Yao, Shun, and Prefiguration: The Origins and Ideology of the Han Imperial Geneaology

Early China 30, 2005–2006

YAO, SHUN, AND PREFIGURATION: THE ORIGINS AND IDEOLOGY OF THE HAN IMPERIAL GENEALOGY

Gopal Sukhu

Introduction*

The term allegory was used in the past more broadly than it is used today. In late antiquity and medieval times it included not only allegory as a means of expression but also allegory as a method of interpretation. The first is a rhetorical mode based on metaphor that creates texts with two levels meaning. The second is a hermeneutic tool applied to texts that were not necessarily intended as allegories in order to find, or create, other levels of meaning. Hermeneutical allegory was the main method the early church fathers applied to reading the Christian scriptures, but on this subject they divided into two conflicting schools. There was the school of Alexandria which looked past the literal meaning of the accounts in the Old Testa-ment and read them primarily as allegories of higher spiritual and moral truths. Because this approach encouraged indifference about the histo-‐‑ricity of Old Testament stories, other church fathers, represented mainly by the school of Antioch, rejected it as inimical to certain premises of the faith. While admi ing that scripture could be read for higher spiritual and moral truths, they insisted on the historicity of everything in the Old Testament, including such things as the Parting of the Waves; for them not only the words carried deeper meanings, but so did the historical events that the words described. Their main reading method was a type of hermeneutical allegory by which persons and events in the Old Testa-ment were read not only as historical but at the same time as prophetic signs of the unfolding of one divine plan, of which the central event was the appearance of Jesus in the world.1

* Special thanks to Alexander Brown of the Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University without whose help this article would have been much more difficult to finish. My gratitude also to the members of the Early China Seminar at Columbia University, Sarah Allan, Elizabeth Childs-‐‑Johnson, and Michael Pue for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

. The main exponent of the school of Alexandria was Origen ( – ). See the

H A N I M P E R I A L G E N E A L O G Y

The Greek term for the prophetic sign was typos, which went into Latin as typus, from which we get the words type and typology; and the Latin term was figura or praefiguratio from which we get the terms figure and prefiguration. This style of allegorical interpretation is therefore variously known in English as figural, typological, or, as Auerbach called it, figural-‐‑typological.2 When the method is applied to the “Song of Solomon”, for example, Solomon is to be seen not only as historical but also the “type” or “prefiguration” of Jesus; likewise the Queen of Sheba becomes the “type” or “prefiguration” of the church. The relationship of the Old Tes-tament to the New Testament is, according to this interpretation, that of prophecy to fulfillment, shadow to that which casts the shadow, real to more real. Thus, through hermeneutics the new doctrine, Christianity, builds its own legitimacy on the old doctrine, Judaism, but at the same time claims to supersede it.3 Many sinologists accept without question the idea that typological allegory is foreign to China. That is the logical outcome of another widely held idea: that the Chinese see the Confucian Classics as “human achievements rather than the products of divine revelation.”⁴ There are also those who claim that not only typology but other forms of allegory, even as modes of expression, are missing from China as well. The reason for this, they argue, is not only the absence of divinely inspired texts, but the absence of the divine—at least in the sense of a realm of spirit that is ontologically separate and superior to the material realm. Heidegger’s view that such a dualistic cosmos is characteristic of the West, and is the necessary precondition for metaphor, is often cited as an authority in this regard.⁵ Pauline Yu, for example, argues that the distinction does not occur in Chinese cosmology, which is therefore monistic, and that for this reason allegory and even metaphor did not occur in early Chinese writing and reading. Andrew Plaks similarly thinks that “all reality, in the Chinese

concise account of the two schools in Leonardo Cecchini, “‘Allegory of the Theologians’ or ‘Allegory of the Poets’: Allegory in Dante’s Commedia,” Orbis Li erarum . (October

), – . See also Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .

. E. Auerbach, “Figura,” Archivum Romanicum ( ), ff.

. Leonardo Cecchini, “Allegory of the Theologians,” – . See also Jean Pepin, Mythe et allegorie: les origines grecques et les contestations Judeo-‐‑chrétiennes, (Paris: Études augustiniennes, ) for one of the best overviews of early church hermeneutic history.

. Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, ), I. .

. See, for example, Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .

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view, exists on one plane;” such a universe is therefore inhospitable to the development of Western allegory. It is nevertheless conducive to a peculiarly Chinese allegory which, he claims, is based on “the horizontal extension of synecdoche.”⁶ These views have become very influential among those who study Chinese poetics, but they have also a racted a certain amount of criti-cal fire. The best aimed, in my view, is that of Haun Saussy. In his The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, he reminds us of the distinction between allegory as an expressive mode and allegory as a hermeneutical mode, observing that allegory as an expressive mode is practiced everywhere, including China, and is independent of any particular metaphysics or cosmology. In his view those who link this everyday allegory to a spirit/ma er metaphysics have conflated the two types of allegory, and this is evidence that they have unconsciously come under the influence of those who had the greatest stake in the spirit/ma er distinction, the early Christian fathers. Their hermeneutic allegory, which we have al-ready discussed, he calls the “allegory of the theologians”, after Dante ( – . .) who distinguishes it from the “allegory of the poets.”⁷ By the time of Dante, what distinguished the theologians from the poets was typological allegory. To take this mode as representative, as Yu and Plaks have done, Saussy argues, is to guarantee that in the al-legory department, at least, China will come up short, for the allegory of the theologians “does not travel well.”⁸ The assumption that it does not is essential both to the theory of the allegory-deniers and to Saussy’s critique of their theory, but Saussy never tells us on what that assumption rests. Certainly not on the differences that the no-allegory-in-China theorists see between the European and Chinese universes, for Saussy undermines the essentializing monist-East/dualist-‐‑West dichotomy by citing insights Leibni had on the ma er back in the eighteenth century.⁹ Yet the view that the allegory of the

. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery, – . Andrew Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in “Dream of the Red Chamber” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – . Both are quoted in Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), – .

. Dante Alighieri, Convivio II, I, . For a convenient translation, see Richard H. Lansing, Il Convivio (The Banquet) (New York: Garland Publishing, ), reprinted in part in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), .

. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, – .

. To the Christian missionaries who took literally such terms as qi 氣 and li 理 and concluded that they were materialist concepts and could therefore not be used to describe the ultimate reality that is God, Leibni put the question: What precisely do terms such as “spirit” and even “being” describe? To show that such questions form


theologians, or something like it, cannot live in China may do the same thing that the theory of a Chinese anti-metaphorical monism does, i.e., claim a deep cultural rift where there never was one. It may be that those who find no typological allegory in China do so for lack of evidence. Both Yu and Saussy have wri en insightfully about the Han commentaries on the Shi jing 詩經. Pauline Yu has wri en an important essay on the commentaries on Chu ci 楚辭, especially that of Wang Yi 王逸 (d. . .).¹⁰ Theirs appears to be a reasonable approach, for the Shi jing and the Chu ci are the earliest anthologies of Chinese poetry that we have. The bulk of the commentaries on them, however, come relatively late in Han hermeneutic history and the variety of com-mentarial tools employed in them is relatively small. To see a fuller array of exegetical techniques a be er source would be earlier commentaries on non-literary texts. Those hoping to answer literary critical questions may find non-‐‑literary texts an odd choice, but when we study ancient commentarial traditions in China and elsewhere we must always bear in mind that those traditions did not make the neat distinctions between historical, ideological, and literary concerns that we sometimes claim to make. It does not take a very close examination of the commentaries on either the Chu ci or the Shi jing to see their strong ideological character. If we were to look for the main site of the ideologi-cal debates still raging in those texts as well as the greatest variety of exegetical strategies deployed by the parties in those debates, no be er source could be found than the formal and informal commentaries on the Chun qiu 春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals). Even typological allegory occurs there, most notably in a Later Han subcommentary on the Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳 by He Xiu 何休 ( –

. .), as well as in the chenwei 讖緯 (also known as the apocrypha), the esoteric commentarial literature he quotes to support the claim that Confucius foresaw the rise of the Han 漢 dynasty ( . . .– . .). Typological allegory also occurs in other texts that were produced in the unstable years between the fall of Wang Mang 王莽 ( . .) and the consolidation of the Later Han dynasty, often as proof of the same claim about Confucius’ power of prophecy, a claim that is closely associated with another, that is, that the founder of the Han, Liu Bang 劉邦 ( – r. . . .), was a descendant of the Sage King Yao 堯.

part of Christian tradition, he cited Christian mystics who thought that even the concept of being was inadequate to the task of comprehending God. The implication is that all speech, Western or Chinese, is reduced to metaphor and instability when it comes to describing the ultimate. See Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, – .

. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery, “Imagery in ‘Encountering Sorrow’,” – .

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According to the best known myth about the sage king Yao, he by-passed his unworthy sons when time came to appoint a successor to the throne, and chose instead the unrelated commoner Shun 舜 for his virtue. Warring States period philosophers a empting to convince kings to em-ploy as ministers the intellectually and morally excellent rather than the merely well-born alluded to this story time and again in their speeches. Those who logically but gingerly applied the same requirements to the king also used the myth of Yao and Shun to legitimize their yearnings. Challenges to hereditary privilege naturally excited controversy, and variations of the story developed to support differing views on the ques-tion. Idealists who held that virtue trumped all other values subscribed to the story of the peaceful abdication of Yao to Shun. Conservatives and political realists told versions of the story where Shun somehow forced Yao to cede him the throne. Those caught between their love of virtue and their respect for hereditary privilege removed the responsibility for the transfer of power from the shoulders of Yao and Shun and laid it at the door of Heaven instead. In other words, Yao neither really abdicated nor did Shun seize the throne; it was Heaven which chose Shun because of his virtue. The best study of the myth of Yao and Shun is in Sarah Allan’s The Heir and the Sage. Her work is both the inspiration and point of depar-ture for this article, but I will not a empt to achieve her thoroughness and theoretical rigor here. I will merely outline the uses of the Yao and Shun myth in the period beyond where her study ends, the Former Han dynasty, to show how the myth came to be involved in the formation of Han ideology, Liu family genealogy, and Later Han Confucian versions of typological allegory.11

The Han Scholar as and versus

the Commoner King

That commoner status did not disqualify one to be supreme ruler may well have always been a minority opinion. Evidence for this is how the scholarly world reacted when the Chinese empire did indeed fall into the hands of a commoner. When Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty, there were many among the well-born and literate who did not support him, citing his commoner origins as his greatest liability. Many believed, or hoped, that his dynasty would not last.12

. Sarah Allan, The Heir and the Sage (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, ), – .. Two traditional scholars from the state of Lu, for example, who had been invited

to help set up Han court ritual refused, protesting that “a reason for se ing up ritual


Later, one of the descendants of Liu Bang, Emperor Wu, or Wudi 武帝 (r. – . . .), decided to prove them wrong by consolidating and expanding Han power. To do this, he chose to enact some of the meri-tocratic implications of the Yao/Shun myth. He decided to reduce the power of the hereditary princes, gradually transferring their territories to the administration of bureaucrats answerable to the central govern-ment and chosen on the basis of merit. His interest was of course less in raising up the worthy than the centralization of power after the model of the Qin dynasty. Unlike the First Emperor of the Qin 秦始皇帝, however, Emperor Wu encouraged the study of the texts that came to be known as the Confucian classics, knowledge of which he made one of the primary requirements for government service.13 Recent scholarship has made a good case against seeing this and the concomitant founding of the imperial academy as a sign of the “victory of Confucianism.” Michael Nylan, for example, has argued that while the imperial academy adopted a heterogeneous set of texts that are now called the Confucian classics, there was no single ideology that unified the thinking and behavior of a distinct group that could be named Confucian.¹⁴ Of course consistent ideologies are difficult to find anywhere in the world before the spread of the idea of systematic philosophy, and be-havior that is wholly consistent with ideology is rare even now. If we look for ideology in the Chinese classics as they are wri en, we will be hard put to find it; we will find it, however, in the commentaries, for in the ancient world, original thought, had to wear the veil of tradition, that is, at least, not appear original, before it could have authority. If the founding of the Han imperial academy did not define one ideology that we can exclusively call Confucianism, it did at least two things: it stabilized the status of Confucius as the main source of ethical, ritual, and political authority, and it designated the Spring and Autumn Annals

and music occurs only after [an aristocratic family] has had a hundred years’ accumu-lation of moral power; then and only then can ritual and music be established for it 禮樂所起, 積德百年而後可興也.” The subtext is that Liu Bang as a commoner was not worthy. See Shi ji 史記 (Beijing: Zhonghua, ), . .

. In her The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), Michael Nylan gives a very useful historical account of how each of the classics was transmi ed and interpreted, revising many aspects of the received wisdom about canon formation in ancient China.

. Michael Nylan, “A Problematic Model: The Han ‘Orthodox Confucian Synthe-sis,’ Then and Now,” in Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics, ed. Kai-‐‑wing Chow, On-‐‑cho Ng, and John B. Henderson (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), – .

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the main source of Confucius’ teachings.¹⁵ Why and how was this text raised to that status? The Spring and Autumn Annals is a bare chronology of events that took place in the state of Lu 魯 between the years and . . . It is arranged according to the sequence of Lu rulers, and reveals no judg-ments, no point of view, no emotion, and very li le background, at least to the unaided gaze. It was thus the ideal text for appropriating tradition without being bound by it, for unlike texts such as the Analects (Lun yu 論語) or the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), the Spring and Autumn Annals con-tained no philosophical or moral teaching in the le er of the text that would get in the way of whatever mystical, political, philosophical or moral content that the skillful exegete could read into it. The Confucius of the Annals could support views and policies that the Confucius of the Analects or Mencius could not. This new Confucius was be er suited to the needs of the new empire. The school of Annals interpretation that came to dominate the impe-rial academy was based on the Gongyang commentary (Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳). The main exegetical strategy the scholars used to create this modern Confucius was the so-‐‑called “praise and blame” (baobian 褒貶) reading. Anyone who has studied the history of Chinese thought knows that the theory behind this method is that the way Confucius phrased a given entry in the Annals revealed his judgment about the people and events involved. The job of the exegete was to decipher these encoded judgments.¹⁶ The method is also called the theory of “subtle phrasing” (weiyan 微言), a term which also means “insignificant words”, for it was supposedly in the insignificant words where the esoteric teachings of the Master were to be found. George kennedy, after rigorous study, proved over fifty years ago that the theory is entirely without foundation.¹⁷ The textbooks dealing with this subject never expose us to the more insidious political applications of the praise and blame method. A good

. Rudolf G. Wagner calls the Spring and Autumn Annals the “lead classic of the Han since Dong Zhongshu’s intervention with Han Wudi,” explaining that the term “lead classic” refers to what the scholars considered the “core” of the classics. “Since the Former Han, this classic was the Chunqiu, which was read as a text into which Con-fucius had wri en all the secrets of running society in accordance with the Way.” See his The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi, (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), and n .

. See Mark Lewis’ analysis of the traditional reading of the Gongyang zhuan in his Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), – . See also Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics, – .. George A. Kennedy, “Interpretation of the Ch’un-‐‑ch’iu,” Journal of the American

Oriental Society, ( ), – .


example is the following where Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒, ca. – . . .), the greatest exponent of the Gongyang school of Annals scholar-

ship, anticipated a bit too early one of Emperor Wu’s policies. In . . ., in the commandery of Liaodong 遼東, the temple dedi-cated to the spirit of the founder of the Han dynasty, caught fire. The emperor suspecting that it was an omen of some sort called in Dong Zhongshu to interpret it. Dong Zhongshu began his memorial about the fire by announcing the basic Gongyang credo: “It is the way of the Spring and Autumn Annals to raise the past to illuminate the future.” He then gave the emperor a brief history lesson from the Annals, with special a ention to an entry that he considered relevant to the emperor’s concerns. The entry was the record of a fire that took place during the second year of the reign of Duke Ding (定公, r. – . . .) The original Annals entry is translated below:

夏、五月壬辰、雉門及兩觀災。

In the summer, in the fifth month, on the renchen day, the Zhi Gate and its two towers were destroyed by fire.

The Gongyang commentary interprets the passage according to the praise and blame theory. This it does in its usual catechistic form, asking a ques-tion and then answering it:

其言雉門及兩觀災何﹖兩觀微也。然則曷為不言雉門災及兩觀﹖主災者兩觀也。主者兩觀、則曷為後言之﹖不以微及大也。

Why does he (Confucius) place the word Zhi Gate first and the word for watchtowers last? The two watchtowers are unimportant (compared with the Zhi Gate). If that is so, then why did it not say that the fire in the Zhi Gate spread to the two watchtowers? The two watchtowers caught fire first . . . If that is the case, why were they mentioned second? One does not start with the less important and then go to the more important . . .¹⁸

This passage and another (Duke Ding, second year: winter, the th month) concerning the rebuilding of the towers and gate were inter-preted so as to support the belief, held by the Gongyang school, that the towers should be read to stand for ministers from the powerful Jisun 季孫 family who were threatening the power of the Ducal House of Lu (and, incidentally, alienating Confucius) and that their burning down was a sign from Heaven giving the Duke permission to rid himself of

. William Hung, Chunqiu jingzhuan yinde 春秋經傳引得 (rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, ) (hereafter Chun qiu), .

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the ministers.¹⁹ Dong Zhongshu in his memorial notes that since the extravagant style of the towers transgressed ritual correctness (they aped the style of the Zhou king):

天災之者、若曰偕禮之臣可以去。

Heaven’s destroying them was tantamount to its saying, ‘Ministers who in their extravagance transgress ritual correctness may be eliminated.’

Dong then cites other instances of fires recorded in the Annals, and finds that in all cases the pa ern is the same: Heaven caused the buildings to burn to show the rulers of Lu that they should rid themselves of corrupt ministers and employ sages (like Confucius, for example).²⁰ Turning to the case in question, Dong reminds the emperor that the buildings that had lately burned down were also from various points of view ritually inappropriate, and that Heaven by destroying them was once again expressing its will in a sign. Heaven was warning the emperor to rid himself of imperial relatives who, as they grew more and more unmindful of their proper subordination, were demonstrating that entitling them with fiefdoms was a mistake. In Dong’s words:

故天災若語陛下:「當今之世⋯非以太平至公、不能治也。視親戚貴屬在諸侯遠正者最甚者、忍而誅之。如吾燔遼東高廟乃可。」

Therefore Heaven’s causing the conflagration is as though it were saying to your Majesty, “In the present generation . . . If one does not enact justice of the utmost impartiality, one cannot govern. Look for those of your aristocratic relatives in their fiefdoms who have strayed farthest from the right path, and, steeling yourself, execute them. If I (Heaven) burned down the Exalted Shrine in Liaodong, it is permi ed (that you kill your noble kin).”21

Emperor Wu would eventually do what Dong Zhongshu advised. But hearing the advice for the first time Emperor Wu was so shocked that he sentenced Dong Zhongshu to death. Dong, through the efforts of his family, eventually managed to worm out of the punishment. After that he restricted his interpretive activity to texts.22 But he had set a precedent that would be followed by many generations of scholars.

