Lord Shang Revisited 8

10. East and West in Statecraft Theory

We can now glance briefly at the right-hand edge of p7 of the handout, to get a larger sense of things.

The great east and west poles of the Sinitic world, in the 03rd century, were Chi and Chin. At one point, it is said, their rulers briefly declared themselves the Emperors of the East and of the West. The corresponding statecraft texts, Gwandz and SJS, stand as parallel monuments of classic statecraft theory. HFZ 43 refers to them as such. What is the relation between them? This is perhaps the most important question in the history of Legalism.

To put it in textual terms, as between Gwandz and SJS, which is indebted to which? Our answer to that very large directionality question, is still very tentative. But as far as our work on the texts has so far proceeded, this is what we find.

At first, the flow of ideas seems to be from east to west. Chi, which had already accumulated a substantial body of statecraft theory in the 04th century, was in any case likely to have been the leader. Throughout the period when the SJS was active, it got ideas, inspirations, and even a few chapter titles from this earlier repository. Later on, as Chin developed a distinctive governmental style and experience of its own, and as that style began to be successful in the world of battle, the East also took note of what the West was doing, and a certain reverse flow is visible. In the final phase, long after the SJS had ceased to be an active text, the Han continuation of the Gwandz movement found in the SJS a mine of quotable lines and even paragraphs. Thus the cultural debt was finally paid off.

11. Han Feidz and the Vermin

A close-up view of that post-SJS period may be had from the Han Feidz. It is well known that SJS 13 overlaps extensively with HFZ 53; one has drawn upon the other. The consensus, with which I concur, is that SJS 13 is the source, and HFZ 53 is the borrower. But the matter does not end there. We have again the Shvn Dau problem: Does the early testimony to the text of SJS support the presumption that what we have reaches back, not to Lord Shang, but at least before Lyou Syang and his catalogue, at the end of Han?

Here, for a change, the evidence is positive. There are some hard places, perhaps textually corrupt ones, in our present SJS 13. We might assume that these arose during later copying of the Han palace text. But no - we find that the HFZ 53 writer is in trouble at those same places; he tends to emend or paraphrase, exactly as we might today. His text of SJS, by and large, is the same as our text of SJS, including its unintelligible spots. What we have in our SJS is what the HFZ copyist was looking at, and that SJS text had already become corrupt, within the Han dynasty. This is one important result.

HFZ 53 not only cannibalizes SJS 13, it also draws material from HFZ 27. Now, any author may easily recycle his early thoughts in his later essays, so the presence of common material is not surprising or significant. But we find that the HFZ 53 author has at some points misunderstood HFZ 27. This is what the same author is not likely to do. In all probability, then, HFZ 53 and HFZ 27 had different authors.

Another such doublet occurs earlier in the work. HFZ 12 is a cogent and literarily brilliant essay on the difficulty of addressing a ruler. HFZ 3 is an inept and clumsily written essay on the same subject; it begins by apologizing for a poor oral presentation made earlier to the same ruler. HFZ 12 is utterly beyond the range of whatever clod wrote HFZ 3. Then in this pair also, we are led to suspect different authorship. I have elsewhere pointed out that most of the HFZ is likely to have been written in Han; its changing themes seem to synchronize well with known changes in the intellectual climate of successive Han courts, down through Wu-di. We seem, then, to see in the HFZ a huge doctrinal tail of Han political essays, added to the tiny head of a few genuine but unimpressive scrawlings of the historical Han Fei.

Is the idea of a Han date for most of HFZ outrageous? Not really. Notice that, unlike the early Gwandz and all the SJS, it does not deal with population control. It does not deal with the preparations for conquest. It deals only with administration and court intrigue, that is, with situations which arise after the Empire has been won. It addresses, unmixed with earlier issues, the political problems that were pressing in Han times.

But is it plausible that Han theorists would have written under Han Fei 's name? Yes, it is. As Hulsewe and others have shown, Chin techniques of rule continued under Han, but it was not Han policy to say so. Instead, Han propagandists boasted of having overthrown the hated oppressive Chin. It would thus have been impolitic for Han theorists to write under the name of Lord Shang, who by then had been accepted as the first architect of the Chin system. They needed a name, since the style of the time was to write under the name of some earlier historical personage, and it should be someone from the classical, that is, the pre-Imperial, period of Chin history. But if at all possible, it should be a victim rather than a lawgiver of Chin: a sympathetic figure. Han Fei exactly filled the bill.

If plausible, is this also important? I would say so. HFZ in our own time is the preferred source for descriptions of Warring States Legalism. If it turns out to be instead evidence for Han Legalism, certain adjustments in our thinking may be required. As a first step in that rethinking, the much-neglected Gwandz, and the even more neglected Shang-jywn Shu, may need some attention.

There is a third interesting anomaly in HFZ 53. In copying SJS 13, its author omitted certain blocks of text. Those blocks emphasize the theme of the Six Parasites. Why not borrow that image also? Most likely because the HFZ writer had only slightly earlier, in HFZ 49, done his own fresh treatment of that general theme, under the title Five Vermin, borrowing the exact term from SJS 14. All the last few HFZ chapters are indebted to SJS, with clear verbal similarities in chapters 49, 50, 53, 54, and 56. We earlier saw that the late Gwandz, which continued to produce and update its theories in Han, found useful material, free for the copying, in the no longer active SJS. We here discover that their rivals, the HFZ people, were doing exactly the same thing. The two Han hyenas together feasted on the carcass of the native tradition of Chin statecraft. One result is that, by incorporating choice passages of SJS, HFZ seems to us today to be not one school, but rather a synthesis of all Chinese statecraft theory. It is indeed a synthesis, but for that reason it is not a source. The real issues of the Warring States period are dealt with, at first hand, in the other two texts.

 

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