The “composite nature of early Chinese texts” is a familiar notion to scholars of early China. It refers to the observation that textual composition before the Han relies on the constituent role played by “building blocks”—preexisting textual materials that are discrete, self-contained, and small in size. On the one hand, an assemblage of building blocks, variable in order, can form a larger text. On the other, larger texts, philosophical and historiographical alike, would contain to some extent a selection of building blocks. As a corollary, “lengthy, literary or essay-like texts, authored by a single writer, in the way we typically think of a text in the modern world, do not reflect the norm for early China but were, at best, the exception.”Footnote 1
As a basic assessment of the compositional and authorial practices in early Chinese writings, this notion of William Boltz’s has remained influential for good reason. It tallies with a belief already established by the mid-Qing—that pre-Han texts existed in single “chapters” (篇) and were transmitted in that form—but extends that movability to a textual unit below the level of a chapter.Footnote 2 It shows how textual composition shares the same modular approach underlying the mass production of artworks like bronze vessels, ceramics, and paintings.Footnote 3 And it has inspired a theory about the compositeness of early Chinese poetry, a genre not of Boltz’s original concern.Footnote 4 Most tellingly, “composite nature” has become part of the lexicon, a trusted modus operandi of scholarly research, and a discourse all of its own. One need only look at the growing number of critiques to see its continuing appeal and the fact that none of the rethinking especially of the “building block” has denied, as Boltz has foreseen, the “eventual tenability” of his overall understanding.Footnote 5 On the contrary, the critiques only help bring the understanding to date through materials largely unpublished until after Boltz’s essay.
At the same time, as the notion gains ground there has appeared no shortage of contentious and, to my mind, problematic applications. A building block is not always shown to be a textual unit that actually builds, but is presumed to be so, the oftentimes nonexistent evidence of which is justified by the material’s supposed transmission via oral- or memory-based means.Footnote 6 To some, actual building in Boltz’s sense (the building block being a movable piece of text both inter- and intra-textually) would in fact disqualify that piece of text as a building block. In that conception, only those textual units that are neither movable within nor removable from a larger whole would count.Footnote 7 A “building block” in that sense is thus arrived at inversely, by dissecting a larger whole into smaller meaning-contributing pieces. It produces what perhaps would be better called units of reading rather than composing, and pliable, idiosyncratic, sometimes arbitrary ones.Footnote 8
When the building block is construed less as a textual “object” but more as a metaphor simply for a small, constituent part of a larger whole, the compositeness that results from the blocks’ assemblage quickly invites questions about “coherence.” Although not referred to as building blocks just yet, the seemingly free combinations of anecdotes, sayings, and short expositions in several of the “miscellaneous chapters” (雜篇) of the Zhuangzi 莊子 (chaps. 23–27, 32) have led A. C. Graham to dismiss them all as “ragbags of odds and ends.”Footnote 9 By contrast, through the uncovering of “verbal connections” in the “Wai wu” 外物 chapter in particular, Wim De Reu rejects that view and reads the chapter as a “coherent philosophical treatise.”Footnote 10 In the same vein, for every argument that the Shuoyuan 說苑 or Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 represents but an assemblage of “miscellaneous” and “haphazard” materials, there is a counterargument for “homogeneity” and “coherence” in one way or another.Footnote 11 All these disputations share one thing in common: a narrow if not anachronistic view of “coherence” based solely on discursive, logical connectedness. They disregard both the genre features of, especially, early Chinese philosophical writings and their rhetorical orientations,Footnote 12 as do they downplay other orders of coherence that are pragmatic,Footnote 13 performative,Footnote 14 or semioticFootnote 15 in nature. Even what appear to be “anti-structures” can exhibit a coherent message, once the readers allow themselves to experience the “chaos.”Footnote 16 Coherence is not a one-dimensional property, nor is the exact—or more dominant—measure of it always obvious.
From the issue of coherence, it is only a short step toward the issue of authorship. What is considered “coherent” is often deemed “authored” and what is “incoherent”—that is, composite—is often deemed “compiled.”Footnote 17 This equation is far too simplistic, but it is often expressed. It reduces the role of the “author” to someone who only creates things ex nihilo and that of the “compiler” to someone who only assembles things as they are when both are far more multifaceted and intertwined with the other.Footnote 18 A particular role, even if clearly identifiable, can perform a variety of compositional acts. Many would agree, for instance, that Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c.145–85 bce) is both an “author” and a “compiler.” So is the supreme “compiler” Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce) inconceivable without having had an “authorial” hand in his many “editorial” projects.Footnote 19 Compiling is already an act of authoring if only in the rudimentary but not insignificant sense of bringing that very compiled text into existence; authoring also does not preclude the engagement, creative or not, with preexisting materials. In practice, any polarization is highly artificial and unnecessarily pedantic, as it privileges some facets of and acts in textual formation at the expense of others.Footnote 20
While some of these issues in applying the “composite nature” arise from their own premises, all have roots in Boltz’s original thinking. Boltz does not make any meaningful distinctions, for instance, between the various types of materials that can be called “building blocks.” Instead, sayings, aphorisms, and anecdotes are just as “innocent” of textual components as archival records. This may not matter as much when the purpose is to purely assemble something. But, when these materials find their way into a larger narrative, what Boltz sees strictly as structural components would have to be reconciled with the rhetorical context of the housing narrative. Especially with regard to sayings, aphorisms, and anecdotes, themselves tools of narration and argumentation in early Chinese writings, the disregard for their rhetorical functions has led Boltz to insist on their origin as “editorial” insertion, from preexisting source-texts no less, instead of, say, authorial composition or adaptation.Footnote 21 Such materials indeed are shared in early Chinese writings, but their use and reuse, as I will show, involve contextually based variations impossible to be traced to a specific provenance.
In addition, in the original explication, the order by which individual building blocks are combined is attributed to “the vicissitudes of a text’s compositional history.”Footnote 22 Rather ambiguous and something of a non-explanation,Footnote 23 it rids a building block of its potential to organize itself among other building blocks or to invite certain organizations on the part of authors, editors, and compilers. Regarding the Laozi 老子, for example, the arrangement of the individual chapters (zhang 章) has been shown to be not entirely random but, at certain places, based on inter-chapter verbal and thematic links.Footnote 24 Such links appear also in other “collage-like” texts in which discrete, “non-hierarchical” components are combined into a larger whole.Footnote 25 In early China, “random” assemblages appear to be just as common as more curated ones with a more pronounced order, facilitated often by such paratextual devices as the enumerative catalog or the jingshuo 經說 (“canon-explanation”) structure.Footnote 26 In neither case is the building block entirely without agency; rather, it can forestall randomness by the lexical, phonetic, semantic, or any other means of association one building block might share with another.
Most importantly, an exercise in source criticism, the “composite nature of early Chinese texts” does not consider what literary conditions make such compositeness possible, acceptable, and indeed “the norm” in early China. Be it the assemblage or integration of building blocks, it is first of all a literary operation, however one might want to see it only from a mechanical point of view. No simple differentiation made between possible roles and acts in textual formation suffices to account for the diverse shapes and structures a composite text can be observed to take. When we move beyond the individual building blocks and their possible origins and look instead at the combination itself—i.e., the compositeness of a composite text Boltz and others do not address as much—the “composite nature of early Chinese texts” can be attributed more concretely to a basic order of textuality that transcends authorial, editorial, and compilatory habits and idiosyncrasies. It is, in other words, a result of a well-observed convention in textual formation that makes an early Chinese text “text.” Due to the convention’s basis in the combinatory relations between parts and between parts and whole, I refer to it as the architectonics of the composite text.Footnote 27
In the study of early and early medieval poetry, an architectonic approach has already revealed the efficacy of poetic expressions, themes, and tropes in organizing themselves into poems supposedly “authored.”Footnote 28 It is my intention in this essay to show that such dynamics exist in prose writings as well. In prose writings, texts are amenable to a prominent reiterative, catalogic order. “Reiterative” because materials (of various kinds) are often reused, not mechanically and without consideration of context, but through a process more fittingly describable as “gathering and framing.” What results is not a verbatim reiteration of something familiar but more often a variant, even uniquely different, instantiation of it.Footnote 29 “Catalogic,” on the other hand, because early Chinese texts so often unfold in an enumerative fashion, at scales large or small. Although the enumeration can proceed without a particular (or particularly obvious) order, the materials enumerated are included in the catalog for a reason. “Catalogic” thus entails both “horizontal” and “vertical” axes of connection, one between the parts included, one between each of the parts and the whole. This reiterative and catalogic order always produces an assemblage of some sort, but whether that assemblage has a larger meaning or significance is, due to the loss of all possible oral instructions in the assemblage’s original contexts of use, up to the readers.
In what follows, I illustrate this architectonics with the four common shapes an assemblage can be observed to take in early China, each more sophisticated, followed by a reconsideration of Boltz’s reading of Mengzi 孟子 3A.4. Taking the assemblage as the point of departure allows us to observe most directly the relations between individual building blocks and between the building blocks and the assemblage as a whole. Looking across the common shapes, on the other hand, offers us some measure in deciding what constitutes a legitimate invitation to read more meaning—like coherence, and by what measure—into a combination of building blocks and, no less critically, what makes that reading profitable rather than idiosyncratic or anachronistic. For that purpose, I reserve the term “compilation” to mean not the assemblage as a textual form or object but an assemblage that can be revealed to have a larger purpose, significance, or effect to the sum of its parts. To read an assemblage “compilationally,” let us say, is thus to engage with the assemblage so as to disclose, on the basis of reconstructible conventions, a meaningful arrangement.Footnote 30 As will be obvious, I limit my analysis to what can be broadly called persuasive discursive, by design or in effect. This does not mean that other types of discourses are unamenable to the same analysis;Footnote 31 the choice is made out of consideration for a balance between economy and illustrative breadth.
