Exemplary Figures / Fayan法言

Introduction

XI Introduction In an era before strict genre distinctions, Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) wrote a work to which he gave the title Fayan 法言. From the beginning , scholars have variously treated Yang’s text as a philosophical masterwork , a commentary on the Analects (Lunyu 論語) and Sima Qian’s 司 馬遷 (145?–86? BCE) Shiji 史記 (usually rendered as Records of the Historian ), a sophisticated work of self-promotion, and a historical source.1 Ban Biao 班彪 (3–54), one of Yang’s more illustrious younger contemporaries , observed that the title clearly refers to the model of the sages.2 The usual English translation of Fayan is Model Sayings. Like the Chinese, this rendering leaves open two possibilities: that the sayings issue from a model and that the sayings themselves are models of fine rhetoric. Still, Model Sayings is ugly in English (and hence a title that Yang would have abhorred). Besides, the word “model” carries unpleasantly prissy connotations for many. More importantly, the process of cultivation that the Fayan explicitly seeks to promote is more complicated than simply modeling oneself upon a person deemed superior. Among my working titles was Exemplary Sayings, which at least had the virtue of alluding to the similarities in grammar and style of the Analects and Yang’s Fayan. Ultimately, however, I settled on Exemplary Figures.3 “Figures,” of course, can refer to “figures of speech,” but the term encompasses “written symbols,” “prominent people,” “the impressions made by people,” “images,” “devices or patterns ,” “emblems,” “embellishments,” “portraying by speech or action,” and “cutting a figure”—which are all important subjects in Yang’s text. In the best of all possible worlds, introductions to literary classics would always supply both a “degressive bibliography,” explaining the original state of the text,4 and a “progressive bibliography” (i.e., a reception history). While this may be possible with, say, the works of Shakespeare , no scholar of classical Chinese would dare claim that she is able to recover a Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE) text or ascertain the true significance of early textual variants among manuscripts compiled several millennia ago, in the time before printing. As a noted Han expert, Michael XII Introduction Loewe, has remarked, “The curtain is firmly drawn.”5 One early editor of an Exemplary Figures manuscript boasted of having “corrected” some 500 separate items in the text. But a later manuscript, supposedly derived from Li Gui’s 李軌 edition (compiled 335), to which Wu Mi’s 吳祕 commentary (before 1081) was appended, still had many variant characters in it.6 The number of textual variants that can be culled from extant Exemplary Figures editions is huge. The earliest extant complete commentary to Exemplary Figures (excluding scattered remarks preserved in the received literature), that by Li Gui, dates to a time nearly three hundred and fifty years after the compilation of Exemplary Figures, by which time Yang’s masterwork had already been adapted by many editors and commentators to new cultural contexts. Almost certainly, then, still more variants appeared in the early manuscript copies circulating among editors and commentators. Frankly, two millennia after the composition of Exemplary Figures, when multiple commentaries offer multiple readings, no translator can easily determine which variant more likely represents Yang’s original argument, especially given Yang’s love for double entendres and ambiguous phrases. Those versed in textual criticism typically argue the wisdom of an approach called lectio difficilior, in which “the harder reading” is thought more likely to be the earliest, since editors tend to revise manuscripts to make them more readable. In the case of Exemplary Figures, however, this approach often does not suffice, since there are several “hard readings,” each backed by one or more authoritative commentaries. In the main, there is a tendency for editions and commentators in late imperial China to inject a sort of moral purism more reminiscent of the True Way Learning (Daoxue 道學) than of Han modes of thinking,7 and so my translation reflects a general preference for earlier over later readings, unless cogent reasons militate against it. Major variants (defined as variants that give different meanings rather than simply different transcriptions) are usually cited in the footnotes to the Chinese text. Readers of classical Chinese may consult Wang Rongbao’s 汪榮寶 1899 Fayan yishu 法言義疏 for a more complete list of variants. Because so much of Exemplary Figures consists of dialogues between Yang and an unnamed interlocutor, the work is often described as “an imitation” of the Analects. However, substantial parts of Exemplary Figures are not in dialogues but...