. Chun qiu, . See also Han shu 漢書, A. (Beijing: Zhonghua, ), where Dong Zhongshu’s interpretation is further explained.

. Han shu, A. .

. See Han shu, . .

. See Han shu, . .


In the example cited above, we can see that all of the machinery of allegory, even as an exegetical mode, is available and in working order for the Han scholar. The buildings stand for the ministers. The ritual incorrectness of the buildings stands for the moral turpitude of the min-isters. The burning stands for the removal of the ministers. Because this type of allegoresis is meant to change the record of an historical event into a divine revelation, it also constitutes one of the building blocks of typological allegory, except that the burning of the Zhi Gate is not interpreted as a prophetic sign of the burning of the Han shrines. The burning of the Zhi Gate is interpreted as the record of a Heaven-‐‑sent sign, a precedent by which one may judge that the burning of the Han shrines was also a Heaven-sent sign with a similar meaning. Typological allegory is here in principle, but it is still not part of a well developed exegetical technique. Of course allegoresis is not the only exegetical strategy at work in Dong Zhongshu’s interpretation of the Annals entry. He applies the praise and blame theory to the phraseology as well. But the casual reader of the Annals will find nothing in the phraseology of the Zhi Gate entry that is out of the ordinary. The only way that the phrasing of the entry can be made to appear other than banal is by filling in historical background against which the words may be interpreted as odd; in this case, part of that background concerns where the fire started. One might ask, “How did the commentator know that the fire started in the towers?” It does not come from the text of the Annals, nor is it the result of a hermeneutic maneuver. The information comes from the zhuan 傳. The term is often translated as commentary, but it originally meant knowledge that was transmi ed orally from teacher to student before it was wri en down. In the case of the Gongyang zhuan, the knowledge was supposedly handed down orally from the time of Confucius and wri en down only in the Han dynasty. That is why it and the Guliang zhuan 穀梁傳 are known as New Script schools—when they were finally commi ed to writing, it was in the script that came into use after the Qin standard-ized writing—the new script as opposed to the pre-‐‑Qin old script.23 The claim of oral transmission allows the writer of a zhuan to say that he has a store of secret knowledge, knowledge that he can add at whim to the explanation of a passage. But such hermeneutic flexibility allowed one to bend the classics in two directions, both towards the throne and away from it. This, whether he knew it or not, was what Emperor Wu was allowing the scholars to teach in the imperial academy to the future officers and to members

. For a good introduction to the origins of the Annals commentaries, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics, – .

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of the imperial household. He was, in effect, granting the Gongyang specialists, at least, a level of power, that of determining the moral and political course of an empire, that Confucius himself had enjoyed only in fantasy. The scholars had a myth to emblematize this new power. Predictably it was the myth of a commoner who became king, but the story concerned neither Yao nor Shun, and certainly not Liu Bang. This time the commoner king was a scholar, Confucius himself. An anonymous scholar writing at the court of the Prince of Huainan 淮南王 after describing a Confucius of almost miraculous mental and physical abilities put it as follows:

然而勇力不聞、伎巧不知、專行教道、以成素王、事亦鮮矣。春秋二百四十二年、亡國五十二、弒君三十六、采善鉏醜、以成王道⋯

Yet his physical strength was unknown and his skills were unap-preciated. He exclusively practiced the art of teaching and guid-ing, thereby becoming a commoner king. His deeds were few. The Spring and Autumn period covers two hundred forty-two years, fifty-‐‑two fallen states, and thirty-‐‑six rulers assassinated by subor-dinates. [When he wrote the Annals], he adopted what was good and rejected what was bad [in those times] and thus he achieved the Way of the kings.²⁴

Thus Confucius (read the classical scholar) rules the world through the Annals. Such talk was not to remain merely hyperbolic praise for Confucius and the profundity of the Annals. Using the methods, improvisation not excluded, that were already well developed in the Gongyang com-mentary, Dong Zhongshu found what he thought was the exact place in the Annals where it said, in code, that Confucius literally received the Heavenly Mandate to assume the role of commoner king (suwang 素王 sometimes translated “uncrowned king”). That was in its very last and most mysterious entry:

十有四年。春。西狩獲麟。

th year (of Duke Ai), Spring: In the west he went hunting and caught a unicorn.²⁵

The year is . . . and the place is the western part of the state of Lu. The person hunting is not made clear; it could be the reigning Duke Ai,

. Huainanzi 淮南子 (Zhuzi jicheng 諸子集成) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, ), – (“Zhushu xun” 主術訓 ).. Chun qiu, .


but nothing in the text suggests this other than a special word for hunt, shou 狩 which usually applies to royalty. The unicorn is the conventional and inaccurate translation of the word lin 麟, the female of the fabulous beast called the qilin 麒麟. The Gongyang comments:

何以書﹖記異也。何異爾?非中國之獸也。然則孰狩之﹖薪采者也。薪采者微也、曷為以狩言之? 大之也。曷為大之﹖為獲麟大之。曷為為大之﹖麟者仁獸也。有王者則至、無王者則不至。

Why did he (Confucius) write it? To record a miraculous event. What was miraculous about it? It is not a creature of the Central States. Well then, who caught it? A firewood gatherer. A firewood gatherer is a person of low status. Why was the word shou (hunt) used to talk about it? To magnify it (the event). Why? Because he had caught a unicorn. Why because he had caught a unicorn? Because the unicorn is the animal of humaneness; when there is a true king (in the world), then it appears. When there is no true king, then it does not appear.

Notice here that the zhuan introduces quite unexpectedly a firewood gatherer. There is nothing in the Annals entry that reveals his presence. He will play a very important role in the classical commentaries of the Later Han dynasty. The commentary continues:

有以告者曰。有麇而角者。孔子曰「孰為來哉。孰為來哉」反袂拭面涕沾袍。顏淵死、子曰「噫。天祝予」西狩獲麟。孔子曰「吾道窮矣」⋯ 君子曷為為春秋﹖撥亂世反諸正。莫近諸春秋⋯末不亦樂乎堯舜之知君子也。制春秋以俟後聖。以君子之為亦有樂乎此。

Someone informed Confucius that they had caught something like a roe but with a horn. Confucius said, “For whom has it come? For whom has it come?” He turned back his sleeve and wiped his face, but the tears wet his robe. When Yan Yuan died, the Master said, “Ai! Heaven is destroying me.” When Zilu died, the Master said, “Ai! Heaven is cu ing me off.” When they hunted in the west and caught a unicorn, he said, “My road has come to its end.” Why did the gentleman write the Annals? To restore order in an age of disorder; to return it to the right path, there is nothing be er than the Annals . . . Indeed he took delight in the fact that Yao and Shun knew of the gentleman (in advance). His purpose in composing the Annals was to anticipate (the needs of) the Sage(s) of the future. And being a man of nobility he took joy in this too.²⁶

. Chun qiu, .

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Dong Zhongshu’s answer to the only question left unanswered in the Gongyang catechism quoted above had far reaching significance for the future of Han hermeneutics. The question was asked by Confucius: For whom has the unicorn come? Dong Zhongshu’s writings point to one answer only: For Confucius. Confucius is the sage king whose coming was foreseen by Yao and Shun, and whose presence in the world was heralded by the unicorn. There was no other king in Confucius’ time capable of carrying out the Mandate of Heaven; therefore it had fallen to Confucius. Of course Confucius ruled over no realm, but he was perform-ing a royal duty by writing the Spring and Autumn Annals, for it contained teachings that anticipated the needs of a future genuine king.²⁷ The Annals was thus to be seen as the repository of the teachings, the way of the sage-kings, that Heaven had mandated Confucius to teach, and Dong Zhongshu’s Gongyang disciples were to be seen as the only true holders of the keys to those teachings. Rulers desiring guidance in the way of the sage-‐‑kings would therefore have to turn to qualified Gongyang scholars. This school thus “arrogated to itself the right to judge” which ruler was practicing the Way, which is to say, which ruler was worthy of receiving the Mandate now under Gongyang protection.²⁸ The example of Yao and Shun figuring large in their thinking, these early scholars did not think of the Mandate as given to whole families, and certainly not the Liu family. Some hoped that under the new regime of classical education the imperial family would eventually produce someone worthy of the Mandate and under him the glorious era of the Sage kings would return. In the meantime the future emperor would have to be convinced that his moral progress was being monitored not only by his tutors but by the ultimate source of the tutor’s authority, Heaven. He was taught to see eclipses, floods, droughts and other unusual phenomena as indicators of Heaven’s opinion of his rule and to look to the interpreter of texts as the one best able to understand their meaning. Dong Zhongzhu’s idea that Confucius was the elect of Heaven would eventually join with the Gongyang idea that he “anticipated” the needs of future sage kings to create the image of Confucius the prophet, an image that corresponded with the increasingly divinatory function of the Han classical scholar. But at this stage neither Confucius nor the Han scholars prophesied the emergence of a sage king in the Han imperial family. In fact, certain scholars were looking for him elsewhere.

. For an interesting interpretation of this tradition, see Mark Lewis, Writing and Authority, – and passim.

. Anne Cheng, Étude sur le Confucianisme Han: Élaboration d’une tradition exégètique sur les classiques (Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, ), .


Sui Hong 眭弘, for example. He was a student of Ying Gong 嬴公 who was a disciple of Dong Zhongshu.²⁹ He served during the reign of Emperor Zhao 昭 (r. – . . .) a time when, under the influence of his scholarly lineage the yin-‐‑yang five elements theory previously used mainly for divination had become one of the standard methods of exege-sis. Skill in reading texts and skill in omen reading were becoming much the same skill. Sui Hong was an early leader of a movement I call Zhou utopianism, a radical Confucian tendency that vigorously campaigned to reshape the Han government along supposed Zhou dynasty lines. One of Sui Hong’s most famous students was Gong Yu 貢禹 who under Emperor Yuan 元 ( – . . .) effected the partial abolition of many of the Qin-‐‑style imperial cults. These he replaced with what were thought to be Zhou dynasty forms of worship. It was following this precedent that kuang Heng 匡衡 around . . . accomplished his more thorough reforms including the abolition of a number of shrines dedicated to the early emperors of the Han.³⁰ After the reign of Emperor Wu, this faction seems to have despaired of ever seeing a sage king bearing the imperial surname of Liu. Such despair is evident in a le er that Sui Hong wrote in . . ., purporting to explain bizarre events rumored to have occurred on Mt. Laiwu 萊蕪 near Taishan 泰山, in Changyi 昌邑, and even in one of the imperial parks. It seems that the people in the Taishan area had heard the sound of thousands of voices shouting on the south side of Mt. Laiwu, but when they went to investigate they found only a huge boulder partially sunk in the earth. Suddenly the boulder rose and stood on three smaller rocks. No sooner had that happened than several thousand albino crows perched at its sides. The le er also reported stories about withered and fallen trees that had spontaneously stood up again both in Changyi and the emperor’s own Shanglin Park 上林苑. On closer inspection, it was noticed that worms had gnawed characters into the leaves that read: Gongsun bing yi li 公孫病已立, which among other things could be interpreted to mean, “Gongsun is cured of the illness. He will become ruler.”31 Sui Hong, divining by the Annals, concluded that the trees and the stone were yin objects betokening a commoner who would soon be elevated

. Han shu, . .

. See Michael Loewe, Crisis and Conflict in Han China (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., ), chapter .

. Han shu, . – . See also Jack Dull, A Historical Introduction to the Apocry-‐‑phal (Chan-‐‑Wei) Texts of the Han Dynasty, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Washington, , – .

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to the throne. The odd behavior of the insects was Heaven’s way of an-nouncing to Emperor Zhao that there was a commoner in the Gongsun family who had the makings of a Sage king. He leaves two things un-interpreted as too obvious for comment: the fact that the stone was first embedded in the earth before it rose and the fact that the crows were white. The Han had already adopted earth as its patron element. Stones and the color white were associated with the metal element. According to the Birth Sequence of the five elements theory, the earth element gives birth to the metal element. The stone rising out of the earth and the albino crows could only have symbolized the peaceful replacement of the Han by a dynasty under the patronage of metal.32 Later in the le er Sui Hong makes an unprecedented statement:

漢家堯後、有傳國之運。漢帝宜誰差天下、求索賢人、禪以帝位⋯

The House of Han is descended from Yao, and is fated to transfer the empire to another (house). The Han emperor should make inquiries and selections throughout the realm, to seek out the worthy one in whose favor to abdicate the imperial throne . . .

In other words, since Yao had chosen a sage, namely Shun, rather than a man of the same surname to succeed him, Emperor Zhao, being the descendant of Yao, should do likewise by abdicating in favor of the sage of the Gongsun family whoever he may be; he would thus “obey the Mandate of Heaven,” of which the strange happenings were signs.33 Sui Hong’s proposal is clear evidence that some Gongyang scholars, and perhaps others, still nursed the old Warring States era hope that the advent of the Sage king was nigh. Here again the myth of Yao and Shun serves to articulate and legitimize that hope, but with a differ-

. Gary Arbuckle believes that the albino crows refer to an aspect of an alternative cosmology, the santong 三統 system, proposed by Dong Zhongshu, which we will dis-cuss below. Their whiteness, according to Arbuckle, symbolizes the change from an era of what he calls “wholeheartedness” represented by the color black (under which Dong classified the Han dynasty) to and era of “reverence” represented by the color white, the era any dynasty directly succeeding the Han would have to usher in, according to Dong’s santong system. The main problem with this theory is that it does not explain the symbolism of the stone, nor does it explain why Sui Hong does not explain the significance of the stone and the white crows. If those objects referred to a system other than the well known five elements cosmology, they surely would have called out for explanation by Sui Hong. See Gary Arbuckle, “Inevitable Treason: Dong Zhongshu’s Theory of Historical Cycles and Early A empts to Invalidate the Han Mandate,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, . (Oct.–Dec., ), – .

. Han shu, . .


ence. Descent from Yao, and conflated with it the Mandate of Heaven, is ascribed to a ruling family, the Han Lius, but only in order to make the desired abdication in favor of a commoner seem somehow natural. Sui Hong saw the desired Han abdication as “fated” (you yun 有運); but did he see it as prefigured in the abdication of Yao to Shun, or did he see it as fated because those descended from Yao had a family tradition, as it were, of abdication, which would make it a recurring pa ern? Because this question is difficult to answer, it is hard to decide whether or not Sui Hong was practicing typological allegory or not. On the other hand, the boulder and the albino crows are prophetic signs, and Sui Hong’s interpretation would be full-‐‑fledged typological allegory, assisted by yin yang five elements theory, save that it is applied to an oneiric rumor rather than scripture. Sui Hong would never see the fulfillment of the prophecy—he was sentenced to death when the under-aged Emperor Zhao’s regent, Huo Guang 霍光 (d. . . .), learned of his strange le er. It is commonly thought that the genealogical connection between Yao and the Liu family was made much later. In fact, it was given a classical foundation and officially accepted only later, as we shall see. Sui Hong’s, as far as I know, is the earliest recorded statement of the idea, and I sus-pect that at that time it was still considered heretical. But where did the idea come from? The first source that should be eliminated is any Liu family history. If there had existed a Liu family history, then it would have provided a genealogy that traced the family further back than Liu Bang’s father and mother who are the only Liu forebears mentioned at the beginning of the Basic Annals of the Shi ji and the Han shu. Gary Arbuckle thinks that the idea began with Dong Zhongshu, spe-cifically with his santong system, the Gongyang leader’s alternative to the then dominant five elements cosmology.³⁴ Dong Zhongshu divided history into two great eras: the time when the governing principle was immutable from regime to regime and the time when it changed from regime to regime. The era of immutabil-ity corresponded to the time of the sage kings Yao, Shun and Yu 禹, whose governing principle was zhong 忠, which Arbuckle translates as “wholeheartedness”. The era of mutability corresponds to the time of the Three Dynasties, Xia 夏, Shang 商, and Zhou 周, whose governing principles were zhong “wholeheartedness”, jing 敬 “reverence”, and wen 文 “refinement”, whose corresponding colors are black, white and red, respectively. These three governing principles are the santong, or as

. Gary Arbuckle, “Inevitable Treason,” – .

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Arbuckle translates it, the “Three Standards”. The governing principle changed from dynasty to dynasty in order to correct the problems caused by the inevitable over-application of the last dynasty’s governing principle. The principles, like the elements, occur in a set order; “wholehearted-ness” is corrected by “reverence”, and “reverence” is corrected by “re-finement”. During the era of immutability, regime change takes place under circumstances of peace; during the era of mutability, dynasties rise and fall after periods of disorder, except for the Xia, which rose in peace but ended in disorder. The next dynasty in line after the Zhou, whose refinement started well but became excessive, is the Han with its corrective “wholeheartedness” beginning the cycle again. It will be noticed that the Qin 秦 dynasty ( – . . .) does not fig-ure in this conception of history. For Dong, the Qin was not a legitimate dynasty; it was merely part of the great disorder out of which the Han arose. Arbuckle believes that, by making Han the beginning of a new cycle that arose out of disorder, Dong was in an occult manner making it the equivalent by analogy, of Yao, who Arbuckle assumes also “acceded in a disorderly age, or more exactly a pre-orderly age . . .”³⁵ The problem with this theory is that the assumption that Yao “acceded in a disorderly age” was not a Han assumption. The Shi ji tells us that Yao assumed the throne after his older brother Zhi 摯 proved himself a “weak” 不善 ruler (or in one version after his death).³⁶ There is no mention of disorder; the commentators, citing other sources, talk only of peaceful abdication.³⁷ We must therefore assume that in the mind of Dong Zhongshu the era of peaceful transfer of power and the era of violent overthrow were quite distinct and that accordingly neither the accession nor abdication of Yao bore the taint of violence. There is therefore no basis for reading Dong’s statement as code indicating that he saw “Emperor Wu in the role of a new Yao.”³⁸ If we go by Dong’s statement in a pertinent memorial to Emperor Wu,

今漢繼大亂之後、若宜少損周之文致、用夏之忠者。

In the present case, since the Han has succeeded after great disorder, it appears appropriate that it reduce the extreme of “refinement” characteristic of the Zhou dynasty and employ the “wholehearted-ness” characteristic of the Xia.³⁹

. Arbuckle, “Inevitable Treason,” n .