Structure I: Claim–Support
Not all assemblages invite questions, as some are fully curated. The Yi Zhoushu 逸周書, for example, has many chapters that are numbered catalogs, dry but well-ordered.Footnote 32 The Han Feizi 韓非子 and Guanzi 管子, on the other hand, contain more dressed-up catalogs of more varieties, embedded further into a larger narrative or rhetorical structure. By contrast, those without any paratextual curation are the ones that prompt the liveliest debate about order, meaning, and provenance; both the Laozi and Lunyu 論語, for example, are the most heavily scrutinized among that group.Footnote 33 Outside of the two polar opposites, there exists a large number of materials that fall somewhere in between in terms of how curated they are and how curatable they can be. Some, like historical records and anecdotes, lend themselves easily to a chronological order and require little curation,Footnote 34 others might appear less sortable but are nonetheless compatible when put in an assemblage. This is not only because building blocks, if they truly build, are also narrative and rhetorical components in addition to structurally forming a text, it also has to do with the existence of shared structures that regulate and inform textual formation in the first place. Each of these structures undergirds a good number of disparate assemblages, and each constitutes a compilation in the sense defined above.
The first and most familiar structure is one in which a claim is made, followed immediately by a range of materials, chief among them anecdotes, that support or illustrate the claim. In existing terminology, this is referred to as the jingshuo structure, although in this case not explicitly marked in the way the Han Feizi, for instance, marks the “Chuo shuo” 儲說 chapters. The structure reveals itself when the reader starts reading. Among the assembled materials, there will sometimes exist pockets of thematic clusters, like that on filial piety in Lunyu 2.5–2.8 or that on one’s parents in Lunyu 4.18–4.21. Overall, however, the horizontal relations between the assembled materials are secondary to the vertical relations between each of the building blocks and the overarching claim. In this structure, disentangling what is “authored” from what is “compiled or “edited” is unlikely to yield any clarity. So long as the purpose and integrity of the structure are understood, any role at any time could have engaged in any compositional acts to ensure that the claim is supported by the materials included. Such work done on the materials I call “framing.”
The Shuoyuan, for example, is a multi-chapter instantiation of this structure, as are several chapters in the Zhuangzi (see “Zhi le” 至樂, “Da sheng” 達生, “Yuyan” 寓言, among others). In the Shuoyuan, all but the first chapter begin with a statement of some sort on the theme that unites the chapter, i.e., the jing of all the shuo assembled therein.Footnote 35 Chapter two, “Chen shu” 臣術 (The Art of the Minister), for example, opens with the following theme/claim-statement:
The art of acting as a minister to a ruler is such that he follows and reports back on the ruler’s orders, and in no respect acts on his own. When it comes to matters of righteousness, he does not make cavalier acquiescence; when it comes to positions of authority, he does not show unwarranted reverence. His actions are always beneficial to the state and complementary to the ruler’s; that is how he acquires honor, and how his sons and grandsons can inherit his honor.
人臣之術，順從而復命，無所敢專。義不苟合，位不苟尊。必有益於國，必有補於君。故其身尊而子孫保之。Footnote 36
Chapter three, “Jian ben” 建本 (Establishing the Root), has a far more typical opening within the Shuoyuan. Instead of an expository statement, it resorts to a cluster of quotations of authoritative voices and canonical sources for the expression of the theme/claim:Footnote 37
Kongzi has said, “A nobleman devotes himself to the root; when the root is established, the Way will arise.” If the root is not upright, the branches will invariably lean sideways; that which does not flourish in the beginning will surely wither in the end. The Shi has it: “Plains and meadows having been leveled,/ spring waters became clear.” [That is,] when the root is established, the Way will arise. The meaning of the Springs and Autumns: when you have proper springs, there will not be disorderly autumns; when there are proper rulers, there will not be endangered states. The Changes says: “Once the root is established, all things will be in order; an inch of mismeasure results in a thousand-league error.” This is why a nobleman values the establishment of the root and prizes the instituting of beginnings.
孔子曰：「君子務本，本立而道生。」夫本不正者末必倚，始不盛者終必衰。詩云：「原隰既平，泉流既清。」本立而道生。春秋之義，有正春者無亂秋，有正君者無危國。易曰：「建其本而萬物理，失之毫釐，差以千里。」是故君子貴建本而重立始。Footnote 38
If the purpose of the Shuoyuan is indeed to “present models and proscriptions” (陳法戒) to the young Emperor Cheng 成帝 (r. 33–7 bce),Footnote 39 no other materials in no other way of presentation will speak as commandingly to the Son of Heaven as these valorized principles of truth. Besides what they all say, the efficacy of such didactic materials derives just as indispensably from quoting them in their “raw,” unmediated state.
This adherence to unmediated presentation offers us a way to reconsider the opening of the first chapter, titled “Jun dao” 君道 (The Way of the Ruler). Without any prefacing, it begins with what looks like a shuo already illustrating the theme of the chapter as indicated by the title, rather than the jing of the chapter:
Duke Ping of Jin asked Master Kuang, “What is the Way of the ruler all about?” [Master Kuang] replied, “As for the Way of the ruler: he is to be undisturbed in non-action, devoted to broad care, and hasty in appointing the worthy. He will open wide his eyes and ears so as to survey the myriad directions, he will resist drowning in transient fashions and succumbing to encumbrance by his left and right. Broadly far-sighted, he loftily stands on his own; regularly inspecting conduct, he presides over his subordinates. These are the principles of a ruler.” Duke Ping replied, “Excellent!”
晉平公問於師曠曰：「人君之道如何？」對曰：「人君之道，清淨無為，務在博愛，趨在任賢；廣開耳目，以察萬方；不固溺於流俗，不拘繫於左右；廓然遠見，踔然獨立；屢省考績，以臨臣下。此人君之操也。」平公曰：「善！」Footnote 40
As Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 has noted, although not an exposition like most other jing-statements, this anecdote fulfills the exact same function of articulating the theme/claim. For, like the unmediated quotations of inherited principles, the anecdote “allows history to speak [for itself]” (讓歷史講話).Footnote 41 Indeed, such is how the vast majority of the shuo materials appear in the Shuoyuan, to the extent that the anthology has been dubbed an inventory of “unedited documentary materials” in their “original shape.”Footnote 42 “Unedited” and “original” as they seem, the “rawness” of the materials should not be taken for granted when the entire anthology exhibits a preference for history to “speak for itself.”Footnote 43 There is a consistent stylistic pattern that seems intended, or, “framed” to be so.Footnote 44
In the case of the first chapter, the placement of the quoted anecdote at the very top of the chapter further suggests intentionality. While the remaining anecdotes all illustrate the “Way of the ruler” in one way or another, this is the only one in which the theme is named and its “definition” provided. The question posed by Duke Ping goes straight to the core of the issue this chapter is concerned with, while Master Kuang’s answer is as plain as an answer can get (note the definitional A, B [也] structure in the first and last lines). That no parallel of this anecdote can be found anywhere in the early sources further points to the likelihood that Liu Xiang wrote it himself, just as he likely “wrote” all the other opening statements, by weaving together canonical quotations. The only way to describe Liu Xiang is as an “author-compiler,” one who creates and collects, or creates by collecting, in ways we can hardly untangle. As has been noted by Xu Fuguan, “to collect stories and anecdotes based on one’s own ideas is the beginning of what can be called authoring [zhu 著]” (以自己的意見為主導地去采傳記行事，始可謂之著).Footnote 45 According to Liu Xiang himself, besides “arranging [the collected materials] in categories” (以類相從), he “also composed new accounts [for a combined total of] more than a hundred thousand words” (更以造新事十萬言以上).Footnote 46 Even without knowledge of how the Shuoyuan was intended to be used, readers of it need only begin with the opening statements on the theme/claim of each chapter before they obtain the freedom to read the rest in any sequence and combination. The path to all the “models and proscriptions” is a self-guided, cathartic one.
Structure II: Claim–Support–(Comment)
The second structure resembles the first in every way except for the addition of a comment to most if not all the anecdotes illustrating the overarching claim guiding their assemblage. The provenance of the comments is not always clear,Footnote 47 but if the structure is adequately adopted, the comment and the anecdote will work in unison to illustrate the overarching claim. This involves, on the one hand, commenting in a manner conducive to the purpose and, on the other, tailoring the anecdote’s presentation so that the “evidence” supports the “analysis.” Neither is a simple procedure of copy-and-paste, even though anecdotes are shared; neither, in addition, can be easily attributed to any specific roles. What one can say with certainty is that, when properly done, the anecdote and its comment will be framed in such a way that the illustration they are tasked with is always felicitous.
Like the first structure, this second structure is found in many texts, manifesting at different scales as well. For illustration purposes, the Lüshi chunqiu is both the least likely and yet, despite that, the most remarkable example. It is the least likely because its provenance story makes the Lüshi chunqiu the single most decentralized among all early Chinese writings in terms of authorship: both the Shiji 史記 and Lü Buwei’s 呂不韋 (d. 235 bce) own preface describe the work as a massive collection of solicited contributions.Footnote 48 Yet, it is the most remarkable because at both the chapter and the anthology levels, the ways in which the materials are structured and presented follow clear patterns.Footnote 49 According to a chapter-by-chapter tally, seventy of the hundred-and-sixty chapters of the Lüshi chunqiu begin with a discursive proposition, followed then entirely by examples for illustration (首段議論，後全舉例證); another twenty-seven include additionally a final remark reiterating the opening proposition. What remains are either expositions through and through (twenty chapters in total) or some other combinations of exposition and example.Footnote 50
Among the first two largest groups, the comments to the anecdotes (when available) overwhelmingly comment only on the characters and events in the anecdotes, without appropriating the anecdotes for other, extradiegetic claims. To the extent they do, they only establish direct connections between the protagonists in the anecdotes and the overarching claim the anecdotes serve to illustrate, through a formulaic expression “A [the protagonist] can be said to be B [an attribute named or entailed in the claim]” A 可謂 B 矣. For example, in an early chapter titled and all about “Qu si” 去私 (Dispensing with Partiality), two of the four anecdotes conclude with a comment that the protagonist (Qi Huangyang 祁黃羊 and Juzi 鉅子, respectively) “can be said to be impartial” (可謂公矣). The other two describe their protagonists directly as either “of the utmost impartiality” (至公) or “not partial” (不私).Footnote 51 When a comment is not appended, the anecdote will lend itself to the intended reading indicated by existing comments in the chapter.
