Cai Yong's Readings of the Odes in Narratives of the Section Shige

According to Cai Yong's preface to the Qincao, the treatise comprised narratives (and partly songs) in four sections: (1) five pieces in the section Shige 詩歌 (i.e., Songs of the Odes); (2) twelve pieces in the section Cao 操; (3) nine pieces in the section Yin 引, and (4) twenty-one pieces in the category Hejian zage 河間雜歌, a set of folksongs purportedly collected during Western Han by King Xian of Hejian (河間獻王).Footnote ¹⁹ Of course, the decision to divide this collection into four parts will immediately recall to attentive readers the four-part division of the Odes classic, into Guofeng 國風 (Airs of the Kingdoms), Xiaoya 小雅, Daya 大雅 (Lesser and Greater Court Hymns), and Song 頌 (Hymns). Notably, in the Odes, the four-part sequence starts with what were construed as vernacular songs and ends with pieces used during solemn temple rituals, while the order of the pieces presented in the Qincao seems to be the reverse, moving as it does from pieces from the “classical” to vernacular songs, following what Han readers would have assumed was a chronological order. After all, it starts from songs whose composition is attributed to people of Western Zhou times, then moves on to pieces attributed to composers who supposedly lived during Chunqiu (cao and yin), and ends with the Hejian zage, songs said to have been composed during the Han dynasty, even if some protagonists of these songs in this section can be dated to earlier eras.

A consistent rendering of the terms cao 操 and yin 引 is not straightforward. In later times, these terms were both used to denote musical pieces without song texts, i.e. melodies or preludes, respectively.Footnote ²⁰ In Han times, the two terms seem to have acquired more specific meanings: in Han scholarship related to the qin zither, cao came to denote a specific discipline or strategy by which a qin player managed to keep his inner balance in disorderly times or during personal misfortunes, so that the rendering of cao with “principle” or “discipline” seems justified, even if the term may best be left untranslated in the titles of pieces.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, the term yin 引 came to designate a special discipline by which the qin player's virtue is advanced and his or her practices refreshed and enlarged.Footnote ²² With regard to the Yin section of the Qincao, since most of the protagonists of the narratives are women or men bewailing their fates, I prefer to render them as “Laments,” on the understanding that the character yin 引 may have been used as a loan for yin 吟.Footnote ²³

The five pieces that Cai Yong selected for the Shige section in the Qincao refer to Odes 161 (“Lu ming” 鹿鳴, The Deer Call), 112 (“Fa tan” 伐檀, Cutting Hardwood), 25 (“Zouyu” 騶虞, The Zouyu),Footnote ²⁴ 12 (“Quechao” 鵲巢, Nest of the Magpie), and 186 (“Boju” 白駒, White Colt), in that order. Each of the narratives relating to these pieces adds the word cao 操 to the ode title, e.g., “Lu ming cao” 鹿鳴操, “Fatan cao” 伐檀操, probably in order to distinguish the Qincao piece from the respective ode.

To only the first of these five pieces is a song text added, namely the first stanza of a total of three in Ode 161, “The Deer Call.” This was probably meant to instruct a reader that all five cao of the first category should be played while reciting or chanting the respective odes that the titles refer to. With the fourth of these pieces, related to Ode 12, only the title has been preserved in the transmitted Qincao text. It seems, however, that Cai Yong in his preface to the Qincao has added short summaries supplying the contents of each of his Qincao narratives included in the first three sections, since a passage quoted in the Yueshu 樂書 (Writings of Music) by the Song scholar Chen Yang 陳暘 (1064–1128), first published in 1101, gives a summary of all five pieces of the section of the Odes as they are contained in the Qincao. This is what the passage says:

Already these short summaries alert readers to two remarkable features of these five narratives in the Qincao in relation to the Odes. Firstly, the protagonists of these stories are described as composers of the respective odes; secondly, they are depicted as singing them to the accompaniment of the qin zither. In other words, all five odes have newly been interpreted as regards their background of origin. Two of the pieces—Ode 161 and 186—belong to the Lesser Court Hymns said to have originated at the Zhou court.Footnote ²⁷ The composer of the cao of “The Deer Call” is thus a high official of the Zhou, and the composer of the piece (cao) of “White Colt” must likewise have been a Zhou official bewailing his lost friend. The three other pieces belong to songs said to have been composed by people residing in the various kingdoms, for Ode 112, said to have been composed by a woman from Wei, is the sixth piece of the “Airs of Wei” (Weifeng 魏風); and Ode 25 is the last and Ode 12 the first piece of the “Shaonan” 召南 section, whose composers are attributed in the Qincao narratives to a man and a woman from Shao.