. Shi ji, . – . The Suoyin 索隱 glosses bushan 不善 as weiruo 微弱.

. Shi ji, . n .

. Arbuckle, “Inevitable Treason,” .

. Han shu, . .


The best that Han could hope for was to be as good as the Xia. Indeed the santong system appears to have been meant to draw a line of equivalence between Han and Xia, for it became the theoretical basis of Emperor Wu’s adoption, on Dong’s advice, of the Xia calendar. Sui Hong’s statement therefore remains the earliest connecting Han to Yao. If the notion of Han descent from Yao was not supported by any of the doctrines taught in the Gongyang-dominated imperial academy, including the santong system, then the most likely place where it could have circu-lated, and at the same time have aroused the concern of someone like Sui Hong, was the imperial household itself. If the activities of Sui Hong’s scholarly lineage, which aimed at reducing the glamour of the imperial family, are any indication of his own a itudes, then his repetition of the idea was probably not an endorsement of it. His intended tone may well have been far more nasty than my fairly literal translation of the Chinese indicated, something to the effect of: “If you are really descended from Yao (as you spuriously claim), why not follow his example and step down in favor of the be er man?” Even if Sui Hong was referring to a doctrine that was influential only in the imperial household the question remains: what were its origins? After Sui Hong, the only one on record before the fall of Wang Mang to state explicitly that the Han dynasty descends from Yao is Wang Mang himself.⁴⁰ The two bases for this claim that are always cited during the Later Han are the chenwei texts, and the Zuo zhuan 左傳. The chenwei texts contained, among other ma ers, “prophecies” whose political motivation was seldom far from the surface. They appear to have been largely wri en during and after the Wang Mang usurpation, but were almost always a ributed to Confucius, the Sages, or divinities. If there were apocryphal texts claiming that the founding ancestor the Liu clan was Yao during Sui Hong’s time, then there probably would have been controversy about them. There are none on record. If there were chenwei that made the claim just before or during the rise of Wang Mang, they would certainly have figured in Wang Mang’s propaganda, whose own claims to legitimacy were based on the doctrine that Han was descended from Yao, as we shall see. But no such texts are mentioned as part of Wang Mang’s propaganda. That leaves the Zuo zhuan, a text that Wang Mang, amid great controversy, made part of the curriculum of the imperial academy just before he usurped the throne.⁴¹ It has always been assumed that the Han controversies surrounding this text were mainly about textual integrity and authenticity; it is my

. Han shu, B. – .

. See Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Chan-‐‑Wei) Texts, .

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contention that those debates hid a deeper debate about the origins and legitimacy of the imperial house.⁴²

Alternative Commentaries and

the New Liu Self Image

I will not discuss the details of the controversies surrounding the origins of the Zuo zhuan, but will repeat the plausible side of what the histories tell us about its role in the intellectual life of Han imperial household. A text by that name was a major object of study at the court of Prince Xian 獻 of Hejian 河間 (d. . . .), who even appointed an Erudit (boshi 博士), a certain Guan Gong 貫公, to teach it.⁴³ The same text, probably transcribed into modern script, a racted a following among the scholarly and aristocratic during the first century . . . Another copy of the text, in ancient characters, lay hidden in the Imperial Library along with a version of the Annals, also in ancient characters, that was two years lon-ger than the one studied in the Academy. During the reign of Emperor Ai 哀 (r. . . . to . .) Liu Xin 劉歆 (d. . . ), discovered, studied, and eventually made them the central texts in what we now call the Old Script (guwen 古文) school.⁴⁴ The Zuo zhuan is an example of an alternative tradition of commen-tary on the Annals that continued to be studied in certain sectors of the imperial household despite the fact that it was not included in official studies, and, unlike the Gongyang zhuan, was not assigned to the Heir Apparent Liu Ju 劉據 ( – . . .) for study. Another such text is the one the Heir Apparent himself preferred, the Guliang zhuan. This text he continued to study in secret even after it was rejected as suitable for the academy and his own education. His support allowed the school to survive underground until ideological circumstances were hospitable to its reemergence decades later, as we shall see below.⁴⁵ These facts suggest that certain members of Liu family found Dong Zhongshu’s interpretation of the Gongyang zhuan inadequate for various reasons. The most important reason, I believe, was that the Gongyang scholars were non-‐‑commi al, at the very least, on questions of Han legitimacy.⁴⁶

. For a good overview of Chinese debates about the Zuo, the Gongyang, and the Guliang, see Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics, – .

. Han shu, . .

. Han shu, . .

. Han shu, . – .

. Gary Arbuckle argues that lack of confidence in Han durability goes back to Dong Zhongshu, but that eventually the Gongyang school split on the viability of Wang Mang’s regime, one school favoring it and the other not. See his “The Gongyang School and Wang Mang,” Monumenta Serica ( ), – .


For many of the Gongyang scholars, moral reform and the introduction of a government based on Confucius’ teachings, however understood, would have constituted de 德 or moral authority and all the basis of le-gitimacy the Han house would ever need. For some of the princes and princesses, perhaps, actual Han power was enough; but for most, both scholarly and princely, legitimacy flowed from a pedigree that proved one more than merely human or at least more than merely common. This of course was the case with most of the monarchies in the world at the time. It was also often the case that if the power was great enough a suitable pedigree was invented. The Gongyang school largely abe ed the Lius in maintaining their power, but remained equivocal about their moral authority, an equivo-cation that might have been difficult to maintain if the Lius could have somehow pointed to origins other than those everyone knew. And no one in the Gongyang school, despite imperial favor and a long tradition of arbitrary textual interpretation, seemed willing to help the Lius to solve this problem. So imagine the delight in the imperial household when some enterprising scholar pointed out the following passages from the Zuo zhuan:

(襄公) 二十有四年。春⋯宣子曰⋯自虞以上為陶唐氏。在夏為御龍氏。在商為豕韋氏。在周為唐杜氏。晉主夏盟為范氏。

(Xiang gong, th year) . . . (Fan 范) Xuanzi said, “ . . . My ancestors, before the time of Yu (Shun) were the Tao Tangs (the clan of Yao). During the Xia they became the Dragon-tamers; during the Shang they became the Shiweis; during the Zhou they became the Tangs and the Dus; when the state of Jin was the leader of the alliance of the central states they became the Fan clan . . .⁴⁷

and

(文公) 十有三年⋯夏五月⋯秦人歸其帑。其處者為劉氏。

(Wen gong , summer, th month) The state of Qin allowed his [Shihui of the Fan clan] wife and children to go home; those of them who remained in Qin became the Liu family.⁴⁸

The speaker of the first passage is Fan Xuanzi 范宣子, a minister in the state of Jin 晉 in . . . and a descendant of Fan Shihui 范士會 who is the subject of the second passage. He claims descent from the same clan as Yao; descent from Fan Shihui alone would have been glorious

. Chun qiu, .

. Chun qiu, .

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enough. Fan Shihui had been a celebrated minister of Jin almost fifty years before. He was renowned for his strategic intelligence, though he had been defeated along with other Jin generals who fought the armies of Chu 楚 in . . .⁴⁹ Previous to that he had served for a while in Qin. When he decided to return to Jin he feared that Qin would not allow his wife and children to return with him. Qin finally did, but the passage in the Zuo (Wen gong 文公 ) that gives us that information ends oddly by telling us that certain members of his family stayed in Qin and became the Liu 劉 family. Who were these family members who remained behind? Unfilial sons? Why did they remain? And what about the phrase that so enigmatically and awkwardly tells that they became the Liu family? Could it be that the text was altered? None of these questions seems to have deterred members of the Liu family who concluded that these bearers of the same surname, who could trace their ancestry back to the famous Fan Shihui and from him back to Yao, were their ancestors. Conveniently, another passage shows that there was a member of Yao’s clan named Liu—Liu Lei 劉累. This was the original name of Dragon-tamer, mentioned in the first passage, the ancestor who supposedly connected the Han Lius to Yao. Who was he and how did he get that name? The answer is in Zhao gong 昭公 , which records the following conversation occasioned by the appearance of a dragon in the suburbs of Jiang 絳, the capital of the state of Jin:

秋。龍見于絳郊。魏獻子問於蔡墨曰。「吾聞之。蟲莫知於龍。以其不生得也謂之知。信乎」。對曰。「人實不知。非龍實知。古者畜龍。故國有豢龍氏。有御龍氏」。獻子曰。「是二氏者。吾亦聞之。而知其故。是何謂也」。對曰。「昔有颺叔安。有裔子曰董父。實甚好龍。能求其耆欲以飲食之。龍多歸之。乃擾畜龍以服事帝舜。帝賜之姓曰董。氏曰豢龍。封諸鬷川。鬷夷氏其後也。故帝舜氏世有畜龍。及有夏孔甲。擾于有帝。帝賜之乘龍。河漢各二。各有雌雄。孔甲不能食。而未獲豢龍氏。有陶唐氏既衰。其後有劉累。學擾龍于豢龍氏。以事孔甲。能飲食之。夏后嘉之。賜氏曰御龍⋯龍一雌死。潛醢以食夏后。夏后饗之。既而使求之。懼而遷于魯縣。范氏其後也」⋯

Autumn. A dragon appeared in the suburbs of Jiang. Wei Xianzi asks Cai Mo, “I have heard it said that there is no beast more intel-ligent than the dragon, the evidence being that it is never caught alive. Do you believe it? (Cai Mo) answered, “The fact of the ma er

. See Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, ), .


is that it is the human being who is not intelligent and not really that the dragon is intelligent. They raised dragons in ancient times; that’s why in the state there was the Dragon-Feeder family and the Dragon-tamer family.” Xianzi said, “I’ve also heard of these two families, but know nothing about their background. What about them?” (Cai Mo) answered, “In the past Shu An of Youyang had a descendant named Dong Fu, who was truly fond of dragons. He knew how to find what things dragons had a weakness for, and that is what he fed them; so dragons came to him in great numbers. He then domesticated them and put them at the service of Lord Shun. The Lord bestowed on him the name Dong and named his clan Dragon-‐‑feeder. He gave him a fief in Zongchuan. The Zong Yi are his descendants. Because of this, Lord Shun’s descendants generation after generation had dragon raisers (at their service). When Kong Jia of the Xia dynasty obeyed the Lord (of Heaven), the Lord bestowed on him draught dragons. The Yellow River and the Han River each were graced with two—a male and a female. But kong Jia did not know what to feed them, nor did he have the Dragon-feeder family at his disposal. When Tao Tang (Yao’s) clan was already in decline, their descendant Liu Lei studied dragon taming with the Dragon-feeders. He then put his skill at the service of kong Jia, who was then able to feed his dragons. The sovereign of Xia (Kong Jia) rewarded him and gave him the clan name Dragon-tamer . . . When one of the female dragons died, he secretly cut it up and made a meat sauce of it which he fed to kong Jia. After kong Jia had dined on that, he sent him out for some more. Liu Lei, fleeing in terror,⁵⁰ exiled himself to Lu Xian. The Fan family are his descendants . . .”⁵¹

I have left un-translated the last part about why dragons are no longer caught alive: the family with dragon taming skill having fallen, the official posi-tion in charge of dragons, which they occupied, has been abolished. These then are the some of the main passages on which the Liu family based its claim of descent from Yao.⁵² The many name changes, lack of

. Fearing perhaps he would come to be known as “Dragon-‐‑butcher?”

. Chun qiu, .

. Shi ji, . , tells the stories of Liu Lei, Kong Jia and the Dragon Tamer, but does not connect them to the Han Liu family. Han shu . , wri en later by supporters of the Yao-‐‑Liu connection, does. The stories do not figure in the panegyrics to the Han by such Former Han writers as Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 ( – . . .), but by the Later Han they are frequently alluded to. A good example of the la er is Zhang Heng’s 張衡 ( – . .) “Nandu fu” 南都賦, in juan of the Wen xuan 文選, (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, ), – . The best translation is the “Southern Capital Rhapsody” by David R. knechtges, Wen Xuan or Anthology of Refined Literature, (Princeton University Press, ), . – . For reference to Fan Xuanzi, Liu Lei, etc., see p. , notes to lines – .

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genealogical detail, and the obviously mythological elements would dis-qualify these accounts if they were judged by modern critical standards. But those were not the standards of the Han dynasty. By the Later Han dynasty these Zuo zhuan accounts were officially accepted as valid basis for the Liu family genealogy. That was not so in the early Former Han dynasty. Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. or -‐‑? . . .) history includes none of the Zuo zhuan account in the entry on the origins of the Liu family, but this is not because Sima Qian, or whoever wrote the entry about the Liu family, was a rationalist. He, or someone, did include, after all, the story of the white serpent in the “Basic Annals of Han Gaozu” 高祖本紀, and that is clearly mytho-logical. The reason that the Zuo zhuan stories are not included in the Shi ji account of Liu family origins is because when that book was being compiled no one, including the imperial family itself, believed that the stories had anything to do with them. It is difficult to determine when the Lius began believing that they did, but Sui Hong’s calling the Lius the descendants of Yao is evidence that the idea was by his time already circulating in the imperial house. It is difficult to say who first proposed the idea. That someone may have been part of an alternative scholarly tradition opposed to some aspects of imperial academy teachings, but closely aligned with the interests of the imperial house. During the reign of Emperor Xuan 宣 (r. – . . .) unofficial princely support for such alternative scholarly traditions begins to make itself felt in official ideology, which is to say that the imperial house was be-coming increasingly adept at using scholarly means to manipulate the scholars. One of the first things Emperor Xuan did after assuming the throne was to rehabilitate Sui Hong, who had been executed by Huo Guang, the regent of the under-‐‑aged Emperor Zhao. The rationale for Emperor Xuan’s pardon was based on his own (or a scholarly advisor’s) interpretive skills. It will be remembered that on the leaves of the dead trees that Sui Hong claimed came back to life in the imperial park the insects had gnawed the sentence Gong sun bing yi li. Sui Hong had interpreted this to mean that someone from the Gongsun family would soon rise to the position of emperor. He had obviously interpreted the phrase to mean something like: “Gongsun is cured of the illness; he will become ruler.” The emperor, however, interpreted it differently. Gongsun 公孫 he took in its literal sense to mean grandson of royalty; bing yi 病已 he read as a given name. The emperor’s interpretation was accordingly, “The grand-son of royalty, Bingyi, will become ruler.” Emperor Xuan was in fact the grandson of Emperor Wu’s Heir Appar-ent, Liu Ju, whose mother was empress Wei 衛. Another of Wu’s consorts, surnamed Li 李, tried to displace her. The rivalry between the Weis and


the Lis broke out into armed conflict under the cover of a witch-‐‑craft scare in capital in . . . Thousands died as a result. Empress Wei and her son the Heir Apparent commi ed suicide and much of the family was executed. The grandson of the heir apparent, though an infant, also ended up on death row, but the man in charge of the jail took pity on him, and had him raised outside of Chang’an by commoners. This child was the future Xuandi. The commoner foster parents gave him the name Bingyi 病已 (meaning “illness has ended”). Sui Hong’s interpretation had missed the bull’s eye by but a hair’s breadth. The commoner whose elevation had been prefigured in the strange events at Taishan, Yichang and the imperial park was not from the Gongsun family, as Sui Hong had said, but a grandson of royalty who was in a state of temporary commoner-hood when Sui Hong made his prediction. Emperor Xuan was displaying a great deal of political, and hermeneutic, ingenuity in editing the Sui Hong prediction so that it changed from one that criticized the Han dynasty to one that supported it. Sui Hong’s son was given an official title to acknowledge his father’s wisdom. Xuan was now the only Han emperor so far whose rise had been foretold in Confucian prophecy.⁵³ Rehabilitating a scholar who had urged him to abdicate could not but win approval from Sui Hong’s Zhou radical reformist faction in the academy. After the death of Huo Guang, who had been appointed by Emperor Wu for his Modernist politics, Emperor Xuan won even more of their approval by purging from government Huo Guang’s relatives and appointees.⁵⁴ Official scholars pleased by these and other policies of Emperor Xuan showed their appreciation by “discovering” signs of Heaven’s approval of his reign between and . . .⁵⁵ Yet despite the favor they showed him, the emperor never became a true friend of the academicians. It appears that he had long harbored a desire to dilute the authority of the academy by dividing it against itself, that is to say by breaking up the monopoly of the Gongyang school.

. See Han shu, . – , and Homer H. Dubs, History of the Former Han Dynasty by Pan Ku (Baltimore: Waverly Press, ), . – and – , and . n . See also Jack Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch’an-‐‑Wei) Texts, – . His reading of the Sui Hong story is somewhat different from mine because of the way that he interprets the word yun 運 in Sui Hong’s speech. I translate it as “fate”; he translates it as “evolution.”

. See The Cambridge History of China, Vol. I, The Ch’in and Han Empires, B.C.-‐‑A.D. , ed. Denis Twitche and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – .

