Johns Hopkins University Press
  • The Consolidation and Transmutation of the Zhenguan-era (627–649) Court Ideology of Wen 文 (Cultural Forms)
Abstract

This essay argues that many of the compilational projects and scholarly works produced by the court of Tang Emperor Taizong 太宗 (r. 626–649) advance a coherent and novel set of claims about his person and his salvific participation in the realm of cultural forms (wen 文). These projects intervene in several previously disconnected sixth-century debates and suggest that their proper solutions are all related to one common narrative of the development, more-recent decline, and nascent reinvigoration of Chinese civilization. Although records of the contemporary reception of this narrative outside of the court do not survive, in the decades after Taizong's death it would be echoed, repurposed, and partially inverted by literati arguing the importance and authority of their own interventions in wen. These echoes of Taizong's court projects in literati work show that they had to some degree succeeded in unifying what had recently been a more-fragmented intellectual world.

Keywords

Early Tang, intellectual history, Classicism, literature

The standard place of the seventh century in accounts of Chinese intellectual history is epitomized by Ge Zhaoguang's 葛兆光 magisterial two-volume summary, where it serves as the intermission point in his narrative. Ge suggests that, coming "in the wake of the intense alterations" that characterized the preceding Period of Division, the seventh century was "an age of fusion, of consolidation, and of summing-up" wherein "all forms of knowledge and thought seem to have been [End Page 1] in the process of being summarized, harmonized, and regularized."1 This point, for Ge, is most powerfully demonstrated by the large compendia compiled and promulgated by the court of Tang Taizong 太宗 (Li Shimin 李世民, r. 626–649), in particular that court's encyclopedias, histories, and Classical commentaries, which "served to confirm and maintain the authority of the Classical tradition from the Han and Wei period onward as well as to give formal sanction to the widened scope of knowledge since the Han and Wei. Within this recognized world of knowledge, thought had a [delimited] freedom of understanding and interpretation, but … the center of the world of knowledge and thought was fixed and its margins had limits."2 Alongside "the political consolidation of the early Tang, this consolidation of the world of thought and culture" engendered what Ge calls "the mediocrity of a flourishing age," wherein "the mission of thought seemed to have come to an end," thought was "reduced to a set of meaningless texts and formulas to be memorized and recited," and the "intellectual stratum of society … gradually lost or abandoned the freedom to choose its future and to develop its thinking."3 In this sense, the seventh century makes for a logical break between the two halves of Chinese intellectual history, the deflating end of the dynamic transformations of early-to-medieval China and the stagnant background against which the intellectual revolutions that would culminate in (what has been called) China's "early modern period" would take shape.4

Ge cannot be faulted for depicting the intellectual ferment of the seventh century as less dramatic than the "intense alterations" it is sandwiched between, especially when it comes to most of the genres and topics that he includes within the purview of "intellectual history." This essay, however, will suggest that there were at least some significant debates under way. To this end, I will reread some [End Page 2] of the Zhenguan 貞觀 reign period (627–649) court compilations that ground Ge's observations about the cumulative character of the age, demonstrating first, that they claim not so much to be summarizing the tradition as intervening in it, and second, that they ground this intervention in a novel argument that wove together interrelated answers to a set of previously debated questions in heretofore disconnected domains of intellectual contention.5 I will then show that literati in the years following Taizong's reign recognized this argument and proposed alternate visions of the same set of issues.

These debates concern a topic of thought and a set of genres that have frequently been treated as lying outside of intellectual history and consigned instead to the domain of "literature": namely, wen 文 (cultural forms, most specifically literary writings).6 My contention will be that in this period, these genres could be argumentative and not merely aesthetic. And when it comes to wen as a topic of thought, the sources that survive suggest that the seventh century was a watershed moment. [End Page 3]

The Pre-Tang Background

All the ideas, motifs, and cultural problematics that would be combined in what I will call (for reasons to be discussed below) "the Zhenguan court ideology of wen" preexisted it by at least a century, often more. On the most basic level, for instance, that ideology's elevation of wen to crucial state significance has both distant precedents from the Han and proximate precedents from the Northern and Southern Dynasties.7 Perhaps the closest precedents derived from the southern state of Liang (502–557), which had witnessed "the rise of a cultural elite" who defined their status in part by their mastery of high-cultural forms, particularly literature, and who were, in turn, patronized by the imperial house of the Liang and put to work for it towards the production of voluminous textual projects—including encyclopedias, catalogues of the imperial collection, and literary anthologies—that represent important models for the even grander projects of wen that would be commissioned by Tang emperors Gaozu 高祖 (566–635, r. 618–626) and Taizong.8 Liang writers also employed a number of the tropes concerning wen's significance that would be invoked in Taizong's court productions. In his preface to the literary collection of his deceased elder brother Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531), for instance, the Liang prince Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–551, r. 549–551 as Liang Emperor Jianwen 梁簡文帝) begins with the following rhapsodic account of wen's importance: [End Page 4]

Great, indeed, and far reaching is the significance of wen!9 It is because [of wen's significance] that we can speak of Confucius' nature matching with the dao [of heaven], that Yao was called reverential and brilliant, that King Wu had the accomplishment of departing from Shang [after conquering it], and that Shun had virtue such that the Miao submitted.10 Thus the Yijing says we should "Observe the wen of heaven to gain insight into the changing times and observe the wen of mankind to complete the edifying transformation of the empire."11 Holding within refined qi and expelling luminescence are the constant behavior of the six guard [stars of the Southern Dipper asterism] and the nine gleams [of the sun]; and being comparable to pearls and similar to dragons is the glory of the Southern Polestar and the Northern Ridgeline asterisms.12 These are what is meant by "the wen of heaven." The birth of written records, the creation of texts and tallies, the arising of songs and odes, and the appearance of rhapsodies and lauds—these all complete filial piety and respect in human relationships, shift the folkways to match kingly governance, and [ensure that] the dao pervades the eight directions and order fills the nine regions, assisting and stirring the gods and harmonizing bells and chimes. These are what is meant by "the wen of mankind." Thus, embodying heaven's warp and unifying wen's weft, holding up sun and moon and harmonizing the pitchpipes—did this not all lie with [Xiao Tong]!13 [End Page 5]

竊以文之為義,大哉遠矣。故孔稱性道,堯曰欽明,武有來商之功,虞有格苗之德。故易曰:觀乎天文以察時變,觀乎人文以化成天下。是以含精吐景,六衞九光之度;方珠喻龍,南樞北陵之采。此之謂天文。文籍生,書契作,詠歌起,賦頌興,成孝敬於人倫,移風俗於王政,道綿乎八極,理浹乎九垓,贊動神明,雍熙鍾石。此之謂人文。若夫體天經而總文緯,揭日月而諧律呂者,其在茲乎!14

This passage is similar to the accounts of wen that would be produced roughly one hundred years later by Taizong's courtiers.15 There too the origins of wen are traced back to the ancient sages, and there too the Yijing is invoked to justify the claim that human wen both renders humanity a fit counterpart of heaven and plays an essential role in propagating moral values throughout the populace.

Unfortunately, however, because many of the compilations and works of textual scholarship produced at the courts of the Southern and Northern dynasties have been lost, it is impossible to know whether they anticipated Taizong's court ideology in other ways as well.16 What is certain is that nothing that survives from before the Tang founding brings together all the elements of that ideology, each of which were, to the contrary, subjects of significant controversy. Writers in the pre-Tang period discussed variously—in unconnected loci and divergent ways—three questions that Taizong's court ideology of wen answered at once. These three questions are: 1) the question of whether the dao 道 could be transmitted in texts; 2) the question of whether wen, and in particular literature, had seriously declined versus an earlier era; and 3) the question of who needed to take the lead in reversing the cultural crisis of the present age.

