elusive stele of “yu the great” jonathan chaves Still Hidden by Spirits and Immortals: The Quest for the Elusive “Stele of Yu the Great” obel laureate in literature Gao Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940; figure 1), N in his novel Soul Mountain 靈山 (1990), describes the peregrination of a young man who, disillusioned by post-Cultural Revolution China, sets out in search of a place he has heard of, “Soul Mountain,” where perhaps he will find some remnants of the “soul” that has so clearly dis- appeared from Chinese life. Towards the end of this ultimately fruitless search, the typically modern antihero visits the “Tomb of Yu the Great” 大禹陵, at Kuaiji 會稽 near Shaoxing (figures 2, 3). Yu the Great, a fig- ure of myth and legend but in recent centuries considered as historical by Chinese scholars, is best known for draining the flood waters that once covered the world (figure 4). He is supposed to have performed this feat in the “twenty-first century bc,” according to Gao’s fictional character; Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, first published in 1931, following tradition dates his reign as emperor from 2205–2197 bc. After reviewing in his mind the various claims made by history about Yu the Great, including his ability to transform himself into a bear, and also entertaining various modern rationalizing explanations for the story of Yu and the flood (“… [I]t is possible to search for ele- ments of prenatal memory in the amniotic fluids of the womb. In overseas countries there are people carrying out this type of research.”), the young man comes upon a “stone epitaph 石碑” attributed to Yu himself, inscribed with characters which remain undecipherable: “[E]xperts still cannot decipher the tadpole-like script on the stone epitaph opposite the main hall.” Figure 1. Gao Xingjian at Book Signing Public domain website. 1 jonathan chaves Figure 2. President Jiang Zemin before Ming-era Stele The stele is inscribed “Da Yu ling 大禹陵”; he is pictured in 1995, shortly after extensive renovation of the site, which had been badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Public domain website. Figure 3. Later Reproduction of “Stele of Yu” The text is the 77-character version presented by Yang Shen. Public domain website. But our (anti)hero decides that indeed they can be read as follows — to cite only a few of his “interpretations:” . history is lies. history is nonsense. history is a state of mind. history is absolutely nothing. history can be read any way and this is a major discovery!1 When I first read this, I understood at once how completely a generation of Chinese intellectuals had joined the ranks of their com- peers in Europe, the United States, and indeed throughout the world. Far from being a “major discovery,” the doctrine that there is no truth, or if there is, we cannot possibly know it, is the perennial dogma of Sophistry, represented in classical antiquity by Gorgias and Protago- ras — and in China by such figures as Hui Shi 惠施 and Gongsun Long 公孫龍 — and reborn in the modern era as the fundamental premise of virtually all modern thought. As Richard Weaver was able to write in 1948, the “very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper,” this because “the soul of modern man craves orgiastic dis- 1 Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 448–51. I would like to thank William Boltz, Robert Harrist, and Stephen Addiss for their useful comments. 2 elusive stele of “yu the great” order.” Thus the “philosophic position of modernism” is in fact “the sheerest relativism.” 2 But the idea of absolutized relativism and subjectivism was ger- minating well before the late 1940s. To take one particularly good ex- ample, one might consider Livro do desassossego, or The Book of Disquiet by Portugal’s most distin- guished modern poet, Fer- nando Pessoa (1888–1935; figure 5). Pessoa wrote this diary-like series of frag- mented thoughts from 1912 to 1935 under the name of Bernardo Soares, one of the “heteronyms,” or lit- erary alter-personalities, into which he felt himself to be divided, although it was never published in his lifetime. Pessoa is a particu- larly fine exemplar of what Figure 4. Yu the Great Pictured in Two Wood- block Illustrations The illustrations appeared in You Xia zhizhuan 有夏志傳 (An Account of the Xia Dynasty), a work of popularized historiography attributed to Zhong Xing 鍾惺 (1574–1624) and Feng Meng- long 馮夢龍 (1574–1646), and printed during the Chongzhen period (1628–43). Top:“King Yu commands that a sacrifice be offered to the deity of the Western Sacred Peak [Mount Hua].” Bottom: “The Yellow Dragon attempts to overturn the Figure 5. Fernando Pessoa boat [from which King Yu is taming the flood waters] Walking through the Streets but King Yu does not change expression.” of Lisbon 傅惜華 Zhongguo Images taken from Fu Xihua , From Maria José de Lancastre, gudian wenxue banhua xuanji 中國古典文學 Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: 版畫選集 (Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, Hazan, 1997), p. 169. 