. See Michael Loewe, “The Authority of the Emperors of Qin and Han,” in Divina-‐‑tion, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China, University of Cambridge Oriental Publica-tions , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

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The emperor achieved this end through a series of scholarly confer-ences culminating in the great Stone Canal Pavilion 石渠閣 debates. The purpose of these meetings was to compare the merits of the Gongyang tradition with those of the Guliang tradition. The Guliang tradition, as we have seen before, had been rejected for inclusion in the official cur-riculum of the imperial academy, but had survived because the Heir Apparent Wei continued to study it in secret. After the death of the Heir Apparent during the witchcraft scare of . . ., interest in the Guliang declined. It was revived when one Rong Guang 榮廣 of Lu studied the text, expounded it, and won a number of well known debates against masters of the Gongyang school, chief among them Sui Hong. Emperor Xuan became interested in the text when he heard that it was a favorite of his unfortunate grandfather Heir Apparent Liu Ju, and he began to champion it.⁵⁶ He appears early to have decided on a long-range plan to get the Gu-‐‑liang zhuan accepted into the imperial academy. Evidence of this is his patronizing the training of a cadre of scholars in that tradition, a process that took ten years. One of the main participants in this project was the famous Liu Xiang 劉向 ( – . . .). In . . ., when the Guliang team was ready, the emperor convened preliminary debates. It was their success in these that won the Guliang scholars their first entry into the Imperial Academy. At the main conference in . ., over which the emperor also presided, the school won even more academic positions. These were clearly the results the emperor had hoped for, but he did not bring them about through arbitrary exercise of power. The fact that he had trained his scholars for ten years shows he knew there could no victory for the Guliang except in terms acceptable to scholars. What was so a ractive about the Guliang tradition that important members of the imperial household studied and patronized it for so long underground? The Guliang tradition like the Gongyang claims to have been orally handed down from the time of Confucius. It is also a catechism, its entries following closely those of the Gongyang, though differing sometimes in interpretation. One often gets the impression that the Guliang comments were wri en as responses to the Gongyang interpretations. Since the Guliang interpretation of certain key entries in the Annals are contrary to the Gongyang interpretations, it follows that they could be used to argue against policies based on the Gongyang interpretations. We have seen how Dong Zhongshu on the basis of his interpretation of the Zhi Gate fire advised Emperor Wu to execute some of his princely

. Han shu, . – and Tjan Tjoe Som, Po Hu T’ung: Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ), . – .


relatives. The Guliang interpretation of the same entry offers no easy op-portunity for such an interpretation. The Guliang catechism, for example, asks why does the word zai 災 (disaster) not come right after the words Zhi Gate? The answer is that “one does not bring that which is respected close to disaster.” The interpreters could be expected to say that this is a teaching that applies to all who are of high status, including, say, the Han princes. Moreover, the Guliang commentary on the rebuilding of the Zhi Gate, unlike the Gongyang commentary, gives no hint that the towers at its sides are symbols of insubordinate ministers.⁵⁷ Another example of how the Guliang differs from the Gongyang is in the interpretation of the entry recording the capture of the unicorn. The Guliang does not suggest that the unicorn was a sign that a sage king had appeared and that Confucius was that sage king. It even tells us that the unicorn was not an animal unusual in China.⁵⁸ The doctrine of the uncrowned king, and all that it implied, could not be easily based on such an interpretation. The Guliang scholars had been specially groomed by the imperial house, and one of them, Liu Xiang, was a member of it; they therefore could not be counted on to support interpretations of the classics that denied or were equivocal about the legitimacy of the Han dynasty. There is, however, no evidence that they supported, in the Former Han at least, the doctrine of Han descent from Yao. If they had, their acceptance into the imperial academy would have made that doctrine official in . . ., which was not the case. Someone did eventually come knocking at the academy door with that doctrine in hand. How the academicians reacted to him shows just how divisive the doctrine was. That someone was Liu Xin, the son of Liu Xiang. Liu Xin’s goal was nothing less than to legitimate the Han dynasty on the basis of the Annals. He, of course, could not do this through the Gongyang commentary, so he chose (some say invented) an alternative tradition of interpretation; this was the Zuo zhuan. This did not mean abandoning the hermeneutic methods of the Gongyang school, however; it simply meant extending them to the Zuo zhuan. The exegetical weapons that the Gongyang school had used against the Liu family, now in Liu family hands, would serve Liu family interests. According to the histories, as stated above, there already was a new script version of the Zuo zhuan in circulation when Liu Xin discovered an old script version of the text in the Imperial Library. The difference in content between these two versions has not been determined. We do not know, for example, if the earlier version contained the passages linking

. Chun qiu, .

. Chun qiu, .

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a Liu clan to Fan Shihui or the clan of Yao. If the Liu family had begun to look to the Zuo zhuan for their origins by the time Liu Xin took up the text he must have been aware of it. Liu Xin’s father Liu Xiang, for one, despite the efforts of his son, never became an advocate of the Zuo zhuan, and never accepted it, as far as we know, as a source of the early history of the Liu family.⁵⁹ Liu Xin, far from rejecting the Zuo zhuan as the source of information about his ancestors, sought to “prove” the “historical” account cosmo-logically, and in the process revised China’s legendary history. He did this on the basis of a passage other than the one dealing directly with the genealogy of the Fans and the Lius. In Zhao gong , autumn, Liu Xin found an account of the succession of legendary emperors that differed from the one found in the officially accepted classics:

秋。郯子來朝。公與之宴。昭子問焉、曰。「少皞氏鳥名官。何故也」。郯子曰。「吾祖也。我知之。昔者黃帝氏以雲紀。故為雲師以雲名。炎帝氏以火紀。故為火師而火名。共工氏以水紀。故為水師而水名。大皞氏以龍紀。故為龍師而龍名。我高祖少皞摯之立也。鳳鳥至。故紀於鳥。為鳥師而鳥名」。

Autumn. Tanzi came to court and the Duke held a feast for him. Zhaozi asked him: ‘Why did Shao Hao (a legendary ruler) use bird names in the titles of his officials?’ Tanzi said, ‘He was my ancestor. I know why. In the past the Yellow Emperor began the chronicle of his rule with the occurrence of an omen in the form of a cloud; therefore having created the body of elite officers known as the Cloud Masters, he gave them all titles referring to clouds. Emperor Yan began his chronicle with the occurrence of an omen in the form of fire; therefore having created a body of elite officers known as the Fire Masters, he gave them all titles referring to fire. Gong Gong began his chronicle with the occurrence of an omen in the form of water; therefore having created the elite body of officers known as the Water Masters, he gave them all titles referring to water. Tai Hao began his chronicle with the occurrence of an omen in the form of a dragon; therefore having created the elite body of officers known as the Dragon Masters he gave them all titles referring to dragons. As our founding ancestor, Shao Hao Zhi, was being enthroned a phoenix made an appearance; therefore he started his chronicle with the occurrence of the bird omen, and, having created the body of elite officers known as the Bird Masters, he gave them all titles referring to birds.’⁶⁰

. Han shu, . .

. Chun qiu, .


The above Zuo zhuan account traces the legendary kings starting with Huangdi backward to Tai Hao; it then deals with the speaker’s ances-tor Shao Hao, who came after Huangdi. Traced forward the resulting sequence—Tai Hao, Gong Gong, Yandi, Huangdi, and Shao Hao—is different from the official one (derived from Zhou dynasty sources such as the Yi jing 易經, and the Shu jing 書經) because it places Gong Gong between Tai Hao and Yandi. The account also tells us that in the case of each ruler, Heaven sent an omen; only after that sign of Heavenly ap-proval did each king formally initiate his chronology, which is another way of saying that he began ruling. The discovery of this Zuo account of the sequence of legendary kings, which Liu Xin considered to be a revelation of the esoteric meaning of the Annals passage it is a ached to, inspired him to write a work offer-ing a new cosmological analysis of ancient history. That work, which is entitled Shi jing 世經 or Canon of the Ages, is included in the Han shu and begins with the Zuo passage.⁶¹ There Liu Xin classifies the omens appearing at the beginning of the reign of each king according to the birth sequence of the five elements. It should be remembered that at the time the official sequence used to classify the previous dynasties was the conquest sequence, the same sequence that the Qin dynasty had used. Liu Xin’s use of the birth sequence indicates his sympathy with those ideologues opposed to the Qin ideological elements still active in the Han government. He clearly imposed the birth sequence on a text not wri en with that sequence in mind; it only partially fits. Huangdi’s omen for example is a cloud, not indicative of the rise of the earth element; nor is Shao Hao’s phoenix a “metal” creature.⁶² Liu Xin nevertheless assigns the dynasties new elements more or less on the basis of the omens: Tai Hao (Wood) Gong Gong (Water), Yandi (Fire), Huangdi (Earth), and Shao Hao (Metal). But Gong Gong is not mentioned in the Zhou dynasty accounts such as the Yi jing or Li ji 禮記. Applying the praise and blame theory to these texts, he concluded that their silence on Gong Gong must mean that the Zhou sages did not consider Gong Gong to be a legitimate king. Gong Gong being under

. Han shu, B. – . See also Christopher Cullen, “The Birthday of the Old Man of Jiang County and Other Puzzles: Work in Progress on Liu Xin’s Canon of the Ages,” Asia Major, rd series XIV. ( ), – . This is an interesting analysis of some of the astronomical aspects of the Canon of the Ages. Cullen misses, however, the political significance of Annals and Zuo zhuan passages in the work.

. Yasui Kozan 安居香山 discusses Liu Xin’s (and his father’s) role in the change-‐‑over to the use of the birth sequence of the elements as a way to reorder history, along with its ideological implications, but without mentioning the Zuo zhuan or Canon of the Ages connections in his Isho to Chūgoku no shinpi shisō 緯書と中囯神秘の思想 (Tokyo: Hirakawa, ), – .

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the patronage of Water is also out of sequence because, according to the system, Wood does not give birth to Water; it gives birth to Fire. Gong Gong’s elemental incorrectness simply corroborates Liu Xin’s judgment that his regime was not legitimate. Taking the birth sequence forward in time, he also found that the Zhou dynasty, which the Han scholars (us-ing the conquest sequence) classified under fire, was really under wood, making it the analogue of Tai Hao; and the patron element of the Han was not Earth, as was officially claimed, but Fire. He then concluded that the Qin which declared itself under the patronage of water (though com-ing between the Wood of Zhou and the Fire of Han) was an illegitimate dynasty by analogy to Gong Gong.⁶³ In this scheme Emperor Yao comes under the patronage of Fire; therefore, the Han, Yao, and Yandi were all elementally related. It was a short step from elemental relation to blood relation, a step both Liu Xin and Wang Mang were soon to take. Wang Aihe has convincingly argued that the application of the birth sequence to history was the moralization of the cosmological founda-tion of imperial sovereignty, and that this process had begun with Dong Zhongshu’s invention of the santong system.⁶⁴ Like the santong system, the birth sequence made Han the legitimate successor of the Zhou dy-nasty while at the time de-‐‑legitimizing the Qin dynasty. Rather than give theoretical validation to the realpolitik of the military empire, as the conquest sequence had for both the Qin and the early Han, the birth se-quence evoked the ideal of government under the Heavenly mandated beneficent ruler found in the Analects and the Mencius. It was the system that eventually displaced the santong system even among the scholars who considered themselves Dong Zhongshu’s ideological successors. Whether or not he had himself set that tendency in motion is still a subject of debate, but by the time of Emperor Zhao and Sui Hong, there were prominent scholars who subscribed to the birth sequence theory, a ributing it to him.⁶⁵ When Liu Xin applied the birth sequence as a hermeneutic tool to the Annals, he was participating in a tendency that, while not yet official, was already well established among the academicians. But his application of the birth sequence to the Annals caused such a scandal that, when he

. Han shu, B. .

. Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – .

. The scholars who defended the more conservatively Confucian side, the Re-formists, to use Michael Loewe’s term, used the birth sequence as the cosmic basis of their program during the debates held in . . . known as the Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yantie lun 鹽鐵論). They frequently cite as their authority Dong Zhongshu. The Modernists used the conquest sequence as the cosmic basis of their program, citing as their authority Zou Yan 鄒衍. See Yantie lun in Zhuzi jicheng, . – .


tried to have the Zuo zhuan included in the curriculum of the academy, the academics would not even reply to his petition.⁶⁶ His use of the Zuo commentary as the primary approach to the Annals was unprecedented, but, I contend, it was the results of his research rather than the authen-ticity of the text, as traditionally claimed, that caused the scandal. The authenticity question was merely a cover that allowed the academicians to put off discussing Liu’s theory without insulting the Lius. Let us recall that the reaction against Liu Xin’s proposal was such that Emperor Ai moved him out of the capital for fear that someone might do him harm.⁶⁷ Mere questions of textual authenticity do not explain such a reaction. I suspect that the imperial academicians rejected the Zuo zhuan primar-ily because Liu Xin claimed that it proved that the Han was descended from Yao rather than because they (many of whom studied and admired the text) thought the Zuo zhuan was not authentic. Nor was their concern mainly the fabricated genealogy; it was the idea that the genealogy nec-essarily placed the Mandate in Liu hands. Liu Xin’s application of the birth sequence to cosmic history not only moralized Heaven, it partially privatized it.

Wang Mang and the Beginnings of

Typological Allegory

One might think that this a empt at bolstering up Liu family pride was undertaken to oppose the main threat to Han authority at the time, i.e., the political maneuvering of the Wang family that eventually led to Wang Mang’s usurpation of the Han throne and the establishment of his Xin 新 dynasty ( – . .). This would be the easy conclusion except for the fact that Liu Xin, unlike his father, was famous for being, at least for a while, a partisan of Wang Mang. And it is the regent Wang Mang who finally brought about the acceptance of Liu Xin’s Zuo zhuan in the imperial academy and appointed him imperial preceptor (guoshi 國師) under the nominal reign of Pingdi 平帝 (r. B.C.E– . .).⁶⁸ How did Wang Mang stand to benefit from Liu Xin’s new interpretation of a classical text? Wang Mang is famous for having staged a virtually bloodless coup. Instead of force of arms, he used force of augury. Exploiting the by then well established belief that Heaven announces the fall of one dynasty and the establishment of a new one through auspicious signs, the Wang Mang faction manufactured omen after omen. The most important of these was a bronze casket that was “found” in the shrine of the founder

. Han shu, . – and Han shu, . – .

. Dubs, History of the Former Han Dynasty, . – and .

. Han shu, . – and Han shu, . – .

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of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang. The casket had wri en on it a message, supposedly from Liu Bang’s spirit, declaring that by the order of Heaven, the Red Emperor was handing over the imperial seals to the Yellow Em-peror. The Red Emperor was of course Liu Bang; the Yellow Emperor, Wang Mang assured everyone, meant himself. According to yin yang-‐‑five elements logic, the color red corresponds to the element Fire and yellow corresponds to Earth. In Liu Xin’s scheme, it will be remembered, Yao was ruled by the element of Fire, and Shun, like the Yellow Emperor, was ruled by the element Earth; therefore the abdication of the Han dynasty to Wang Mang would represent both the cyclic ceding of Fire to Earth as well as the re-enactment of Yao’s abdication to Shun.⁶⁹ Wang Mang in the meantime appears to have fabricated a genealogy connecting himself to Shun. If the Lius had made themselves the kin of Yao by elemental analogy, then Wang Mang would make himself the descendant of Shun by the same means.⁷⁰ Wang Mang literally enshrined his new ancestry after he usurped the throne. He changed the name of Liu Bang’s shrine to Wenzu miao 文祖廟 or the Shrine of the Cultured Ancestor. The Wenzu miao, according to the Shu jing (“Yao dian” 堯典), was the shrine of Yao’s ancestor and the place where Shun formally accepted the throne from Yao. In case the symbol-ism escaped anyone, Wang Mang made it explicit in a proclamation:

予之皇始祖考虞帝受禪于唐。漢氏初祖唐帝。世有傳國之象。予復親受金策於漢高皇帝之靈。

My August First Ancestor Lord Yu (Shun) accepted the throne abdicated by Tang (Yao). The First Ancestor of the Han clan is Tang (Yao); his descendants have the image (or model) of someone who transferred the realm (to someone of another surname). I am again personally accepting the golden tablets from the spirit of a High August Lord (Liu Bang).⁷¹

. Han shu, A. .

. Han shu, . , the biography of Yuandi’s empress, Wang Mang’s aunt, tells us that Wang Mang was a self-styled descendant of the Yellow Emperor, and that ac-cording to his own genealogy the bloodline came to him via Shun. Han shu B. tells us that immediately after he took the throne Wang Mang decided that it was time to “determine his origins in order to find divinity in his past 決其原以神前事,” and two scholars, one of them Liu Fen 劉棻, the son of Liu Xin, helped him fabricate the genealogy. Another bit of evidence that the genealogy was his own invention was that neither the Yellow Emperor nor Shun were ever worshipped as ancestors in his family until he began the practice just before he ascended the throne. See Dubs, History of the Former Han Dynasty, . and – . Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch’an-‐‑Wei) Texts, .

. Han shu, B. .


Wang Mang’s proclamation echoes the statement made by another scholar decades before. It will be recalled that Sui Hong had called for the abdication of a Han emperor using similar rhetoric. He said “The House of Han are the descendants of Yao, they have the destiny of hand-ing over the realm (or: they are destined to hand over the realm).” Wang Mang, however, instead of saying that the Han has the “destiny,” yun 運, to abdicate, tells us that it has the “image,” xiang 象, of abdication. The word xiang is a technical term used in divination manuals such as the Yi jing to denote a sign that predicts a future event. In this sense the term is exactly equivalent to the Latin typus, (from Greek typos) which also means image and from which we derive the words type and ty-pology. For Wang Mang, Yao in ceding the throne to Shun is the type or prefiguration of the Han emperor abdicating to Wang Mang. Wang Mang’s statement, as much as Sui Hong’s, implies destiny, a destiny that did not favor the continued rule of the Liu family. And, although it cites no particular text, it is very close to typological allegory, except his use of the word fu 復 “again” in the last sentence appears to indicate that he considers abdication in the Yao family something that occurs in a regular cycle, which would be perfectly consistent with Liu Xin’s Canon of the Ages cosmology. On the same occasion, however, Wang Mang does in fact apply typo-logical allegory to a particular text—the text, predictably, was the Spring and Autumn Annals. In the same speech at the newly named Wenzu Shrine, he states that he knew that the Han was in danger, and that he did everything he could to save it, but failed. He failed because the waning of the fire element and the concomitant fall of the Han was inevitable. This he knew because it had been predicted in the Annals. According to him that prediction was en-coded in Duke Ai, year , the all important unicorn hunt section that we have already quoted. Wang Mang’s interpretation was the following:

然自孔子作春秋以為後王法、至于哀之十四而一代畢、協之於今、亦哀之十四也。赤世計盡、終不可強濟。皇天明威、黃德當興、逢顯大命、屬予以天下。

However, starting with the time when Confucius began composing the Annals as a model for the kings of the future to the th year after the accession of Ai (Duke of Lu), he brought the Spring and Autumn era to an end. If one looks for something to which this corresponds today, one finds that it is also in the th year after Ai (this Ai being a Former Han dynasty emperor) when the Red Generation (Han dynasty) was counted as finished. In the end, it could not be saved by force. August Heaven has manifested its awesome majesty; the

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Power of Yellow is on the rise. It has sent down a clear and great Mandate delivering the world to me.⁷²

Wang Mang takes the ending of the Annals in the fourteenth year after the beginning of the reign of Duke Ai of Lu as prefiguring the fall of the Han (with the Wang Mang usurpation) fourteen years after the enthrone-ment of Emperor Ai, because the rulers’ names and the number of years are the same. The word xie 協 “find correspondence” in the statement announces the establishment of the relationship of sign to fulfillment between the two events. Before this one looked to the Annals for precedents or recurring pat-terns to explain the present or predict the future. Dong Zhongshu, as we have seen, explained the meaning of a contemporary conflagration by reference to Gongyang interpretations of conflagrations of the past. The Han shrine fires are seen as the repetition of a kind of omen Heaven has sent before, exemplified in the Zhi Gate fires; but the Zhi Gate fires do not predict, or prophesy, the Han shrine fires. Liu Xin judged the Qin illegitimate and the Han legitimate on the basis of the recurring pat-tern of the elemental cycle he saw behind the unfolding of the history recorded in the Annals, a pa ern that would continue in the future; but he did not base his analysis on prophetic signs. In Wang Mang’s read-ing of the last entry in the Annals, Confucius’ laying down his writing brush after recording the fourteen years after the accession of Duke Ai is not a precedent nor is it part of a recurring pa ern; it is typos, figura, a prophetic sign. With Wang Mang’s interpretation of the last entry in the Annals, we witness the first application of typological allegory to a specific Confu-cian text.⁷³ Wang Mang’s application of the principles of omen reading to the ex-egesis of a classical text did not occur in a vacuum. As I have suggested before, during the Han dynasty omen reading and classical exegesis in-volved much the same skill, but the propagandists supporting the various factions in the power struggles during and after the fall of Wang Mang mingled the two to an unprecedented degree. The hybrid that emerged from this mingling was the chenwei literature. Most of this literature was lost in post-‐‑Han proscriptions, so it is difficult to determine how much of this literature Wang Mang actually used in his own propaganda. The

. Han shu, B. .