The first question, of whether texts can transmit the dao from those who know it to those who don't, is so famously ancient in the Chinese tradition that its loci [End Page 6] classici in texts like the Laozi 老子 and the Zhuangzi 莊子 need not be quoted here.17 By the sixth century, this question and the paradoxes generated by texts answering it in the negative were at the center of several intellectual traditions, including much scholarship of the Xuanxue 玄學 ("Obscure Learning") inflected variety. As John Makeham has noted, for instance, Huang Kan 皇侃 (488–545) in his Lunyu yishu 論語義疏 does not entertain the possibility that "worthies" (xianzhe 賢者) might become "sages" (shengren 聖人) through learning, maintaining instead that sages are fundamentally different from the rest of us in being "without a mind, … empty and still and at one with the dao, and thus without any thoughts" 聖人無心…豁寂同道,故無意也; in "having no emotions in their basic substance" 聖人體無哀樂; and in "being born with knowledge and recognition" 生而自有知識 such that they have no need to study or learn.18 Given these differences between most of us and the sages, the best that can be accomplished by even the second-best grade of people, "superior worthies" 上賢, is to "depend upon learning to fulfill their [limited] potential" 資學以滿分, a potential that does not include understanding the dao, which, Huang suggests, cannot be fathomed through study.19 This position seems to underlie Huang's account of the Classics.

The Six Classics [edited by Confucius] are but the fishtrap and snare of the sages; they have no purchase on the fish or rabbit….20 The [ultimate] meaning of the Six Classics' words thus cannot be heard in them. The reason for this is that Confucius' nature is matched in virtue with the great and endless universal dao; and this is so deep and distant that common sorts of people cannot understand it. Accordingly, we cannot get to hear his words on these topics.

六籍是聖人之筌蹄,亦無關於魚兔矣。……而六籍所言之旨,不可得而聞也。所以爾者,夫子之性與天地元亨之道合其德,致此處深遠,非凡人所知。故其言不可得聞也。21 [End Page 7]

Huang's own commentary, however, provides some evidence that this view of the Classics' inability to transmit the dao was not universal among Six Dynasties commentators, even those inclined towards Xuanxue. In another context, he cites an earlier Lunyu commentator, Sun Chuo 孫綽 (320–377), to the effect that "through exhaustive study and thorough understanding of the techniques [of the Yijing] one can attain it [i.e., knowledge of heaven's command 知命—one of Confucius' sagely attributes]. Not all have to be 'born knowing it'" 窮學盡數,可以得之,不必皆生而知之也.22 And the issue does not seem to have been settled in Huang's own time and place either. Huang's elder contemporary Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 440s–520s), for instance, writes in his great literary treatise Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 that "the dao used the sages to bequeath wen to the rest of us, and the sages used wen to clarify the dao" 道沿聖以垂文,聖因文而明道—suggesting, against Huang's argument that the Classics do not transmit the dao, that they might have some "purchase on the fish or rabbit."23 While this statement probably should not be read as a considered intervention into Classical scholarship, it does suggest that there was no firm orthodoxy on this question in the sixth century.24

Sixth-century thinkers seem likewise to have disagreed about the second question: whether wen had declined dramatically from the era of the sage kings. During the Liang dynasty, a number of writers argued that literary wen had not, in fact, endured a radical break from its normative sources; if contemporary writing, in particular, looked different from ancient writing, that was merely because, as Liu Xie put it, "transforming allowed it to remain vital" 變則可久.25 Xiao Tong, similarly, suggests that literature's transformation from the past to the present is comparable to the evolution of the "crude cart" 椎輪 into the imperial "Grand Carriage" 大輅, and Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯 (489–537) opines, somewhat more provocatively, that "the greatest problem in literature is writing that is ordinary or outdated. If a piece does not offer some novel transformation, it cannot be the [End Page 8] best of its age" 在乎文章,彌患凡舊。若無新變,不能代雄.26 There were, however, intellectuals who took a hardline stance against what they saw as the degeneracy of the age's wen. Pei Ziye 裴子野 (471–532), for instance, castigated his contemporaries for "their abandonment of the Six Principles [of the Classic of Poetry]" 擯落六藝, worrying that they were displaying in their writings "the sign of an age about to fall into disorder" 亂代之徵.27 And Li E 李諤 (d. ca. 591), more dramatically, wrote a memorial to the Sui emperor recommending that writers practicing "contemporary" literary styles be executed, since literary degeneration was partly responsible for the political instability of the last several hundred years.28

While Li E's petition suggests that literati sometimes looked to the imperial court for the resolution of cultural disputes, the proper locus of cultural authority was also a topic of active debate in the period. Claims for the cultural authority of the emperor and central court had reached an apogee in the Liang, when the courtiers of Liang Emperor Wu 梁武帝 (464–549, r. 502–549) argued that "if the composing and rectifying of ritual has through the ages rarely been accomplished, it is because it is only when there is an emperor of brilliance on the throne that the work can be done" 竊以撰正履禮,歷代罕就,皇明在運,厥功克成.29 For centuries, they wrote in a memorial prefacing the submission of a recently completed ritual code, emperors had devoted themselves to military matters and Daoist immortality practices, while "This Wen was preserved by officials [only, and [End Page 9] therefore] lost its proper order day by day" 官守斯文,日失其序.30 Liang Wudi, however, has changed this historical pattern by "ordering the age through wen" 經世以文, searching out scholars capable of creating that new ritual system and directing them that,

if there were doubtful points, the scholars in charge should first offer their own expositions, thoroughly consulting the established scholars of the five types of rituals as well as others who participated in the work.31 After everyone had discussed the differences [of interpretation], [the scholars in charge should then] compile them into lists to be sent to the emperor, who would decide them through imperial stipulation. Since there were many such points of doubt and much time passed [in the compiling of the work], he had to make a large number of such determinations, yet there was no instance in which he failed to completely comprehend the Classics and royal proclamations, accomplishing his goals with perfect completeness,32 [his grasp of] the meaning [of the canon] threading through the deep and subtle and its ordering principles matching with the numinous, [displaying understanding of] what previous Ru-scholars had not explained and what latter-day students had never heard about. All of these points of imperial determination are listed at the head of their respective scrolls in order to lay out his sagely teachings as a standard never to be blotted out.

若有疑義,所掌學士當先立議,通諮五禮舊學士及參知,各言同異,條牒啟聞,決之制旨。疑事既多,歲時又積,制旨裁斷,其數不少,莫不網羅經誥,玉振金聲,義貫幽微,理入神契,前儒所不釋,後學所未聞。凡諸奏決,皆載篇首,具列聖旨,為不刊之則。33

This text is one of the most important precursors of the early Tang ideology to be discussed below. Its vision of imperial prerogative was, however, only one of several [End Page 10] models pre-Tang intellectuals described in imagining a renovation of culture. Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–591), for instance, located the possibility of cultural renewal in men like himself, who represented a respectable house but did not (and did not aspire to) hold a high court position. For Yan, who had witnessed the cataclysmic destruction of the Liang library and mourned in it "the complete loss of This Wen throughout all under heaven" 溥天之下,斯文盡喪, states, courts, and even texts were too fragile to rely upon; the only hope of true social flourishing lay with learned men rebuilding culture from the family level up.34 Yet another model was offered by Wang Tong 王通 (ca. 584–617), a teacher with no official position who seems to have presented himself as entirely reorienting the textual culture of the last several centuries.35 Wang appears to have held that Classicist scholarship in the post-Classical age represented a thoroughgoing betrayal of the Classics themselves, which did not aim to inspire the complex traditions of exegesis that had taken root since the Han dynasty, but rather to point their readers back in the direction of the simplicity that had prevailed in earlier ages.36 For this reason, Wang did not write new commentaries, instead compiling new Classics out of materials from the post-Classical period. In this way, he seems to have figured himself as a sage in much the sense Confucius had been, and equally unrecognized by the benighted powers of the age.37

As we will see, Taizong's court would not definitively resolve any of these disputes about whether the dao could be transmitted in textual forms, whether and [End Page 11] when literary writing had declined, and who could intervene to restore the empire's culture. But if Tang intellectuals continued to debate these issues, they came to do so differently from their pre-Tang forebears. The pre-Tang works surveyed here, that is, take up these topics piecemeal: a position on who could rectify culture did not need to (and in practice generally did not) depend upon an answer to the question of whether texts can transmit the dao or whether contemporary literature aligned with proper norms, and answers to these questions tended not to be connected to rhapsodic discussions of the importance of wen. When, by contrast, writers in the second half of the seventh century stake out their own responses to these questions, they will often do so as a unit, engaging and repurposing the integral narrative of wen that Taizong's court develops to answer all of these concerns at once. In this respect, Taizong's court ideology of wen represents an intellectual consolidation mirroring—within the intellectual domains demarcated by these questions—the Tang's successful integration of the long-fragmented empire.