Another noteworthy fact about the stories related to the four pieces in the Shige section of the Qincao is that they are thought to convey warnings of a declining age already in Western Zhou. The only exception conveying a positive picture is the summary composed for Ode 12, “Nest of the Magpie.”

An attentive reader may ask why Cai Yong chose these particular five odes from the collection of 305 odes that comprises the transmitted Odes classic. Did he intend to emulate Confucius’ role as a compiler of the Odes classic, who is said to have selected 305 pieces from among more than 3,000, and then sang them to the accompaniment of strings, by several sources?Footnote ²⁸ Or may we trust a much later source, the Qinshi 琴史, by Zhu Changwen 朱長文 (1039–1098), which says that these five odes were the only ones that could still be sung during Han times?Footnote ²⁹

Among the five pieces in this first section of the Qincao, the narrative related to the first one, “The Deer Call,” is the one which is quoted most often in later sources.Footnote ³⁰ In order to illustrate how the qin narrative relates to the original ode, the passage will be quoted in full:

By the Zuo Tradition (Zuo zhuan 左傳), this piece, the first ode of the section Lesser Court Hymns, was played on the occasion of diplomatic receptions in Lu kingdom. An account dated to the fourth year of Duke Xiang of Lu (569 b.c.e.) refers to a visit by a diplomat from Lu at the court of Jin. Music was played, and the envoy is reported to have only bowed when hearing the ode “The Deer Call.” When questioned by the Jin duke about his behavior, the envoy explains that “The Deer Call” is the only piece that honors an envoy like him and hence his bow in response.Footnote ³³ Perhaps the fact that “The Deer Call” served as a piece of music used to welcome envoys from other kingdoms explains why the ode's ritual meaning was so widely known throughout the Zhou oikumene, albeit the Lu envoy is clearly depicted in the Zuo account as the one more familiar with the rules of etiquette than his host.

Another entry, dated to that same duke's twenty-ninth year (544 b.c.e.), is no less remarkable in that it reveals that already at a very early time the individual pieces in the Lesser Court Hymns section might have been perceived, at least in part, as odes conveying a critical tone. The entry records that a prince of Wu, far to the southeast, traveled to Lu on a diplomatic mission and asked there to be introduced to the music of the Zhou. The court musicians of Lu were then ordered to present such classical songs for him. Coming to the songs belonging to the Lesser Court Hymns, the prince is recorded to have reacted on the presentation as follows:

What is called here the “waning of the Zhou's virtue” is, as we will soon see clearly, precisely one of the key elements that distinguish the Lu readings of the Odes from other readings that view these songs as laudatory pieces composed during the “Golden Age” of Western Zhou. Possibly the earliest passage in which the view that the odes belonging to the Lesser Court Hymns section were composed by men or women who were dissatisfied with the rulers of their eras is formulated in the Xunzi 荀子, where we read,

As previously argued by some scholars, the Xunzi text might even be seen as the origin of that Odes reading that came to be called the Lu reading, in view of Xunzi's connections with Lu.Footnote ³⁶

The idea that the Odes of the Lesser Court Hymns section had already been composed with a critical intent is even more clearly expressed in the Shi ji 史記, whose references to the Odes also may be assigned, at least partly, to the Lu interpretive line.Footnote ³⁷ One Shi ji passage insists that the origin of at least part of the Odes cannot be the Golden (early) Age of Western Zhou, but must rather be a later stage of these Western Zhou when the “Kingly Way” was already claimed by some to have been in decline. The lines say:

A second Shi ji passage dates the origin of both of these odes, in the Lesser Court Hymns and Airs of the Kingdoms sections, even more concretely:

While both passages contain the expression renxi 衽席, rendered as “bedding and mat,” the first passage informs the reader only in quite general terms of a Zhou “decline,” whereas the second passage dates this decline specifically to the reigns of Kings You 幽 and Li 厲. When the Zhou kings were in virtual exile from the capital,Footnote ⁴⁰ King You felt the need to move his capital to Luoyang.Footnote ⁴¹ Both passages consistently claim that these reigns represented the time of decline that began already during the Western Zhou, when these, and probably other pieces in the Airs of the Kingdoms and Lesser Court Hymns sections, were supposedly composed, and the ode “The Deer Call” explicitly ties this political decline to a moral decline, namely, the destruction of “humanity and morality” (renyi 仁義). And there is a second remarkable claim to appear in the second passage that concerns the intentional placement of both odes as the first odes in their respective sections, in the overall arrangement of the Odes.

Very much in contrast to the above-discussed Lu reading is that offered in the Mao 毛 interpretive line, which became, mainly through the commentator Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200), the officially acknowledged reading of the Odes in the post-Han period.Footnote ⁴² According to the so-called “Little Preface” (xiaoxu 小序), the ode is to be understood as a laudatory piece. It says,

By this Mao reading, the ode describes the festive occasions when a good ruler honors his worthy guests by feasting them and giving them gifts. This is, as it happens, precisely the positive picture that the content of the ode seems to convey, since the ode speaks of a ruler's merry invitation to his worthy guests, as well as his delight that these men appreciated him and will guide him correctly in his government.

If one compares these two concurring interpretations with the content of the ode “The Deer Call” proper, one will probably be inclined to think that the Mao reading comes closer to what is actually said in the ode itself. In contrast, the Lu reading requires some kind of exegetical training, assuming that the situation described in the ode text is only an ideal against which the de facto situation of the times should be read.

Let us now turn to look at how the Qincao introduces the second piece in its Shige section:

Bemoaning that “people who eat the bread of idleness had attained positions” (sucan zai wei 素餐在位), the protagonist of the Qincao narrative, this woman from Wei, directly refers to the original “Cutting Hardwood” ode where, at the end of each of its three stanzas, the exclamation is made, “O that noble man! He would not eat the bread of idleness!” (彼君子兮，不素餐兮); the same ode includes the couplet: “You sow not, nor do you reap/So how is it that you've acquired the produce of those three hundred farms?” (不稼不穡，胡取禾三百億兮).Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, by formulating “They suspend from their walls precious and rare items; they accumulate all sorts of grain, they take the land all for themselves, and no gracious favors are extended to the common people” (懸珍奇，積百穀，並包有土，德澤不加百姓), the Qincao text takes up the verse line in the ode saying, “You sow not, nor do you reap,/ So how is it that you get the produce of those three hundred farms? You do not follow the chase. So how is it that [the pelts of] badgers are hung up in your courtyards?” (不稼不穡，胡取禾三百廛兮。不狩不獵，胡瞻爾庭有縣貆兮).

In this case, the Mao reading does not differ much from the Lu reading, judging from its “Little Preface”:

Another remarkable facet of the narrative with which Cai Yong has introduced this piece is the calling into question that people who—abstractly speaking—do not do physical labor but instead live from others who do this work for them, expressed in the words, “Now, according to the regulations of the sage kings, those who rule others are fed by them, while those who are ruled by others should make their livings from the farming land” (夫聖王之制，能治人者食於人，治於人者食於田). Cai Yong here seems to have in mind the dialogue recorded in the Mengzi 孟子 text, between Meng Ke 孟軻 (372–289 b.c.e.) and Gongsun Chou 公孫丑, one of his disciples, where the expression “bread of idleness” of Ode 112 is also explained:

Gongsun Chou uses the ode to question whether it is justified for a “noble man” (junzi 君子) who did no hard physical labor in the fields to earn his daily food, and Mengzi explicitly affirms that even without tilling the land, by educating people a noble man will also not “eat the bread of idleness.” In an anecdote preserved in the Kongcongzi 孔叢子 (Kong Family Masters’ Anthology),Footnote ⁴⁸ Kongzi commented laconically, “From ‘Cutting Hardwood,’ I see that a worthy man will first perform his service and only later eat” (於伐檀見賢者之先食後食也).Footnote ⁴⁹ We may thus safely conclude that, with this ode, all extant comments deem its message a critical one.

