Partitur des Lebens: Die Liaofan si xun von Yuan Huang (1533-1606) (review)

Martin Lehnert's Score of Life: The Liaofan si xun of Yuan Huang (1533-1606) provides a complete translation into German and a substantial study of the most influential system of "ledgers of merit and demerit" at the end of the Ming period. The Liaofan si xun, "Four Instructions of Liaofan," are a posthumous compilation of the four texts of Yuan Huang and are central to his exemplification and discussion of the tables of karmatic retribution. The four texts—Li ming zhi xue, Gai guo zhi fa, Ji shan zhi fang, and Qiande zhi xiao—were also the textual basis of Cynthia J. Brokaw's The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit published in 1991.¹ What, then, are the merits of this new study?

Lehnert's monograph is divided into four parts of about equal length. The introduction presents the content of the Liaofan si xun and gives a philological analysis of the extant versions. It also provides a brief biography of Yuan Huang and offers a detailed discussion of the state of research on the topic. The very readable and clear translation of the Liaofan si xun has a generous apparatus of footnotes. The third and the fourth parts are denominated "commentary" and "context," respectively. Next to the bibliography and index, an English summary has been provided at the end. The commentary is a discursive analysis of the text, and the contextual chapter focuses on such aspects as the family history of Yuan Huang; the state examination situation at the end of the Ming; the late Ming social crisis; the philosophical context of Yuan Huang's thinking; Yuan Huang's conversion, through the debate with the Chan-monk Yunggu (1500-1575), from an "empirical fatalism" to an "ambitious determinism" (p 232); and the impact of Shao Yong's (1011-1077) numerology on Yuan Huang's arithmetical operations in his tabular ledgers. Based on the interpretations of Shao Yong's thinking by Wyatt and Arrault,² Lehnert shows continuity from Shao to Yuan Huang, not only within his early fatalism but also in light of his calculation of karmatic retribution. Both the numerology of Shao Yong and the tabular calculation of merits and demerits of Yuan Huang, the author argues, fill in the gap of calculability and pragmatism in the Confucian search for self cultivation. In a further chapter on the "contexts," Lehnert discusses karmatic retribution, an aspect central to Yuan's ledgers. Here Lehnert coins the phrase "karmatic genealogical contract" (p. 242). Since merits and demerits can be assigned to an individual's afterlife and to his biological descendants as well—and may also help the living in their ambitions through a transfer of merits to the karmatic needy—the Buddhist concept of karmatic retribution functions as a stabilizing feature within a fundamentally Confucian moral order.

Yet the contextual aspects are not the main concern of the author. Historical aspects and sociological considerations do not make up the bulk of this study, and questions regarding the tradition of the genre of ledgers of merit and demerit do not provide the horizon for Lehnert's research. Furthermore, a view of the four texts under consideration, which restricts them to a discussion of chances for improvement within the imperial examination system—and thus a means to personal or clan advancement—would certainly be, in the eyes of the author, too narrow. He explicitly refuses a method of interpretation that is guided by an a priori theory and rather believes that the text can be read in itself, using the appropriate hermeneutical methodology (pp. 30-32). In the third chapter (the comments) the results of this analysis are presented. The sphere of Lehnert's interpretation of the texts under discussion includes music and psychology. Music is used as...