Taizong's Court Ideology of Wen

Given the complicated textual histories of the products of this court, a number of which were begun under Gaozu and revised multiple times before completion, it is difficult to know whether the Zhenguan ideology was intended to function as such an intellectual consolidation. Though we can reasonably assume, as Jack W. Chen has written, that Taizong's public emphasis on wen was meant to be understood as signaling a turn away from the military values (wu 武) that had won the Tang the empire towards a set of civil values more conducive to dynastic peace and longevity, it does not appear to me possible, based on surviving sources, to detail the process by which the fuller Zhenguan narrative was developed or how it came to be widespread in the court productions completed under Taizong's rule.38 There are, however, four points that can be gleaned about this process from [End Page 12] what survives: first, that this narrative seems not to have been emphasized in court-sponsored textual projects completed in Gaozu's reign (or, for that matter, in the Sui);39 second, that it appears clearly in texts composed in the first few years of Taizong's reign;40 third, that the narrative is not repeated in the prefaces or submission memorials (often written last) to those works of Taizong's court that were completed after his death, though it can sometimes be found within the works themselves, perhaps signaling that it had previously guided the compilation work but was no longer useful to Gaozong 高宗 (r. 649–683);41 and fourth, that where it does appear, it is generally depicted as a corporate understanding, not as the contribution of the specific writer. Taken together, these points suggest that the narrative represented something like a "court ideology" specific to Taizong's reign, rather than a collection of truths commonly held. It should be emphasized that this set of claims was, at most, merely one ideology among others in the [End Page 13] court's repertoire, and one, moreover, that was not so set as to preclude deviations, even in court-compiled products where one might expect to find it.42 But if this narrative was seen as useful enough to repeat in several works compiled by different committees over decades, it was perhaps in part because it was felt to provide an encompassing answer to a number of disputes within the relatively fragmented intellectual world in which Taizong's courtiers had grown up.

The narrative runs roughly as follows. The dao is constitutively obscure, and as such, it is capable of being fathomed only by sages. For this reason, sages create wen in order to establish on the basis of their esoteric understanding exoteric models—models that, if society is to flourish, must be broadly observed and imitated by people of less-than-sagely abilities. Yet this ideal grounding of manifest wen in the obscure dao creates a problem: namely, that non-sages can and must imitate normative wen, but they, by definition, have no unfailing ability to tell the difference between normative wen and semblances thereof. Wen, therefore, has a natural tendency to decline in the absence of a sage who can reestablish its connection to the dao. And indeed, wen has declined terribly over the past few centuries, reaching a crisis point at which the civilization founded by the ancient sage kings is on the verge of being lost. At this moment of crisis, however, Taizong appears and achieves rulership over the empire. For the first time in more than a millennium, China has a sage possessed of the mysterious insight necessary to rectify wen and thus to realign civilization with the dao, and that sage has the authoritative position to legislate his normative wen to non-sages who might otherwise not follow his lead. As such, both Taizong's enlightened governance and his textual projects are designed to save the Chinese world from a millennial decline.

A relatively clear and complete instantiation of this narrative can be found in Gao Jian's 高儉 (575–647) preface to the Wensi boyao 文思博要 ("The Comprehensive Essentials of the Thought Preserved in Wen"), a vast literary encyclopedia in 1200 scrolls completed in 641 by a team of scholars and high ministers.43 The first paragraph of the preface begins by outlining wen's importance for the empire's governance. [End Page 14]

Great indeed is the flourishing of written texts (wenji 文籍). They mold and delimit heaven and earth and secretly assists the numinous.44 If used among the bureaucracy, the hundred officers will be in good order, and if used among the people in their villages, the myriad surnames will be well-observed [by the government]….45 For this reason, the former kings used them to establish the principle [of their governments], and the sages used them to set forth their teachings, providing a teacher and model for a hundred generations and ordering all throughout the four seas.46

大矣哉,文籍之盛也。範圍天地,幽贊神明。用之邦國,則百官以乂;用之鄉人,則萬姓以察。……故先王以之建極,聖人以之設教,師範百代,彌綸四海。47

Next, Gao traces the history of wen from its creation by the sage kings of great antiquity. The tradition faltered, he writes, in the Spring and Autumn era when Confucius failed to attain the temporal authority his sageliness deserved. But This Wen did not come to an end at that point, since having failed to attain rulership, Confucius set about preserving the Classics, thereby "generously opening wide the gate of Ru-learning for a hundred generations" 誾誾焉闢儒門於百代 and establishing a scholarly inheritance that would perdure, tenuously, for several centuries. By the end of the Period of Division, however, the tradition had significantly decayed, and when the Sui collapsed, the "Royal Academy [first instituted by the ancient Zhou dynasty] was overrun by thorns and brambles and the Imperial Library [first established in the Han] was destroyed by fire. The nine streams of thought described by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92) at this point all flowed off with the rivers and were exhausted, and the four categories of text categorized by Li Chong 李充 (fl. early fourth c.) were scattered and lost throughout the [End Page 15] provinces" 辟雍蔓於荊棘,延閣殫於煨燼。孟堅九流,與川瀆而俱竭;弘度四部,隨岳牧而分崩.48

At this nadir of the cultural tradition, Taizong intervenes. "With a wisdom encompassing all within heaven and earth and a dao that reaches beyond the cosmos, he grasped the [martial] asterisms Shen and Fa to purify heaven's paces and ranged from the Kunlun mountains to the sea retying the mainstays of the earth" 智周乾坤之表,道濟宇宙之外,操參伐而清天步,橫崑海而紐地維. The empire thus pacified, Taizong turned his attentions immediately to wen, "[re-]establishing the Chengjun academies [first instituted under the ancient Zhou], whereupon [great scholars like] Liu An, Dong Zhongshu, Ma Rong, and Zheng Xuan sped to them; and opening Institutes for Revering Wen, at which [great writers like] Yang Xiong, Ban Gu, Pan Yue, and Jiang Yan gathered dense as fog" 置成均之職,劉董與馬鄭風馳;開崇文之館,揚班與潘江霧集. His capstone achievement, however, would be the Wensi boyao.

In his spare time from governance, our emperor turned his attentions to This Wen. As for its refined meanings, he exhausted the most numinous, and when it comes to its subtle words, he explored their secrets.49 He circled his storied boat on the seas of learning, obtaining treasures worth ten cities; he paused his feathered canopy within the forest of brushes, plucking the Three Pearls that grow on the immortals' trees.50 He recognized that in reading books what is important is getting the essentials, as then you can make use of the Ten Schools of thought at once; and that in observing the essentials it is important to be broad, so as to allow the Seven Categories of books to conduce to different [End Page 16] ends.51 If, however, one cannot hold together substance and ornamentation while differentiating among them, or intermix antiquity and the present while making them follow the same carriage tracks, then how will it be possible for the myriad things follow the same system of categories, and how could people all share the same aspirations over thousands of miles?

帝聽朝之暇,屬意斯文。精義窮神,微言探賾。紆樓船於學海,獲十城之珍;駐羽蓋於翰林,搴三珠之寶。以為觀書貴要,則十家並馳;觀要貴博,則七略殊致。自非惣質文而分其流,混古今而共其轍,則萬物雖眾,可以同類,千里雖遙,可以同聲?

These final sentences present the justification for Taizong's compilation of an imperial encyclopedia. Wondrously rich as the tradition of wen is, it needs to be comprehensively and comprehensibly unified if it is to play the role it should in consolidating an empire.