Let us now see how the third piece, relating to “The Zouyu,” is introduced in the Qincao:

The two stanzas of the text of the ode consist of three verse lines with four characters each. In Waley's translation the text of the first stanza reads as follows:

The “Little Preface” in the Mao reading says this about the ode:

Again we see that, whereas the introductory story of the Qincao bespeaks decline and bad government, the Mao school casts the “Nest of the Magpie” in diametrically opposed ways, as a laudatory piece full of praise for the good government of King Wen of Zhou.

Of the fifth and last piece belonging to the Shige section, the Qincao has this to say:

According to the “Little Preface,” the ode was written by a high minister who criticized King Xuan of the Zhou 周宣王 (827–782 b.c.e.).Footnote ⁵⁴ The first stanza of the ode reads, in Arthur Waley's translation,

Comparing the Qincao narrative with the ode itself and its Lu interpretation one gains the impression that the friend mentioned in the Qincao as the composer of the piece is inspired by the older reading—that the ode was written when thinking of a friend and fellow officer who had abandoned public life and gone into retreat. His friend, perhaps the “excellent statesman” (guoshi 國士), composed this piece to keep his friend's memory alive.

Strikingly, all four extant narratives in the Shige section in the Qincao refer to composers who take the qin and sing to express their criticisms, so it is not difficult to imagine that the fifth piece, the piece (cao) “Nest of the Magpie,” likewise would have been ascribed to a protagonist who had composed the piece in a mood of criticism, had it been preserved. Judging from the four extant Qincao narratives in the first section, we gain thus a rough impression of the difference between the so-called Lu interpretive line and the other scholastic traditions attached to the transmitted Classic. While it is not always easy to distinguish between the different exegetical lines, the dominant narrative in the Shige section of the Qincao seems clear enough, namely that many of the odes were composed at the very end of the Western Zhou, in order to comment on the decline that allegedly had occurred by then, and this assertion seems to have served as the basis of Wang Xianqian's decision to assign all four of the extant Shige narratives in the Qincao to the Lu reading, and to give them a prominent place in his Shi sanjia yi jishu, as possibly the purest expression of what he calls “Lu sayings” (Lushuo 魯說).Footnote ⁵⁶

Apart from this exegetical aspect of the way Cai Yong wrote his narratives in the Shige section, there is another which is, in my view, quite remarkable, namely the way he assigns the composition of these pieces to composers. As “The Deer Call” belongs to the Lesser Court Hymns, the composer of the piece (cao) of “The Deer Call” is said in the Qincao to have been a high minister of the Zhou; as “Cutting Hardword” belongs to the Odes of Wei, the composer of the piece (cao) of “Cutting Hardwood” is introduced in the Qincao to be a woman from Wei. Thus, what Cai Yong does in his Qincao narratives is to turn the (for the most part anonymously composed) odes into pieces composed by a specific person reacting to a particular situation with strong emotions such as sorrow, resentment, grief, or even anger (for example, an official of the Zhou court or women hailing from one kingdom or another); these compilers then sing the lyrics of the Odes to the accompaniment of the qin zither.Footnote ⁵⁷ That makes the protagonists of these selections from the Odes role models for the qin player, who in a way “reenacts” the inner emotions evoked by the protagonist's story while singing and playing the zither.Footnote ⁵⁸ This technique, perhaps not coincidentally, parallels that found in several texts describing scenes of instruction that feature Kongzi as a qin player and qin teacher who uses the instrument also as part of his education.Footnote ⁵⁹ I suggest that this special approach of Cai Yong as seen from his Qincao can be understood as a kind of “exegesis by empathy.”