More adroitly, some chapters both present and comment on an anecdote in ways completely unique to the Lüshi chunqiu, unlike any other use and interpretation of the same anecdote. Take, for example, the following anecdote and its comment as they appear in the “Zhi yue” 製樂 (Making Music) chapter of the “Jixia ji” 季夏紀 (Almanac for the Third Summer Month):
Therefore, during the time of King Tang the Accomplished, a mulberry tree sprouted in his courtyard. It appeared at dusk and by dawn was already so thick that one could wrap one’s arms around it. Tang’s officer asked to have the cause divined. But Tang turned away the diviner, saying, “I have heard that an auspicious sign is the harbinger of blessing; when one sees an auspicious sign but does evil, the blessing will not come of it. A baleful sign, on the other hand, is the harbinger of calamity; when one sees a baleful sign and does good, then calamity will not materialize.” Thereupon, the king attended court early and retired late. He inquired after the sick, mourned the dead, and applied himself to the comfort of the people. Within three days, the mulberry tree disappeared. Hence: “Calamity is that on which blessing leans; blessing is that behind which calamity looms.” This is the insight of a sage alone. How would the average man ever understand the depth of it?
故成湯之時，有穀生於庭，昏而生，比旦而大拱，其吏請卜其故。湯退卜者曰：「吾聞祥者福之先者也，見祥而為不善則福不至；妖者禍之先者也，見妖而為善則禍不至。」於是早朝晏退，問疾弔喪，務鎮撫百姓，三日而穀亡。故禍兮福之所倚，福兮禍之所伏，聖人所獨見，眾人焉知其極。Footnote 52
Numerous parallels of this anecdote exist in other source materials, all differing, first, in the identities of the protagonists.Footnote 53 King Tang’s role has been played by Kings Taiwu 太戊 and Wuding 武丁, while the role of the diviner, here supplanted by King Tang, is in all other variations played either by an actual court-diviner or advisor. In most of those variations, the diviner decodes the sudden appearance of the mulberry tree as a sign of the state’s imminent collapse, the fear of which prompts the king to instantly better his behavior. Only the Shi ji version skips the decoding altogether in exchange for Yi Zhi’s 伊陟 admonition to King Taiwu: “I have heard that balefulness does not overcome virtue. Dare I say that your rule is lacking in some ways? Please cultivate virtue, my lord!” (臣聞妖不勝德。帝之政其有闕與？帝其修德).Footnote 54
In the Lüshi chunqiu version, all the differences in the anecdote—and these differences are the most drastic in comparison—prove to have been carefully choreographed. King Tang, for instance, “turns away” (退) the court-diviner in order to decode the sign himself, a move anticipating the final comment that the reading of the sign is “the insight of a sage alone” (聖人所獨見); the “average man” (眾人), the court-diviner included, would not “understand the depth of it” (知其極).Footnote 55 Commensurate with his perspicacity, King Tang elects to better fulfill his kingly duties out of his own volition and diagnosis of the problem, rather than out of fear or pressure from his advisors. Compared to all other variations of this anecdote and its interpretations, the Lüshi chunqiu version is the only instance in which emphasis is placed on the king’s own reading of the sign and the righting of his own wrongs rather than on his respect for good counsel or the potency of omens. And that emphasis is brought out by framing (or reframing) this popular anecdote in the unique way it reads here and by commenting on it from a perspective unseen anywhere else.Footnote 56 Needless to say, King Tang as the founder of the Shang is likewise far more exemplary a sage than Kings Taiwu and Wuding. Little in this instantiation of the anecdote and its interpretation is not a purposeful variation.
This distinctive take on the anecdote accentuating a ruler’s own discernment and drive aligns with the morals of the remaining two anecdotes assembled in this chapter. In one, the venerable King Wen 文王 rejects his officials’ suggestion to “dispel” (移) an earthquake by amassing mass labor to build more city walls; instead, he insists that he is the one Heaven is warning because he must be the one who has committed crimes. Therefore, he is the one, not the people, who is to “rectify his behavior and double his goodwill” (改行重善).Footnote 57 In the other, an astronomical movement is agreed to be a sign of the imminent demise of Duke Jing of Song 宋景公. Rather than follow his advisor’s urge to shift the calamity to either his ministers, citizens, or the upcoming harvest, the duke insists on exchanging his own life for the larger good, for “it is my allotted time” (寡人之命), the duke says, “that has reached its sure end” (固盡已).Footnote 58 As in the King Wen anecdote, Duke Jing’s ownership of what is due to him earns him not only the vanishing of the omen but Heaven’s reward. Although neither of these two anecdotes conclude with a comment, the narratives themselves reveal, and confirm, the moral to us: King Wen ruled for another forty-three years after the incident; Duke Jing is promised another twenty-one years of life.
Like the King Tang anecdote, both of these anecdotes have parallels elsewhere.Footnote 59 They are not inherently related, they serve different functions in different contexts, but in here they combine to illustrate a larger point, with equal weight, that oversees and prefaces their assemblage:
To observe the utmost music, one looks to the utmost order. Where order is substantial, musical order is also substantial. Where order is frail, musical order is also frail. In chaotic times, what is slighted is music. Now, even if doors are shut and windows sealed, the stirring of Heaven and Earth can stem from within a single room.
欲觀至樂，必於至治。其治厚者其樂治厚，其治薄者其樂治薄。亂世則慢以樂矣。 今窒閉戶牖，動天地，一室也。Footnote 60
The correlation between music and order is not a new idea, what stands out here is the claim that “a single room” might hold the power to “stir Heaven and Earth,” even if it is completely sealed off. If that is what “utmost order” boils down to, then what better examples are there than the three rulers’ unwavering drive to own their responsibilities, all with far-reaching consequences, all made behind closed doors with—even against—their innermost circles? The omens that begin all three anecdotes are not the point; they simply serve to prompt the kings’ self-correction. Framed and assembled in the ways they are, this cluster of materials carries the argumentative weight of the opening claim.Footnote 61
Structure III: (Claim)–Support–Comment, or, the Performative Assemblage
Sometimes, an opening theme or claim is not given in an assemblage; it emerges only from the reader’s inference. This is not to say that any inference is plausible. The way the assemblage is shaped—structurally, materially, and rhetorically—will guide the readers toward an inference more reasonable than others. This shape is the third structure commonly shared in early Chinese writings, in which the assemblage’s argument is made performatively, i.e., by enacting the argument rather than articulating it. The “Daoying xun” 道應訓 chapter of the Huainanzi 淮南子, for example, is one such instantiation of the structure that has drawn some reflections in this regard. Combining fifty-six anecdotes into one single assemblage, fifty-three of which are capped by a Laozi quotation, the assemblage, says Sarah Queen, “demonstrates the versatility of the Laozi as an authority of sagely rules,” and it does so by having the Laozi “speak to virtually any and every occasion.”Footnote 62 In the process, Queen further notes, the chapter “not only explains the Laozi in novel ways, it also refashions ancient stories to suit its particular aims” (emphasis added).Footnote 63 The former is the unarticulated argument made by the assemblage, effected in part by the repeated invocation of the same source (the Laozi); the latter speaks to the “framedness” of the building blocks.
As Queen also reminds us, the “Daoying xun” is not alone in adopting this structure. Along with the “Jie Lao” 解老 and “Yu Lao” 喻老 chapters of the Han Feizi,Footnote 64 it aims to rival the universal applicability of the Shi 詩 in speaking to “whatever circumstance might arise in human affairs.”Footnote 65 This is a very tall order, however, as the model in which the Shi appears, the Hanshi waizhuan 韓詩外傳, touches on far more “human affairs.” The anthology assembles 306 anecdotes and brief expositions, only twenty-four of which do not culminate in a Shi quotation.Footnote 66 Altogether, 107 Shi poems are represented, in largely the same order as the received Mao shi 毛詩. As James Hightower has observed, the Hanshi waizhuan is “as miscellaneous in its contents as the dozen or so works from which it draws its materials, and yet the book is essentially homogeneous and constructed systematically. Its unity derives from its purpose and appears in the inevitable Shi yue 詩曰 at the end of each paragraph.”Footnote 67 In other words, it is the transcendental value of the Shi that lends coherence to this sizable assemblage of “miscellaneous” materials.
That said, the Hanshi waizhuan also projects a more complex relationship between the Shi and the assembled materials. On the one hand, a single line from the Shi is routinely quoted to conclude multiple pieces of materials; on the other, in many clusters of materials concluded by the same Shi quotation, anecdotes are joined by other types of illustrative materials such as aphoristic sayings and brief expositions.Footnote 68 This anthology-wide pattern creates an interesting dialectic between the “application of Shi” (用詩) and the “interpretation of Shi” (解詩), two paradigms in the study of Shi quotations often opposed to each other in the case of the Hanshi waizhuan.Footnote 69 But, as will become clear, the interplay between the two is what truly defines the anthology, as both a “textbook” of the Shi and an example of its transcendental value.Footnote 70
The anecdote about the portentous mulberry tree, for example, also appears in the Hanshi waizhuan. This time read by King Tang’s advisor Yi Yin 伊尹, the omen’s dismissal by the king’s change of behavior leads to a line from Mao 272: “The Shi has it, ‘Revere Heaven’s awe, / by being timely you can preserve [Heaven’s favor]’” (⟪詩⟫曰：「畏天之威，于時保之」).Footnote 71 Right after that, the same King Wen anecdote following this one in the Lüshi chunqiu also appears to preface the same line from the Shi. While the King Wen anecdote remains unchanged in its new iteration here, the Shi quotation alone alters its reading and, consequently, illustrative focus. It is no longer the king’s ownership of his fate and responsibility that is being highlighted, but his reverence for Heaven. The anecdote both explains and is explained by the Shi. The same goes for the King Tang anecdote, except in that case, the structure of the anecdote itself shifts so that the king is forewarned. In perfect choreography, the Shi line is both illustrated by the stories of two dynastic founders, and shown to be variously applicable, as each king is dealing with a different problem at a different time.