Other emperors and courts had previously tried to accomplish this goal, Gao continues, by compiling their own imperial encyclopedias. Those projects, however, failed, since "even though the point of their composition lay in being comprehensive, in their actual compilation, there has been much lacking" 雖草創之指,義在兼包,而編錄之內,猶多遺闕.52

Our emperor, therefore, turned his sagely passions [to the task of creating a new, better encyclopedia] and minutely applied to it his mysterious powers of understanding,53 condescending his judgment to correct the mistakes [of [End Page 17] previous encyclopedias] and establishing standards to remedy their departures from proper norms. He has thus rectified the net of heaven from his Penglai [Palace] such that both the overall order and its components roused themselves, speeding his cloud carriage within the bureau of documents such that his carriage tracks can be followed.54 [In this encyclopedia,] the meaning of the writings of sages and worthies are clear and the guidelines that are to be found in the textual tradition are comprehensively provided….55

The significance [of the Wensi boyao thus] goes beyond the Six Classics and encompasses the affairs of the hundred thinkers; it explores the rules of emperors and kings and covers the full extent of the teachings of sages and worthies; and in it the dao of heaven and earth is complete and the margin between heaven and man can be found.56 It shines like the sun and moon, taking their place in illuminating the earth below; it is brilliant as the constellations, and proceeds in their astral processions. This, truly, is the garden of all ancient canons and the ocean of all literary writings. For this reason, anyone in charge of imperial governance will revere its rule and charismatic virtue, anyone in charge of a family will revere its [manifestation of principles of] transformation and continuity, and anyone who works at compiling wen will revere its comprehensiveness. Truly it is sufficient, on the one hand, to observe all of antiquity, rendering it the same as [the primal sage] Fu Xi's composition of the hexagram and Decision statements of the Changes, and, on the other, to survey the hundred kings, thus overtaking the compilation of ritual and music by the Duke of Zhou and Confucius. How could it be likened to the mere stone-carving of the Classics in the Han capital or the Qin's [promulgation of a detailed legal code so effective it discouraged even [End Page 18] great criminals] from taking coins hanging in the marketplace?57 How could it be compared to Zuo Qiuming's (legendarily fl. 500 BCE) mere creation of a commentary for [Confucius' Spring and Autumn Annals] or equivalent to Sima Qian's (ca. 145–ca. 86 BCE) compilation of his [universal history]?58

帝乃親縈聖情,曲留玄覽,垂權衡以正其失,定準繩以矯其違。頓天網於蓬萊,綱目自舉;馳雲車於策府,轍跡可尋。述作之義坦然,筆削之規大備。……

義出六經,事兼百氏,究帝王之則,極聖賢之訓,天地之道備矣,人神之際在焉。昭昭若日月,代明於下土;離離若星辰,錯行於躔次。斯固墳素之苑囿,文章之江海也。是為國者尚其道德,為家者尚其變通,緯文者尚其溥。諒足以仰觀千古,同羲文之爻彖;俯觀百王,軼姬孔之禮樂。豈止刻石漢京,懸金秦市,比邱明之作傳,侔子長之著書而已哉?

Gao argues here that the Wensi boyao is not merely another entry in the cultural tradition, equivalent to the great works of Zuo Qiuming or Sima Qian, or even to the Six Classics compiled by Confucius. Instead, he suggests that the encyclopedia gathers everything essential from, organizes, and thus supersedes the entire precedent tradition, representing a refounding of wen akin to Fu Xi's civilizationinitiating composition of the Changes. It is dubious whether, in actual historical fact, Taizong could have had the "spare time" to participate personally in such a massive textual undertaking, the day-to-day business of which Gao ascribes, in a passage omitted from this translation, to fifteen high ministers.59 Yet no matter how august the rank of these ministers might have been, this line of argument requires that the encyclopedia's prime mover be a sage. Only such a sage, possessed of "sagely passions" and "mysterious powers of understanding," could accomplish what recent emperors and imperial courts had failed to accomplish with their own encyclopedias. Though they had sought to be broad and encompassing, they lacked Taizong's "wisdom encompassing all within heaven and earth," his "dao that reaches beyond the cosmos," his "sagely passions," and his "mysterious [End Page 19] understanding." As a result, they could not produce works capable of grounding their short-lived empires in wen in the way the sage kings of great antiquity had done with their much-more-successful polities.

By Taizong's time, there was several centuries' worth of precedent for flattering the emperor as a "sage." Yet Taizong's courtiers are remarkable for consistently elevating Taizong over past sages, and in particular over the sage most associated with This Wen as a textual tradition: Confucius.60 This claim, that Taizong's patronage of wen puts even Confucius in the shade, is particularly marked in Yu Shinan's 虞世南 (558–638) early Zhenguan-era stele inscription for the 627 court-sponsored renovation of the Confucius temple, a text we might expect to venerate the Master. Instead, Yu takes the opportunity presented by this renovation to recite the entire court narrative of wen, praising Taizong for restoring to its full glory the tradition Confucius had only tenuously preserved.61

The inscription begins by discussing the nature and ideal application of sageliness. As Yu tells it, sages possess a depth of understanding that is not shared by most people: "'To know the incipient is numinous,' and so only the sapient can be sages, for the realm of the mysterious and subtle is tenuous and faint and cannot be fathomed" 知幾其神,惟睿作聖;玄妙之境,希夷不 測.62 From the time of the Three Thearchs and Five Godkings 三五 all the way [End Page 20] to the early Zhou kings, however, the sages worked to translate their exceptional understanding into forms that would benefit others. They did this in part through "the coming into being of the Canons and Landmark Texts, through which their numinous accomplishments and sagely traces can be spoken about [even today]" 典墳斯著,神功聖跡,可得言焉.63 Just as important, they all became rulers, "responding to auspicious signs [concerning their rule] and receiving the Mandate of Heaven" 膺符受命, "their edifying transformation diffusing throughout the eight directions and their orders being practiced throughout the four seas" 化漸八方,令行四海. Both in their governing and in their texts, therefore, the ancient sages "bequeathed models for a hundred [later] kings and left behind their edifying influence for ten-thousand generations." 垂範於百王,遺風於萬代.

Confucius too was a sage, but his role in his age and in the tradition writ large was fundamentally different from that of previous sages. He too "held within the most refined qi of the Five Wefts [five visible planets], and he walked in the footsteps of a thousand years of sages, firm in upright substance empowered by heaven and endowed with virtue at birth when his spirit descended [into our world]" 夫子膺五緯之精,踵千年之聖,固天縱以挺質,稟生德而降靈, and like all sages, he was defined by uncommon sapience, "knowing the subtle and the manifest" 知微知章. He, however, lived in an era in which "the cycle of heaven was in decline and the mainstays of the earth were about to snap, and when the Zhou house was in ruins and the dao of his homeland of Lu was feebler by the day" 天曆寢微,地維將絕,周室大壞,魯道日衰. As a result, he was unable to attain to a high governing position and, after suffering various reversals, "returned from Wei to Lu, where he edited the Documents and fixed the Music, commented upon the dao of the Changes in order to fathom its refined subtleties, and edited the Spring and Autumn Annals in order to correct praise and blame" 自衞反魯,刪書定樂,贊易道以測精微,修春秋以正襃貶. This was, Yu avers, a magnificent accomplishment, one only possible for a sage "who embodied the dao and exhausted the numinous, was spiritual to the utmost degree and understood transformation" 體道窮神,至靈知化. Yet though Confucius thus ensured that, "since his time, the lingering fragrance [of the sagely tradition he transmitted] did not cease" 自時厥後,遺芳無絕, nonetheless the continuance of that sagely tradition was in the ensuing centuries far more tenuous than it had been in antiquity, with "times of [relative] enlightenment and times of darkness, times of difficulty and times of flourishing, each in turn" 而晦明匪一,屯亨遞有.64 [End Page 21] Finally, "when the essence of fire [representing the Sui] lost control of the empire, warlords and bandits rose like hornets or hedgehog quills, and military notices sped in all directions, such that the proper dao of the Classics and [related] texts came to an end" 炎精失御,蜂飛蝟起,羽檄交馳,經籍道息. By the end of the Sui, Yu writes, "the five types of ritual and the six types of music had been cut off and burnt to ashes. If these utmost teachings were to be made great again, it would truly need to be in the era of a sage" 五禮六樂,翦焉煨燼。重 宏至教,允屬聖期.

