On the Authenticity of the Tz’u Attributed to Li Po

T'ang Studies 7 (1989) On the Authenticity of the Tz'u Attributed to Li Po DANIEL BRYANT UNIVERSITY OF VlCIDRIA I There are some questions to which a conclusive answer seems to become more remote the more they are discussed.! One conspicuous example in the field of Chinese literature concerns the various tz'u till poems attributed to the great T'ang poet Li Po *8 . TIle question is, did Li really write these poems? The course of the "who wrote Shakespeare?" debate suggests that any question of authenticity is likely to generate a good deal of discussion, much of it trivial, if a famous author is concerned. But the problem of Li Po's tz'u has a wider significance, one that makes its conclusive resolution a matter of considerable importance for the historical study of Chinese literature. If the poenlS are by Li, they represent the earliest significant body oftz'u poetry written by a well-known Chinese poet and show that even by the mid-eighth century the tz'u had developed to the extent that a writer recognized as belonging at least marginally to the literate governing class (and of course his marginality is a potential point of interest in the debate) could produce poems of a kind that would not appear again among the literati for another century. If the poems are not his, then we lack evidence even for "proto1 I wish to thank Professors Hans H. Frankel, Elling Eide, and Kang-i Sun Chang for their kindness and generosity in reading an earlier draft of this paper and pointing out a number of errors. I am also grateful to the University of Victoria for supporting mywork on this project with several research grants. Mer the paper was drafted, I had the opportunity to see Professor Frankel's recent conference paper, "The Problem of the Authenticity of the Eleven tz'u Attributed to Li Po" (to be published by the Academia Sinica in the proceedings of the conference at which it was presented), which brings new intrinsic evidence other than rhyming to bear on the question and comes to essentially the same conclusion as mine. It was Professor Frankel's paper that called the work of Lin Mei-i and LiHan-ch'ao (cited below) to myattention. Parts of my paper were presented at the Thirty-first International Conference of Orientalists in Japan, Tokyo, May, 1986 and the 1987 meeting of the American Oriental Society. 105 Bryant: The Authenticity of Li Po's Tz'u tz'u," single-stanza poems whose metrical patterns are only slight1yirregular , among the literati until more than a half century after Li's day and for "real" tz'u, such as some of those attributed to Li, until a full century after. Moreover, if the poems are not by Li Po or one of his contemporaries, then the dating of the body of anonymous tz'u discovered among the Tun-huang manuscripts may have to be reexamined as well, and the whole development period for the tz'u shifted toward a later date as a consequence. We shall begin our discussion by reviewing the evidence and the arguments considered hitherto. The controversy has been the occasion for some remarkable displays of erudition and ingenuity, but we shall find that many of these have been misdirected, for the evidence so far adduced is by nature inherently insufficient to resolve the real problems at issue. By taking into account a type of linguistic evidence not previously considered - the rhYming categories of the poems - it can be shown that in fact the majority of them, including all those most controversial in the past, cannot have been written by Li Po or by any of his contemporaries. The poems in question are listed in the accompanying table for reference, along with the abbreviations by which they will be referred to in the discussion to follow:2 2 The poems are given in the order of the Tang Wu-tai tz'u m11.it ~ of Lin Ta-ch'un ***-W (1929; rpt. Peking, 1956), where they appear on pp. 4-8. AIl the poems except PSM1 and PSM3 are included in the Ch...