Following this twice-invoked Shi quotation, the next batch of materials connects another Shi quotation to three pieces of materials: two brief expository claims and a lengthy anecdote.Footnote 72 The first piece goes like this:
A king in assessing virtue does not esteem those without merit, employ those without moral power, or punish those without guilt. At court, there is no position of opportunism; among the people, there is no unearned living. As such, he elevates the worthy and uses the capable, so ranks are not transgressed; subdues cruelty and outlaws brutality, so punishment is not overprescribed. People all fully understand that if one does good at home, one will receive praise at court; if one does evil in private, one will suffer punishment in public. When all these are affirmed, one can say the assessment is completed. This is the virtue of a king. The Shi has it, “Brilliant and glorious the House of Zhou, / all positions regulated by order.”
王者之論德也，不尊無功，不官無德，不誅無罪。朝無幸位，民無幸生。故上賢使能而等級不踰；折暴禁悍而刑罰不過。百姓曉然皆知夫為善於家，取賞於朝也；為不善於幽而蒙刑於顯。夫是之謂定論。是王者之德。⟪詩⟫曰：「明昭有周，式序在位。」Footnote 73
According to the Mao reading, the poem from which the line above is quoted (Mao 273) is a song performed at a ritual sacrifice commemorating King Wu 武王. It celebrates his overthrow of the Shang before praising the measures he took to found the Zhou. The quoted line is thus understood as King Wu’s “assigning of positions by rank and order, as he had around him worthy talents” (以其有俊乂，用次第處位).Footnote 74 From this perspective, this brief exposition expands on the notion of shixu 式序 to make sure it is understood not as an order based on blood or seniority but on merit and morality. Everyone earns what he is given. The keyword lun 論 with its dual meanings makes it clear that the king’s “assessment” (lùn; *[r]ˤu[n]-s) is done for the purpose of employment, promotion, recognition—things premised on “ranking,” on being “sorted out” (lún; *[r]u[n]).Footnote 75
As if one explanation/illustration was not enough, the assemblage associates the same Shi line with another piece of expository material from an unknown Tradition (傳), a pronouncement on the fourfold difference between the “common people” (民), the “man-of-service” (士), the “gentleman” (君子), and the “sage” (聖人):
The Tradition says: To take following customs as appropriate, material goods as treasure, and the nurturing of nature as the utmost Way for oneself—this is the virtue of the common people, not yet that of the man-of-service. To act in the bounds of law, while still maintaining a firm will, so that what is learned is not interfered with by what is selfishly desired—this is an upright man-of-service, but not yet a gentleman. To act in the bounds of law while maintaining a firm will, to be fond of cultivating what he has learned so as to correct his dispositions, to be mostly proper in his words and deeds and yet not fully understanding, to be mostly apt with his thoughts and worries and yet neither thorough nor circumspect, to be able to make great what he exalts above, to be capable of guiding those who are lesser than him below—this is a genuine, substantial gentleman, but not yet a sage. If, however, he can cultivate the models of the hundred kings as easily as differentiating white from black, adapt to the changes of the current time as effortlessly as counting from one to two, carry out rituals and hold to integrity as naturally as moving his limbs,Footnote 76 follow the transformations to establish merits as [insightfully] as predicting the four seasons, so that all-under-Heaven obtain order, and the myriad things find peace in where they belong—this, then, is a sage. The Shi has it, “Brilliant and glorious the House of Zhou, / all positions regulated by order.”
傳曰：以從俗為善，以貨財為寶，以養性為己至道，是民德也，未及於士也。行法而志堅，不以私欲害其所聞，是勁士也，未及於君子也。行法而志堅，好脩其所聞以矯其情，言行多當，未安諭也，知慮多當，未周密也，上則能大其所隆也，下則能開道不若己者，是篤厚君子，未及聖人也。若夫脩百王之法，若別白黑，應當世之變，若數一二，行禮要節，若性四支，因化立功，若推四時，天下得序，羣物安居，是聖人也。⟪詩⟫曰：「明昭有周，式序在位。」Footnote 77
Compared to the first piece, this second claim is more elaborate, more concrete, and more oriented toward the final staging of the sage as the ultimate embodiment of virtue. It does not name King Wu, but by culminating in the quoted Shi line, it implicates that the sage here is the very King Wu celebrated in the poem. The Tradition and the Shi complete each other. Not only that, the underlined part of this entire piece is the only variation from this piece’s parallel in the Xunzi 荀子, which says instead, “his skill in seizing the opportunity to achieve merit is like that of proclaiming the four seasons; his excellence in fairly and squarely harmonizing the people makes millions and millions all act as if they were one” (要時立功之巧若詔四時。平正和民之善，億萬之眾而搏若一人).Footnote 78 The first halves of the two variations are not that different; the sage achieving merits is compared to his ushering in of the four seasons. But the second half in the Hanshi waizhuan version explicitly spells out what it means for the Shi to say “all positions regulated by order” (式序在位): it means precisely that “all-under-Heaven obtain order, and the myriad things find peace in where they belong” (天下得序，羣物安居). In light of the Xunzi version, these lines also tie the entire passage together by subsuming all that has been mentioned so far under the umbrella terms of tianxia 天下 and qunwu 羣物. Like the first piece of material, this one both explains and illustrates the Shi. Just as the earlier quotation of Mao 272 is prefaced by a tailored variation of the mulberry tree anecdote, the illustrating and the illustrated here operate in symbiosis as well.
Furthermore, a third piece of material immediately follows to offer yet another example of this Shi quotation’s relevance to historical particulars—in this case, a lengthy and dramatic anecdote on how Duke Wen of Wei 魏文侯 chose his grand minister. Closely paralleled in both the Shiji and Shuoyuan,Footnote 79 the anecdote in the Hanshi waizhuan version begins thus:
Duke Wen of Wei wanted to appoint a grand minister. He summoned Li Ke to ask him, “I wish to appoint a grand minister. If it is not Zhai Huang, it is going to be Wei Chengzi. Allow me to make my choice with you, Sir.” Li Ke withdrew from his seat and demurred, saying, “I have heard that the lowly does not counsel the honorable; the unacquainted does not come between those who are close. I am someone who resides on the outside. I dare not answer your command.” Duke Wen replied, “Sir, do preside over it, do not hold back.” Li Ke thus went on, “When evaluating people—if seated [in power], look at who he is close with; if wealthy, look at what he gives away; if successful, look at whom he promotes; if deprived, look at what he does not do; if impoverished, look at what he does not take. These five should suffice for your evaluation.” Duke Wen said, “You may go home, Sir. My grand minister has been decided.”
魏文侯欲置相，召李克問曰：「寡人欲置相，非翟黃則魏成子。願卜之於先生。」李克避席而辭曰：「臣聞之：卑不謀尊，疏不間親。臣外居者也，不敢當命。」文侯曰：「先生臨事勿讓。」李克曰：「夫觀士也，居則視其所親，富則視其所與，達則視其所舉，窮則視其所不為，貧則視其所不取。此五者足以觀矣。」文侯曰：「請先生就舍，寡人之相定矣。」Footnote 80
On his way out, Li Ke was confronted by Zhai Huang, who heard of his audience with the duke. Asking him point-blank who had been chosen as the grand minister, Zhai Huang was told Wei Chengzi and burst into an enraged accusation of Li Ke’s interference. In response, Li Ke repeated to Zhai Huang verbatim the five criteria he offered Duke Wen, followed by a pointed comparison between the two candidates, adding, “How would [the duke] wait for me [to decide]? By the [duke’s response] I already knew that Wei Chengzi was to become the grand minister” (何待克哉？是以知魏成子為相也).Footnote 81 Hearing that, Zhai Huang finally backed down in embarrassment. Then, the text concludes with the same Shi quotation, “Brilliant and glorious the House of Zhou, / all positions regulated by order.”
What is assembled here is not just another example, but, in this trio of examples, the most vivid illustration. By dramatizing what in the first two instances are dry precepts, by showcasing an actual instance of regulating and ordering people, and by having Li Ke spell out the criteria for evaluating people not once but twice, this anecdote provides a livelier, more accessible avenue to understanding this Shi quotation’s meaning and significance.Footnote 82 If the Hanshi waizhuan was indeed the Han school’s textbook on the Shi, this one line from Mao 273 is illustrated three times, each by materials yet more concrete. For some, the expository claims may have sufficed; for others, this dramatic anecdote might be the only recourse. Altogether, however, it shows that the Shi is universally applicable as a principle of truth, not only to historical particulars typically expressed in the form of the anecdote, but also to more abstract ideals, those inherited (the Zhuan 傳) included.
In the larger picture, this is how the Hanshi waizhuan operates across the entire anthology. A Shi quotation is not only explained, illustrated, attested to multiple times and through varying means, the Shi as a whole also stands to gain the recognition that it indeed speaks to “whatever circumstance might arise in human affairs.” This effect on the reader is consistently structured across the ten chapters of the Hanshi waizhuan, and the effect is brought to bear through unannounced demonstration, not explicit instruction. All of that is made possible by this compilation’s adoption of the performative structure of the early Chinese assemblage, one that enacts the argument through its selection, arrangement, and presentation of the materials.