Cai Yong's Digest of Other Authors’ Readings of the Odes in his Qincao

While the narratives belonging to the first section of the Qincao directly refer to the Odes classic, those in the other three sections also relate to the Classic in various ways. One important feature whose description lies beyond the limits of this present study is the frequent quotation of verse lines from the Odes in the song texts included in the Qincao sections Cao, Yin, and Hejian zage, not to mention Cai's many indirect references to the Odes that take the form of digests—and occasionally re-readings—of anecdotes supplied by earlier sources that seek to apply verses from the Odes in order to illuminate a moral lesson. The Qincao shares close parallels with three works: the Hanshi waizhuan 韓詩外傳 (Outer Commentary on the Han School Text of the Classic of Songs, trans. Hightower),Footnote ⁶⁰ a text generally attributed to Han Ying 韓嬰 (early second century b.c.e.),Footnote ⁶¹ and Liu Xiang's 劉向 (77–6 b.c.e.) Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Categorized Biographies of Women, trans. Kinney)Footnote ⁶² and Shuoyuan 說苑 (Garden of Eloquence, trans. Henry).Footnote ⁶³ Even though scholars may disagree whether these works should be understood as exegetical works or as anecdote collections serving argumentative and rhetorical purposes, what these texts have in common is a propensity to apply verses from the Odes to sum up their protagonists’ moral character, and hence the moral lessons to be derived from their lives, a feature found also in the Qincao narratives.Footnote ⁶⁴

That Cai Yong was the author, rather than merely the compiler, of the Qincao should be clear from the quite individual formulations chosen for each of these narratives, which show close parallels to the aforementioned texts but still differ from them in significant if subtle ways.Footnote ⁶⁵ Take, for example, the narrative of the first piece of the Yin section of the Qincao, “Lienü yin” 列女引 (“Lament by a Principled Woman”), which says:

This same story appears in both the Hanshi waizhuan Footnote ⁷⁰ and Lienü zhuan.Footnote ⁷¹ A comparison of all three stories shows the protagonists to be the same, namely King Zhuang 莊王 (r. 613–591 b.c.e.) of Chu, Fan Ji, Yuqiu (sometimes known as Prime Minister Shen, Shen ling 沈令), and Sunshu Ao. In all narratives, Fan Ji chides her ruler, King Zhuang of Chu, for coming too late in the morning for his formal court audience. In both the Hanshi waizhuan and Lienü zhuan, Fan Ji's efforts are recorded by a scribe of Chu, who traces Chu's attainment of hegemon status to Fan Ji's efforts (楚之霸樊姬之力).Footnote ⁷² And while the Hanshi waizhuan account ends with verses from Ode 54 (“Zaichi” 載馳), saying, “The hundred plans you think of/ Are not equal to the course I was going to take,”Footnote ⁷³ the Lienü zhuan cites verses from two different Odes, namely Ode 57 (“Shuoren” 碩人), where it is said, “Early retire, ye great officers,/ And do not make the ruler fatigued!,” and Ode 301 (“Na” 那), with the verses “Be mild from morning to night,/ And reverent in discharging service.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Different from the Hanshi waizhuan version, the Lienü zhuan version then ends with an appraisal of Fan Ji, saying, “Fan Ji was humble, yielding and without jealousy. She recommended and advanced beauties who were ranked as her peers. She criticized Master Yuqiu for blocking the path of the worthy. King Zhuang of Chu applied these lessons, and his efforts soon made him hegemon.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The moral message of the Fan Ji narrative in all three versions is more or less the same,Footnote ⁷⁶ namely that King Zhuang should not listen to only one of his ministers, but instead lend his ear to as many counselors as possible, just as Fan Ji, as a responsible mate took care to provide the potential for many princelings on behalf of the king's ruling line. Yet there is one important detail in which the Qincao differs from both the Hanshi waizhuan and the Lienü zhuan: here, in the Fan Ji story in the “Lament” (Yin) section, the Qincao narrative depicts Fan Ji herself as the composer of the song and lets her explain her behavior and her emotions to the reader who will then play that qin piece inspired by them.