. Jack Dull believed that what was innovative about Wang Mang’s interpretation of th year of Duke Ai entry was the idea that Confucius had ended his Annals “because

a cycle had ended at that time.” Dull never said what type of “cycle” was in question. See Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Chan-‐‑Wei) Texts, – .


historical record suggests that he in fact used very li le.⁷⁴ It appears more frequently, in fact, in the propaganda of those who opposed him. The scholar Zhi Yun 郅惲, for example, cited unspecified chenwei texts in a memorial urging Wang Mang to return the throne to the Han:

⋯天⋯顯表紀世圖錄豫設。漢歷久長、孔為赤制、不使愚惑、殘人亂時。智者順以成德、愚者逆器有命、不可虛獲。上天垂戒、欲悟陛下、令就臣位、傳禍為福。劉氏享天永命、陛下順節盛衰、取之以天、還之以天、可謂知天命矣。若不早圖、是不免於竊位也。且堯舜不以天顯自與、故禪天下陛下何貪非天顯以自累。

. . . Heaven . . . clearly indicates in advance the duration of dynasties in the charts and records. The duration of the Han will be long, for Confucius created the Red System (of the Han government) not in order to bring stupidity or confusion or to mistreat people or throw the seasons into confusion. By following it, the wise maintain their moral authority. By going against them, the stupid incur harm. The Sacred Implement (the throne) is granted by Heavenly Mandate; one cannot pretend to have it. High Heaven is sending warnings to bring Your Majesty to your senses. It is ordering you to return to the position of minister in order to change disaster into good fortune. The Liu family has received the eternal Mandate of Heaven. Your Majesty, adjust yourself to their times of weakness and their times of strength. You took the throne by Heaven’s order. If you return it by Heaven’s order you can be said to know the Mandate of Heaven. If you do not plan to do it soon, then it will be hard to avoid the accusation of having usurped the throne. Moreover Yao and Shun did not keep the throne to themselves because Heaven manifested its will; it was for that reason that they abdicated. Your Majesty, what greed would make you deny what Heaven has made clear and thus bring distress to yourself?

The History of the Later Han tells us that the memorial threw Wang Mang into a rage and he had Zhi Yun imprisoned, but bearing in mind that Zhi Yun had based his advice on the prophetic texts he did not have him executed, but tried instead to induce Zhi Yun to claim that he had made his remarks under the influence of temporary insanity. This Zhi Yun resolutely refused to do.⁷⁵

. See Yasui Kozan, Isho to Chūgoku no shinpi shisō, – , and Zhong Zhaopeng 鍾肇鵬, Chenwei lunlue 讖緯論略 (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu, ). See also Jack Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch’an-‐‑wei) Texts, – and – .

. Hou Han shu (Beijing: Zhonghua, ), . .

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Wang Mang, as we have just seen, had used similar Yao/Shun rhetoric against the Han; Zhi Yun’s remarks therefore could hardly have been more pointed. It is interesting to note that Zhi Yun’s teacher’s teacher had been Sui Hong, the first on record to use the image of Yao and Shun in this particular way.⁷⁶

Classical Commentary, Yao, and

Full-‐‑fledged Typological Allegory

By the time Emperor Guangwudi 光武帝 ( – ) founded the Later Han dynasty, Wang Mang’s typological maneuver had become a popular pro-paganda weapon both for those who supported and those who opposed the regime. Gongsun Shu 公孫述, for example, who had originally been Grand Administrator of Shu 蜀 under Wang Mang, used it to justify his a empt to overthrow Guangwu. According to him, a chenwei text had revealed that the twelve dukes whose reigns are chronicled in the An-‐‑nals prefigured the twelve emperors (including Guangwudi) of the Han dynasty. This meant that with Guangwudi the Han would come to an end. Clearly this is just a variant of the-end-of-the-Annals-‐‑prefigures-‐‑the-‐‑end-of-the-Han theory of Wang Mang.⁷⁷ Eventually the chenwei, prefiguration, and the Liu-‐‑descends-‐‑from-‐‑Yao doctrine would be absorbed into formal commentaries on the official classics, but to glorify rather than doom the Han. When Guangwudi restored the Gongyang scholars to the imperial academy, he expelled the Zuo zhuan specialists, the classical scholars associated with the Xin regime. He took pains to preserve, however, much of the chenwei literature that had emerged from the recent political chaos. The reason for this move is only too clear. The doctrine of Han descent from Yao, which proved that the Liu family had the Mandate of Heaven, was supported in much of that literature. The emperor had only to edit out the anti-Liu parts, and add on pro-Liu elaborations to form the legitimating documents of the Han dynasty. The newly edited texts

. Zhi Yun was a disciple of Zhuang Pengzu 莊彭祖, whose school of classical interpretation constituted one of two branches the Gongyang school split into after the execution of Sui Hong, the other being the school of Yan Anle 顏安樂, according to the research of Gary Arbuckle. The school of Zhuang Pengzu declined with the rise of Wang Mang, while the school of Yan Anle appears to have been favored by Wang Mang, suggesting that “the two schools took an opposing a itude to Wang Mang’s rationale for assuming the throne.” See Arbuckle, “The Gongyang School and Wang Mang,” – .

. Hou Han shu, . , – . Under Wang Mang the name of the commandery of Shu 蜀郡 was changed to Daojiang 導江 and the title of taishou 太守 was changed to zuzheng 卒正.


were then promulgated throughout the empire in . ., and became an obligatory subject of study in the Imperial Academy.⁷⁸ Since Guang-wudi referred mainly to these texts to prove that he was the legitimate ruler, acceptance of the chenwei was to become a test of loyalty to the throne.⁷⁹ Now the Gongyang academicians could no longer afford to deny or even be reticent about the legitimacy of the Han dynasty, and so they eventually, although sometimes ambivalently, incorporated the chenwei literature into the official commentaries on the classics. The following passage is an example of how this was done. It is a sub-commentary to the Gongyang commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals by the famous Later Han Gongyang scholar He Xiu, and it brings us back to Duke Ai of the Spring and Autumn Annals where the unicorn, sign of the advent of a Sage king, appears and is captured:

夫子素案圖錄知庶聖劉季當代周。見薪采者獲麟知為其出。何者。麟者木精。薪采者庶人燃火之意。此赤帝將代周居其位。故麟為薪采者所執⋯夫子知其將有六國爭彊。從橫相滅之敗、秦項驅除積骨流血之虐。然後劉氏乃帝。深閔民之離害甚久、故豫泣也⋯得麟之後、天下血、書魯端門、曰。「趨作法、孔聖沒、周姬亡、彗東出、秦政起、胡破術、書記散、孔不絕」。子夏明日往視之、血書飛為赤鳥、化為白書、署曰演孔圖。中有作圖制法之狀。孔子仰推天命、俯察時、卻觀未來、豫解無窮。知漢當繼大亂之後、作撥亂之法以授之。

. . . The Master (Confucius) had long known, on the basis of the tulu (a generic term for chenwei) that a commoner named Liu Ji (a.k.a. Liu Bang) would succeed the Zhou dynasty. When he saw that the unicorn had been captured by a firewood gatherer, he understood it to signify the emergence of that man. How? The unicorn represents the essence of the element Wood; the firewood gatherer signifies a commoner lighting Fire. This means that the Red (Fire) Emperor (Liu Bang) would replace the Zhou dynasty (ruled by Wood) and occupy the throne. Therefore the unicorn was captured by a fire-wood gatherer . . .

. Hou Han shu, A. ; A. ; B. ; Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apoc-‐‑ryphal (Chan-‐‑Wei) Texts, – .

. The emperor often reacted against those who cast doubt on the authenticity of the texts or who suggested that the emperor was over dependent on them. Examples are the cases of Yin Min 尹敏 and Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. . . .- . . ). The former almost lost his position when he at first refused when the emperor ordered that he help edit the chenwei texts, saying that the texts could not be the work of the Sages as the emperor claimed. The emperor threatened to execute Huan Tan when he showed his disdain for the texts. See Hou Han shu A. and . – .

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The Master foresaw the defeat that came when the Six States vied for supremacy, and the vertical and horizontal alliances destroyed each other. He foresaw also that the Qin and Hsiang Yu would be eliminated amidst masses of bones and torrents of blood, and that only afterward would the head of the Liu clan become emperor. Grieving profoundly that the people would endure such prolonged suffering, Confucius wept in advance . . . After the capture of the unicorn, Heaven rained down blood that fell in the form of writing over the main gate of the State of Lu, which said, ‘It is necessary to make haste to institute the rules of the Royal Way, for Confucius the Sage will die soon, the Zhou dynastic family of Ji will disappear, a comet will appear in the east, the cudgel of Qin will fall, Hu will destroy the arts, the books and records will be dispersed, but the teaching of Confucius will endure.’ Confucius’ student Zixia went to see the writing the next day, upon which the inscriptions in blood took flight in the form of red birds, which in turn turned into white writing entitled, The Diagram of the Principles of Confucius (Yan Kong tu) in which can be found the Diagrams for Instituting the Rules of the Royal Way. Confucius then raised his eyes to consider the Heavenly Mandate and lowered them to observe the changes of the times. He could see into the future and his prescience had no limits. He knew that the Han would succeed after great disorder; therefore he created the laws for dispelling disorder to give to them.⁸⁰

Let us remember that, according to the Gongyang commentary, when Confucius was shown the unicorn, he took it to mean that his own demise was near, and it spurred him to finish the Annals for the edification of future rulers. Dong Zhongshu later took the appearance of the unicorn to signify that Confucius had received the Mandate of Heaven, and was looking forward to the time when the Mandate might be transferred to a worthy ruler in charge of a real state. In this Later Han subcommentary, Confucius takes the capture of the unicorn as the sign that the worthy ruler will be Liu Bang and the real state the Han dynasty.

. This passage is from the Chunqiu Gongyang jiegu 春秋公羊解詁 which is inter-spersed with the shu 疏 in the Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan zhushu 春秋公羊傳注疏 in the

Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua, ), – . I have based my parsing of the text, and to a certain extent my translation, on the French version by Anne Cheng in her Étude sur le Confucianisme Han, – . An easier text to read, because it is just the He Xiu commentary and the Gongyang commentary, is the Chunqiu Gongyang jingzhuan jiegu 春秋公羊經傳解詁, the Zhonghua photocopy of the Song edition of the Chunxi Fuzhou Gongshi ku kanben 淳熙撫州公使庫刊本 text kept in the National Library, Beijing.


Clearly hermeneutics by the Later Han had passed from the arbitrary to the magical; in the process it developed full fledged typological al-legory. In the above passage Confucius imposes typological allegory on a text wherein he is the main character. The firewood gatherer is the type of Liu Bang not only because he is a commoner, but also because of his association with the fire element, patron element of the Han and Yao. The unicorn is the type of the Zhou dynasty because it is classified under the Wood element. Its being captured by the firewood gatherer prefigures the replacement of the Zhou dynasty, not by Qin, but by the Yao- descended commoner Liu Bang. The revealed nature of the Yan Kong tu 演孔圖, the chenwei text containing Confucius’ instructions on the Royal Way is established by the image of its descending from Heaven in a rain of blood; blood being red is another harbinger of the rise of Fire. Indeed the whole passage describing the descent of the Yan Kong tu is based on an al-most identical passage in the Yan Kong tu itself. That text, one of the few chenwei texts that has survived, also describes such ma ers as the affair Confucius’ mother had with the Black Lord, which resulted in the out of wedlock birth of Confucius, and Confucius’ miraculous features.⁸¹ The promulgation of the chenwei texts throughout the empire in . ., indicating their formal incorporation into the curriculum of the Impe-rial Academy is an event that marks the point where the Han imperial house both entrusts its legitimacy to this literature, and ceases to tolerate the application of the Yao/Shun principle of meritocracy to the supreme ruler—even in theory.⁸²

The Reconstruction of Yao and Shun in

Later Han Ideology

Ironically, the images of Yao and Shun occur again and again in the rhetoric of the ideologues who supported this new intolerance. These scholars, contrary to what one might expect, were not specialists in the Gongyang commentary that had lately been restored to the imperial academy; they were specialists in the Zuo zhuan, the commentary that

. For the Yan Kong tu, see the Chunqiu Yan Kong tu 春秋演孔圖 in Weishu jicheng 緯書集成 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, ), (for the descent of the Yan Kong tu, see p. ). An alternative version of the capture of the unicorn, where the firewood gatherer brings the unicorn to Confucius in a wheelbarrow, and the unicorn spits out texts, can be found in another chenwei text entitled Xiaojing youqi 孝經右契. For the Xiaojing youqi, see p. . See also Dull, Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Chan-‐‑Wei) Texts, – .

. Han shu, B. .

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had been recently expelled from the academy.⁸³ Readers familiar with the history of Chinese thought will recognize in these two groups the two main “camps” in what has come to be known as the Old Text/New Text (jinwen 今文 guwen 古文) controversy of the Han dynasty. In recent years, however, the idea that jinwen and guwen designated sharply divided schools of thought has been challenged. The work of Michael Nylan is particularly influential in this regard, although the work of Li Xueqin 李學勤 and Hans Van Ess should also be mentioned.⁸⁴ According to Nylan most of the criteria that sinologists until recently have unthinkingly used to distinguish the parties in the so-called Han Old-‐‑Text/New-‐‑Text controversy were furnished by Qing re-‐‑creators of the controversy who read their own concerns back into the past. The result has been a distortion of our view of the Han debates. The Qing debate begins with the claim that certain texts, such as the Zuo zhuan, that were called guwen classics during the Han were in fact forgeries; the main forger was thought to be Liu Xin. Later, full-‐‑fledged philosophical and ideological positions are a ributed to the specialists in either guwen or jinwen texts. The guwen specialists, for example, came to be known as rationalists who rejected the cosmological and superstitious rigmarole, including the chenwei texts, of the jinwen school.⁸⁵ The great Han scholar Michael Loewe, to take another example, once thought that the jinwen scholars were of the authoritarian Modernist political orientation while the guwen specialists were the relatively liberal Reformists.⁸⁶

. On the close connection between the Gongyang scholarship and the chenwei, see Zhong Zhaopeng, Chenwei lunlue, – . On the general connection between jinwen scholarship and the chenwei, see Yasui kozan, Isho to Chūgoku no shinpi shisō, – , where he gives evidence of still subscribing to the “rationalism vs superstition” theory of guwen vs jinwen. On the same subject see Lü Zongli 呂宗力, “Weishu yu Xi-Han jinwen jingxue” 緯書與西漢今文經學, in Shin’i shisō no sogoteki kenkyū 讖緯思想の綜合的研究, ed. Yasui Kozan (Tokyo: Kokusho, ), – .

. See Michael Nylan, “The Chin wen/ku wen Controversy in Han Times,” T’oung Pao LXXX ( ), – . See also Li Xueqin 李學勤, “Jingu xue kao yu Wujing yiyi” 今古學考與五經異義, Guoxue jinlun 國學今論 (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu), ; and Hans Van Ess, “The Old Text/New Text Controversy: Has the th Century Got It Wrong?,” T’oung Pao LXXX ( ), – .

. See Anne Cheng, “What Did It Mean to Be a Ru in Han Times?,” Asia Major, rd series, XIV. ( ), . See also Robert Kramers, “The Development of the Confucian Schools” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume , The Ch’in and Han Empires B.C-‐‑A.D. , .

. Michael Loewe in his influential Crisis and Conflict in Han China (London: George Allen and Unwin, ), , characterized the difference between the two poli-‐‑tical orientations in the following way: “The Modernists derived their tradition from Ch’in and its unification of the world under a single rule, and the occult forces which they worshipped had been served by the kings and then the emperors of Ch’in. The


The argument that forgery was a Han concern has virtually disap-peared along with the idea that jinwen represented “superstition” and adherence to the chenwei while guwen represented “rationalism” and abhorrence of the chenwei.⁸⁷ And Loewe appears to have become an agnostic on the jin/gu question, at least as far as it concerns the Former Han.⁸⁸ However, the idea that there were two schools divided over texts and ideology is still very much in play. Wang Baoxuan 王褓玹, for example, still argues a variation of the traditional view that jinwen and guwen were in conflict during the Former Han, although he believes that the distinc-tions between the two schools were blurred in the Later Han because of the influence of Wang Mang, who played both sides.⁸⁹ Of the scholars who argue against the traditional distinctions between jin and gu, Michael Nylan offers the most radical theory and applies it equally to both Former and Later Han:

While primary sources for the period include a wealth of informa-tion about variant readings for the Confucian Classics, these sources present no consistent theoretical positions or political agendas for either chin wen or ku wen scholars.⁹⁰

Yet in another part of the same essay she states:

Reformists harked back to a tradition which they traced to the kings and ethical ideas of Chou . . . The Modernists tried to shape imperial policies so that they could control human endeavour, utilise human strength and exploit natural resources in order to enrich and strengthen the state. The Reformists found it repugnant to exercise more controls on the population than were absolutely necessary, and in place of the obedi-ence to official orders which the Modernists demanded, the Reformists looked to the people of China to follow the example and moral lead of the emperor . . . To Modernists the emperor stood at the apex of the State and administrative duties were delegated according to a strictly prescribed scheme of senior and junior officials. The Reformists saw the Emperor first and foremost as an instrument for conferring bounties on mankind and believed that the most senior statesmen should share the supreme responsibility for government from positions that were of equal status.”

