A History of Chinese Classical Scholarship, Volume II

Qin, Han, Wei, Jin

David B Honey

• Publisher: Academica Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781680539912
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Volume II of David M. Honey's comprehensive history of Chinese thought covers a vital 500-year stretch in China's history, from national unification in 221 BCE to the first post-imperial fragmentation into rival northern and southern polities. This volume discusses the reconstitution of the classics after the textual devastation wrought by the policies of the First Emperor of Qin, who destroyed many of them, and their eventual canonization by the crown during the Western Han period. Honey also examines the professionalization of Chinese classical scholarship as a state-sponsored enterprise, whereby private masters gave way to tenured academicians who specialized in single classical works. This volume also covers the development of various subgenres in the discipline of philology by the three great Eastern Han classicists Liu Xiang in textual criticism, Xu Shen in lexicography, and the polymath Zheng Xuan in the exegesis of virtually all the classics. Honey concludes with an examination of Zheng Xuan as the inspiration for other exegetical modes to explain textual complexities following this era.

Chapter One

The Qin Disruption and Legacy

1.1. Traditional Views on the Qin

Volume 2 of the recent set of studies History of Chinese Confucianism 中国儒学 史 commences with a truism that isn’t wholly true: “Han dynasty Confucianism inherited and developed the thought of pre-Qin Confucianism.… It enjoys an intimate relationship with the Confucian classical studies that flourished during the Han dynasty” 汉代儒学继承和发展了先秦儒学的思想......它与昌盛于汉代的儒家经学有着十分密切的联系.¹ Though true to a certain point, this first part conveniently glides over the entire Qin regime without striking a single point worthy of notice. However, it continues with a second part that is wholly true, concluding with a catch phrase of such importance as to justify the existence of this present work, focusing initially as I do on the twin Han dynasties: “Confucianism during the Han laid the foundation for the ruling position of Confucianism throughout the entirety of the last two thousand years of the feudal society of China, and of its ruling ideology” 汉代儒学奠定了整个两千年来的我国封建社会儒家统治地位和同志思想的基础.² Given the debt owed by the Han to Qin precedents and practices, especially in terms of classical scholarship, this present work must commence with a brief evaluation of the Qin.

The Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) enjoys a preeminent position among all Chinese dynasties for its unparalleled accomplishment in uniting the ancient Chinese realm and inaugurating the imperial era. The practical measures that standardized the various states’ competing systems of weights, measures, writing, and the like made unification logistically feasible. The pervasive bureaucracy, its underpinning ideology and code of laws developed by the Qin, set the future course of Chinese political institutions on immovable tracks. Even the very concept of power deriving from the imperium of political office instead of the regnum of royal inheritance was part and parcel of this new unified world order. And never again would the Chinese worldview accept for long the partitioning of its territory into a less-than-empire-sized oikoumene.³ Despite these very concrete and enduring contributions to the course of Chinese civilization, an intensely negative image of the Qin has prevailed historically in the Chinese public consciousness, at least until the modern Chinese reunification of 1949. The intensity of the objurgation of the Qin was largely based on the barbaric means of unification, built as it was on the violent force of law and the subsequent enshrinement of harsh legalist regulations as ruling policy rather than the traditional suasive power of moral virtue.

And yet, as Martin Kern has clearly demonstrated, the Han cultural debt to the Qin was pervasive.⁴ For one thing, the Confucian masters at work in the early Han period had either been commissioned as erudites at the academy or functioned as independent masters during the Qin period, or at least trained by Qin teachers.⁵ For another, the ritual foundation of the Han was largely based on Qin precedents. And the same literary forms and technical language that informed the composition of the famous Qin stone inscriptions were at work in the composition of the ritual hymns of the Han dynasty hardly a decade after the last of the Qin stones had been completed. It was a strange quirk of historiographical legerdemain that was able to foster the view that the ancient, aristocratic state of Qin was the destroyer of tradition while the plebian, upstart state of Han was its preserver.⁶ In fact, according to Lothar von Falkenhause, the rites were at the heart of this continuity of tradition: “Given the later Confucian excoriation of Qin, it is a delicious irony to observe, in the light of the archaeological data, that Qin was the only part of China where the kinds of ritual that the Confucian ritualists considered orthodox were still being consistently reflected in elite funerary remains during the lifetimes of Confucius (551–479 BC) and his early disciples.”⁷ Alas, this informed view that widespread cultural continuity was maintained from the Qin to the Han did not impact the historically negative view of Qin, a view that was formulated in the early Han period.