Structure IV: (Claim)–Support–(Comment), or, the Experiential Assemblage
The three structures so far discussed demonstrate a number of commonalities between assemblages that can be read compilationally. First, the building block corresponds to a variety of literary forms. It is not just any textual unit but, chief among others, an anecdote, an aphoristic saying, a piece of expository reasoning created or borrowed. Second, all of the building blocks are structurally, contextually, and rhetorically conducive to the construction of a larger whole. What is gathered is always framed in some ways, so the sum of the parts can exhibit a coherent meaning and/or effect. Third, this process of “gathering and framing” is neither at odds with the notion of authorship, however defined, nor confined to any specific roles of textual formation. The acts of tailoring the materials can be done by anyone who understands the “genre rules” of the structures. Fourth, although all these structures afford meaning to the sum of their parts, because they are removed from their original context, it is ultimately the readers who will be assigning meaning to them. That being the case, the kind of meaning readers can assign will not be random. As something that was shared among early Chinese texts, these structures have common characteristics that serve as more reliable measures against idiosyncratic and anachronistic readings.
All these considerations merit some priority when approaching an early Chinese assemblage, especially those that appear to be truly unstructured. A linear, discursive coherence, as is so often sought, is among the most anachronistic impositions a modern reader can, and has, introduced to such kinds of assemblages. Small pockets of such coherence are not uncommon, but even in those cases, the materials are more often linked by association than by logical necessity.Footnote 83 In an assemblage, coherence is always multidimensional. The measure is first of all formal and structural, and only then thematic, discursive, and so forth. In the absence of oral instructions that likely have accompanied the production and use of these assemblages, a modern reader stands to gain from exercising patience, modesty, and an openness to the ways a text suggests its own reading.
In that regard, the two “Shui lin” 說林 chapters of the Han Feizi have a lot to teach us. A highly “unstructured” assemblage, of a variety of materials as well, the “Shui lin” has been taken as a collection of “raw materials,” a partially edited text furnished with uneven authorial input,Footnote 84 or a unified philosophical work on the problems of “mind, language, and society.”Footnote 85 The first view overemphasizes the haphazardness of the “Shui lin”—there is indeed no apparent order one can discern—and the heterogeneity of the materials assembled; the second privileges what looks like commentarial materials over other, “raw” constituents like anecdotes and inherited sayings;Footnote 86 and the third focuses on the ideas embedded in the assemblage at the expense of its form.Footnote 87 Examined as an assemblage that can be read compilationally, however, the “Shui lin” proves to be exactly what the title suggests, “a forest of persuasions.”Footnote 88 To arrive at that understanding, the reader’s sensitivity and partnership cannot be separated from the assemblage’s arrangement and inclusions. Such is how the fourth and final common structure of the assemblage works—by training the reader through the reading process to grasp the overall meaning and significance of the assemblage.
The “Shui lin” consists of four kinds of materials, each differing from the others, each intermixed with the others, but all amount to a particular type of shui, persuasion. The first is the anecdote in its “full-size” shape, complete with a beginning, middle, and end, and centered on an exchange of speech.Footnote 89 Out of the seventy-one pieces of material assembled, this group adds up to twenty-five. In all these anecdotes, a speech act of persuasion is narrated, whose felicity is then confirmed. The assemblage opens, for instance, with the following anecdote:
Having overthrown Jie, Tang feared that the world would regard him as greedy, so he offered to abdicate the throne to Wuguang. Fearing that Wuguang might accept it, he sent an envoy to dissuade him: “Tang murdered his lord and wished to pass the stigma onto you, hence his abdication in favor of you.” Wuguang thereupon threw himself into the River.
湯以伐桀，而恐天下言自己為貪也，因乃讓天下於務光。而恐務光之受之也，乃使人說務光曰：「湯殺君而欲傳惡聲于子，故讓天下於子。」務光因自投於河。Footnote 90
Tang’s unusual hypocrisy aside,Footnote 91 the final statement that “Wuguang thereupon threw himself into the River” (務光因自投於河) confirms by way of conclusion the success of the persuasion, in this case a dissuasion. The verb shui 說 marking the envoy’s speech as an illocution of persuasion does not have to be supplied; a generic yue 曰 would have sufficed so long as the act of persuasion is delivered at the locutionary level, that is, in the words of a speaker. Consider, for example, this anecdote:
Having defeated Yin, the Duke of Zhou, Dan, was about to attack Shanghe. The Duke of Xin, Jia, said to him, “Bigger forces are harder to conquer; smaller ones are easier to subdue. It would be better to first subdue the many small powers before taking on the big one.” Thus, they attacked first the nine barbarian tribes, after which Shanghe submitted.
周公旦已勝殷，將攻商蓋。辛公甲曰：「大難攻，小易服。不如服眾小以劫大。」乃攻九夷而商蓋服矣。Footnote 92
Not anticipated by shui, the buru 不如 (would be better to) in Jia’s speech signals that he is uttering a persuasion. Like in the earlier case, the persuasion is also confirmed to be successful by the final narration, in which we are told that the Duke of Zhou changed course. Marked or not, the speech act of persuasion is always produced by the actual speech uttered.
Sometimes, not one but two persuasions are strung into one anecdote, creating a sense of narrative flow otherwise unseen in the materials comprising the “Shui lin”:
[1] Having defeated Wu, Yue demanded soldiers from Jing (i.e., Chu) in a bid to attack Jin. Yixiang, the Minister on the Left, said to the King of Jing, “Now that Yue has penetrated Wu, their elite officers have all been killed, their frontline soldiers exhausted, and their heavy armors damaged. That they now demand soldiers from us to attack Jin is simply a pretense to signal to us that they are not in distress. It would be better for us to raise our army and split Wu with them.” The King of Jing said, “Excellent!” Thereupon, Jing raised their army to follow Yue’s.
越已勝吳，又索卒於荊而攻晉。左史倚相謂荊王曰：「夫越破吳，豪士死，銳卒盡，大甲傷。今又索卒以攻晉，示我不病也。不如起師與分吳。」荊王曰：「善。」因起師而從越。
[2] The King of Yue was infuriated and wished to strike Jing. But Zhong, his grand minister, said to him, “Do not do it! Our elite officers have all been killed, and our heavy armors are all damaged. Should we fight them, we will have no chance at winning. It would be better for us to bribe them.” Thus, Yue carved out 500 miles of territory north of Mount Lu to offer as a bribe to Jing.
越王怒，將擊之。大夫種曰：「不可。吾豪士盡，大甲傷，我與戰必不剋。不如賂之。」乃割露山之陰五百里以賂之。Footnote 93
Two exchanges, two persuasions, two narrative confirmations of success. The king’s “excellent” 善 and the conjunctions yin 因 and nai 乃 are the most common—and formulaic—ways of expressing persuasive felicity in the “Shui lin.” In most cases, the persuasion is also the centerpiece of the narrative. But occasionally, a few more exchanges would first lay the narrative ground for persuasion, only to have the persuasion delivered in conjunction with the culmination of the story.Footnote 94 In either case, what is featured is a forcefully articulated persuasion situated in a concrete historical context, and its success is always confirmed by the narrative itself.
Joining this first type of materials are seventeen anecdotes that uniformly lack a concluding narration. They all come to a full stop whenever the exchange retold in the anecdote is over. One of the first occurrences of this kind reads like this:
King Hui of Wei made the Covenant of Jiuli, which would restore the position of the Son of Heaven. Peng Xi said to the ruler of Zheng: “Do not listen to it, my lord. Big states loathe the existence of the Son of Heaven, only small states benefit from it. If you and the other big states turn a deaf ear to it, how is Wei going to restore the Son of Heaven with the other small states?!”
魏惠王為臼里之盟，將復立於天子。彭喜謂鄭君曰：「君勿聽。大國惡有天子，小國利之。若君與大不聽，魏焉能與小立之。」Footnote 95
Although the anecdote is left open-ended, the strong prohibitive wuting 勿聽 (do not listen) in Peng Xi’s speech renders what follows a clear persuasion. The lord of Zheng is to be dissuaded from joining the King of Wei, as it is against Zheng’s interest to restore the Son of Heaven. In another example, a prohibitive (buke 不可) is followed by an alternative (buru 不如), turning one instance of persuasion organically into two:
Zhou Zao said to Gong Tuo, “Please say this for me to the King of Qi, ‘If Qi is willing to help me prevail in Wei, I shall serve Qi with Wei.’” Gong Tuo said, “This is not advisable. This would be showing the King of Qi that you do not possess Wei. By no means will he aid someone who does not possess Wei; instead, he will only grow antagonistic to he who does. You, my lord, had better say, ‘Per your desire, I wish to submit to you with Wei.’ The King of Qi will then think that you already control Wei, and will therefore grant you his favor. By thus gaining Qi, you will have gained both Qi and Wei.’”
周趮謂宮他曰：「為我謂齊王曰：『以齊資我於魏，請以魏事王。』」宮他曰：「不可。是示之無魏也。齊王必不資於無魏者，而以怨有魏者。公不如曰：『以王之所欲，臣請以魏聽王。』齊王必以公為有魏也，必因公。是公有齊也，因以有齊魏矣。」Footnote 96
A clever shift in rhetoric, the strategy offered by Gong Tuo is built on his disapproval of Zhou Zao’s initial suggestion. Gong’s alternative, palimpsestous advice marks the necessity in certain types of persuasion to overwrite one plan with another. Such two-part persuasion is very common among this second type of materials in the “Shui lin.”Footnote 97 It compensates for the underdetermined illocutions, all marked here by yue, by clearly articulating the shui in the locution. But again, persuasion as a speech act is determined by the actual words spoken. Sometimes, even the clear locutionary markers of persuasion like wuting, buke, and buru are omitted as well. What results is still a persuasion, only more subtly and artfully expressed. Consider the following example:
Duke Mu of Lu sent his many princes to take up offices either in Jin or Jing. Li Ju said, “Say that you borrow someone from Yue to rescue a drowning child here, even though the Yue people are good at swimming, the child will not live. Say, again, that you have a fire, but you go fetch water from the sea. Even though the sea has plenty of water, the fire will not be extinguished. Distant water does not eliminate a fire nearby. Now, even though Jin and Jing are both powerful, Qi is, however, closer. Does Lu really worry that they will not come to its rescue?”
