview

Kerry Brown

It should be stressed that in this essay the main subject is biographies in the Chinese language produced by Chinese writers and biographers. In English, French, German, and of course in Asian languages – Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese – there is an immense amount of writing about the lives of Chi- nese figures from the earliest times to the present. But the focus of this piece is on the tradition of writing about the lives of prominent Chinese figures in the Chinese language, in cases where the original is written in Chinese. There is a perfectly valid reason for this focus. The tradition of biography in Chinese literature is long and distinguished, comparable in antiquity to traditions in ancient Greek and Latin, and in extent to those existing almost any- where else in the world. The most significant figure is Sima Qian (d. 86 BCE 司马迁), the grand court historian in the Han era (206 BCE–220 CE), whose immense Records of the Grand Historian (史记), completed mostly after he had been castrated as punishment for offending the ruling emperor, remains one of the great masterpieces of world literature. A compilation of 132 lives, from the most ancient dynasties of the Xia (c. 2700–1600 BCE) and Shang (c. 1700–1070 BCE) up to Sima’s own period, it combines a powerful sense of narrative with piercing insights into the psychology of the figures being discussed. The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (259–210 BCE 秦始皇帝), is described as a man ‘with a waspish nose, eyes like slits, a chicken breast, and a voice like a jackal. When in difficulties he willingly humbles himself, when successful he swallows men up without a scruple […] Should he succeed in conquering the empire, we shall all become his captives. There is no staying long with such a man.’1 Such a portrait summarizes as well as anyone has in the intervening two thousand years the powerfully horrifying completeness of this ruler’s despotism, some- thing that visitors to that monument of megalomania, the Terracotta Warrior site in Xian, central China, can appreciate to this day.

1 Sima Qian, Selections from Records of the Historian, ed. An Pingqiu, trans. Yang Xiangyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2008), 11. A more complete selection is also available in the translation of Burton Watson: the two-volume Records of the Grand Historian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

The narrative traditions that Sima Qian’s work promoted and cemented in the Chinese literary tradition have continued unabated to the present. In this sense he can be called the father not just of Chinese historians but of Chi- nese biographers. But his work was produced within a specific view of what humans and their stories were, a context shaped by the developing tradition of Confucianism. Confucius (551–479 BCE 孔子), a figure whose biography is given in the Records of the Grand Historians, had lived four centuries before. He, and philosophers active in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) im- mediately before and after him, had, as American sinologist Donald Munro wrote, convictions about the evaluative nature of human personality and the deep need for the moral cultivation of the self. In this outlook, despite the in- difference of their work to the kinds of metaphysical questions being posed by the almost contemporaneous Greek philosophers in Athens, they shared Plato’s desire to discover which regimes and habits could be used to cultivate a better self and bring about individual moral improvement. This imperative to improve the self, in accordance with the strong sense of the deep significance of commitment to rituals and the key sets of societal relationships within the Confucian social order, set the boundaries within which a personal life story had meaning, and dictated how it should be told and developed.2 There is also a sense in which a stress on family, social life and collective identity means that modes of expressing a strong sense of indiduality, and one which celebrates this sort of individuality, set against these other more collecticist values does not fit easily in the Chinese literary tradition. There are biographies of figures like the great intinerant monk Xuanzang (602–664 CE 玄奘) from the early Tang era (618–906 CE), but his remarkable tale, al- though it was recorded by his almost exact contemporary Huili (慧立), is far better known in the semi-fictional Journey to the West (西游记).3 For imper- ial figures, too, there are official court accounts of their lives. But whereas in the Western literary tradition there are copious lives of saints, produced by writers under the aegis of the Christian church, there is no analogous phe- nomenon in China: perhaps the Buddhist predisposition to discount the value of individual personal histories and their importance reduced the space available for biographies that could be edifying and might convey particular stories about personal development. Finding out about the life stories of scientists

2 Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). 3 Huili’s life of Xuanzang has only been translated into French from the original Chinese. Histoire de la Vie de Hiouen-Thsang et Ses Voyages Dans L’Inde Depuis L’An 629 Jusqu’en 645, trans. Stanislas Julien (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1853).