. The absence of the forgery/philology debate in the Han was noticed by the great late Qing classicist Liao Ping 廖平 ( – ), as Li Xueqin has pointed out; see Li Xueqin, “Jingu xuekao yu Wujing yiyi,” – . See also Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty and the Old Text/New Text Controversy,” T’oung Pao LXXXV ( ), – .

. In his “The Imperial Tombs of the Former Han Dynasty and their Shrines,” T’oung Pao LXXVIII ( ), , Loewe states, “How far a distinction should be drawn at this time between the two a itudes later to be described as Ku-‐‑wen and Chin-‐‑wen may perhaps not be known.”

. Wang Baoxuan 王褓玹, Xi-‐‑Han jingxue yuanliu 西漢經學源流 (Taipei: Dongda, ).. Nylan, “The Chin/Ku Wen Controversy,” – .

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The Ch’un Ch’iu was the scripture most closely associated with Han legitimacy, for it was said to have been composed by Confucius to supply the Liu clan with a detailed blueprint for its predestined rule. All three Ch’un Ch’iu commentaries, however, proposed radically different visions of political legitimacy. The Kung-‐‑yang Commen-tary, for example, tended to downplay the gap between emperor and subject, making the emperor primus inter pares only so long as his stock of charismatic virtue held out, while the Tso Commentary stressed the unique character of the imperial dignity.⁹¹

Assuming that the political “visions” in the commentaries were inscribed, or read, into them by real people with real interests, the above statement would appear to contradict the idea that the sources show “no consistent theoretical positions or political agendas” for either the jinwen or the gu-‐‑wen scholars, if in the category of jinwen and guwen scholars we include, as we must, Gongyang specialists and Zuo specialists. Such an apparently contradictory argument could be salvaged if the Zuo zhuan specialists with their ideological concerns were merely a side show in the larger Later Han debate about the nature of rulership—but that was not the case, as a careful look at the sources reveals. The main representatives of the Zuo zhuan position were none other than Ban Biao 班彪 (ca. – . .), Ban Gu 班固 ( – . .), and Jia Kui 賈逵 ( – . .) whose importance in the history of Han political discourse hardly

needs mention. While we must heed Nylan’s warning not to read Qing and post-‐‑Qing political concerns into Han scholarly debate, it would appear that even her own statements should caution us from concluding that Han schol-ars had li le to debate—that there were no ideological “camps” whose arguments were based on the interpretation of texts. Against Nylan’s view, I will argue below that: . The Zuo zhuan spe-cialists of the Eastern Han held a consistent ideological position founded on the Liu Xin interpretation of the Zuo zhuan; . The same ideological position was the reason the Zuo zhuan was rejected by the imperial aca-demicians at the end of the Former Han (not, as Nylan claims, merely because of “Liu Xin’s a acks on their amour propre”) and during all of the Later Han (not, as Nylan claims, merely because “its scholastic origins and filiation were uncertain”); and . That the ideological position of the Zuo zhuan specialists a racted the favor of the Eastern Han emperors, a circumstance that is the main reason that Zuo zhuan (and related guwen) studies eclipsed Gongyang (and related jinwen) studies.⁹²

. Nylan, “The Chin/Ku Wen Controversy,” .

. See Nylan, “The Chin Wen/Ku Wen Controversy,” and .


Let us first examine aspects of the political theory of the Later Han Zuo

zhuan specialists, paying particular a ention to how, in their rhetoric, Yao and Shun came to represent not the primacy of virtue over heredity, but just the opposite. Ban Biao, for example, in his Fate of Kings (Wangming lun 王命論), arguably the first manifesto of the restored Han dynasty, claims that the main reason Heaven chose Liu Bang to be the founder of a dynasty was his heredity, his descent from Yao.⁹³ This, Ban Biao tells us, is con-firmed in the Annals—the Zuo tradition is implied here—and in the fact that both Yao and the Han are under the patronage of Fire—the Liu Xin cosmological proof in his Canon of the Ages is implied here. He goes on to quote what Yao was supposed to have said to Shun when he abdicated in his favor, “Alas, thou Shun, according to Heaven’s plan it is now your turn [to be supreme ruler] 咨爾舜, 天之曆數在爾躬.”⁹⁴ This passage comes from a version of the Yao-Shun story according to which the transfer of supreme sovereignty to Shun was effected by Heaven rather than by Yao, who only proposed it.⁹⁵ This was the ver-sion of the story favored by Mencius, as Sarah Allan has pointed out.⁹⁶ Mencius was thus very cautiously granting that the man of virtue could replace the rightful heir to the throne, provided his was “the virtue of a Yao or a Shun” and that Heaven had given him its Mandate. Ban Biao is also building a case for the agency of Heaven in the mak-ing and unmaking of kings, but his is not also an argument privileging moral virtue over heredity. Quite the opposite. Ban Biao, writing at a time when the memory of Wang Mang was still fresh and Guangwudi's power was still unconsolidated, is warning the remnant contenders for the throne that their efforts were futile, for Heaven had blessed the Han because of their godly heredity. De, understood as a virtue or a potential that could be cultivated, had nothing to do with it. This theory answers a long standing criticism of the founder of the dynasty, that he had won the throne by mere military prowess.⁹⁷ Anyone who thinks that Liu Bang became supreme ruler through mere military prowess, Ban Biao declares, “does not know that the Sacred Instrument is a ma er of Fate (ming 命)

. Han shu, . – .

. Han shu, . .

. Han shu, A. f.

. See Sarah Allan, The Heir and the Sage, and Mengzi (Sibu congkan ed.) / a– b ( A. , ).

. Liu Bang’s having won the right to rule not through divine intervention or he-redity, but through military prowess was frankly affirmed by his followers. See Wang Aihe’s excellent article on the founding of the dynasty, “Creators of an Emperor: the Political Group behind the Founding of the Han Empire,” Asia Major, rd series, XIV. , – , especially – .

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and cannot be sought through cunning or physical effort 不知神器有命不可以智力求也.” Nevertheless, in addition to Liu Bang’s semi-divine heredity, Ban Biao claims, out of habit perhaps, that such things as his military skill, his way with people, and even his physical characteristics were signs that he was elected by Heaven.⁹⁸ This left the door to the palace too far ajar for some tastes. Ban Gu, Ban Biao’s son, tried to close it completely by declaring that as long as the occupant of the throne had the Mandate, his personal qualities were entirely irrelevant. Heredity, the ascendant element, and the will of Heaven, as manifested in omens and in sacred texts were the only requisites.⁹⁹ In addition, Ban Gu made it clear that his theories, as well as his personal sympathies, were in line with those Han policies that derived from the Qin dynasty. The First Emperor of the Qin he describes as having a ained “the majesty of the Sage (Kings)” for his military suc-cess and his creation of the system of the government that he bequeathed to the “later kings,” meaning, of course, the Han emperors.¹⁰⁰ He also denounced Sima Qian for his critical comments about the Han dynasty, while praising the propagandistic efforts of Sima Xiangru on behalf of emperor Wu, who, like the First Emperor of the Qin, was a paragon of Modernist values, as Loewe defines them.¹⁰¹ While clearly Ban Gu and his father argue a position that on the surface appears modernist, on closer inspection we find a few major differences between them and the modernists of the Former Han, as Loewe defines them. For one thing, the Former Han Modernists, like Qin dynasty theorists before them, justified force, in the military sense, as a means to establish and to maintain power by reference to the conquest sequence of the Five Elements which they held was the active ingredient in the rise and fall of dynasties. They made li le use of the idea of the Mandate of Heaven.¹⁰² Ban Biao and Ban Gu, however, unlike the Former Han

. Han shu, A. – and .

. See Quan Hou Han wen 全後漢文, . b– a; . a, b, a– a, in Yan Kejun 嚴可均 ( – ), comp. Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文, rpt. (Beijing: Zhonghua, ); Tjan Tjoe Som, trans., Po-‐‑hu t’ung: The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall (Leiden: E.J. Brill, , ), . ff; and The Cambridge History of China, .

. These remarks are in Ban Gu’s critique of Jia Yi’s 賈誼 ( – . . .) “The Faults of Qin” (Guo Qin lun 過秦論) in Shi ji, . .

. Quan Hou Han Wen . a (in Yan Kejun, Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han Sanguo liuchao wen). See also Ch’en Ch’i-‐‑yun, “Confucian, Legalist, and Taoist Thought in Later Han” in The Cambridge History of China, .

. See Michael Loewe, “Imperial Sovereignty: Tung Chung-shu’s Contribution and his Predecessors”, in his Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China, – , where he says (on p. ), “Heaven took li le or no place in the religious cults patron-ized by the Han emperors until c. BC.”


Modernists, saw the birth sequence as the underlying force of history. Unlike the reformists of the Former Han, who also advocated the birth sequence, the Later Han Zuo zhuan advocates, such as Ban Biao and Ban Gu, linked the Five Elements with sage-king genealogies while at the same time linking those genealogies to a Mandate of Heaven that is not a reward for virtue, but a gift granted for mysterious reasons.¹⁰³ The frequency with which the Yao-Liu connection is repeated in the work of these early propagandists of the Later Han suggests not only that the idea was new, but being debated. Predictably,—for who would openly fight the emperor on this issue?—we hear very li le from the other side. The Zuo zhuan specialists, however, advance their position with almost evangelical zeal. Especially redolent of this a itude is an essay by Ban Gu, called “Ex-tending the Canon” (“Dianyin pian” 典引篇). The title is significant, for the “Canon” being “extended” was to be understood as the “Yao Canon” (“Yao dian”) in the Book of Documents. Ban Gu’s essay is an encomium to the Han dynasty. The rationale for the title is the following: since Han was the successor of Yao, any praise for Han, as far as Ban Gu was concerned, was praise for Yao and thus merely an extension of the “Yao Canon”.¹⁰⁴ The essay tells us, among other ma ers, that when Heaven gave the emperorship to the Han Lius it was returning imperial power to its “original starting point” (yuan shou 元首), that is, reviving the line of Yao, the exemplar of royal virtue, whose patron element is Fire. This Heaven duly did after having mandated Shun (Earth), Yu (Xia/Metal), Cheng Tang (Shang/Water), and King Wu (Zhou/Wood) to establish their dynasties.¹⁰⁵ This scheme comes from Liu Xin’s reconstruction of history, but Ban Gu, unlike Ban Biao, cites as an authority, here and in many other places in his pro-Han propaganda work, the chenwei texts, which he calls tianzhe 天哲 “the wisdom of Heaven.”¹⁰⁶ The most likely reason for this is that Guangwudi by this time had made clear that he favored the chenwei. But why the chenwei? The precise origin of the chenwei texts as a genre is a ma er of debate, but it seems safe to assume that at least some of the most important chenwei that

. The Han shu . outline of the transmission of the study of the Zuo zhuan from the Former Han to the Later Han marks the teachings of Liu Xin as the turning point in the study of that text.

. Hou Han shu, B. – .

. Hou Han shu, B. .

. Hou Han shu B. . Nylan in the “The Chin Wen/Ku Wen Controversy,” , claims that Ban Biao based the “Wangming lun” “on claims found in the apocrypha.” I know of no references to the chenwei in that work.

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Guangwudi promulgated in . . were propaganda pieces custom-made for his political purposes and that their main message was that the Liu family should be restored to the emperorship because of their descent from Yao.¹⁰⁷ We have already seen, in the He Xiu subcommentary above, an example of how the cosmological aspect of that message was translated into im-ages, where the color red figures prominently, forming a narrative meant to be interpreted allegorically. Such apocryphal narratives taught the gist of Liu Xin’s Canon of the Ages cosmology in easily digestible form. It is likely that in such form Guangwudi, who was not a learned man, and his supporters happily received and propagated the doctrine during the struggles preceding the establishment of the Eastern Han dynasty, and it was primarily in that form that they clung to the doctrine for sometime thereafter. When Guangwudi promulgated the chenwei throughout the empire and thus made it obligatory study in the imperial academy, he was not doing so merely because the literature contained the new doctrine about Han descent. Let us remember that many of the chenwei were ascribed to Confucius or Heaven itself, as is clearly the case of the chenwei embedded in the He Xiu commentary quoted above. In establishing the chenwei, Guangwudi showed that he recognized that the imperial house now had something unprecedented—the Lius now had in effect their own classics, that is, authoritative scriptures through which they could counterpose their own authority against that of the tradition that the scholars claimed to represent. When the chenwei are first mentioned in Later Han history it is almost always in the context of the emperor trying to force some scholar to accept them. For example, when Yin Min, who is described in the Hou

Han shu as a scholar of both the jinwen Ouyang Shang shu 歐陽尚書 and guwen texts (such as the Zuo zhuan), was asked by the Guangwudi to help edit the chenwei, he made fun of a common fortune-telling technique frequently occurring in those texts: the spli ing up of characters into their constituent elements in order to read the result for prophetic signs. He also denied that the chenwei could be the work of the Sage(s) given the inelegance of their style.¹⁰⁸ Another example of scholarly resistance to the emperor’s promotion of the chenwei was Huan Tan, who, by virtue of his being a direct disciple of Liu Xin, is usually classified an Old Text scholar. When he was asked by the emperor what he thought of basing the construction of the Lingtai

. Hou Han shu, A. .

. Hou Han shu, A. .


靈台, or the Spirit Terrace—a ritual building whose use and structure were a subject of controversy—, on the principles given in the chenwei, he simply stated that he never read the chenwei.¹⁰⁹ When the emperor asked him why, he argued against treating the chenwei on a par with the classics. The emperor, as a result, threatened to have him executed.¹¹⁰ There was also the case of Zheng Xing 鄭興, another direct disciple of Liu Xin, who had at first studied the Gongyang but came to prefer the Zuo

zhuan. After he indicated to Guangwudi his opposition to the chenwei, his career at court came to a halt.111 Some see in these episodes evidence that the so-called Old Text scholars opposed the chenwei. I do not believe that that these instances support that conclusion. The fact that these instances were considered worthy of note suggests that those who outwardly opposed the chenwei were in the minority. The texts were new, and serious scholars, such as Yin Min, had to know that they were not what the emperor said they were. The direct students of Liu Xin were particularly opposed to them, I suspect, not only because, like everyone else, they knew that the chenwei had been made to order, but also because they had studied the Liu Xin theory behind the new Han genealogy and felt that it was being co-opted, perhaps even distorted, in the chenwei. We should remember that Ban Biao wrote his Wangming lun around the same time that these events were taking place, that is, before the official promulgation of the chenwei in . ., but he never mentions the chenwei. Imperial decree had not yet required that that everyone take them seriously. After promulgation, the mainstream of Zuo advocates falls into line with the emperor’s view of the chenwei—that they were, as Ban Gu put it, the “wisdom of Heaven.” From then on, outward opposition to chenwei remains rare, and when it occurs, the histories note it. There was the famous example of a leader of the Gongyang scholars Li Yu 李育 (ca. – . .) who in the course of his debate against the Zuo advocate Jia

kui criticized the emperor for excessive dependence on the chenwei.112 Later there was the case of Zhang Heng 張衡, another Old Text scholar, who submi ed a memorial to the throne that stated among other things that the chenwei were of too recent date to be considered canonical and recommended that they be proscribed.113 These cases suggest that it was the emperors who were the main advocates of the chenwei. It was for this reason that most scholars who

. See Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” – .

. Hou Han shu, A. .

. Hou Han shu, . – .

. Hou Han shu, B. .


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wished to have careers at court, no ma er what their scholarly affilia-tions, outwardly supported them. Those who openly disapproved were a small minority. The way Guangwudi dealt with Huan Tan demonstrated to the other scholars that the emperor was prepared to use brute force against those who outwardly rejected the chenwei. But in the “Empire of Writing,” to use Mark Edward Lewis’ phrase, brute force even if accompanied by writing would win no long lasting respect from the empire’s writers.¹¹⁴ Eventually the emperor would have to deal with the scholars on their own terms. When the emperor promulgated the chenwei, he no doubt thought that he had thus made, for all intents and purposes, the doctrine of Han descent from Yao official and beyond debate in the imperial academy. Yet when he a empted to induce the imperial academy to accept the historical and theoretical basis of the doctrine, i.e., the Zuo zhuan—and by implication the Canon of the Ages—, he met with resistance. The first time was in . . at the debates at the Cloud Terrace (Yun Tai 雲台) in the precincts of the Imperial Palace. The contents of the debate we know mainly from the Hou Han shu . – . The representative of the Academy who argued against the Zuo zhuan was Fan Sheng 范升, although his specialty was the Yi jing of Meng Xi 夢喜.¹¹⁵ The advocate for the Zuo zhuan was Chen Yuan 陳元. The arguments followed much the same lines as those advanced when Liu Xin first proposed academic adoption of the Zuo: “The Zuo did not go directly back to Confucius” versus “Zuo Qiuming was a direct disciple of Confucius;” “the Gongyang was unreliable oral transmission wri en a long time after the time of the Master” versus “Zuo Qiuming had commi ed his record to writing during the time of the Master,” etc. The academicians clearly wanted nothing to do with the Zuo zhuan; Guangwudi forced it on them nevertheless. He re-established the posi-tion of Erudit with a specialty in the Zuo zhuan that had been established in the academy under Pingdi. After the death of the Guangwudi’s Zuo

zhuan Erudit, however, the position was never refilled.¹¹⁶ Why was there such resistance to the Zuo zhuan? The easy answer would be that the Zuo specialists had served Wang Mang and therefore were not considered worthy to be in the academy. But that does not explain why later generations of Zuo specialists were excluded. And the very fact that there were later generations of Zuo specialists raises

. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State Uni-versity of New York Press, ), – .

. Hou Han shu, A. .