From this point in the preface onward, Yu turns to Taizong. It was at precisely this moment of peril, this nadir of the tradition, that

The great Tang house came to inherit the position of emperor, establishing a foundation that will last more than seven-hundred years.65 Magnificent truly are its kingly plans and bourgeoning is its luminous mandate;66 its great name is flourishing and resplendent, beyond my ability to praise it. Our emperor [Taizong], is diligent and enlightened, sapient and wise, making a third with heaven and a pair with earth,67 both sagely and numinous, truly wen and truly wu.68 When his work of ordering the world began, the age belonged to battling dragons [i.e. was at war], so he straightened his armor to restore a great heritage. His numinous strategies were unfathomable and his subtle calculations left nothing out, and so he greatly saved the empire from difficulty and pacified and unified the realm. He returned the folk to benevolence and longevity and brought the dao of rulership back to [where it had been with the ancient sages] Yao and Shun.69 [End Page 22]

大唐運膺九五,基超七百。赫矣王猷,蒸哉景命;鴻名盛烈,無得稱焉。皇帝欽明睿哲,參天兩地,迺聖迺神,允文允武。經綸云始,時維龍戰。爰整戎衣,用扶興業。神謀不測,妙算無遺,宏濟艱難,平壹區宇。納蒼生於仁壽,致君道於堯舜。

Here follows a rhapsodic account of Taizong's governing accomplishments, the moral virtues he has instilled in his population, and his pacification of more territory than had ever been governed by any previous Chinese dynasty, including that of the ancient sage kings. According to Yu, this restoration of Chinese civilization after a catastrophic decline represents an achievement "unprecedented since the beginning of the universe" 開闢以來,未之有也.

In the following section, Yu turns to detail Taizong's attentions to matters of wen specifically. Since Taizong recognized that "if he was to craft learned ministers [to aid his rule], it would necessarily be through institutes of higher learning, and if he was to improve his people through the dao and virtue, it would depend on schools" 括羽成器,必在膠雍,道德潤身,皆資學校, he therefore set to work rebuilding the education system—a project that included the renovation of the Confucius temple on which this inscription was written.70 Yu then takes up the topic of Taizong's own writing and his influence on the wen of the empire at large.

In his spare time from observing [and responding to] the incipient [i.e., governing in the way only sages, with their "knowledge of the incipient" can], the emperor also thoroughly perused the many books and then wrote his "Golden Mirror" to forever bequeath lessons and warnings, to exhaustively demonstrate the way sages use their minds, and to magnify the subtle meanings of the great teachings [of the sages], such that the wondrous dao and its heavenly wen are resplendently complete in it.71 His crown prince takes to heart the venerability of inheriting from him and, embodying excellent virtue appropriate to his position,72 condescends his passions to the arts of the Ru [End Page 23] and roams his mind in the Classics. The poetry of Chu overflows with the Six Principles [of the Classic of Poetry] and in Pei they learn the Yijing from its nine [early Han] masters.73 The many officials have inclined their hearts [to the throne,] famous Ru scholars have come in crowds so tight they were treading on each other's heels, and all within the four seas have bent like grass in the wind.74 It has become the common folkway to hold the Classics in one's robes and to drum on one's bookboxes, to raise one's hems in order to enter the inner chambers.75 When he shone his mirror upon us, it was like clouds opening up; when he included all in his repast, it was like a spring bursting forth.76 Since our white silk has been dyed and our plain jade carved [by imperial influence],77 it is as if [Taizong] had relied upon [many people] overturning baskets [of soil] and thus built a mountain, or like he had guided trickles and streams so that they formed an ocean.78 Great indeed! Thus we know that advancing learning is essential [for governance], and that the magnifying of the dao depends upon [there being the right] man [in a position of authority].79

皇上以幾覽餘暇,遍該羣籍,乃製金鏡述一篇,永垂鑒戒,極聖人之用心,宏大訓之微旨,妙道天文,煥乎畢備。副君膺上嗣之尊,體元良之德,降情儒術,遊心經藝。楚詩盛於六義,沛易明於九師。多士伏膺,名儒接武,四海之內,靡然成俗,懷經鼓篋,攝inline graphic趨奧。並鏡雲披,俱餐泉湧,素絲既染,白玉巳雕,資覆簣以成山,導涓流而為海。大矣哉。然後知達學之為貴,而宏道之由人也。 [End Page 24]

Finally, Yu concludes the inscription by proclaiming that Taizong "is propagating the teaching of wen through the six institutes of learning and carrying forward the influence of the ancient sage kings after a thousand-year hiatus" 宣文教於六學,闡皇風於千載.80 Insofar as the term used for "ancient sage kings" here recalls the most ancient "Three Thearchs" 三皇 mentioned at the very beginning of the inscription, this claim brings the text full circle, suggesting that whereas Confucius preserved tenuously but could neither fully activate nor truly save the legacy of the ancient sage kings, Taizong has restored sagely rule.

In a text ostensibly written to glorify a temple dedicated to Confucius, it may seem counterintuitive that Yu Shinan should work to suggest here that Confucius was a sort of sage manqué, the only sage in a line stretching back to great antiquity who failed to achieve rulership and thus order the world. The point, however, is to elevate Taizong as a sage without parallel in the past millennium, a savior of wen who has reconnected the wayward tradition to its fundamental sources. Tellingly, Taizong's "magnification of the dao" 宏道 seems merely to have "depended upon [there being the right] man" 由人. Whereas Confucius only managed to "preserve himself" 周身 in a period when the dao was in decline, Taizong was able to intervene in a catastrophically declining cycle to decisively change the culture.

The parallels between Yu Shinan's narrative of wen, composed near the beginning of Taizong's reign, and Gao Jian's, composed near the end, should, I think, be apparent. One point of similarity that deserves special attention, however, concerns the language of "mystery" 玄, "subtlety" 微, "secretness" 賾, and "numinousness" 神 that consistently characterizes sagely understanding in these texts and that encodes an account of sagely activity that is explained more explicitly in other writings from Taizong's court. The Wujing zhengyi ("Corrected Meanings of the Five Classics") series of Classical subcommentaries, for instance, declares that, although the sages created the Classics "basically in order to provide teachings" 本以垂教, those Classics cannot actually transmit the dao to readers, since "the dao is Negativity" 道即无也, and "teachings can only teach about Actuality" 教之所備,本備於有.81 This point, indeed, is essentially definitional [End Page 25] for the Zhengyi, since "the dao" and "Negativity" are merely alternate names for what cannot be truly named or truly understood by anyone but sages: "speaking of it in virtue of its substance [i.e., it has no form], it is called Negativity; in virtue of its providing a path for things, it is called dao; and in virtue of its being subtle, wondrous, and unfathomable [to most people], it is called numinous:… in these ways, the sages gave it [various] names by analogy to [comprehensible] human affairs" 以體言之謂之无,以物得開通謂之道,以微妙不測謂之神,…聖人以人事名之.82 For the Zhengyi, therefore, it is the characteristic work of the sages that they provide everyone else with exoteric translations of fundamentally esoteric truths—a point that, because I have discussed it at length elsewhere, I will not recite the full evidence for here.83 What is worth noting at this juncture is that the Zhengyi's vision of the sages is implicit in the narratives of wen's decline and restoration in both Gao Jian's Wensi boyao and Yu Shinan's inscription on the Confucius temple, each of which claim that it was Taizong's "mysterious powers of understanding" 玄覽 that allowed him to reground a tradition that had survived only tenuously since the time of the last sage, Confucius. Because no one but a sage can peer into the "realm of the mysterious and subtle" 玄妙之境, no one from Confucius' time to the end of the Sui had been able to "broadly" recognize all the "essentials" of the textual tradition, or to distinguish them from the excrescences that had begun to smother it in the post-Classical period.