Another interesting piece in that section is “Si gui yin” 思歸引 (“Lament on Longing to Return”). The Qincao narrates the related story as follows:

No parallel story appears in the Hanshi waizhuan, but the Lienü zhuan has a very similar episode, according to which the daughter of the Marquis of Qi was married to the ruler of Wei, who died the very moment she arrived at the Wei city gates. Her governess suggested she return to Wei, but she would not listen. Instead, she proceeded to the deceased ruler's house and there observed three years of mourning.Footnote ⁷⁸ After the end of the mourning period, the deceased king's younger brother, who had ascended the throne, asked her to marry him, but she refused, even after her own brothers tried to persuade her to make this marriage alliance. She, too, is mentioned as the composer of verses that are part of Ode 26 in the Odes classic, where she is finally given praise for her decision to remain true to her betrothed. The central message of the narrative in both the Lienü zhuan and the Qincao is the same, namely that it would run counter the rituals that a woman who has been married to a ruler, even if she is widowed, should not accept a second offer of marriage, no matter how highly placed the suitor.

Roughly the same motive is thematized in a further story in the Lienü zhuan, which seems to me of special interest, as it contains an indication of how Liu Xiang in his Lienü zhuan approached the “Guanju” (Calling Ospreys) ode, the first ode of the Airs of the Kingdoms, which figures prominently in Cai Yong's “Qingyi fu.” The story is entitled “The Old Woman of Quwo in Wei.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The reference to the ode is part of a long instructive speech that this old woman, the mother of Ru Er 如耳, a high minister of the Wei, gives to King Ai of Wei 魏哀王, whose reign began c. 296 b.c.e.Footnote ⁸⁰ King Ai had selected a bride for his heir apparent, Prince Zheng of Wei, but when she had arrived in Wei, she turned out to be of such a spectacular beauty that the king decided to take her for himself. Ru Er's mother at first begged her son to admonish the king, because his wishes so clearly violated ritual propriety, but because he soon took off on a diplomatic mission, his mother decided to admonish the king herself. Her speech opened with the forthright words, “I have heard that the separation of sexes is an important principle of the realm.” (妾聞男女之別，國之大節也).Footnote ⁸¹ After this followed a long historical survey, claiming that “from antiquity the sage kings always had felt the need to take the utmost care to rectify their consorts of every rank” (自古聖王必正妃匹妃),Footnote ⁸² and then she proceeded to use the mirror history, showing how realms flourished when a virtuous and wise woman was at the ruler's side and perished through interventions by women of the wrong sort. She then referred to the exemplary King Kang of the Zhou. saying:

The tale of the Quwo woman ends with her success in remonstrating against her king: upon hearing her, the king gave up his plans, redirected his focus to court affairs, and thus prevented the mighty King of Qin from daring to raise troops against Wei.

What makes this episode so interesting is that it explicitly addresses two topics: “transgression of rules by sexual desires” and the palpable fear that a ruling line is jeopardized by the intervention of palace women of loose morals. Nonetheless, by his decision to put the advice addressed to the ruler of Wei into the mouth of a woman, Liu Xiang adopted the Lu reading of the “Guanju” ode, transforming a message about the pernicious women into a pedagogical lesson celebrating worthy women, just as in the previous case, where Fan Ji admonishes King Zhuang of Chu.

Even these few selections show Cai Yong following very much in Liu Xiang's footsteps in terms of transforming an era of decline into a morality play featuring exemplary leaders. Even the trope where a worthy protagonist composes one or another ode is already attested in the Lienü zhuan.Footnote ⁸⁴ What is really new in the Qincao stories is, however, how much space is devoted to delineating the emotions of the protagonist, who then takes up the qin and composes a song, hoping thereby to console himself or herself or to vent his or her anger.