. Hou Han shu, . .


another important question. If the chenwei contained essentially the same doctrine as the Zuo zhuan on the question of Han descent, why did later generations of scholars not simply renounce the Zuo zhuan and thereby make themselves more palatable to the academy? Why did a debate that ultimately resulted in the exclusion of the Zuo zhuan continue, and what was it really about? Could it be that the Zuo specialists felt that they had some things to offer that the Gongyang specialists did not? Could it be that they were encour-aged by signs that the emperors were well aware of it? And could those things have included not only the historical and theoretical bases of the doctrine of Han descent from Yao but also the inevitable political agenda that flow from the conception of the ruler as seed of the divine? The most convincing response so far to Nylan’s contention that there was no jin/gu divide is Hans Van Ess’ article entitled “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty and the Old Text/New Text Controversy”.¹¹⁷ Van Ess holds that Nylan’s conclusions are too much colored by the sources she used, which for the most part are the imperial histories. For a be er picture of the intellectual climate of the times, Van Ess turns to the chenwei themselves, as well as the literature that was produced in the give and take of scholarly debate. Chief among these sources is the Wujing yiyi 五經異義 (Different Meanings of the Five Classics) by Xu Shen 許慎 (ca. -‐‑ca. . .), most famous for his dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字. The Wujing yiyi survives only in fragments whose number and nature nevertheless allow a reconstruction of various scholarly positions on institutional and intellectual ma ers that were debated at end of the Former Han and the beginning of the Later Han. The text groups the opposing scholarly opinions under two rubrics “old” and “new,” gu 古 and jin 今. The opinions are typically justified by reference to the classics, with the gu scholars citing what have traditionally been designated as Old Texts, such the Zuo zhuan, and the jin scholars citing the traditional New Texts, such as the Gongyang zhuan. Comparing the Wujing yiyi opinions with those expressed in one of the most extensive records of scholarly debate, the Yantie lun, as well as with those found in the official Han histories, Van Ess made a remarkable discovery. The opinions expressed in the Wujing yiyi fell either on the side of the modernists or on the side of the reformists, as Loewe defined them. But, unexpectedly, New Text classics were not cited to legitimize the Modernist opinions and the Old Text classics were not cited to sup-port the Reformist opinions, as Loewe had once claimed. The opposite occurred. With remarkable consistency the gu scholars advocated aspects of the Modernist program supported by Emperors Wu and Xuan, while

. T’oung Pao LXXXV ( ), – .

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the jin scholars supported the reformist program that gained ground under Emperor Yuan. Xu Shen also records his own opinions on the issues, and they favor the “gu” opinions. What this means is that at least according a scholar who was well acquainted with both the scholarly and political discourse of his time, jin and gu were not only designations of different scholarly orientations, but opposing political and ideological camps. This directly contradicts Nylan’s claim that no such camps existed.¹¹⁸ The modernist orientation of the gu positions represented in the Wujing yiyi is consistent with the ideological stance of Ban Biao and Ban Gu, and Jia kui—some of whose opinions will be re-examined below—, all Zuo

zhuan advocates, and all traditionally classified as guwen scholars. If we add to that the fact that study of the Zuo zhuan continued, and appears to have flourished with and after Jia Kui, we get a picture of a strong line of scholarly transmission going back at least as far as Liu Xin.¹¹⁹ The continuation of that tradition in the face of official academic rejection in the Eastern Han remains to be explained. For part of the explanation we must look to the imperial academy. For evidence about the ideological orientation of that institution we turn to another of Van Ess’ discoveries. He found a very strong correspondence between the opinions designated jin in the Wujing yiyi and opinions on the same issues found in the chenwei.¹²⁰ Why was there this correspondence between the reformist opinions and the pertinent passages in the chenwei? Van Ess’ research on the Wu-‐‑jing yiyi offers convincing evidence of a convergence of reformist policy and jinwen scholarship, as well as evidence that the reformists used the chenwei as a means to argue their position. Less convincing, however, is

. Li Xueqin argues that scholars, such as Liao Ping, who used the Wujing yiyi to demonstrate sharp differences between the jinwen and guwen scholars miss the fact that in that text Xu Shen’s own “gu” opinions sometimes agree with the “jin” opinions, and that sometimes “gu” and “jin” opinions are in agreement. Van Ess, basing his argu-ment somewhat on the research of R. A. Miller’s work, shows that instances of “gu” and “jin” agreement are either negligible or explainable, and do not in fact constitute counter-‐‑evidence of fundamental differences between the two schools. See Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” – . See also Li Xueqin, “Jingu xue kao yu Wujing yiyi,” – , and R. A. Miller, “The Wu-‐‑ching i-‐‑i of Hsu Shen,” Monumenta Serica ( – ), – . For Liao Ping’s views, see his Jingu xuekao 今古學考 in Liao Ping xueshu lunzhu xuanji 廖平學術論著選集 (Chengdu: Ba Shu, ) – , – , especially – .. Hou Han shu, . , in fact, traces the Han dynasty study of the Zuo zhuan

back to Jia Yi, but indicates that one of the two main lines of Zuo zhuan studies in the Later Han is traceable back to Liu Xin.

. Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” – . Compare Yasui kozan, Isho no seiritsu to sono tenkai 緯書の成立とその展開, (Tokyo: Kokusho, ), – .


his conclusion that the agreement of jinwen texts and chenwei texts sup-ported “the traditional claim that apocryphal texts belonged to the stream of thought advocated by the New Text school (my emphasis).”121 Van Ess believes that jinwen scholars were using the chenwei to talk about those things not covered in the classics.122 I do not think that his evidence supports this view, for almost all the reformist opinions he quotes from in the Wujing yiyi that are echoed by the chenwei are also accompanied by citations of interpretations of the classics.123 In these cases, the issues were indeed covered in the classics. Besides, as we have seen, the flexibility of Han hermeneutic methods was capable of making the classics “cover” almost anything. Why then, in the case of opinions that found adequate support in the classics, would scholars resort to the chenwei in addition to the usual commentarial methods? If reformist opinions that had classical justification are also found in the chenwei, it is probably because at some point in the intellectual history of the Han dynasty the traditional classical justification—especially as a means to bolster arguments in political debate—was for some reason not considered adequate and a chenwei justification was needed to seal the argument. That probably happened after the chenwei were officially raised to quasi-canonical status near the beginning of the Later Han dynasty, when the emperor required that they be promulgated throughout China—when he became so dependent on them that some scholars, to their great peril, began to complain. As I have suggested before, the emperors were using the chenwei the way scholars had previously used the classics—to make proposals not on one’s own authority, but on that of Confucius, the sages, or Heaven itself. Once the chenwei were introduced into the old scholarly game of interpretation, they, like the classics, could be maneuvered to favor either side of any debate. Van Ess, in pointing out the presence of reformist opinions in the chenwei, is not, I contend, demonstrating that the chenwei were necessarily reformist in nature. In fact, it appears that the main purpose for requiring that chenwei specialists be included in the Impe-rial Academy was to represent there, in disguised form, the ideological

. Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” .

. See Van Ess, “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” .

. In Van Ess’ “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty,” ff, for example, an explanation (shuo 說) of the Han shi 韓氏 tradition of Book of Odes interpretation is cited as the “new” (jin 今) opinion on the construction of the Lingtai; the Ouyang Shang shu and the Xiahou Shang shu 夏侯尚書 traditions are cited as the bases for the “new” opinion concerning the sangong 三公; and the Qi 齊 Lu Han 魯韓 interpretive traditions on the Odes are cited as the bases for “new” doctrine of the miraculous births of the sages.

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orientation the emperors really favored, that based on the excluded Zuo

zhuan, as expounded by the likes of Ban Biao and Ban Gu. Good examples of how this type of scholarly fifth column operated can be found in the accounts about Cao Chong 曹充 and his son, Cao Bao 曹褒 in the History of the Later Han Dynasty. Cao Chong served under Mingdi 明帝 (r. – . .), in the Imperial Academy as a specialist in the Qing version of the Li ji 慶氏禮記. When he recommended that the emperor alter state ritual so that the Han would have “its own” ritual, however, he cited not the Li ji but two chenwei texts: the Hetu dikuo xiang 河圖括地象 and the Shang shu xuanji qian 尚書璇璣鈐. The la er text mentions the imperial house by name, but Mingdi in fact made only insignificant changes in court ritual, to Cao Chong’s disappointment, in accordance with that text. What did Cao Chong have in mind when he recommended that “the Great Han create its own ritual” 大漢自制禮?¹²⁴ I believe that the answer is to be found in a similar proposal made by Mingdi’s successor, Zhangdi 章帝 (r. – . .), in the year . In a decree calling for the reform of Han state ritual, he quoted the same two chenwei texts Cao Cong had, plus a third. The first quotation was from the Hetu (which I believe is an abbreviation of Hetu dikuo xiang), which said:

赤九會昌、十世以光、十一以興。

The Red ninth will encounter glory. In the tenth generation it will be luminous, and in the eleventh it will rise.

The text was of course using the code language based on the cosmology of the Canon of the Ages. Red, of course, stands for Fire, the Han dynasty and Yao. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh generations are meant to stand for Guangwudi, Mingdi, and Zhangdi himself respectively.¹²⁵ The next text quoted was from the Shang shu xuanji qian:

述 (脩) 堯理世、平制禮樂、放唐之文。

Adorn this generation given order by Yao; normalize the rites and music imitating the culture of Tang (Yao).

The last chenwei text quoted was Diming yan 帝命驗:

順堯考德。題期立象

Accord with Yao and examine the elements; determine their order and the signs of their rise (and fall).¹²⁶

. Hou Han shu, . .

. See Hou Han shu, . for this explanation.

. Hou Han shu, . .


Zhangdi appears to be proposing what Cao Chong originally intended when he quoted some of the same texts to Mingdi—the creation of a Han state ritual that affirmed the Liu genealogical connection to Yao. When the emperor decided to try to implement the proposal, he chose two scholars to help him. The first was a specialist in ritual, Cao Bao, who, like his father, was an Erudit (boshi) in the academy, and who, also like his father, had a long-standing ambition to be the man to reform Han state ritual. The second was Ban Gu, whose advocacy of the doctrine of Han descent from Yao we have discussed above. Cao Bao submi ed a memorial to the throne in support of Zhangdi’s proposal. The emperor sent the memorial to the Superintendent of Cer-emonies (taichang 太常), Chao Kan 巢堪, who was also chief examiner of the academy.¹²⁷ Chao kan rejected the proposal. After that, Zhangdi consulted with Ban Gu. Ban Gu suggested placing the ma er before the assembled scholarly authorities of the capital. What Ban Gu was suggesting, of course, was a debate; but the last time that the emperor had a empted to effect change through scholarly debate was when he had had Jia kui argue the merits of the Zuo zhuan in the White Tiger Hall in the hope that it would be welcomed into the impe-rial academy—a debate to which we will return later. That had ended in another rejection by the academy of the Zuo zhuan. Zhangdi knew that a debate would have to involve the members of the imperial academy as well as other scholars, some of whom would oppose changing the state rites, others of whom might support it, so he responded to Ban Gu by indicating that the best he could hope for by following his advice was the usual scholarly logjam. He ended the interview with a statement that might seem enigmatic at this historical remove, but of which Ban Gu no doubt understood the significance immediately:

昔堯作大章、一夔足矣

In the old days when Yao was creating the Da Zhang (music for his court ritual), one Kui was enough.

This is another Chinese case of allegory, which given the context, should be interpreted as follows: Yao stands for Zhangdi, and Kui, Yao’s music master, stands for Cao Bao. Zhangdi thus gave the sign that he intended to use Cao Bao to bypass the usual scholarly authorities. In . ., Cao Bao was summoned to the imperial palace and ordered to rewrite the Han state ritual. In the meantime, Ban Gu had performed an important service for the emperor; he had found a copy of The Han State Ceremonies (Han yi 漢儀) composed by Shusun Tong 叔孫通 during

. For the functions of the taichang, see Hou Han shu, zhi 志 . .

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the reign of the first Han emperor, Liu Bang. This book Ban Gu presented to the emperor and the emperor turned it over to Cao Bao, encouraging him to fill in the gaps of this old ritual system and revise the many parts that did not “accord with the classics” 不合經. The emperor gave him complete access to the imperial libraries to complete his task. This was Cao Bao’s opportunity of a lifetime. By the end of the year he had produced a massive work entitled Han State Rituals (Han li 漢禮), in one hundred fifty sections (pian 篇), that covered not only court ritual but the major events in the lives of all the social classes from the emperor down to the lowliest commoner. The work, while mostly based on standard classical sources, bore the strong imprint of the chenwei texts. Accordance with the chenwei, no doubt, is what Zhangdi had envisioned when he had asked Cao Bao to make the old Han ritual “accord with the classics.” We do not know the details, but it is a good guess that the most important rites affirmed the doctrine of Liu descent from Yao. The emperor fearing opposition simply ratified the new system by fiat without the customary scholarly consultations, but he never was to see it enacted. He died just a few months later. His son, Hedi 和帝, succeeded him while still a minor. When Hedi came of age, Cao Bao selected the pertinent sections from the Han State Rituals, wrote an explanatory commentary (zhangju 章句), and staged an impressive ceremony, called the New Ritual (xinli 新禮), for the capping ceremony welcoming the emperor to manhood. Hedi was so pleased with his work that he promoted him twice. Cao Bao before his downfall, therefore, enjoyed the title of Colonel of Archers Who Shoot by Sound (shesheng xiaowei 射聲校尉). A backlash eventually came from the scholar officials. Cao Bao was accused of unlawfully altering state ritual. Hedi never acted on the in-dictment, but, to avoid further controversy, he never allowed any part of Cao Bao’s Han State Rituals to be practiced at court again.¹²⁸ These two accounts describe cases where emperors used the chenwei texts as weapons to fight the scholars on their own territory. The special-ists in these texts worked inside the academy to further the emperor’s cause. Zhangdi relied on scholars outside of the academy as well, and his cabal came from either side of the jin/gu divide. The case of Zhangdi makes it clear that, although the chenwei were ostensibly accepted into the imperial academy, that did not guarantee the acceptance of all chen-‐‑wei-based proposals.

. See Han shu, . – . Van Ess has a somewhat different interpretation of the same affair. See his “The Old Text/New Text Controversy: Has the th Century Got It Wrong?,” – .


The rejection of Zhangdi’s “Yao-‐‑based” ritual changes, as well as his dependence on a chenwei specialist to advocate them to the academicians, suggest that the doctrine of Han descent from Yao was taught in the academy mainly, if not only, by chenwei specialists, a thesis supported by the statements by Ban Gu and—as we shall further see—by Jia kui. It is also supported by the emperor’s anticipation that his proposals would be rejected. Clearly the emperor could only depend on a minority of academi-cians to be “true believers” in the new Liu family genealogy. Zhangdi’s a empt to bypass both the academy and other scholarly authorities in order to translate the doctrine of Han descent from Yao into state ritual also suggests, at the very least, that he knew he could not depend on the majority of scholars in the capital at large to support it either. The undo-ing of his ritual reforms under Hedi shows that the academy and the scholar-‐‑officials at court still had enough influence to deny the emperors the power to wantonly invent tradition. The academicians rejected the new Han rituals for the same reason that they rejected the Zuo zhuan. Accepting either into the imperial academy would have officially granted classical legitimation not only of the Zuo

zhuan-based doctrine of Han descent from Yao but also the autocratic political ideology that that genealogy justified. One might ask at this point, “Didn’t the academicians already accept the most important half of that Zuo zhuan-based ideology by accepting the chenwei supporting the doctrine of Han descent from Yao into the academic curriculum?” If the chenwei taught that doctrine, how did they do so without reference to the Zuo zhuan? Unlike the Zuo zhuan, the chenwei were eclectic, changeable, ambiguous, and flexible. The composers of the texts were largely anonymous; some clearly were in the employ of the imperial family while others served the purposes of the academy. As is well known much of the literature was lost to successive proscriptions. But the extant fragments tell us much about how they were used. The passages quoted by Zhangdi to further his cause are gnomic in character; they never explicitly state the doctrine of Han descent from Yao—they assume it. It is assumed, for example, that one understands what the color red symbolizes, who the numbered genera-tions indicate, what a phrase like “generation given order by Yao” means, and will interpret the passages accordingly. Contrast this style with that of the work of Ban Biao and Ban Gu, wherein explicit and direct state-ments of the doctrine of Han descent from Yao are not hard to find. Such clarity on the doctrine is not to be found in the writings associated with Gongyang scholarship that have survived.¹²⁹ It appears, then, that

. Gary Arbuckle has argued that, although the Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 is not a

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the emperor could only import his genealogy into the academy by means of the chenwei because the academicians preferred it in that medium, a medium in whose ambiguities and gnomic indirection they could both expose and hide what they really thought of the emperor’s policies—a medium be er suited to contesting power than institutionalizing it. A good example of how this was done is the chenwei that we find em-bedded in the He Xiu subcommentary on the Gongyang, which we have translated above. Its imagery, wherein the color red and other correlates with the Fire element figure prominently, are unimaginable without Liu Xin’s prior exegetical maneuvers on the Zuo zhuan linking Yao to Fire and the Liu family to Yao. The imagery thus seems to support the theory behind the doctrine that Yao is the ancestor of Liu, but the doctrine is never explicitly stated. He Xiu, moreover, misses every opportunity to mention the theory or the doctrine. For example, when confronted with the following Gongyang commentary,

末不亦樂乎堯舜之知君子也。制春秋之義俟後聖。

Was it not after all a joy for the Noble Man (Confucius) to know that the Yaos and the Shuns (or: a Yao or a Shun) would recognize his wisdom? He systematized the principles of the Annals to anticipate the Sage(s) of the future.

He Xiu explains:

末不亦樂後有聖漢受命而王。德如堯舜⋯待聖漢之王以為法。

Was it not after all a joy for Confucius to know that there would be in the future the very sagely Han dynasty which would reign after having received the Mandate, and whose virtue would be like that of Yao and Shun? . . . In anticipation of that sagely Han king he made the Laws (my emphasis)?¹³⁰

Here, where it would be most appropriate to affirm the doctrine of Han descent from Yao, He Xiu carefully avoids it. He could have used an equivocating metaphor (i.e., “the Lius are Yaos” or “Liu Bang was a la er-‐‑day Yao”) but instead employed a simile (“whose virtue would be

reliable source for the thought of Dong Zhongshu, parts of it were wri en or revised after Dong’s lifetime to refute the claims of Wang Mang and “prove” “the Han dynasty cosmologically inviolate and invulnerable to replacement.” In none of the Chunqiu fanlu essays where he sees evidence of this (chapters , , , , , and ) is the case for the Han argued in genealogical terms—it is argued only in cosmological terms. See his “The Gongyang School and Wang Mang,” – .