1981), pp. 633, 639. 2 Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984; paperback edn. of 1948 publication), pp. 52, 53, 87, 164. 3 jonathan chaves I am broadly terming “modern thought,” because he is, especially in this particular work, uncharacteristically (for modern intellectuals) can- did and explicit about his actually quite dogmatic relativism and even nihilism. For example, ... That is what I believe, this afternoon. Tomorrow morning it will be different, because tomorrow morning I will be different. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know, because to know that I would need to have been there already. Tomorrow or today not even the eternal God I believe in now will know, because today I’m me and tomorrow he may perhaps never have existed.3 Gao Xingjian’s protagonist, over half a century later, might well have adapted this as yet another “translation” of the Stele of Yu 禹碑. The premise is precisely the same. As it happens, when Gao’s character visits the Mausoleum of Yu the Great, he becomes the most recent in a long series of pilgrims to this spot, and others associated with the culture hero, in hopes of some- how getting closer to Yu’s spirit, or even discovering actual writings of his. None other than China’s great historian, Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 85 bc) famously visited the site as a young man, in hopes of perhaps recovering ancient documents associated with Yu the Great. In the “Author’s Preface 自序” to his masterpiece, early China’s single greatest historiographical work — the Shi ji 史記 or “Records of the Historian” — Sima states, “At the age of twenty [nineteen by Western reckoning] I traveled south to the Yangzi and Huai River region, as- cending Kuaiji and exploring the Cave of Yu.”4 This is said to be the cave in which Yu deposited some of his writings. Thus there was an association of the Kuaiji locale with Yu the Great at least by the time of the Han dynasty, as well as a statement about certain writings left behind by the ancient Yu. But Sima goes no further than informing us that he visited the site. 3 Fernando Pessoa, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, The Book of Disquiet (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), p. 219. 4 Sima Qian, Shi ji (e-SKQS), 130 [2a]. For the first time in any of my publications, I have decided to cite Siku quanshu editions, which I have consulted in their electronic version. Com- parisons with printed editions have convinced me that, at least for certain purposes, these texts are dependable. In some cases I have referred to alternate editions, especially when the find- ings of modern scholarship are directly relevant to points being made here. (The primary e- SKQS texts are unpaginated; in some cases the accessible original pages show pagination.) I am grateful to Stephen D. Allee for first — and very patiently — introducing me to the mysteries of the e-SKQS, and to Ronald Egan for graciously answering questions raised in my mind by his superb discussion of this resource, “Reflections on Uses of the Electronic Siku quanshu,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 23 (Dec. 2001), pp. 103–13. 4 elusive stele of “yu the great” The earliest reference to an actual “Stele of Yu” occurs in one of the few remaining fragmentary passages of a lost book, Xiangzhong ji 湘中記 (An Account of Affairs within the Xiang River Region), by the Jin- dynasty scholar Luo Han 羅含 (ca. 301–ca. 385): “On Mount Goulou 岣嶁山, there are jade tablets; Yu took instruction from these texts for draining the flood waters. On this mountain is the Stele of Yu.”5 Now, Mount Goulou, far from being located at Kuaiji, is one of the peaks of the Southern Sacred Mountain, or Mount Heng 衡山, in Hunan Prov- ince. Yu is indeed supposed to have passed through this range during his labors. Although Luo Han does not specifically state that the stele was executed by Yu himself, that seems to have been the general be- lief. And so intoxicating was the possibility, that no less a figure than the great Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), one of the architects of the whole Neo-Confucian revival that would eventually bear full fruit in the Song dynasty, took the trouble to travel to Mount Goulou in hopes of find- ing this stele! His poem on the journey is a key text: 6 Mount Goulou 岣嶁山尖神禹碑 On the very top of Mount Goulou is the Stele of Yu the Divine, 字青石赤形模奇 The characters greenish, the stone reddish, the writing forms quite strange: 科鬥拳身薤倒披 Like tadpoles curling up their bodies, or scallions hanging spread out, 鸞飄鳳泊拿虎螭 Roc-birds soaring, phoenixes perching, tigers, dragons clawing.