In the Qinshi, in a section entitled “Shengge” 聲歌 (“Songs Set to Music”), we find a reverberation of the idea expressed in the Qincao that strong emotions can be best expressed by singing accompanied by playing the qin:

Of course, an attentive reader will immediately be reminded of a very similar sequence relating to zhi 志 (disposition), from which derives qing 情 (emotion) and its expression in action, found in what is nowadays called the “Great Preface” (Daxu 大序) to the Odes, starting from the disposition of the heart-mind (xin 心), which becomes an ode (shi 詩) when it takes shape in words, followed by the idea that emotion (qing 情) so moves the person, that he or she may sing them, and if singing proves to be still not enough, the person's hands will start to dance and feet to tap out the rhythm.Footnote ⁸⁶ Though this early theory of emotions has traditionally mostly been attributed to the Mao reading of the Odes, Cai Yong has apparently not hesitated to transpose this key concept of Odes exegesis into the world of qin playing.

Cai Yong's “Qingyi fu” as an Example of his Reading of the Odes

Having traced Cai Yong's reading of the Odes in the “Shige” section and his exegetical attitude in three pieces of the “Yin” section of his Qincao, I will now turn to the question raised at the outset of this study, namely of the relation between Cai Yong's “Qingyi fu” and Zhang Chao's “Qiao qingyi fu,” the latter of which directly follows Cai Yong's fu in two Tang encyclopedias.Footnote ⁸⁷ According to Asselin (who follows Gong Kechang 龔克昌),Footnote ⁸⁸ Zhang Chao's fu was meant to be a critical response to Cai Yong's fu. Asselin writes, “Zhang Chao excoriates Cai Yong for his use of elegant language to depict the beauty of a lowly maidservant, and for expressing unseemly sentiments toward her.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Asselin next proceeds to show how Zhang Chao's fu represents the Lu reading of the Odes, and more specifically, the Lu reading of the “Guanju” 關雎 (Calling Ospreys), the first piece in the transmitted text of the Classic.Footnote ⁹⁰ Here is an example of how Zhang Chao's poem conveys such a view.

There is, of course, no doubt that Zhang Chao's fu outlines in these verse lines basic elements of the Lu reading of the Odes. The “Guanju” is explicitly addressed here, and also the important message that “it is their virtue not to go together in pairs,” meaning, they forego any sexual intercourse if the relationship is illicit. Equally obviously, the “Guanju” is the focus of Cai Yong's “Qingyi fu,” as well, for an explicit quotation is found in lines 25–26, which I render as, “The purity of the ‘Calling Ospreys’ is such that one does not act perversely or contrary to ritual propriety” (關雎之潔，不蹈邪非).Footnote ⁹² Indeed, Cai's whole poem may be understood as a “reenactment” of the main topic of the “Guanju,” namely a young man falls in love with a beautiful young woman, whose status is, however, inferior (as indicated already in the metaphors in the poem's first lines), so that a sexual relationship with her would be illicit. Cai's verse lines depicting the object of his love (“Ah, this coy and comely one” [歎茲窈窕]; “An engaging smile and animated eyes, a fair beauty” [盼倩淑麗]; “A pure maid, lovely and lithe” [窈窕淑女]) directly quote from the “Guanju” ode. Moreover, the male protagonist's desire to be intimate with that woman is expressed in the ode’s verse lines (“Seeking but not getting her, awake and asleep, I desire her” [求之不得．寤寐思服]; and “Oh, the yearning, the yearning, the tossing and turning from side to side” [悠哉悠哉．輾轉反側])Footnote ⁹³ are transported into Cai Yong's own poem, where he writes, “I wheel and stagger, stumble and fall” (展轉倒頹); “Muddled, rash—muddled, rash—/ My longing cannot be dispelled” (矇冒矇冒，思不可排); and “I think about you, muse about you,/ Aching for satisfaction, I'm utterly famished” (思爾念爾，惄焉且饑). Indubitably, the “Qingyi fu” is an ardent love poem. Indeed, the erotic character of Cai's fu caused Gong Kechang to identify the “Qingyi fu” as the beginning of erotic literature in China and to quote the modern scholar Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書, who described Cai as possibly “the originator of pornographic literature” (然則謂蔡氏為淫媒文字始作俑者，無不可也).Footnote ⁹⁴

