The Way of the Barbarians

Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China

Shao-yun Yang

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780295746029
• eBook ISBN: 9780295746012
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, "barbarism, " were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian ( daoxue ) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

CHAPTER 1

Han Yu, the Annals, and the Origins of Ethnicized Orthodoxy

HAN YU’S significance in the intellectual history of the Tang-Song transition is well known: historians have long recognized that his literary and intellectual predilections, while eccentric in his own time, became an inspiration and eventually a norm for leading writers and thinkers of the Song period and beyond. Without Han Yu, some have argued, there would have been no Guwen in the Song and no Daoxue.1 Nonetheless, one aspect of Han Yu’s influence has gone largely unacknowledged: a way of talking about Chinese identity that is frequently labeled as “culturalism” or “Confucian universalism” but can more aptly be described as two distinct discourses, “ethnicized orthodoxy” and “ethnocentric moralism.” Of the two, Han Yu was directly responsible for the former’s origins and supplied the inspiration for the latter.

Ethnicized orthodoxy interpreted Chinese identity as synonymous with an exclusive form of Classicist (“Confucian”) identity and associated non-Classicist intellectual or religious traditions with barbarism. Han Yu sought to endow this interpretation of Chineseness with prestige by attributing it to Confucius, but it gained little support in the highly pluralistic intellectual culture of late Tang times. Nonetheless, his rising stature after the Tang eventually led so many Chinese scholars to accept his claim of Confucian authority that his interpretation’s radical originality has frequently been overlooked or underestimated. Han Yu’s innovations relating to the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy involved utilizing the Annals commentaries’ idea of “barbarizing” demotion as a rhetorical strategy in the separate (and previously Daoist-dominated) genre of anti-Buddhist polemic; claiming unambiguously that the “barbarization” seen in the Annals was an objective consequence (i.e., becoming a barbarian) rather than just a subjective judgment (i.e., being deemed morally barbaric by Confucius); implying that any descent into barbarism would be permanent rather than brief and reversible; and linking barbarization not only to standards of ritual orthopraxy but also to a concept of ideological orthodoxy. In other words, Han Yu appears to have given the idea of barbarization a literal, ideology-centered interpretation with new implications for the identity of those being “regarded as barbarians.”

HAN YU’S REINTERPRETATION OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION

Han Yu’s unconventional views on writing, Classicism, the history of civilization, and his place in that history had already taken shape by 798 when, aged thirty, he held an administrative post in Bianzhou (Kaifeng) while teaching literary composition to the civil service examination candidates Li Ao (ca. 772–836) and Zhang Ji (ca. 766–ca. 830). In a letter written that year to Feng Su (767–836), Han remarks that by choosing him as a teacher, Li and Zhang are “abandoning conventional fashions to follow a lonely Way and use it in vying for fame in our time.”2 This “lonely Way,” a prose style modeled on the “ancient” texts of the Eastern Zhou and Han periods rather than the florid parallel prose literature of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, had emerged among a handful of Tang writers soon after the An Lushan Rebellion and had come to be known as Guwen, but was still favored by only a tiny literary fringe.

Complaining to Feng Su that his peers applaud his embarrassingly conventional and clichéd pieces while being baffled and bemused by the Guwen works of which he is most proud, Han Yu takes some comfort in comparing himself to the Eastern Han Classicist thinker and writer Yang Xiong (53 BCE–18 CE), whose peers ridiculed his Classic of Supreme Mystery (Taixuan jing) for being abstruse. According to Han Yu, Yang confidently predicted that a second Yang Xiong would appreciate his work in a future age. Han then laments that this second Yang Xiong has yet to appear, hinting none too subtly that he is that man.3

A letter from Zhang Ji to Han Yu, also dated to 798, reveals that Han’s sense of affinity with Yang Xiong went beyond his perception of Yang as a misunderstood and underappreciated writer.4 In past conversations, Zhang notes, Han Yu credited Yang Xiong as the last person who understood the “Way of the Sages,” the moral essence of civilization. This Way, Han claimed, had previously gone through two cycles of decline and revival: one from Confucius’s death and the rise of the philosophies of Mozi (ca. 470–391 BCE) and Yang Zhu (ca. 440–360 BCE) to the Classicist thinker Mencius’s (Mengzi; ca. 372–ca. 289 BCE) successful attack on these philosophies; and one from the Qin “burning of books” and the rise of the syncretic Huang-Lao philosophy (most likely based on Laozi’s Classic of the Way and Its Power [Laozi daodejing] and texts or teachings attributed to the legendary sage-king Huangdi)5 in early Western Han to Yang Xiong’s promotion of Classicism some two centuries later.

Han Yu placed himself in the third cycle’s exceptionally long decline phase, in which Buddhism and the Daoist religion (which he conflates with Huang-Lao) had defined the moral values of the Central Lands for six centuries since the end of Eastern Han. This cyclical model was probably based on Mencius 3B.9, in which Mencius posits that history from the age of the sage-kings Yao and Shun to his own day has been divided into three cycles of “order followed by disorder” and that he is living in the third cycle’s nadir as the “Way of Confucius” has been eclipsed by Mozi and Yang Zhu.6 Past scholarship on Han Yu’s narrative of the Way of the Sages has tended to focus on the final section of the Mencius, 7B.38, as an inspiration for that narrative, while neglecting 3B.9.7 This is partly because Han Yu’s narrative did eventually shift toward the linear model of 7B.38, in which the Way of the Sages was transmitted continuously from Yao and Shun to Confucius, only to be forgotten in Mencius’s day.