魯穆公使眾公子或宦於晉，或宦於荊。犁鉏曰：「假人於越而救溺子，越人雖善遊， 子必不生矣。失火而取水於海，海水雖多，火必不滅矣。遠水不救近火也。今晉與荊雖強，而齊近，魯患其不救乎？」Footnote 98
Told through two analogies of certain (bi 必) impossibility, Li Ju is thus suggesting to Duke Mu that his plan is miscalculated, that Jin and Jing will never repay him for volunteering his children basically as hostages. Instead, he implies, Lu should cultivate its relationship with Qi, since, geopolitically, the two bordering states would have more interests in common. The same disapproval-alternative mix underlies Li’s speech, and the applicability of the analogies is connected to the concrete case of Lu’s alliance choice by the word jin 今 (now). Combined with a rhetorical question at the end, Li Ju’s speech is subtle yet forceful, conveying a persuasion not by articulating a course of action but by analyzing the problem at hand. To some, such “indirect persuasion” speaks more effectively.Footnote 99
In whichever case, the focus of this second group of materials remains that of persuasion. They differ from the first group mainly in the absence of a final narration confirming the felicity of the persuasion. In the larger picture, this is not really a problem: the assemblage is titled a “Forest of Persuasions,” not a “Forest of Successful Persuasions.” But if one so wishes, there is no harm in reading felicity into any of these anecdotes. When the first group all combine to establish a clear pattern of narrative confirmation, “the habits of reading prompt readers to enunciate the judgment for themselves.”Footnote 100 Along with that, it is also not hard to see that the persuasions so far illustrated all arise out of the speaking voice of a character in the anecdote. This selection of kindred materials suggests authorial control and/or compilatory consistency.
The third type of materials, still anecdotes in kind, are the very materials that have led some scholars to argue for Han Fei’s authorship of the “Shui lin.” Eleven in total, these anecdotes all conclude in some commentarial language that immediately triggers a different mode of reading for some readers. The first anecdote in this group reads like this:
Guan Zhong and Xi Peng accompanied Duke Huan of Qi on an expedition against Guzhu. They left in the spring, returned in the winter, and got lost on the way. Guan Zhong said, “The wits of an old horse can be borrowed.” They thus set free an old horse, followed it, and found their way. While they were trekking through the mountains, they ran out of water. Xi Peng said, “Ants live on the south side of the mountain in the winter and the north side in the summer. If an ant nest is one inch high, there will be water one ren [seven to eight chi 尺, or about five to six feet] beneath.” So, they dug up the ground and found water. With Guan Zhong’s wisdom and Xi Peng’s intellect, when facing things they did not know, they still felt no shame in learning from horses and ants. Is it not too absurd that today’s people, foolish as they are, do not know well enough to learn from the wisdom of the sage?
管仲、隰朋從於桓公而伐孤竹，春往冬反，迷惑失道。管仲曰：「老馬之智可用也。」乃放老馬而隨之，遂得道。行山中無水，隰朋曰：「蟻冬居山之陽，夏居山之陰，蟻壤一寸而仞有水。」乃掘地，遂得水。以管仲之聖，而隰朋之智，至其所不知，不難師於老馬與蟻。今人不知以其愚心而師聖人之智，不亦過乎。Footnote 101
Unlike the previous examples, this passage concludes with commentarial materials on the characters and events in the anecdote. In a departure from earlier speeches, the words uttered also no longer sound like a persuasion of any kind. Both Guan Zhong and Xi Peng simply address a situation confronting their way back home. The first peculiarity saves the “Shui lin,” says Zheng Liangshu 鄭良樹, from “being necessarily discounted in value,” that is, from “having no place in the discussion of Han Fei’s thought.”Footnote 102 The second, on the other hand, appears to contradict the reading of the title of this assemblage as a “Forest of Persuasions,” as what we now see in the two speakers is not shui but shuo, and shuo in the most basic sense of “to speak.”Footnote 103 No matter how one looks at it, this anecdote introduces several complications.
These complications, however, speak not so much to “problems” in the assemblage as to our hermeneutic premises. Shui and shuo, for instance, do not conflict. While the characters in the anecdotes might be simply uttering a shuo, their shuo can be the anecdote’s shui addressed to the readers. As Michael Hunter has rather nicely put it, “A shui is simply a directed shuo.”Footnote 104 The direction, one could add, goes not only from one character to another but also, cross-diegetically, from the character to the audience of the anecdote. Likewise, when the commentarial language is not read as “paratext,” an authorial addition aimed at the containment of meaning of the “raw anecdote” that is the “text,”Footnote 105 what is said in it makes a perfect shui out of the anecdote in toto. The two speeches by Guan Zhong and Xi Peng feed into a more general statement about the significance of learning, humility, and knowledge. The message is that you, dear readers, ought to learn from the wise if you understand the moral of the story. The concluding question in this anecdote, a rhetorical one, is also not inviting an answer but urging a response. The recognition of the persuasion depends fully on the reader’s sensitivity to the anecdote’s overall message, expressed diegetically but directed extra-diegetically. To put it in a more speculative way, the entire anecdote, the comment included, is the locution of someone’s illocution of persuasion.
For all the other inclusions in this group of materials, this is precisely how persuasion works. When, for example, a certain father from the Wei 偉 asked his daughter to “make sure to secretly stock up and stash away” (必私積聚) after marrying her off, citing the “normalcy” (常) of “expulsion” (出) as reason, the daughter followed along and was unsurprisingly expelled from her in-laws.’ A comment, then, criticizes the father as someone who “does not fault himself for teaching his daughter indecency but rather considers his daughter to have gained wealth” (不自罪於教子非也， 而自知其益富). From there, the anecdote concludes: “Nowadays, people occupying offices are all of this type” (今人臣之處官者皆是類也).Footnote 106 The father’s spoken instruction to the daughter prefaces the two-part comment in which a broader persuasion, or dissuasion, rather, is derived from the targeted judgement of the father. The message is that you, present and future officials, will be out of a job too if you steal on the job. Like the Guan Zhong and Xi Peng anecdote, both argue from an analogy, both comment first specifically then generally, and both address a contemporary (jin 今) audience with every single word in the entire piece.
Alternatively, consider this slightly lengthier but much more direct expression of persuasion, delivered still via the entire narrative flow from the anecdote to the final comment:
Bole was teaching two people how to appraise the “Kicker,” a breed of horse, and they went together to Jianzi’s stable to look at horses. One of them identified a “Kicker.” The other went around to its back, stroked its rump three times, but the horse did not kick. The first man, therefore, thought he had erred in his appraisal. The other man said, “You did not. This horse is suffering from bruised collarbones and swollen knees. When a “Kicker” kicks his hind legs, he has to put his weight on the front legs. This one’s swollen knees cannot bear his weight, and that is why he did not kick. You indeed are good at appraising the “Kicker,” but you are clumsy at recognizing swollen knees.” Now, everything goes back somewhere. In this case, the swollen knees failing to carry weight is, however, what only the wise can understand. Master Hui once said, “When you encage a gibbon, the gibbon will be no different from a piglet.” Therefore, when the circumstances are not favorable, it is not the time to showcase one’s skills.
伯樂教二人相踶馬，相與之簡子廄觀馬。一人舉踶馬，其一人從後而循之，三撫其尻而馬不踶，此自以為失相。其一人曰：「子非失相也。此其為馬也，踒肩而腫膝。 夫踶馬也者，舉後而任前。腫膝不可任也，故後不舉。子巧於相踶馬而拙於任腫膝。」夫事有所必歸，而以有所腫膝而不任，智者之所獨知也。惠子曰；「 置猿於柙中，則與豚同。」故勢不便，非所以逞能也。Footnote 107
As in the Guan Zhong and Xi Peng anecdote, nothing said by the two men is in any way a persuasion. Yet, their shuo feeds into a layered progression of commentarial materials. It goes from a targeted remark on the anecdote, its characters and events, to an intermediary quotation from Master Hui, to an unqualified claim on shi 勢, circumstances, and the timing of one’s endeavors. Both the horse and the appraiser can be said to be the victims of unfavorable shi. Although some members in this group of materials leap straight to the final generalization, marked likewise by gu 故 or guyue 故曰,Footnote 108 the transference of the persuasive message from the anecdotal story per se to the comment remains the same. The anecdote prepares the ground, broaches the topic, while the comment ties everything up in some evaluative language both about the story world and about the world in which the story is told. Whether Han Fei authored any of these is beyond our grasp. What is more evident is the consistency of the format, of the symbiosis between the “text” and the “paratext,” and of the “paratext” brokering the persuasion. All of that is evidence, again, of both authorial control and compilatory consistency, or some combination of both.
The final group of materials is what calls for the reader’s keenest partnership in making the “Shui lin” a true “Forest of Persuasions.” Unlike any of the materials discussed so far, the reader is presented now with eighteen cautionary tales, as it were, of different kinds. Some speak to the general audience, others make more sense only from certain perspectives. Also unlike the first three groups of materials, few of the cautionary tales are paralleled anywhere in extant writings from early China. From the point of view of both variety and novelty, this “forest” in the Han Feizi seems carefully curated to maximize the reader’s exposure to what a “persuasion” might look like. And to read a persuasion out of a cautionary tale would constitute the reader’s utmost goodwill in trusting that an assemblage of diverse materials whose provenance is far beyond determination can somehow have a coherent design and message. The following examples require little convincing:
Among birds there is a breed known as the “Feathery Heady.” Its head is heavy and its tail bent. Whenever it tries to drink from a stream, it will inevitably tip over. Only by sucking water from its feather can it drink. If among people there are those who cannot drink with their feet planted,Footnote 109 they cannot but seek their own “feathers” as well.
