A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden)

Selected Writings

Zhi Li, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, Haun Saussy, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, Haun Saussy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231541534
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Li Zhi's iconoclastic interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations have fascinated Chinese intellectuals for centuries. His approach synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming (1472–1529). The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries, despite an imperial ban on their publication, and intrigued Chinese audiences long after his death.

Translated for the first time into English, Li Zhi's bold challenge to established doctrines will captivate anyone curious about the origins of such subtly transgressive works as the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion or the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden), Li Zhi confronts accepted ideas about gender, questions the true identity of history's heroes and villains, and offers his own readings of Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi made no distinction between high and low literary genres in his literary analysis. He refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging social critiques. Li Zhi praised scholars who risked everything to expose extortion and misrule. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this heterodox intellectual's vital contribution to Chinese thought and culture.

SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK TO BURN (FENSHU 焚書)

PART I

PREFACES 序引

“AUTHOR’S PREFACE”

自序

“ZI XU”

The preface¹ to A Book to Burn, written in Macheng in 1590, encapsulates many of the salient stylistic features of Li Zhi’s text: classical allusions, hyperbole, and self-contradiction, as well as many themes prominent throughout Li’s writings—authenticity, friendship, and the quest for sagehood. In this short introduction, Li situates A Book to Burn in the context of his other literary works and explains the book’s provocative title: he admits to hoping that the book be burned lest it offend readers’ sensibilities. By sharing with readers his own ambivalence over the status and value of his book, Li creates an intimate bond between author and reader and challenges the reader to take a stand. His comment that readers “certainly will wish to kill me” resembles a self-confirming prophecy, for in 1602 Li Zhi was arrested on charges that his writings “threw men’s minds into confusion,” “disrupted the Dao,” and “muddled a generation.” He committed suicide in prison. (RHS)

I have written four books. The first is called A Book to Keep (Hidden). It records several thousands of years of good and bad deeds from ancient times to the present. It is not easy for common people with eyes of flesh to read, so I intended [at first] to hide it.² I meant for it to be hidden in a mountain to await someone of a later generation, a Ziyun to come.³ The second book is called A Book to Burn; in it I reply to the questions posed by my soul friends. Its words get right to the point and criticize the intractable errors of today’s scholars. Since I strike at the heart of their inveterate flaws, they certainly will wish to kill me. So I originally intended this book to be burned. I meant it to be burned and abandoned so that none of it would remain. At the back of A Book to Burn is an appendix called “The Suffering of Old Age.”⁴ Although it is part of A Book to Burn, I made it into a separate fascicle so that the people who want to burn my writings can burn it separately. Only On the Four Books, a work in forty-four chapters, truly brings delight.⁵ It sheds light on the essence and inner riches of the sages and explains their applicability to everyday life. Readers who scan it will immediately understand that there is nothing difficult about becoming a sage, and nothing false about transcending the world of appearances. To be sure, writings such as commentaries and annotations exist to assist people in becoming sages, but in fact they close the doors to sagehood; they do not draw people in but rather block the path. How lamentable! My On the Four Books says, “It was seeing my friends compose eight-legged essays that prompted to me to write On the Four Books.⁶ So On the Four Books may bolster the writing of eight-legged essays, but there are plenty of pieces in it that will not have that effect.”

Now On the Four Books has already been printed; A Book to Burn has also been printed; and one or two parts of A Book to Keep (Hidden) have been printed. What was to have been burned is no longer to be burned, and what was to have been hidden is no longer to be hidden.

Someone said, “If that’s the case, it doesn’t make sense to call your book A Book to Burn. Wouldn’t using such a name produce a situation in which words and deeds no longer correspond and names can no longer be spoken?”

Alas! How would I know? And how would you possibly know? The reason to burn it is that [some claim] the book is grating to people’s ears. The reason to print it is that [some claim] it enters people’s minds. I fear that those who find my work grating to the ear will most certainly kill me. But I am sixty-four years old. If my writings should enter someone’s mind, then perhaps I may find someone who understands me! I hope to be lucky enough to find even a few such people. Therefore I am letting it be printed.

TRANSLATED BY RIVI HANDLER-SPITZ

1. FS, j. 1, in LZQJZ 1:1.

2. The Buddhist term “eyes of flesh” (rouyan 肉眼, Skt. māṃsacakṣus) refers to the most mundane form of vision, which an utterly unenlightened person may possess. It represents the lowest point on a five-point scale. “Fleshy eyes” are followed by “heavenly eyes,” “wisdom eyes,” “dharma eyes,” and finally “Buddha eyes.”

3. Ziyun 子雲 refers to the philosopher Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 B.C.E.–ca. 18 C.E.), who lived a half millennium after the time of Confucius. His Fayan 法言 [Model sayings] and Taixuan 太玄 [Ultimate mystery] are modeled on the Confucian Analects and the Zhouyi. Although Yang Xiong’s reputation fell somewhat in late imperial times, Li Zhi thought highly of him and included his biography in the “Virtuous Confucian Ministers” section of A Book to Keep (Hidden). Through the figure of Ziyun, Li invokes the image of an empathetic and understanding (but remote) reader. The idea of awaiting an appreciative reader has a long history; the locus classicus of this trope is the Han historian Sima Qian’s declaration that he will hide his opus away in a mountain for readers of later generations to find; see his “Bao Ren An shu” 報任安書 [Letter to Ren An] in Han shu, j. 62; Watson, Records: Qin Dynasty, 236.

4. The title of this Buddhist-inspired text refers to the four types of suffering: birth, old age, illness, and death.

5. On the Four Books (Shuo shu 說書) is a collection of Li’s critical essays on the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Great Learning, and the Mencius (a subset of the classics designated for special exegetic attention by Zhu Xi). These critical essays were later incorporated into Li’s Commentary on the Four Books (Sishu ping 四書評). For further bibliographic information on these two texts of Li’s, see Hok-lam Chan, Li Chih, 169–70.

6. The eight-legged essay was a literary form required in writing answers to certain parts of the civil service examination and became the focus of much comparative evaluation and theory during the Ming. See the introduction, p. xxii, and “Postface to The Prose of Our Time,” pp. 132–34.

PART II

LETTERS 書答

“IN RESPONSE TO DENG SHIYANG”

答鄧石陽

“DA DENG SHIYANG”

Written in 1585 in Macheng to Deng Lincai 鄧林材 (juren 1561), this letter¹ responds to Deng’s advocacy of the Cheng-Zhu School of Principle. Li’s focus on the corporeal, the material, and ever-changing daily bodily needs contrasts markedly with views of Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucians, who judged valuable only that which represented an immutable principle (li 理). For example, Cheng Yi (1033–1107), of that school, is known for remarking, “Starving to death is a small matter; losing one’s chastity is a great matter.” While at odds in their philosophical views, Deng and Li were close friends. In 1564 while Li was away and his wife and daughters were in the midst of a fam...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Selections From A Book To Burn (Fenshu 焚書)
• From A Book To Keep (Hidden) (Cangshu 藏書) (1599)
• The Historical Record 史料
• Chronology of Li Zhi’s Life
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Translations from the Asian Classics