The West As the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism

5. Chaos and the West

FIVE Chaos and the West Legendarily Yu the Great put all his efforts into serving the Heavenly Supremacy (Tiandi). He descended to the human world so to survey the nine prefectures (jiu zhou) and the four quarters of the country (si ye). Why would such a great person then capture the woman from Tu Mountain? And why did he commit adultery (sitong) at Taisang? After a sad intercourse, they conceived their descendants. Why did they enjoy temporary pleasure without a serious consideration of mutual belonging? (c.f. G. Lin, 1983, pp. 98–99) Qu Yuan reflected on the world by drawing from the liturgies of the shamanic dances of his country (Chu).1 In Tian Wen (Questions of Heaven), a text consisting of 178 sentences, Qu Yuan brought into question histories of the cosmos, the mandate, and the sovereigns. Among these 178 sentences, 44 are about cosmology, geography, and mythology; 72 are about the history of the three classical dynasties of Xia, Shang, and Zhou; and 24 are unclassifiable (Su, 2007 [1964], p. 1). The above are likely a few lines in which Qu Yuan implicitly questioned the moral virtue accorded to Yu the Great (Da Yu)—the mythical builder of the Mandate of Heaven. Under Zhou, many institutions of civility were installed; but they were attributed to the great ancient sovereigns. King Wen’s establishment of Zhou as an inter-cultural polity or a “civilization” was later re-asserted as Yu’s achievement. TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 117 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 117 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 118 Yu the Great supposedly realized the alternation of history in his victory over Ku, the warrior king, and was authorized by Heaven to reign with its mandate. As Granet puts it, “Yu the Great, the founder of the Hsia [Xia] Dynasty, has all the characteristics of a Sovereign; and indeed no sovereign more resembles a demiurge than this creator of Royalty” (Granet, 1930, p. 16). As the father of royalty, Yu was mythically autochthonic. However, the actual line along which he achieved his royalty ended in the termination of his own sacred autonomy. As soon as Yu became the Great, to continue his own bloodline, he was in need of the woman from Tu Mountain. In Qu Yuan’s representation, Yu the Great was simply the paradox of the sovereign itself. Qu Yuan’s Conscience Qu Yuan lived in the middle of the “axial age”; born in 340 B.C., he committed suicide in 278 B.C. As elsewhere at this time, civilization was fragmented. The rivalries within the kingdoms of the Chinese world were harmful to the unitary order of All under Heaven, but it stimulated the “paradigmatic individuals”: “Socrates, in the world, goes the way of thought, of human reason…. Buddha strives to annul the world by extinguishing the will to existence. Confucius aspires to build a world. Jesus is the world’s crisis” (Jaspers, 1962b, p. 93). As one of the greatest Chinese artists and thinkers of the age, Qu Yuan was extremely creative and open-minded. Su Xuelin (2007 [1964]) argued that Questions of Heaven was a synthesis of the Occidental mythology of genesis and Chinese cosmological and historical ideas. Although Su’s perspective may not be acceptable to most Chinese scholars, it points to the possibility of mutual influences between the great civilizations of the Eurasian landmass, and to differences between Qu Yuan’s thought and the Confucian ideal of civility prevalent at the time. As legend has it, Qu Yuan was devoted to high moral pursuits. As a model of virtue, he “emerged out of mud without being polluted” (chu yuni er buran). He had a special kind of “patriotism,” one that integrated his personality with his country’s integrity. His “patriotism” was, however, eroded by the king he served. In great despair, Qu Yuan isolated himself, escaped from the corrupt world of officialdom, and joined the realm of the shamanic. He sang songs to bring the sounds of TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 118 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 118 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM CHAOS AND THE WEST 119 Heaven down to Earth and to plunge himself into the worlds of the archaic sovereigns. Trying to rescue himself from total disillusionment, he embarked on a form of mental travel. He discovered traces of the virtuous sovereign Shun in the mountains and...