One may well wonder how Cai Yong would feel, were he alive today and read such discussions. I think he would defend himself by recommending that blame be placed on the original “Guanju” ode, but not on his writing the “Qingyi fu.” After all, the erotic character not only of the “Qingyi fu” but also of other pieces assigned to the Airs of the Kingdoms section of the Odes classic is mentioned already in the Xunzi text, where we read,

For Xunzi, the decisive point in reading “Guanju,” the first ode in the Airs of the Kingdoms section, and apparently other pieces of this section as well, is this: despite the male's ardent desire, he knows when and where to stop, and this is exactly what the “I voice” of the poem says: “I make ready my carriage, hastily pack my bags,/ About to abandon you and depart” (飭駕趣嚴，將舍爾乖).Footnote ⁹⁶ Seen from this perspective, Cai Yong's fu very much follows the Xunzi's reading of the Odes, insofar as eroticism is permitted within certain confines, and though Cai may have interpreted these confines more broadly than most, his rhapsody should still be regarded as an exegetically correct endeavor.

When Asselin claims that Zhang Chao's fu was “outraged at the liberties he sees Cai Yong taking in this poem,”Footnote ⁹⁷ he is misled, I believe, because I am convinced that Cai Yong as author of the “Qingyi fu” cannot simply be equated with the protagonist of that fu. Truly, if the male “I voice” is so much taken with the female beauty he desires as to prompt Zhang Chao's outrage, well, that is not the precise problem of the Han exegetical adherents to the Lu reading. In my view, Zhang Chao did not intend a critical response to Cai; rather, Zhang adduced all these metaphors characteristic of the Lu reading in his fu, to comment on the powerful message that the first poem in the Odes conveys. In other words, in formulating his own fu, Cai Yong resorted to “exegesis by empathy,” whereas Zhang Chao seems to register his own alarm at the way he felt himself succumbing to the erotic mood of the “Guanju” ode. Lest my surmise seem too farfetched, let us recall the famous anecdote in which Cai Yong himself grew alarmed at a friend's house, where a qin player performed a tune that took such a sudden turn toward the aggressive that Cai feared that someone in the house was planning an attack on his host. Cai duly informed his host as to his fears and was later told that the qin player confessed that, during the performance, he had witnessed a praying mantis preparing an attack on a cicada, and that anticipation of violence had permeated his music.Footnote ⁹⁸

Such a reading that constructs Zhang Chao's fu as a comment, rather than critique, of Cai Yong's fu would also force a reconsideration of Asselin's title for Zhang Chao's fu. As Asselin admits, there is a grammatical problem with his decision to render the title “Qiao qingyi fu” as “Reproaching the ‘Fu on a Grisette,’” because normally the last word in the Chinese title of a fu should be the genre title fu. Still, if Zhang Chao had indeed intended to write his criticism of Cai Yong's fu into the title, no fu is left to denote Zhang Chao's own fu.Footnote ⁹⁹ An alternative rendering of the title “Qiao qingyi fu,” namely as “Rhapsody on Reproaching a Grisette,” would make not Cai Yong's fu, but the female protagonist of Cai Yong's fu, the grisette (qingyi), the butt of Zhang Chao's ire, opening a space for the idea that Zhang Chao perhaps wrote his own fu very much on the same exegetical grounds as Cai Yong wrote his “Qingyi fu,” namely, both based on the Lu reading.

In this study, I have tried to show that Cai Yong's reading of the Odes favored the exegesis associated with Lu, at least as far as his Qincao and one of his rhapsodies is concerned. To my knowledge, the “Qingyi fu” has not yet been interpreted in light of its exegetical preoccupations. As I have also tried to show, Cai Yong in his Qincao and in this rhapsody applied a specific voice in exegesis, which I propose to call “exegesis by empathy.” By reading the narratives of the Qincao and Cai Yong's “Qingyi fu” together in this way I have tried to trace one facet of Cai Yong's personality which may be surprising to some, especially if compared to other parts of his oeuvre, but which may turn out as one that is worth to be reconsidered in further approaches.