To some degree, this account of the sages represents the legacy of Xuanxue. Yet the court ideology's incorporation of Xuanxue ideas was complex, insofar as its narrative of wen's decline often blamed Xuanxue itself, along with other religious and literary movements associated with it, for perverting the tradition away from its normative roots. This complexity is most obvious in the court-compiled Jingji zhi 經籍志 ("Treatise on the Classics and Texts [of the states of the sixth century]"), begun in 641 under Taizong and now attached to the Sui shu 隋書.84 [End Page 26] Like the Wujing zhengyi, this text makes it clear that sages base their exoteric teachings upon esoteric insights they cannot transmit to non-sages. It is, however, even more explicit than the Zhengyi in discouraging non-sages—that is, essentially everyone—from seeking out the esoteric sources of those teachings.

The dao is the mystery of the myriad things, the utmost secret of the sages…. It is refined and subtle, pure and unmixed, such that none can know its substance. Within yin it becomes one with yin, but within yang it is not [therefore] different from yang.85 The benevolent depend on the dao to complete their benevolence, but the dao cannot be called benevolent; the wise depend on the dao to be wise, but the dao cannot be called wise; the common folk depend on the dao on a daily basis, but they do not understand its function in their lives.86 The sages embodied the dao as their nature, preserving themselves void and pure, accomplishing and not being arrogant about it, growing things and not dominating them.87 Therefore, they did not need to tax their intelligence, yet their people transformed of their own accord; and they did not make use of laborious methods of rule, and yet their achievements naturally came to completion. The mysterious power [of the dao] is thus deep and distant, and cannot be fathomed with words or images.88 For this reason, the Former Kings were afraid that people would be confused, and placed [these mysteries] "beyond the bounds";89 thus the Six Classics rarely discuss them. [End Page 27]

道者,蓋為萬物之奧,聖人之至賾也。……至於道者,精微淳粹,而莫知其體。處陰與陰為一,在陽與陽不二。仁者資道以成仁,道非仁之謂也;智者資道以為智,道非智之謂也;百姓資道而日用,而不知其用也。聖人體道成性,清虛自守,為而不恃,長而不宰,故能不勞聰明而人自化,不假修營而功自成。其玄德深遠,言象不測。先王懼人之惑,置于方外,六經之義,是所罕言。90

This same point is made again in the Jingji zhi's discussion of the "beyond-thebounds teachings" 方外之教 of Daoism and Buddhism 道佛, which claims that although the true cores of these religions represent the distant purport of the [Confucian] sages" 聖人之遠致也,

when people of common intelligence practice them, they do not understand their true meaning and go off into abstruse absurdities, their suppositions and illusions creating disorder in the age, which is why [these religions] are so deleterious. Therefore, the [sages'] teachings aiming at harmony and constancy [i.e. those in the Classics] rarely discuss [this distant purport].91

俗士為之,不通其指,多離以迂怪,假託變幻亂於世,斯所以為弊也。故中庸之教,是所罕言.92

For the authors of the Jingji zhi, in other words, intellectual and religious traditions that inquired into the more esoteric insights of the sages were positively dangerous, which explains why the tradition of Classicism declined particularly precipitously from the Jin dynasty onwards, in the period that witnessed the rise of Xuanxue, the establishment of Buddhism, and the propagation of religious Daoism throughout both north and south China.

Now when the Former Kings established their teachings, they did so in order to restrain human desires, and for this reason they always based them on human affairs and moderated them by means of the middle path.93 They rarely discussed the mandate of heaven and of course did not discourse on truths "beyond the [End Page 28] bounds." Yet in the Eastern Han [scholars] loved apocrypha and in the Jin they valued Xuanxue discourse, [rashly] boring into [these mysteries] and day by day producing more absurd works. The correct canons of the Former Kings were intermixed with strange absurdities, and the teachings of the Major Elegantiae [i.e., the Classics] were muddied by unrestrained bombast.94 Things continued to decline up to recent times, with [scholars] becoming increasingly distant from the correct and no longer possessing the method of teaching and being taught [the tradition].95 In studying [the Classics] they did not understand them,96 so they singlemindedly praised one another for their ornate trivialities, creating all sorts of miscellaneous difficulties….97 They flaunted their excessive verbiage, tangling the normal order of things, such that disputation became the common folkway and none recognized it.

且先王設教,以防人欲,必本於人事,折之中道。上天之命,略而罕言,方外之理,固所未說。至後漢好圖讖,晉世重玄言,穿鑿妄作,日以滋生。先王正典,雜之以妖妄,大雅之論,汩之以放誕。陵夷至于近代,去正轉疎,無復師資之法。學不心解,專以浮華相尚,豫造雜難……馳騁煩言,以紊彝敍,譊譊成俗,而不知變。98

Much this same narrative is also repeated in the Jingji zhi's account of literary writing in the period leading up to the Tang. "After the Yongjia period (307–313)," the editors write there, "the wind of Xuanxue was blowing and phrasing became so monotonous that wen lost its power of salutary moral influence, so that reaching the period of the Southern Dynasties, its ruination could no longer be overcome" 永嘉已後,玄風既扇,辭多平淡,文寡風力,降及江東,不勝其弊. The north at the time was no better, having been characterized by "military disorder for so many years that the dao of wenzhang ceased entirely" 兵亂積年,文章道盡. [End Page 29] And by the Sui, literary culture had declined so far that it approved the old truism that "through the presentation of its poetry and the observation of the mores [implicit in that poetry], one can foretell the ruin of a state" 陳詩觀風,斯亦所以關乎盛衰.99

Because it is a retrospective treatise on the textual culture of the sixth century—and perhaps because, though it was commissioned by and largely written under Taizong, it was only finalized in 656, seven years after his death—the Jingji zhi does not narrate the Zhenguan restoration of wen.100 Other works of Taizong's court can, however, be seen as enacting the basic vision implied in the Jingji zhi of how an emperor might create such a restoration: that is, simultaneously regrounding wen in sagely insight and pointedly discouraging non-sages from inquiring into its esoteric sources. Perhaps the most obvious in this respect is the Qunshu zhiyao 群書治要 ("Essentials for Governance from the Many Books"), a court-sponsored compilation that abridges the Classics, Masters Texts 子書, and histories from the sagely epochs to the Jin dynasty.101 In the preface for this compendium, submitted in 631, Wei Zheng 魏徵 (580–643) recites once again the familiar narrative of wen's history, arguing that, despite its importance in governing the empire and its august derivation from the Sage Kings, it has suffered a precipitous decline in recent centuries. Wei then goes on to contrast Taizong's work in wen with that of recent emperors who were unduly influenced by Xuanxue and the debased and trivial literary culture of the Southern Dynasties that the Jingji zhi associated with it.

Recent emperors have often written texts, and they all claim to encompass heaven and earth and encage the myriad beings,102 competing with each other [End Page 30] to pick out phrases of trivial beauty and vying to speed their abstruse and absurd theories. They thus give rein to what they have heard in debased traditions of learning and take as their teachers those who have mastered the minor art of insect carving, flowing on heedless without turning back, following many paths all to reach the same point.103 Though they have discriminated completely the ten-thousand things, they have increasingly lost the source that allows one to control them; and though they have discoursed pervasively on the hundred minor schools of thought, they have increasingly departed from the meaning that allows one to grasp their unity.104

Our emperor, however, by means of abilities imbued in him by heaven, revolving sapient thoughts that arise from his innate knowledge, with a nature that matches with the dao,105 moving with the miraculous springs of the numinous and a mysterious virtue that secretly pervades all, exercises edifying transformation over [populations] no previous king ever edified and, in reducing his own portion to benefit others, accomplishes what the line of sages up to this point could not accomplish. [The previously non-Chinese] wildernesses of Hanhai and Longting have been made into provinces, and in the [mythologically distant] regions of the Fusang and the Ruomu, all wear [Chinese] caps and sashes.106 Heaven and earth have been pacified, internal and external regions experience prosperity, and though Taizong has accomplished this, he does not take it for granted, and though he is [now apparently] at rest [from his martial conquests], in fact he does not rest. [Instead of resting, that is, he uses his time now to] gaze down and match [his governance with the ancient sage kings] Yao and Shun and upwards to follow his investigations of antiquity, using as his mirror not still water but previous wise men.107 Knowing, moreover, that the Six Classics have become so tangled and the hundred schools of thought so disordered that understanding principle and completing one's nature have become nigh impossible tasks [for most people], and that though in reading broadly [such people] might thus become widely learned but [End Page 31] nonetheless impoverished in their knowledge of the essentials,108 he ordered his officials to make selections from the many books, cutting out what was absurd and unrestrained and making clearly evident their canonical lessons.