鳥有翢翢者，重首而屈尾。將欲飲於河則必顛，乃銜其羽而飲之。人之所有飲不足者，不可不索其羽也。Footnote 110
Among the rich merchants of Song, there was a man named Jian Zhizi. In a quarrelsome bid for a piece of uncarved jade worth a hundred pieces of gold, he damaged it by dropping it “by mistake.” Bearing a hundred pieces of gold as compensation, Jian polished the blemish and gained a thousand [pieces of gold] more. To take on an undertaking only to suffer failure is still better than not taking it on. [Jian’s] bearing the cost [of the jade] is a case in point.Footnote 111
宋之富賈有監止子者，與人爭買百金之璞玉，因佯失而毀之。負其百金，而理其毀瑕，得千溢焉。事有舉之而有敗而賢其毋舉之者，負之時也。Footnote 112
One told through an allegory, one an anecdote, both conclude with a teaching developed from the stories just told. The concluding comments do not address the reader but certainly speak to one. In terms of structure, these cautionary tales proceed—and persuade—in the exact same way the third group of materials do: by prefacing the concluding, generalized comment with a historical particular as topic and evidence. That the second tale apparently features a trickery over any other story as an example of “committing to action” is the prerogative of the Han Feizi. It aligns with its belief in shu 術, technique, over blind morality. Compared to the first tale with the physically challenged bird, it will not persuade everyone or everyone equally; yet, that does not disqualify it as a persuasion.Footnote 113
The same “selective” persuasiveness, so to speak, accounts for the inclusion of the following tale as well, counterintuitive at first sight but distinctively Han Feizi upon further reflection:
Zhang Qian was prime minster in Han, and he was about to die from an illness. Gongcheng Wuzheng took thirty pieces of gold to inquire after him. A month later, heFootnote 114 asked Zhang Qian, “If you die, whom are you going to recommend as your replacement?” Zhang Qian replied, “You, Wuzheng, take the law seriously and are in reverence of your superiors. That being so, you are no comparison to Prince Shiwo, who has the support of the people.” Upon Zhang Qian’s death, Gongcheng Wuzheng was made prime minister.
張譴相韓，病將死。公乘無正懷三十金而問其疾，居一月自問張譴曰：「若子死，將誰使代子？」答曰：「無正重法而畏上，雖然，不如公子食我之得民也。」張譴死，因相公乘無正。Footnote 115
From Zhang Qian’s reply, it seems obvious that he favors Prince Shiwo: the concessive suiran 雖然 (that being the case) and the comparative buru 不如 (no comparison to) both suggest his preference for people’s support over the respect for law and authority. In addition, the irony is not lost when he describes Gongcheng Wuzheng as someone who “takes the law seriously” 重法 when Gongcheng apparently tried to bribe him with thirty pieces of gold.Footnote 116 Yet, despite all that, Gongcheng Wuzheng was appointed prime minister, suggesting that the ruler of Han still favors fa 法 and the reverence for shang 上, himself, over popularity among the people. Such “sacrilegious” values exist only in the thought system of the Han Feizi. As Christoph Harbsmeier notes, “popularity with the people would only make the alternative candidate a dangerous competitor to the ruler, as the ruler understands.”Footnote 117 Zhang Qian, then, comes off as the fool here. But to the rulers and officials who are targeted by the Han Feizi, the message is loud and clear: to become a prime minister, history has shown that one has to prioritize fa and shang over the support of the common people.
While most of the cautionary tales persuade in similar ways, there remain three pieces of materials that truly stand out in the entire “Shui lin.” In form, they are all anecdotes like the first three groups of materials. But in terms of illocution, the utterances made in these anecdotes are neither shuo nor shui but predictions, and in all cases successful predictions. At first, these materials seem to break the pattern of the assemblage so far observed; but, should one want to, a persuasion can still be read out of a predication. Consider the following:
When Qi attacked Song, Song sent Master Zangsun south to seek help from Jing. Jing was greatly pleased and promised to send help, which was a tremendous encouragement [to Song]. Master Zangsun looked worried on his return, so his driver asked, “We sought help and are promised help, why is it that you have this worried look on you?” Master Zangsun said, “Song is small and Qi is large. To save small Song will [cause Jing] to be detested by large Qi—this is what I am worried about. The reason the King of Jing is pleased is that [his help] will fortify us. When we are fortified, Qi will be weakened [in comparison], and that benefits Jing.” Upon Master Zangsun’s return, Qi seized five cities from Song with help from Jing yet to arrive.
齊攻宋，宋使臧孫子南求救於荊。荊大說，許救之，甚歡。臧孫子憂而反。其御曰：「索救而得，今子有憂色何也？」臧孫子曰：「宋小而齊大。夫救小宋而惡於大齊，此人之所以憂也。而荊王說，必以堅我也。我堅而齊敝，荊之所利也。」臧孫子乃歸，齊人拔五城於宋而荊救不至。Footnote 118
Master Zangsun’s “worried look” 憂色 is a sign of distrust. He does not have to articulate the prediction that Jing is not going to fulfill the empty promise; his facial expression says it all.Footnote 119 In his answer to his driver’s query, however, one can piece together a persuasion. Despite the promise, which turned out to be a calculated deceit out of self-interest, Jing is not going to risk antagonizing Qi just for the sake of Song. Words serve at the pleasure of power politics. To the intended readers of the Han Feizi, this is its philosophy in action. If you, rulers and ministers alike, are credulous enough to believe in goodwill, camaraderie, or anything that is not motivated by self-interest—and, in this case, by evaluation of the circumstances (shi 勢)—then you will reap what your naivety sows. Master Zangsun’s answer to his driver is the very persuasion to the readers of this anecdote.Footnote 120
Taken together, the “Shui lin” is neither a collection of “raw materials” nor a unified exercise in philosophical reasoning. Rather, it is a compilation of persuasion in its various plausible shapes, and a highly coherent one in terms of the relation between each piece of the assembled materials and the overall significance and effect of the assemblage. The “forest” impresses when it is explored, experienced, and taken in by the reader with an open mind to what it offers. The “unstructured” nature of this “forest” is part and parcel of how it convinces: by offering an open field of diverse but mutually compatible materials that the reader can access in any order, from any point of entry, at any degree of engagement. Many of the readings proposed here may very well have existed as oral instructions for the original audience of the “Shui lin,” but the way the assemblage is put together leaves us clues as to what those lost instructions may have been. After all, the “Shui lin” proves to be a rather “rigorous” instantiation of the fourth structure of the assemblage, one that, like the third one, registers its meaning performatively, but through more varieties of illustrative materials not all of which lend fully to the interpretative strategies we are accustomed to.
Assemblage Integrated
So far, every text discussed is an example of a self-standing assemblage. They correspond to the Laozi in Boltz’s original discussion. Within these materials, we can already see that the building block is above all else a literary rather than an editorial unit: it manifests itself in a number of conventional literary forms and contributes to a larger assemblage in rhetorically congruous ways. This suggests that not every “textual unit” can or should be called a “building block,” if the block truly builds something in combination with other such blocks. What is needed in identifying the “building block” is not only an examination of its size, discursive integrity, and portability, Boltz’s chief criteria, but also a look into its use and function in the larger context in which it appears. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the materials comprising what I have shown to be “compilations”—instead of, say, a list or inventory compiled for the sole purpose of preserving information—belong essentially to a repertoire of shared cultural knowledge, expressed in the familiar forms of anecdotes, sayings, analogies, proof texts, and so forth. They are always framed in some ways when gathered into an assemblage, and they contribute both individually and as a group to the larger significance of the assemblage. There is, in other words, a rhetorical dimension to the “building block,” which is interdependent on the block’s receptiveness to contextually bound framing and reframing. Few “building blocks” present genuinely new information; rather, they present something in a new shape and form conducive to the purpose of the broader assemblages in which they are included.
The rhetorical aptness of the building block is even more pronounced and dominant of a selection principle when the building block is imported into a larger narrative. Tobias Zürn has shown rich examples from the Huainanzi;Footnote 121 in the remaining pages, let me briefly reconsider one of Boltz’s original examples, the list of legendary figures from Yao 堯 to Xie 契 in Mengzi 3A.4, so as to illustrate how a rhetorical analysis can add to a more nuanced conception of the “composite nature of early Chinese texts.”
The list appears in the middle of a conversation between Mengzi and Chen Xiang 陳相, who gave up his earlier teaching to follow that of Xu Xing 許行, who himself preaches the teaching of Shennong 神農. Their exchange revolves around the well-known problematic of the obligations of the ruler, in which Chen Xiang insists that a sage ruler ought to plow with the people, only to be told by Mengzi that this is both naïve and impractical. As Mengzi quips, “Even the hundred crafts cannot be done in conjunction with plowing, how is ruling the world alone such an exception that it must be combined with plowing” (百工之事固不可耕且為也，然則治天下獨可耕且為與?).Footnote
122
Soon after, Mengzi goes into the following enumeration of the legendary figures known to the tradition as the creators of the world. In Boltz’s arrangement and translation:Footnote
123
(a)
當堯之時
At the time of Yao
(b)22
天下猶未平，洪水橫流，氾濫於天下，草木暢茂，禽獸繁殖；
the subcelestial realm had not yet become settled; flooding waters coursed across their banks, spreading far and wide throughout the subcelestial realm; grasses and trees burgeoned and flourished; birds and beasts proliferated and abounded.
(c)22
五穀不登，禽獸偪人，獸蹄鳥跡之道交於中國，堯獨憂之；
None of the five grain crops could be grown; birds and beasts oppressed the people; paths worn by animal hooves and bird tracks crisscrossed throughout the Central States. Yao alone was concerned about this.
(d)22
舉舜而敷治焉，舜使益掌火，益烈山澤而焚之，禽獸逃匿。
Having promoted Shun, he brought a far-reaching order to all of this. Shun charged Yi with control of the fire; Yi then wrought havoc on the hills and marshes, devastating them, such that the birds and beasts fled into hiding.
(e)21
禹疏九河，瀹濟漯而注諸海；決汝漢，排淮泗，而注之江，
Yu channeled the Nine Rivers, trenched the Ji and the Lei, draining them into the sea; bore open the Ru and the Han, furrowed the Huai and the Si, draining them into the Yangtze.