Jia Yi’s 賈誼 (201–169 BC) essay “On Censuring Qin” 過秦論 embodies the twin historical perspectives of unprecedented unification and malevolent rule remarked on above:

The First Emperor arose to carry on the glorious achievements of the six generations. Cracking his long whip, he drove the universe before him, swallowing up the eastern and western Chou and overthrowing the feudal lords. He ascended to the highest position and ruled the six directions, scourging the world with his rod, and his might shook the four seas.…

Thereupon he discarded the ways of the former kings and burned the writings of the hundred schools in order to make the people ignorant.… Yet after it had become master of the whole empire and established itself within the fastness of the pass, a single commoner opposed [the Qin] and its ancestral temples toppled, its ruler died at the hands of men, and it became the laughingstock of the world. Why? Because it failed to rule with humanity and righteousness and to realize that the power to attack and the power to retain what one has thereby won are not the same.

及至始皇，奮六世之餘烈，振長策而馭宇內，吞二周而亡諸侯，履至尊而制六合， 執捶拊以鞭笞天下，威振四海。…… 於是廢先王之道，焚百家之言，以愚黔首。……然後以六合為家，肴函為宮，一夫作難而七廟墮，身死人手，為天下笑者， 何也？仁義不施，而攻守之勢異也。⁸

Whether Jia Yi’s evaluation was an ad captandum reaction designed to please the Confucian class or a sincere historical analysis, his conclusion has informed the tradition. To generations of Confucian classicists, the image that coalesced was not the glorious unification of the realm and the creation of the empire but the ruthless control of people and thought, the nefast monopolization and exploitation of resources; most egregiously was the resultant disruption of the flow of texts from the classical past that embodied the royal way first established by the storied Zhou dynasty. Even though the Qin produced few notable scholars, I have isolated three particular ways in which the Qin created the immediate need for and impacted the long-term development of formal, codified classical scholarship during the Han, in addition to providing the cultural continuum mentioned before: the negative ideological foil of the Qin’s abysmal treatment of Confucians, the development of the erudite’s office, and the unification of the script. The matter of transmitting the classics through unofficial channels and in truncated or even tattered form is lightly touched on at present, but it will be addressed more attentively in chapter 4.

1.2. The Burning of the Books

The last unforgivable crime mentioned in the previous section was erroneously characterized by the catchphrase of “burning of the books and the burial of the Confucians” (fenshu kengru 焚書坑儒).⁹ The Historian’s Records 史記 encapsulates the effect of this Qin scholarly proscription against classical scholarship succinctly: “Then followed the twilight days of the Qin emperor, who burned the Odes [Poems] and Documents and buried the scholars alive, and from this time on the texts of the Six Classics of the Confucians were defective” 及至秦之 季世，焚詩書，阬術士，六藝從此缺焉.¹⁰ Another short epitome includes the Qin’s unforgivable abandonment of the canonical rites: “Formerly, the Qin severed the way of the sages, killed the scholars of technical arts, burned the Poems and Documents, abandoned the rites and their performance,¹¹ stressed deceit and force, employed penalties and punishments, and transferred grain from the coastal areas to Xihe” 昔秦絕聖人之道，殺術士，燔詩書，棄禮義，尚詐力，任刑罰，轉負海之粟致之西河.¹² Ban Gu took these twin evils as metaphor for the intellectual life of the entire period: “The decline reached violent Qin, which burned the classical works, murdered Confucian scholars, devised the law that proscribed the works, punished the crime of affirming antiquity [to negate the present], and from all of this arts of the Way subsequently became extinguished.” 陵夷至于暴秦，燔經書，殺儒士，設挾書之法，行是古之罪，道術由是遂滅。¹³

The terminology employed concerning the victims in both passages was “scholars of technical arts” (shushi 術 士), magicians and wonder-working thaumaturges, not Confucians. At the time, Confucians were scarcely distinguishable from shushi.¹⁴ Nicolas Zufferey describes the tragedy as a single event, the single occurrence of “burying of the ‘scholars and esoteric experts’ [wenxue fangshushi 文學方術士]” in 212 BC, and properly notes that it was not even necessarily directed toward the Confucians but rather those scholars or experts concerned with the techniques of immortality, referred to as fangshi 方 士.¹⁵ Yet Historian’s Records elsewhere describes those who were buried as “all who chanted Confucius’ works and imitated him” 皆誦法孔子.¹⁶ Zuffrey’s explanation of this discrepancy is not entirely satisfactory unless we concede the macaronic mix of different strains in early Han Confucianism. Nevertheless, this one-time tragedy was co-opted by later Confucians to underscore the evils wreaked on their intellectual ancestors by the hated Qin regime. Therefore, according to the traditional mindset, the Qin targeted Confucian classicists, and this baleful policy became the intellectual backdrop to the development of classical scholarship.

This pogrom against the old learning and selected scholars was set in motion by Chancellor Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 BC) in a memorial delivered to the throne in 213 BC:

The Chancellor, Your Subject, risks his life to say that formerly the world was divided and in disorder,...