近古皇王,時有撰述,並皆包括天地,牢籠群有,競採浮艷之詞,爭馳迂誕之說。騁末學之傳聞,師雕蟲之小技,流宕忘返,殊途同致。雖辯周萬物,愈失司契之源;術總百端,彌乖得一之旨。

皇上以天縱之多才,運生知之睿思,性與道合,動妙機神,玄德潜通,化前王之所未化;損己利物,行列聖所不能行。瀚海龍庭之野,並爲郡國;扶桑若木之域,咸襲纓冕。天地成平,內外禔福,猶且爲而不恃,雖休勿休。俯協堯舜,式遵稽古,不察貌乎止水,將取鑒乎哲人。以爲六籍紛綸,百家踳駁,窮理盡性,則勞而少功;周覽泛觀,則博而寡要。故爰命臣等,採摭群書,剪截浮放,光昭訓典。109

We see here once again the basic epistemological stratification characteristic of the Zhenguan ideology of wen. On the one hand, there is the sagely Taizong, possessed of innate access to realms of mystery and numinousness, and there is his court, tasked with translating his insight into normative wen. And, on the other hand, there is the literate populace at large, which needs to be shielded from "abstruse and absurd theories" speculating into those realms of mystery and numinousness and from the non-normative wen that has accompanied them. The Qunshu zhiyao, as the normative wen produced by Taizong and his court for the consumption of his populace, lies between these strata as the medium through which literary governance operates, providing epitomes of the great works of the tradition that pointedly excise their speculations into the obscure and instead direct readers towards "what our Sage [Taizong] wants [readers] to focus on: working at the techniques of good governance" 聖思所存,務乎政術.

A relatively clear example of how the Qunshu zhiyao exercises this sort of literary governance can be found in the last and latest text it excerpts, Ge Hong's 葛洪 (283–343) Baopuzi 抱朴子. The Baopuzi may seem like a surprising inclusion, given that this Eastern Jin text is primarily studied nowadays for the Daoist immortality practices that constitute the core concern of its "Inner Chapters" 內篇. Yet the Qunshu zhiyao selects exclusively from what have been [End Page 32] called the "Confucian" "Outer Chapters" 外篇 of the Baopuzi; highlights among those chapters passages that express Ge Hong's scorn of people who "value what is distant and so overlook what is close" 貴遠而賤近 or "believe their ears and doubt their eyes" 信耳而疑目; and seems to focus especially on those sections Robert Ford Campany has identified as "voic[ing Ge Hong's] opposition to the entire repertoire of ideas, practices, narratives, and personages that had come to be associated with the by then loaded expressions xuanxue 玄學 and qingtan 清談."110 By ending with this selection, in other words, Taizong's court seems to be making a point: that even the renowned Daoist master (and according to some, transcendent [xian 仙]) Ge Hong had disdained Xuanxue and its cultural influence, which encouraged too free speculation into the obscure and too much non-normative literature. Yet Xuanxue and its cultural influence later became so pervasive that it guaranteed the next 250 years would leave no texts worth excerpting.

To state what I hope is already obvious, the account of the Qunshu zhiyao given in Wei Zheng's preface and backed up by this decision to end the compilation with these excerpts from the Baopuzi runs diametrically counter to the common contemporary assumption that the massive compilations of Taizong's court were meant to symbolize the all-embracing character of his reunified empire.111 Instead, the Qunshu zhiyao suggests that while Taizong himself understood the whole tradition, he was making choices in his compilations about what literati should study and what they should forget.112 These compilations were, in other words, designed to place intellectual and literary limitations on the literati and to discourage unrestrained cultural production of the sort that had, according to several Zhenguan-era court works, destabilized several of the short-lived dynasties of the Period of Division.113

This desire to curb the ambitions of the literati accounts for some of the disparagement of the enterprise of literary writing that is found in Zhenguan court productions, despite their overall investment in the value of wen. Consider, for [End Page 33] example, Li Baiyao's 李百藥 (565–648) comments on the "Garden of Wen" 文 苑 biographies of literary men in the court-commissioned Bei Qi shu 北齊書 ("History of the Northern Qi").

Afar we hear that in the three ages of antiquity, what threaded through a hundred generations was the [sagely] instituting of ritual and the creation of music, the galloping of moral substance and the soaring of tones, for if words are without alluring pattern (wen), then how can they travel far?114 And Confucius' saying—"Now that King Wen is dead, is not wen lodged in me?"—shows that great sages followed one after another for a thousand years.115 In that period, there were also an uncountable number of outstanding worthies who might stand out from a crowd. It was, however, appropriate for all of them to simply sheathe their brushes and put aside their paper, unable to even speak about wen: this is because "talent is difficult to come by—is this not the truth!"116

Reaching to the time of [Confucius' disciples] Ziyou and Zixia, who used patterned words to stake a claim to beauty; Yan Hui, who was almost on the verge of being a sage;117 Qu Yuan and Song Yu, who were like dust in their wake; and Sima Xiangru and Yang Xiong, who [simply] could not stop writing—from this point on talented literary writers were endless like the waves and the clouds, stirring up the feathered array of mandarin ducks and egrets and letting loose their dragon-carving of patterned jades, with people claiming that they had found the [mythical] black pearl from the Crimson River118 or had whipped the speeding lightning to [the home of the immortals in] the Kunlun range, blooming the four kinds of flowers in the spring and forming the myriad fruits of the autumn.

However, [true] wen arises from feelings [properly] stirred within.119 Human feelings are imbued with the most exceptional [qi] of the [universe's] [End Page 34] five phases, and when those feelings are stirred by the natural phenomena [of the universe], they accord with the order of the seasons. Thus one who has perfect understanding imbued by Di and whose many abilities are endowed by heaven, who can expostulate on the ritual array [of a ruler] because he is born knowing it, who can be asked about the jade plaques [of ministers] because of his advance perception120—[his production of wen] can be compared to the figured clouds naturally turning five different colors or the phoenix mysteriously matching with the eight tones [of the scale]: it is the unique achievement of one stirred by the most outstanding numen, and not something that can be achieved by hard work.

Yet even if one's feelings and thoughts are lowly and blocked up and the gates [of one's spirit] do not allow passage, if one nonetheless bows one's breast without slacking,121 looking up at and boring into [the dao of writing] with earnest endeavor, engaging with the best sort of men and congregating with friends who improve one,122 forcing oneself to study to broaden what one has seen and heard and single-mindedly withdrawing from all thoughts of profit, embellishing one's paintings with red and green and carving and chiseling to complete one's implements—in such a case one can learn it [wen] through study, which is good enough at least to [reach the level of] the worthies.123

逖聽三古,彌綸百代,制禮作樂,騰實飛聲,若或言之不文,豈能行之遠也。子曰:文王既沒,文不在茲?大聖踵武,邈將千載。其間英賢卓犖, [End Page 35] 不可勝紀,咸宜韜筆寢牘,未可言文,斯固才難不其然也。至夫游、夏以文詞擅美,顏回則庶幾將聖,屈、宋所以後塵,卿、雲未能輟簡。於是辭人才子,波駭雲屬,振鵷鷺之羽儀,縱雕龍之符采,人謂得玄珠於赤水,策奔電於崑丘,開四照於春華,成萬寶於秋實。然文之所起,情發於中。人有六情,稟五常之秀;情感六氣,順四時之序。其有帝資懸解,天縱多能,摛黼黻於生知,問珪璋於先覺,譬雕雲之自成五色,猶儀鳳之冥會八音,斯固感英靈以特達,非勞心所能致也。縱其情思底滯,關鍵不通,但伏膺無怠,鑽仰斯切,馳騖勝流,周旋益友,強學廣其聞見,專心屏於涉求,畫繢飾以丹青,彫琢成其器用,是以學而知之,猶足賢乎已也。124

Put simply, Li Baiyao is suggesting here that most writers will never reach the level of the sages and that it might be appropriate, therefore, if they "sheathed their brushes and put aside their paper," as did the majority of the worthies in the millennium before Confucius' time, from which little wen survives. This does not mean, of course, that contemporary writers cannot aspire to praiseworthy achievements; it simply means they must do so with checked ambitions. They must limit themselves to emulating those who are born with god-given talents and following the models they have produced, without hope of equaling or surpassing them.