. Chunqiu Gongyang jiegu, Shisan jing zhushu, . On the use of the Chun qiu as a basis of Han jurisprudence, see Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon: The Herme-‐‑neutics of the Spring and Autumn, according to Tung Chung-‐‑shu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – .


like that of Yao and Shun”) that removed even the exegetical possibility of genealogically linking Yao or Shun with anyone in the Han dynasty. The doctrine of Han descent from Yao has been deftly transformed into the doctrine of Confucius’ prophecy of the Han. Exploiting the imagery of one doctrine while explicitly articulating another, He Xiu creates a kind of exegetical “plausible deniability.” Not only is there no reference to the new Liu genealogy, but reference to its “historical” basis is nowhere to be found in the He Xiu subcommentary, in the Gongyang zhuan, or, for that ma er, in any other jinwen classic or commentary.131 The reason for this is only too clear: while the Gongyang academicians could tolerate the message of the Zuo zhuan-based cosmol-ogy, i.e., that the Han dynasty was under the patronage of Fire, they could not tolerate the message of the Zuo zhuan-based history, i.e., that the Liu family was descended from the sage king Yao. The only scholars who claimed that there was a “historical” basis (meaning an Annals basis) for the genealogy were specialists in the Zuo zhuan. Jia kui reminded the emperor and the others gathered in the White Tiger Hall of this when he said:

又五經家皆無以證圖讖明劉氏為堯後者、左氏獨有明文。

Moreover, the Five Classics scholars (in this case referring to the academicians) have nothing to prove that the apocrypha show that the Liu family are the descendants of Yao; Mr. Zuo alone has the textual proof.132

It is unlikely that anyone in a endance at the White Tiger Hall (Bohu guan 白虎觀) in the year . . needed reminding, especially the emperor. He had long been a student and admirer of the Zuo zhuan, and from the beginning of his reign had shown special favor to Old Text scholars such as Jia kui.133 The famous debates in the White Tiger Hall, as I mentioned above, were in fact organized by the emperor to argue the merits of the Zuo zhuan in the hope of gaining it entry into the imperial academy. This move recalled Emperor Xuan’s debates in the Stone Canal Pavilion, which were clearly staged to gain the Guliang zhuan entry to the academy. Where Emperor Xuan appointed Liu Xiang to defend the Guliang zhuan, Emperor Zhang had Jia Kui to defend the Zuo zhuan. Jia Kui acqui ed himself admirably, not only showing how the Zuo

zhuan and the chenwei were consistent on the question of the Liu descent from Yao, but expounding the political ideology that distinguished the

. See Anne Cheng, Étude sur le confucianisme Han, – , for a discussion of He Xiu’s debt to Huwu Sheng 胡毋生, a contemporary of Dong Zhongshu.

. Hou Han shu, . .

. Anne Cheng, Étude sur le confucianisme Han, – .

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New Text scholars in the academy from the Old Text scholars outside of it. He argued that the fundamental teaching of the Zuo zhuan resides in respect for the ruler and the father, in contrast to Gongyang’s emphasis on expedience (quan 權).¹³⁴ Jia kui’s critique of the principle of “expedience” clearly marks his political orientation. “Expedience”, as applied to jurisprudence meant judging cases by taking into account such things as the circumstances and motivation. It was a principle developed by Gongyang scholars as a way to counteract the inflexibility of the Qin legal system, some of which was still in effect during the Han. Jia Yi in taking a stand against “expedience” marks himself as a Modernist—as Loewe would define the term.¹³⁵ But none of this could have been new to the emperor or to the many scholars who were familiar with both Gongyang and Zuo traditions. The same ideology had been clearly articulated by Ban Biao and Ban Gu, as we have seen, and Ban Gu was still serving the court. Off the mark, then, is the impression given by some scholars that at the debates in the White Tiger Hall Jia Kui convinced Emperor Zhang of the merits of the Zuo zhuan for the first time or that he was presenting ideas never heard before.¹³⁶ On the question of Liu family descent the Zuo zhuan advocates had not changed since at least the time of Liu Xin; on the question of imperial authority they had not changed since at least the time of Guangwudi. Jia kui’s statement invites the emperor to compare the Zuo advocates’ clarity on the issues with the ambiguities of the chenwei and the refusals of

. Hou Han shu, . .

. See Sarah A. Queen’s illuminating discussion of the concept of quan in From Chronicle to Canon, – .

. Michael Nylan, for example, in her “The Chin Wen/Ku Wen Controversy”, – , says, “Chia gauged the interests of his imperial audience well, for he asserted

the superiority of the Tso Commentary over its chin wen counterparts (the Kung-‐‑yang and the Ku-‐‑liang commentaries) in two related ways, both of which were calculated to please the throne: Chia argued first that only the Tso celebrated hierarchical obligations to the ruler and the father, while the Kung-‐‑yang undercut obligations to the ruling house in alleging that receipt of the Mandate depended more upon expedient action (ch’uan 權) than Heaven’s divine appointment. He also contended that the Tso accorded be er with the apocrypha, which confirmed the ruling Liu clan’s descent from the demi-‐‑god ruler, Yao. In this way, only the Tso was seen to uphold the Lius’ growing pretensions to divine right. Emperor Chang was easily persuaded to favour the Tso Commentary once he became convinced that it supported notions of divine rule” (my emphasis). Anne Cheng in her Étude sur le confucianisme Han, , says, “Jia Kui avait donc bien compris qu’une apologie des Classiques en guwen ne pouvait être réçue avec faveur par l’empereur que si elle s’assurait le soutien des Apocryphes. Malgré ce e concession, . . . Jia Kui proposait la première analyse veritable des differences entre les deux traditions, “ancienne” et “moderne”. Rien de précis, jusque là, n’avait été dit . . . (my emphasis)”


the academy. He was warning the emperor that the Liu family could only expect the Gongyang specialists to pay equivocal lip service, but never grant wholehearted support, to the claim that Yao stood at the head of the Liu family line. The reaction of the academicians to Zhangdi’s proposal to affirm that claim in Han state ritual in and the absence of that claim in explicit terms (mingwen 明文) from He Xiu’s subcommentary to the Gongyang in the second century would appear to prove him right. Despite Jia Kui’s fine performance, the academicians ceded nothing; the Zuo zhuan would never be taught in the Han imperial academy again. But Emperor Zhang was undeterred. He promptly shifted consider-able support away from the academy and granted it to Jia kui. Heaping material benefits on him, the emperor even allowed him to take twenty of the best students from the most eminent Gongyang masters in order to convert them into exponents of the Zuo zhuan. He also commissioned Jia kui to write scholarly works comparing, invidiously, the merits of the two schools.¹³⁷ Thenceforth the Old Text school flourished. Jia Kui’s best student was Ma Rong 馬融 ( – . .), who became the most famous exegete of his era. Under the patronage of empress Deng 鄧 (d. . .), he became known for his eclectic approach to commentary, including, for example, passages from non-Confucian classics to explicate Confucian texts.¹³⁸ He also studied and taught the chenwei, and his best student was the famous Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 ( – . .), who showed his talents by helping his teacher solve numerological problems in those texts.¹³⁹ These men con-stitute the mainstream of what is traditionally known as Old Text stud-ies in the Later Han. Neither rejected the chenwei or the doctrine of Han descent from Yao. Imperial support would not have been forthcoming if they had. The common view is that the Gongyang-dominated imperial academy became moribund because the bigotry of its scholars and the prolixity of it commentaries could not contend with the intellectual vitality of the Old Text school. It is my contention that the reason the academy fell into disuse while the Zuo zhuan specialists found new life was that, after the debates in the White Tiger Hall, the imperial family shifted significant support away from the academy to the Zuo zhuan specialists. This is because the imperial family knew that the main supporters of their new genealogy, and the political program it implied, were not within the academy but in the ranks of the Zuo zhuan scholars. The doctrine that held that the Lius were descended from the Sage

. Hou Han shu, . .

. Anne Cheng, Étude sur le confucianisme Han, .


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king Yao, I suspect, was the main and until now unrecognized cause of division between the Gongyang and the Zuo zhuan schools in the Later Han. Gratefully heeding Michael Nylan’s warnings about the polysemy of the terms jinwen and guwen, we must be careful not to impute the Gongyang/Zuo zhuan ideological divisions unthinkingly to every occur-rence of those terms in Han texts, much less read into them concerns that properly belong to the Qing dynasty. But since those terms are often used to mark such divisions in the Later Han, using them with caution rather than discarding them seems, for now, the best course.

Conclusions

1. The Myth of Yao and Shun and the Liu family genealogy

The Gongyang commentary to the Annals entry about the appearance of the unicorn asks why Confucius wrote the Annals, and answers in part:

制春秋之義以俟後聖⋯

[Confucius] organized the principles of the Annals in anticipation of the sages of the future . . .

Yet nowhere in the works of Early Han thinkers is there even a hint that anyone took “the sages of the future” to be the Han emperors. At the time of the founding of the imperial academy the Annals was not thought of as the legitimating document of the Han dynasty, but by the time Guangwudi founded the Later Han that is what it had become. We have seen how this way of reading the Annals can be traced back to Liu Xin—we do not know if the idea originated with him—, how it was made official under Wang Mang, and how it was expelled from the academy when Guangwudi a empted to restore the status quo ante. That status quo ante was an academy dominated by the Gongyang interpretation of the Annals; however, that interpretation, under pressure from the imperial house, was to change. The Gongyang tradition, as Sarah Queen has shown, conceived of the emperorship as subject to Heaven’s authority. It “envisioned an emperor who ruled by embodying Heaven’s normative pa erns.”¹⁴⁰ For the Gongyang scholars one of the pa erns that most bore on the emperor-ship concerned Heaven’s Mandate, which went to the virtuous and was withdrawn from the corrupt. The Zuo zhuan doctrine of Han descent is an a empt on the part of the imperial family to offer an alternative vision of that particular normative pa ern.

. Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, .


Liu Xin and the later Han Zuo zhuan tradition reconstructed the myth of Yao and Shun so as to privilege heredity rather than virtue. But virtue was not thus entirely discounted. Virtue and the a endant Mandate became inheritable items. The core of the myth, that Yao won the Man-date because of his virtue and passed the throne to Shun because of his, is allowed to stand. Then, however, the Zuo zhuan scholars perform a curious bait and switch maneuver with the term de 德, which can mean, among other things, moral virtue or the cosmic power of each of the Five Elements—as in wu de 五德, another term for the Five Elements—, depending on context. Liu Xin’s hermeneutic re-routing of the Five Elements through the bloodlines of Sage kings and dynastic founders switches the context from character to cosmos, thus shifting the mean-ing of de and transforming the myth. Yao’s ceding his throne to Shun is no longer the allegory of the triumph of virtue over heredity, it is now the drama of the waning of the Fire element, represented by Yao, and the waxing of the Earth element, represented by Shun. In the Gongyang interpretation of the myth, will, self-cultivation and moral autonomy dominate; according to the interpretation of the Zuo zhuan scholars, will, self-cultivation and moral autonomy cede to the mysterious workings of the cosmos. With the favoring of cosmic de over moral de, a Heaven inclined to-wards virtue is replaced by an impersonal Heaven. This new Heaven expresses its will in the waxing and waning of the elements; its decisions are no longer amenable to moral analysis; its mandate is not winnable through moral effort. It is therefore futile to judge Heaven’s choice of earthly ruler on a moral basis. Indeed, to do so is disloyal. In this scheme one can no longer appeal to Heaven to legitimize dissent. In the eyes of the Gongyang scholars in the academy this ideology transformed Yao and Shun from exemplars of royal virtue into progenitors of tyrants. When it was clear that the Gongyang scholars would never accept the Zuo zhuan form of the doctrine, the emperor used the chenwei to force this doctrine on the academy. It was in the chenwei that both the Zuo ideology and the Gongyang ideology changed. In the Gongyang tradi-tion, knowledge about the normative pa erns of Heaven resides in the classics because Confucius having obtained it through the exercise of his interpretive intelligence put it there. “Yet,” as Sarah Queen put it, “unlike Moses or Muhammad who received God’s words in a personal encounter, Confucius willed the Spring and Autumn into existence, as the knowledge embodied in this text was not the product of divine revela-tion, but derived from human perception.” Nevertheless, it is precisely divine revelation that the chenwei introduce. They thus transform this Gongyang conception of the relationship of

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Confucius to texts. This new conception is exemplified in the chenwei that He Xiu incorporated into his subcommentary. In He Xiu’s subcommen-tary, a chenwei text descends directly from Heaven. Confucius passively watches the text form. Knowledge of the new (Han) normative pa erns of Heaven come to him prepackaged; he need not exercise his “human perception.” He is now merely a message carrier, a conduit like Moses or Muhammad. Just as the Zuo zhuan ruler does not win the Mandate through will, Confucius does not will the chenwei text into existence. Heaven, as usual not speaking, nevertheless writes it out for him. The fact that it writes in blood, a red thing, shows that it is a Heaven partial to the Han dynasty. knowing that the imperial house would not tolerate dissent on the question of their legitimacy, the Gongyang scholars kept the chenwei im-agery, affirming the new Liu genealogy while at the same time offering a compromise doctrine. Recovering some of Confucius’ former powers, they have him foresee that the sage rulers of the future were the Han em-perors; they also have him set up a system of government specifically for the Han accessible through the proper interpretation of the Annals. Thus did the Later Han Gongyang scholars symbolically a empt to maintain the throne-checking power they had often enjoyed in the Former Han, a power that was clearly being contested in the chenwei and in fact. Eventually the Liu family grew weary of these hermeneutical shenani-gans and switched its support away from the academy to the Zuo zhuan scholars, but the academicians, although weakened, continued to resist. The failure of ritual implementation of the Yao doctrine under Zhangdi is one of the results of their resistance. In the hands of Ban Biao, the doctrine of Han descent from Yao was used to discourage upstarts; by the end of the dynasty the upstarts found use in the doctrine, too. One of the doctrine’s ingenious features was that it explained why there was no bloodline continuously in power from the time of the sage kings till the Han. It also explained how the commoner Liu Bang could become a legitimate emperor. Instead of a continuous bloodline, the theory created a caste of five different bloodlines correlated with the Five Elements. The waxing of a particular element brings a particular bloodline, e.g., that of Yao, to power. The waning of the element sends the bloodline into obscurity, commoner-hood. In other words, the Lius were only apparently commoners; the virtue of Yao, the power of Fire, and the right to the Mandate all inhered in their bloodline; they were simply waiting for their historical moment. But this meant that another apparently common family could be waiting in the wings for the mysterious election of Heaven as well. All they had


to do was discover (or cobble together) an appropriate genealogy the same way the Lius and Wang Mang had. Most of those who contested emperor Guangwudi’s legitimacy at the beginning of his reign did so on the basis of equally dubious pedigrees. Legitimacy would again be contested within the same elemental-genealogical discourse by various upstarts towards the end of the dynasty.¹⁴¹

2. Cosmology and Allegory

The cosmology that allowed the transformation of the Yao-Shun myth far from precluding allegory, as some have supposed, in fact facilitated it. In the He Xiu subcommentary on the Gongyang, the woodcu er rep-resents the cosmic element of Fire and at the same time prefigures the future Red (Fire) Emperor, Liu Bang. The unicorn stands for the Zhou dynasty because both represent the Power of Wood (mude 木德). The woodcu er’s capture of the unicorn is the allegory and prefiguration of the fall of the Zhou and the rise of the Han. It appears that the five ele-ments system, being itself deeply allegorical, has the power to change anything it touches into allegory. Even that supposedly most Western of allegories, the typological allegory, occurs under its auspices. This should not be surprising for typological allegory is, after all, merely omen reading applied to texts, and the Han uses of the Five Elements cosmology expose it as less a metaphysical theory than a tool of divination, a method for reading omens. All systems of divination, no ma er how the prevailing metaphysics constructs the ambient cos-mos, create a basic dualism constituted of the hidden and the revealed. The hidden is always the residence of the more powerful forces. This practical dualism, which is overlooked by those who cleave to the idea of a Chinese monistic world view, has the same effect as an ontological dualism, whatever that may ultimately mean.

3. Transcultural Exegetical Culture

Examination of the fate of the Yao Shun myth in the Han dynasty provides yet another corroboration of the thesis of the book Scripture, Canon and Commentary by John B. Henderson. There he observed that while clas-sical or scriptural texts of different cultures (e.g., the epics such as the Iliad of Greece versus the heterogeneous classics of China), “indisput-ably differ widely form one another, . . . it is just as indisputable that the

. For an excellent study of how genealogy and cosmology continued to influence political discourse at the end of the Han and beyond, see Howard L. Goodman, Ts’ao P’i Transcendent: the Political Culture of Dynasty Founding in China at the End of the Han (Sea le: Scripta Serica, ). See also Yasui Kozan, Isho to Chūgoku no shinpi shisō, – .

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commentarial traditions which evolved from a empts to interpret these texts have much in common . . . In fact, it may be stated as a general rule that the further commentarial traditions developed away from their ca-nonical sources, both chronologically and conceptually, the more similar they became to one another, both with respect to the assumptions they made about the nature of the canon and the strategies they devised for supporting these assumptions.”¹⁴² Henderson goes on to list the main commentarial assumptions that these traditions hold about their classics or scriptures such as that the texts are comprehensive, containing all truth; and that they are arranged according to some principle—logical, cosmological, or pedagogical—that gives them coherence.¹⁴³ Henderson makes a good case for the occurrence, to one degree or another, of such elements in commentarial traditions transculturally. A subcategory could perhaps be added to his list of commentarial assump-tions, the one explored in this article, the assumption that the classic or scripture predicts the rise of the institution with which the commentator is affiliated, especially where the institution constitutes a break with the tradition which produced the classic or scripture. This is an assumption the early Church Fathers and the Later Han Confucians share. As noted before, commentators of the early Christian church inter-preted statements, events, and persons in the Old Testament as prophetic signs of the coming of Jesus and the Church. The Later Han scholars, some of them the anonymous authors of the chenwei, interpreted the Annals—conflating, as usual, the zhuan with the jing—as recording pro-phetic signs of the rise of Liu Bang and his founding of the Han dynasty. The belief in prophetic signs usually accompanies the belief in a divine plan and its revelation in history and in a sacred text. One of the main commentarial strategies (to use Henderson’s term) to which both the early Church fathers and the Han Confucians resorted in order to support these beliefs was the typological allegory. In both cases that strategy was thought sufficient to prove that the founding of the patron institution was the fulfillment of a divine plan, and that the founder of the institution was ordained by divine powers and/or related to divine powers. Thus the commoner king Jesus of Nazareth (rex iudaeorum) became the son of God and founder of the one true Church; thus the commoner king Liu Bang became the descendant of the sage king Yao and one of the true sons of Heaven.

. John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .

. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary, chapter .

Yao, Shun, and Prefiguration: The Origins and Ideology of the Han Imperial Geneaology

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