Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China (review)

For the past fifteen years Alan Berkowitz has been publishing articles on "recluses" in early medieval China—men who "deliberately and habitually shunned a life of service to the state" and were deemed morally exemplary (p. 228), and even a few women whose views on the subject, fortunately for us, are recorded (p. 112). Scholars now have his long-awaited monograph on the subject to consult, along with Aat Vervoorn's Men of the Cliffs and Caves (Chinese University Press, 1990), which focuses on the Han and earlier periods. Berkowitz' book is carefully researched and reflects the author's thorough familiarity with both primary and secondary sources relevant to the subject.

Berkowitz begins his work with mentions of reclusion as an ideal and of exemplary recluses in pre-Han texts stretching back to Confucius' recorded sayings and early mentions of the perennial examples Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves rather than serve a ruler they considered unjust. In successive chapters he then moves down in time through the Western and Eastern Han, Wei, Jin, and the Northern and Southern dynasties, culminating with an examination of such Liang-era figures as Tao Hongjing. Along the way he translates a good selection of Chinese passages on reclusion as a general subject or on particular recluses, and this collection of translated materials is one of the book's most valuable assets. The book also includes a thorough bibliography (including generous citations of modern works by Chinese and Japanese scholars) and an index. While I admire the book and the scholarship that went into its making, I would like to raise a couple of questions; these are not meant to undermine readers' confidence in this work but simply to further scholarly discussion of its important topic.

One effect of the chronological arrangement of chapters is that the shape of Berkowitz' own arguments or claims about this voluminous material remains somewhat unclear; thematic chapters, or chapters organized around distinct questions or particular aspects of the material other than periodization, would have yielded a book in which the author's interpretations were more clearly in focus. That having been said, certain interpretive issues recur in the text. One methodological problem with which Berkowitz deals repeatedly, without ever quite reaching a satisfying position on it, is the extent to which texts about individuals reflect those persons' historicity versus the extent to which they use individuals' names as vehicles for deploying standard tropes and stereotyped imagery. Clearly some texts seem to deal more than others with the historical realia of people's lives, but beyond this it is impossible to say much with certainty, and behind this or that genre of text there is no other type or stratum of evidence to which we might appeal when assessing the "accuracy" of a textual portrayal. It is particularly when struggling to assess the extent of the "sincerity" or motivation of reclusive individuals (see esp. pp. 137, 173) that Berkowitz runs afoul of this problem in the nature of his sources—or rather, perhaps, in how he and many others wish to read such sources. No text of any kind, not even first-person statements, gives us unmediated access to the real intentions of historical actors or "what they were really thinking" (my phrase, not the author's), so the question of the factuality of this or that account of persons' feelings, motives, and character is, I fear, more or less doomed to be a non-starter. (It is not always an easy job to judge the motivations and character of people we know personally; to attempt this on the basis of stylized biographical narratives from the long-distant past is simply asking too much ofthe texts we have.)

What we can and should study, on the other hand, is the array of representations of recluses and of the shifting cultural concerns, tensions, alternatives, and...