(f)21
然後中國可得而食也。「當是時也，」禹八年於外，三過其門而不入，「雖欲耕，得乎」。
After all of this had become so, the Central States came to be livable. [Just at this same time] Yu had been away from home for eight years. Thrice he passed his own gate but never once entered. [Even had he wished to do his own plowing, would this have been possible?]
(g)22
后稷教民稼穡，樹藝五穀，五穀熟而民人育，人之有道也，
Hou Ji instructed the people in agricultural techniques; thus they planted and cultivated the five grain crops. When these five grain crops ripened, the people then were well reared; this was owing to the fact that the people had achieved a proper way.
(h)24
飽食煖衣，逸居而無教，則近於禽獸，聖人有憂之，使契為司徒，
People were well fed and warmly clothed but lived indulgently and were devoid of moral training, and so they came close the status of birds and beasts. The Sagely One showed a concern with this and sent Xie to serve as Educational Overseer.
(i)24
教以人倫，父子有親，君臣有義，夫婦有別，長幼有序，朋友有信。
He taught them about human relations: that between father and son there is a proper intimacy, between lord and vassal there are correct proprieties, between husband and wife there are required discriminations, between old and young there are hierarchical expectations, and among colleagues and friends there is a presumed credibility.
According to Boltz, lines (b)–(d) on Yao and Shun, lines (e)–(f) on Yu, line (g) on Hou Ji, and lines (h)–(i) on Xie each come from a different source. The numbers preceding each line denote the word count in that line, those in the brackets (in line [f]) excluded. Together with the first four words in line (a), Boltz argues, the bracketed phrases are “precisely the kind of editorial/compositional work that the ‘author-compiler’ of the Mencius would contribute as he integrated passages from the various source-texts on which he was relying into an edited narrative whole.”Footnote 124 This entire list, in other words, is borrowed from elsewhere, with only a few “suture marks” added to aid the narrative flow.
This exercise in source criticism is not necessarily uninstructive, although exact parallels to these lines are scarcely found.Footnote 125 Rather, the insistence that these materials are borrowed creates a rigid division between source and destination, authoring and compiling, text and context. We do not know where these lines come from; we do not know, given the commonplaceness of these legends, how much of it is copied from a preexisting source or reproduced from memory or even composed anew as yet another iteration of these highly familiar stories. As Boltz notes himself, “In each case the story or account is independently well known from other transmitted Warring States or early Han texts.”Footnote 126 What remains equally important is that in none of those sources are any of these legends written about in the same way.Footnote 127 This is not to say that no one copied anyone else, but that these legends are among the closest things in early China to being amenable to contextual invocation in new or renewed ways of representation, because they are a valorized trope. Every iteration is likely a new iteration as the legends themselves arise not from an “original” version of their telling but out of intense cultural production.Footnote 128 They fit so well into the larger narrative of Mengzi 3A.4 that they can be imagined to cross the boundaries between borrowing, framing, and outright creating.
To begin with, these legends are appealed to as historical examples, a move “nearly ubiquitous in ancient Chinese philosophy.”Footnote 129 They serve to illustrate Mengzi’s claim in response to Chen Xiang’s naivety that “there are affairs of the great men, just as there are affairs of the small men. Even in one man, he would have the need for the hundred crafts. If one has to make everything himself before he can use it, this will lead the world into misery” (有大人之事，有小人之事。且一人之身，而百工之所為備。如必自為而後用之，是率天下而路也).Footnote 130 In the context, this list of legendary examples is also prefaced by a maxim familiar to all readers of Mengzi, which serves to bolster the efficacy of the examples even further: “Therefore it is said, ‘Some toil with their minds; some their muscles. Those who toil with their minds rule people; those who toil with their muscles are ruled by people. Those who are ruled feed people; those who rule are fed by people.’ This is a general principle of the world” (故曰：「或勞心，或勞力。勞心者治人，勞力者治於人。治於人者食人，治人者食於人。天下之通義也」).Footnote 131 From refuting Chen Xiang’s point specifically to invoking a general truth (tongyi 通義) and to, finally, substantiating that general truth with nothing but the most exemplary of all historical examples, Mengzi’s reply simultaneously employs all the rhetorical tools in early China to establish his own (counter-)argument.
To ensure that these examples are read in the intended way—what we see so far are simply the legendary figures doing what they are known for; there is nothing about “the affairs of the great men” versus “the affairs of the small men”—Mengzi concludes this list with a guide to interpretation: “Fangxun [i.e., Yao] says, ‘Work them, convene them; straighten them, rectify them; aid them, equip them; make them happy in their station, then follow by teaching them virtue.’ The sage worried about the people to such an extent as this. Could he still have the leisure to plow” (放勳曰：「勞之來之，匡之直之，輔之翼之，使自得之，又從而振德之。聖人之憂民如此，而暇耕乎」?).Footnote 132 Apparently unique to the Mengzi, Yao’s words capture, and in a way summarize, what he and all the other figures from Shun to Xie have done. From creating a habitable land to teaching people agriculture to regulating them with the proper “human relations” (ren lun 人倫), they combine to “convene,” “straighten,” and “aid” the people in addition to “teaching them virtue.” These “affairs of the great men,” one can now confidently say, are what keep the “sage” (聖人) busy, to the extent that he has no “leisure” (暇) to plow with the people. In this very comment by Mengzi, one finally sees the contrast between the business of a small man and the business of a great man, as well as the point Mengzi has been trying to make with all these legendary examples. But before it, the seeds for that interpretation have long been sown: Yao “worried about” (憂) the world (line [c]), hence his promotion of Shun (line [d]); even if Yu wanted to plow, he asks “how [that would have been] possible” (得乎) (line [f]); Shun “worried” again about “no teaching” (無教), so he appointed Xie to oversee education (line [h]). If all of those lines are borrowed from separate sources, in wording that is only “slightly different,”Footnote 133 the gradual culmination in Mengzi’s final remark is nothing short of an extraordinary coincidence. Each of the examples may very well have been gathered—from memory, a written source, or even hearsay—but in the context, they must have been framed to fit the narrative, in ways more than adding a few “suture marks.”
In the remainder of Mengzi’s response, he refers again to Yao and Shun as the exemplary rulers who have more important things to worry about than the common people. And all that is aimed at chastising Chen Xiang for turning against his teacher Chen Liang 陳良, a devout follower of the Duke of Zhou and Confucius, and for abandoning what is “Chinese” (Xia 夏) for what is “alien” (yi 夷). Why is that such an offense? Because, Mengzi concludes, “If we were to follow the ways of Master Xu, people would one after another engage in deception. How, then, can one govern a state” (從許子之道，相率而為偽者也。惡能治國家?).Footnote 134 The illustrative valence of Yao and other sages lingers; the cogency of Mengzi’s reply impresses.
A Poetics of Compositeness
Both the Mengzi and the earlier examples attest to Boltz’s observation that a “composite structure is more of a norm than an exception” in early Chinese writings.Footnote 135 Left inadequately addressed in Boltz’s groundbreaking discussion, and all later studies inspired by it, are the conditions—literary, cultural, historical—that gave rise to, and sustained, the norm. Simply opposing, as I understand Boltz to be saying, how authorship and text typically “work” in early China versus how they do in the modern world is not very satisfying,Footnote 136 since both are essentializations of highly complex and, in the case of early China, vaguely delineable processes. We are always working with uncertainty when it comes to the issue of textual formation in early China. That is why I have tried to focus on the acts of textual formation (authoring, editing, compiling, etc.), which I discuss collectively as “gathering and framing,” rather than the individual roles of authors, editors, and compilers. Most will agree, at least in principle, that all these roles, to the extent that they are definable, must have engaged in all those various acts. We simply know little, in general, about how and to what extent.Footnote 137 As the analysis above shows, the variations made on and symbioses observed between different textual materials comprising the assemblages resist any clear attribution. Fuzziness should be tolerated where fuzziness prevails.
Once we accommodate fuzziness, something more concrete can be observed. All the various acts involved in “gathering and framing” stem from and answer to a convention in textual formation itself reflective of a basic order of textuality I have described as the architectonics of the composite text. This architectonics governs the selection, arrangement, and rhetorical shaping of disparate textual materials into a combined whole that then conveys a larger significance than the sum of its parts. It provides a structure both to the text and to how the building blocks in the text can cohere with one another. Compositeness does not entail disorganization or incoherence. Rather, all four structures discussed in this essay suggest the opposite when we measure organization and coherence against the reiterative and catalogic order of the structures.
There is, first of all, a vertical relation between each of the building blocks and the larger purpose, meaning, and effect of the assemblage and then, secondarily, a horizontal axis of relations between the building blocks. The vertical relation is characteristically one of “claim and support,” although the claim is not always articulated, with the support appearing in different forms and manners. The horizontal relations, on the other hand, can vary from strictly chronological to thematically associable and to any other local or universal means of organization by shape, genre, origin, and so forth. What matters is that all building blocks in the structure, imported or created (anew), can be accounted for from the perspective of both axes. As noted earlier too, not every “textual unit” can or should be called a “building block.” Within the materials examined in this essay, a block that truly builds manifests in the various literary forms that carry and represent shared cultural knowledge. As tools of narration and argumentation in early Chinese writings to begin with (or as a result?), these materials prove to be eminently amenable to contextual framing. A building block builds in the shape and function desired.
In thus reconsidering the “composite nature of early Chinese texts,” my larger goal is to advocate for more attention to what can be called “textual poetics” in our otherwise author- and source-centered criticism of early Chinese writings. Textual poetics is concerned with codes and systems, of which architectonics is one prominent dimension regarding the relations between parts and whole. It asks how meanings and effects are possible, and what literary conventions and reading practices enable texts to have the kind of meanings and effects they do. It does not explain every text, since there are always exceptions and innovations. But it offers us a baseline against which all such departures from the codes and systems can be discerned. As modern readers who are confronted with many unknowns by virtue of our texts’ conceivable origin or use in an orally assisted context, it is all the more important for us to recognize the “rules of the game” when any can be observed. Some measure of validity has to be put in the enterprise of interpretation.
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