Organizer: Martin Kern, Columbia University
Chair: Madeleine Yue Dong, University of Washington
Discussant: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
The Qin foundation and Han consolidation of the Chinese imperial state roused distinctively new needs of political legitimation. Concluding centuries of disunion, the empire claimed its tradition directly from high antiquity—a tradition originally composed of ritual practice and a largely fluid body of texts. A set of interrelated text-centered phenomena emerged to serve imperial legitimation: the formation of a canon, the rise of scriptural learning, the differentiation of scholastic lineages, and the creation of a new political mythology. This "textualization in Han times,"—as Michael Nylan’s contribution is entitled—provided the state with standards to define ideological normativity, to select scholars and statesmen, and to exert social control. The new mythological texts—in the foreground the Ru and Huanglao canonical scriptures—formed the core of Han textualization; they promoted genuinely normative contents in a written form that was no longer fluid and fragmentary, but fixed, controllable, and subject to negotiation. William G. Boltz and Zongli Lu address key themes of early imperial mythology: the Yellow Emperor as the model cosmic ruler and the miraculous birth as a mark of both cultural heroes and emperors. Martin Kern discusses the First Emperor’s self-representation and its Han times reversal—a case of imperial myth and counter-myth. Together, the four papers present a coherent set of challenging approaches to the formation of both the Chinese empire and imperial Confucianism. Drawing on archaeological evidence and the full scale of textual genres, the panel will stimulate lively discussions among students of various disciplines.
Miraculous Birth in the Han Texts
Zongli Lu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
It has been a long-term debate: Were the early Chinese culture bearers, such as Fu Xi, Shen Nong (The Divine Farmer), Huang Di (Yellow Emperor), Zhuan Xu, Yao, and Shun, "euhemerized gods"? Or, on the contrary, were they mythicized human heroes? While no conclusion on these questions can be reached at this point, we observe interesting transitions of the narratives of these culture bearers from early Chinese texts (pre-Qin to Western Han), both historiographical and philosophical, to the later writings, such as the Eastern Han stone inscriptions and apocryphal texts. Among these interesting transitions are the miraculous birth stories about almost every early culture hero that are told in the later narratives but not—or only in a simpler form—in the earlier ones. The later versions of the miraculous birth stories of the early Chinese heroes appear as "contemporary political myths" created by Han writers. These stories are narrated within a certain frame, and they reflect contemporary views—obviously influenced by the Five Powers theory—of the universe, of history, and of man’s destiny. Thus, we see a progress in which the Chinese culture bearers’ stories are re-narrated from generation to generation, in order to harmonize, or to compromise, with the contemporary cultural, political and social settings. From this time on, "miraculous birth" became one of the most significant and essential symbols for a Chinese "true son of Heaven," frequently encountered in later historiographical writings.
Chinese Myth in the Early Empire
William G. Boltz, University of Washington
Chinese myths of the pre-imperial period are extant largely only in fragments and frequently in secularized and historicized guises in transmitted classical texts. All the same, they can be seen to array themselves around the twin concerns of cosmic order and societal survival. They are in effect punctual reductions of enduring, vague, and ill-understood anxieties over society’s welfare and threats to its continued survival. Their principal function is to give credible voice and concrete expression to the society’s confidence in its own capacity to survive. In the early imperial period the role of myth takes a form markedly different from its classical precursor. Now the anxieties do not center on survival but on historical pedigree and intrinsic political legitimacy. This gives rise in part to a corpus of new myths, associated exclusively with the imperial age and unknown from any earlier time, and in part to a re-structuring and re-interpretation of the pre-imperial cosmic order myths. Chief among the former is the Yellow Emperor myth, with which Sima Qian chooses to begin his Shiji. Inasmuch as it reflects the shift from pre-imperial survival anxiety to imperial legitimacy anxiety, the Yellow Emperor myth is paradigmatic of the structure and function of myth in general after the Qin-Han unification. Not only does it not have any pre-imperial mythic roots in fact, conceptually it could not have any such roots given that its function is entirely a consequence of an imperial mentality.
Competing Myths: The First Emperor’s Ritual Self-Representation and Early Han Counter-Narratives
Martin Kern, Columbia University
In an outburst of ritual activities, the Qin First Emperor, conqueror of the Zhou eastern states and founder of the empire in 221 B.C.E., presented himself as the true successor to the Chinese cultural heroes of high antiquity: the tour of inspection through the newly absorbed territories, the boastful and formulaic diction of the inscribed eulogies, the unification of rules, measures, and the official script, as well as the elaborate sacrifices to numerous natural spirits contributed to a political legitimacy that was modeled upon the legendary Yao, Shun, and Yu. Although the First Emperor anchored his rule in the common ground of Eastern Zhou political doctrine and mythology, this ritual self-representation was effectively countered by Western Han "Confucian" political thinkers and statesmen like Jia Yi and Sima Qian who transformed the self-designed cultural hero into a superstitious megalomaniac, cruel tyrant, and enemy of traditional culture. This counter-image—since then adopted as the historical truth—became the founding myth of the new dynasty. Lacking any ancestral lineage and established by military force, the Han drew their legitimation primarily from a vision in which they had terminated the Qin tyranny and restored the Zhou cultural tradition. Only in this context of competing myths the Zhou cultural legacy was gradually identified with a defined corpus of texts and a distinctive Confucian "school" as their body of transmission—a "school" that was again juxtaposed to other imaginary "schools" of political thought, especially to the so-called Qin dynasty "Legalists."
Textualization in Han Times
Michael Nylan, Bryn Mawr College
Recent archaeological finds dating from the fourth through second centuries B.C. (principally those from Baoshan, Guodian, Shuihudi, and Mawangdui) have helped to refocus scholarly attention on issues concerning the textualization of the classical tradition in China. Materials gathered in the Shiji, Hanshu, and HouHanshu texts strongly suggest that the content of Ru (= classicists, among whom committed Confucians were only a small subset) traditions changed dramatically during the course of Western Han in response to the requirements of the newly centralizing imperial state, to the evolution of a new kind of bureaucrat, and to the invention of proto-paper. Whereas Ru traditions prior to Han had centered on methods of ritual practice in small communities, with supplemental text-based learning mainly a function of the perceived need to draw upon a wide variety of exemplary models from history, Ru traditions by Eastern Han stressed the acquisition of textual learning to an unprecedented degree. In light of this information, many of our old assumptions about the Han period must be jettisoned. For example, in Western Han the term jia was not employed in the same sense as in later imperial history: it did not mean, in other words, a scholastic lineage claiming canonical authority as a result of the intact transmission of authoritative texts and associated teachings from one generation to the next. In Western Han, distinctions between jia were seldom observed. As late as Eastern Han, such distinctions proved of primary importance to the imperial state, which sought to use them as methods of social control.