According to Zhang Ji, Han Yu explained that Buddhism and Daoism had been especially damaging to “the customs of this age” because the Chinese were still using the material aspects of the civilization that the ancient sages created, but had forgotten its moral essence and turned to “heterodox learning” (yixue): “Now in this world, every tool or implement used for sustaining life was invented by the sages. But when it comes to human relationships, we are immersed in heterodox learning and do not follow the Way of the Sages. This has caused the moral duties between rulers and ministers, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and friends to be obscured in this age, and our country repeatedly suffers disorder. This is certainly painful to any humane man.”8 The repeated “disorder” mentioned here is probably a reference to the frequent armed clashes between the Tang court and independent-minded provincial governors since the end of the An Lushan Rebellion. But Han Yu was tracing this disorder not to the rebellion alone, but to what he saw as a fundamental problem of ideological impurity that had corrupted and weakened Chinese civilization since the fall of the Han.

The main section of Han Yu’s farewell or valedictory preface (songxu) for the Buddhist monk Wenchang, composed in the spring of 803, presents a second version of his narrative of the history of civilization:

When our people first appeared, they were like animals or barbarians. The sages arose, and only then did they know how to live in houses and eat grains, to love their kin and respect their superiors, to nurture the living and bury the dead. That is why there is no greater Way than humaneness and moral duty, and no teaching more correct than that of rites and music, laws and government.… Yao passed them on to Shun, Shun passed them on to Yu, Yu passed them on to Tang, Tang passed them on to Kings Wen and Wu, and Kings Wen and Wu passed them on to the Duke of Zhou. Confucius wrote them into books,9 and the people of the Central Lands have followed them generation after generation.10

This passage is noteworthy for containing the first known iteration of a theory that the Way of the Sages was transmitted or passed on from one sage to the next, often across a span of centuries. In this theory, the narrative of the Way’s history is essentially linear, unlike the cyclical model found in Zhang Ji’s letter, and is therefore a continuation of the narrative presented in Mencius 7B.38. There has long been speculation that Han Yu borrowed this idea of linear transmission from Chan Buddhism and not directly from Mencius. This hypothesis has had prominent supporters, including Chen Yinke and Qian Mu, but its most significant weakness is the fact that Chan lineages do not allow for transmission between patriarchs separated by long gaps of time.11

An equally striking feature of the preface is that it contradicts the most crucial and controversial aspect of the narrative in Zhang Ji’s 798 letter: the idea of civilizational decline. Instead of blaming Buddhism for bringing disorder to the Central Lands by obscuring the Way of the Sages, Han Yu claims that the Chinese have been practicing the Way of humaneness and moral duty and the teaching of rites and music continuously since Confucius compiled the Classics. He merely faults Buddhist monks like Wenchang for teaching an inferior “Way” and not acknowledging their debt to the sages who created the civilization whose comforts they enjoy.12 This somewhat incomplete version of Han Yu’s narrative of the Way of the Sages suggests that as of 803, he remained reluctant to promote the full narrative beyond a small circle of friends. In the 798 letter, Zhang Ji had already faulted him for his unwillingness to publish it in writing for a wider audience. Han’s reply to Zhang at the time revealed that he feared a reputation for opposing Buddhism and Daoism would jeopardize his already difficult prospects for career advancement by offending patrons of both religions at the imperial court.13

The third and last version of Han Yu’s narrative is found in the essay “Tracing the Way,” conventionally dated to 804 but more likely (for reasons explained in the next chapter) written in or after 812. Like the preface for Wenchang, “Tracing the Way” includes an account of how the sages created civilization, although its intent is to rebut the primitivist philosophy of Laozi’s Classic of the Way and Its Power, not to fault the Buddhists for taking civilization for granted. Moreover, the essay’s larger narrative of civilization’s history differs from both the picture of continuity presented in the preface for Wenchang14 and the cyclical version told to Zhang Ji in one significant respect: it claims that the Way of the Sages has been lost for a single thousand-year period from Mencius’s death to the present, thus denying that there was a revival of the Way in Han times. Early in the essay, Han Yu introduces this theme of continuous decline, claiming, “The Way of the Zhou dynasty declined, Confucius died, and [the Way was destroyed] by fire in the Qin, by Huang-Lao in the Han, and by Buddhism in the Jin, [Northern] Wei, Liang, and Sui. Of those who spoke of the Way’s moral power (de), humaneness, and moral duty, anyone who did not go for Yang Zhu’s [philosophy] went for Mozi’s; anyone who did not go for Laozi’s [teaching] went for the Buddha’s.”15

There are clear echoes of Zhang Ji’s letter here, but both Mencius and Yang Xiong are conspicuously absent, along with the revivals of the Way that they supposedly achieved. Near the essay’s end, Han Yu does restore Mencius to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Dynasties
• Introduction
• 1. Han Yu, the Annals, and the Origins of Ethnicized Orthodoxy
• 2. Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, and the Debate over Buddhism and Barbarism
• 3. Ethnocentric Moralism in Two Late Tang Essays
• 4. Ethnicized Orthodoxy in the Northern Song Guwen Revival
• 5. Ideas of Barbarization in Eleventh-Century Annals Exegesis
• 6. Chineseness and Barbarism in Early Daoxue Philosophy
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index