Session 198: Sources of Power: The Politics of Writing in Premodern East Asia

Organizer: Christian de Pee, McDaniel College

Chair: Herman Ooms, University of California, Los Angeles

Discussant: Angela Zito, New York University

At the courts of Nara, Heian, Koryo, and Song, brush and ink did not merely serve to chronicle the events of past and present, but writing was itself an instrument of power. The recognition of the written page as a site of political assertion and resistance enhances an understanding of the workings of power in premodern East Asia both by allowing more accurate and more intricate readings of the sources, and by introducing new texts into the traditional canon of political history. The former is demonstrated by David Lurie, who identifies legends about Prince Shotoku as charged ideological claims of authorship and royal legitimacy in early Japan, and by Edward Shultz, who explores the political subtexts of the composition and subsequent uses of the Samguk sagi, the earliest history of Korea. The latter is illustrated by T. J. Hinrichs’s analysis of medical texts, compiled at the Song imperial court in hopes of transforming the social fabric of southern regions, and by Christian de Pee’s reading of Song notebooks as negative circumscriptions of a stabilizing imperial center.

Together, the papers of this panel ponder the complex similarities and differences in the uses to which kingdoms and empires of premodern East Asia put a shared repertoire of scriptural technologies. In order to underline that the engagement in Japan and Korea of the possibilities of this shared repertoire was independent and coherent rather than derivative of Chinese practices, the panel sets out from the imperial center of Nara and Heian, then moves to the royal court of Koryo, and ends in the Song empire with confrontations between the written center and the unwritten periphery.

The Author Formerly Known as Prince Shotoku: Royal Authority and Narratives of Literacy in Early Japan

David Lurie, Columbia University

Among the most controversial topics of premodern Japanese history is the legendary Asuka period paragon, Prince Shotoku (trad. 574–622). A long tradition of skepticism about his exploits has recently been capped by dramatic claims that no such person ever existed. The important issue, however, is not this unresolvable question of facticity, but rather what narratives of his "achievements" meant in the contexts in which they originally circulated. Of particular interest is Shotoku’s role, in Nara- and Heian-period texts, as the first author in Japan. Early accounts variously credit him with the composition of the first history of Japan, commentaries on the Lotus, Vimalakirti, and Lion’s Roar sutras, and the famous Seventeen-Article Code of Conduct. Through these attributions, as well as anecdotes about his wisdom and learning, he is situated as inaugurator of the sundry regimes of textuality that became the foundations of Japanese statecraft from the mid-seventh century onward. Analysis of the treatment of reading and writing in hagiographic accounts of Shotoku, from the Nihon shoki (720) through the Shotoku taishi denryaku (early tenth century), sheds considerable light on how literacy and its political ramifications were conceptualized in early Japan. Despite its undeniable practical importance, writing was approached from an idealized and highly ideological perspective, its advent in Japan seen not as a gradual development mediated by clerks and scribes (many of them from the Korean peninsula or from kinship groups claiming descent from Chinese or Korean figures), but rather as a spontaneous expression of the virtue and legitimacy of the royal line, as exemplified by the figure of Shotoku.

The Politics of Writing History: Twelfth-Century Korea

Edward J. Shultz, University of Hawaii, Manoa

In 1145, the Koryo statesman Kim Pusik submitted to King Injong a copy of the just completed Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms). The Samguk sagi is the oldest extant history of Korea written by Koreans. It was compiled by a group of Koryo historians under the leadership of Kim Pusik and on completion comprised fifty kwon (juan). The Samguk sagi is an official history in that the court-appointed scholars composed it according to Chinese historiographical models. It adheres to the composite historical style of annals, chronology, treatises, and biographies.

Although the Samguk sagi recounts the histories of the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla kingdoms, it is also very much an instrument of political power. In its preface, Kim Pusik lamented that Koreans often knew more of Chinese history than of their own traditions. He wanted to create a guide for Korea’s future leaders. Kim Pusik’s political agenda has attracted considerable attention, and this will be the focus of this paper. Kim is accused of providing a pro-Silla bias through his selections. Other critics charge him with overemphasizing Chinese norms and paying only scant attention to native values. The historical commentaries that are scattered within the text yield further evidence of Kim’s political agenda.

The Samguk sagi remains relevant to political discourse today. When Chinese historians in 2003 sought to list with UNESCO ancient Koguryo monuments as part of China’s past, a storm of protest erupted in Korea. Koreans claim that Koguryo is a Korean kingdom and point to the Samguk sagi and particularly its Koguryo annals as evidence of this heritage.

Governance by Medical Texts in Northern Song China

T. J. Hinrichs, Boston College

In the Northern Song (960–1126), officials and emperors commissioned, compiled, and distributed medical texts with the explicit purpose of "edifying and transforming" local mores and customs (jiaohua fengsu), particularly those of southern China. These customs included abandonment of the sick during epidemics and patronage of "shamans" or "spirit-mediums" (wu) rather than physicians. In some cases officials engraved and posted medical texts so that common people had direct access to them; in some cases they distributed such texts directly to shamans. While neither of these targeted groups tells us what viewing or receiving these texts meant to them, other unstated audiences—officials, literati, and physicians—leave us some hints. Through an examination of prefaces and other writings about these medical texts, as well as of their medical content, this paper explores the political and moral meanings of the production and distribution, as well as the receipt and consumption of these medical texts. It places the official distribution of medical works in the contexts of increasingly activist approaches to governance, and of parallel policies to unify family ritual. In doing so, it considers and refines the questions: Is medicine family? Are texts ritual?

Circumscriptions of the Center: The Writing of the Empire in Song Notebooks

Christian de Pee, McDaniel College

Prefaces to Song-dynasty notebooks (biji) commonly portray the author as an aged scholar, jotting down scattered, fading memories of his official career in the rural isolation of his retirement. Such prefaces befit the contents of notebooks, which comprise everything that does not have a legitimate place in other genres of classical writing. The notebook can therefore be understood as a negative, marginal genre. Written by marginal men, notebooks are concerned with things marginal, "off center" in both the geographical and the metaphorical sense: local products, local customs, local speech, local history, but also immoral officials, humor and puns, unusual talent or unusual virtue, ghosts and manifestations of fate, lost texts, oral literature, and violence. And yet this very concern with margins and extremes suggests a center, the stable center of imperial power that grounds civilization, morality, and meaning. Notebooks, in other words, confirm imperial ideology by producing a literary landscape in which a virtuous, civilized center recedes into an intemperate, violent periphery.

For this reason, notebooks provide the historian with a space to reflect on the relationship between writing and imperial power. The imagination of the empire as a text or, more precisely, as wen (a cosmic pattern manifested in the talented compositions of virtuous men as well as in ephemeral texts, natural textures, and cosmic patterns) invests imperial power in signs that were ever open to contestation, and that are still today accessible to the historian.