Zhenguan texts also lay a similar injunction on those literati who were inclined to scholarship, rather than literature. According to the Jingji zhi, "Ruscholars are those who assist the ruler in clarifying his edifying transformation [of his populace]. When the sages teach, they cannot personally go to the doors of each of their people, so they have Ru-scholars who propagate and clarify [their teachings]" 儒者,所以助人君明教化者也。聖人之教,非家至而戶說,故有儒者宣而明之.125 Such Ru-scholars should, the editors enjoin, not be like those "vulgar Ru who, when they engage in this activity, do not pay attention to the root [of this teaching], and merely want to impress others, setting forth many tricky puzzles and using artful language and clever theories that end up disordering the greater whole and making it difficult for students to understand" 俗儒為之,不顧其本,苟欲譁眾,多設問難,便辭巧說,亂其大體,致令學者難曉.126 Instead, they should confine themselves to propagating the sages' "teachings of harmony and constancy, that which did not change throughout the rule of a hundred kings," 中庸之教,百王不易者也—teachings, as we saw in [End Page 36] another passage from the Jingji zhi cited above, that could be contrasted with those same sages' more obscure "distant purport" 聖人之遠致.127 As was the case in Li Baiyao's discussion of literary pursuits, then, the editors of the Jingji zhi suggest that literati inclined to scholarship on the Classics should confine their ambitions to disseminating and clarifying the circumscribed wen that the sages have determined is appropriate for the rest of us, rather than boring into anything abstruse or proclaiming novel ideas.128

Repurposing the Court Narrative

Given how little survives to us from the first half of the seventh century, it is difficult to discern the full range of responses literati outside the court might have had to the court ideology promulgated in these works. Some surely must have recognized its glorification of Taizong—not merely over Confucius, but even more obviously, over Taizong's recently deposed father, Gaozu, whom it afforded no place whatsoever in the narrative of the Tang's restoration of wen (or, in some cases, even its military victories!)—for the brazen cant it was, while others might have been encouraged merely by the ideology's emphasis on wen, rather than wu. Whatever the case may have been in the Zhenguan era, however, texts from outside the court that show the influence of the court narrative begin to appear in the [End Page 37] record during the reign of Gaozong and then the rule, effective and later official, of Empress Wu 武后 (Wu Zhao 武曌, r. as Empress of the Zhou dynasty 690–705). Insofar as none of these courts publicly valorized wen or produced compilations of wen with anything like the focus of Taizong's, it is doubtful that literati who echoed and repurposed the Zhenguan court narrative at these later moments did so primarily because they felt it a present imposition on their freedom or an affront to their prerogatives. Instead, the authors who echoed Taizong's court narrative seem to have done so because they found its concatenation of previously disparate areas of disputation useful for their own projects—with, however, a few important modifications.129

A full survey of early Tang works that might represent responses to Taizong's court projects is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I propose to examine a single genre—prefaces to a writer's collected works (ji xu 集序)—that shows a significant engagement with the issues brought together by the Zhenguan court ideology of wen for several decades after Taizong's death. There are a few reasons why this genre was a natural arena for writers to engage with the claims Taizong's court had made about their art. As seen above in a brief citation of Xiao Gang's preface for the literary collection of his brother Xiao Tong, for instance, discussions of wen's importance, parallel to those that often introduce Taizong's court projects, had been a standard feature of such collection prefaces for over a century. Also characteristic of the genre—and important for the counterclaims these early Tang writers would use it to make against Taizong's arrogation of sagely prerogative—was the longstanding precedent of claiming that the author of the literary collection in question was a special individual, in some cases even a sage. Xiao Gang himself had gone on from his rhapsodic account of wen's importance to argue that his brother "exhausted the numinous and was fully sagely" 窮神盡聖, and even earlier, Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508) had depicted Wang Jian 王儉 (452–489) as "having been born with the talent to lead the age, embodying the flower of the Three Principals and treading the path of getting it at the second stage, truly the brightness of the Mao asterism come to earth, refined qi of great virtue descended to our world" 誕授命世,體三才之茂,踐得二之機,信乃昴宿垂芒,德精降祉.130 These generic features of collection prefaces do, of [End Page 38] course, require us to be circumspect about ascribing the appearance of like tropes in the Tang genre to the influence of Taizong's compilations. When, however, a preface combines these features with a discussion of whether the obscure dao can be transmitted in texts and a historical narrative of wen's decline and restoration—a narrative that either explicitly features or pointedly excludes Taizong's Zhenguan reign—we can sometimes sense that that preface is responding, whether directly or through intermediaries, to the court narrative.

The clearest example here is also the earliest, dating from a period in which the memory of Taizong's court ideology was likely still fresh in the minds of many. The preface in question was written by Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 (ca. 634–ca. 684) for Lai Ji 來濟 (610–662), one of the literary courtiers who served Taizong in his compilation projects.131 Perhaps with this service in mind, Lu largely recapitulates the Zhenguan court narrative, including its central claim that wen was saved from its epochal decline during Taizong's reign. Yet Lu suggests that the credit should properly go not to Taizong himself, but rather to the courtiers who actually performed the literary work of his court. These courtiers, Lu suggests, were not born sages; instead, they merely engaged appropriately with the tradition of wen. It is this tradition, he argues, rather than some inborn insight into the obscure, that allows

the way by which states can be improved132 and the cultural legacy bequeathed by the ancient sages and a hundred previous generations to hang like the sun and moon within our breasts, placing wind and clouds at the tips of our brushes.133 Holding within the regulations of past and present, [this tradition] allows us to strike the appropriate notes on the scale. At its most subtle it enters and exits where there is no gap, and at its most broad, it regulates the cosmos.134 [End Page 39]

齊魯一變之道,唐虞百代之文,懸日月於胸懷,挫風雲於毫翰。含今古之制,扣宮徵之聲。細則出入無間,麤則彌綸區宇。135

Lu disagrees, in other words, with the synthesis offered in the Zhenguan court productions Lai Ji himself participated in: that because wen does not transmit the dao, it requires the periodic intervention of a born sage to rectify it. Instead, for Lu, the tradition of wen can itself serve as the rectifying force, if only literati will inherit and continue it as Lai Ji and his colleagues at the Zhenguan court did.

Lu begins his preface by recounting the history of This Wen from its glorious origins to its ruination in the sixth century. Yet though the general thrust of the account thus echoes the Zhenguan narrative, Lu affords the tradition itself more agency than the Zhenguan court had done.

Of old, a dragon [Confucius] crouched in Lu in the east and laid out normative Ritual and Music in order to save the myriad folk; but a tiger [the first emperor of Qin] grasped Qin in the west and burned the Poems and Documents in order to make the common folk ignorant.136 "Numinous" is that which can continue through such transformations, acting as a third with Heaven and a second with Earth; "Sagely" is that which matches with their incipiencies, unchanged through yin and yang.137

昔者龍蹲東魯,陳禮樂而救蒼生;虎據西秦,焚詩書以愚黔首。通其變,參天二地謂之神;合其機,一陰一陽謂之聖。

From this point forward, Lu dedicates several paragraphs to describing how the tradition of wen adapted to the demands of each successive age, no matter how disordered.138 His survey ends with the Northern and Southern Dynasties. [End Page 40]

Refined, broadly learned, forthright, and beautiful, Yan Yanzhi [early fifth c.] struggled hard in the space between Jiang Yan and Bao Zhao [both fifth c.]; relaxed and dashing, Xie Tiao [late fifth c.] strolled casually above Xiang Xiu and Liu Ling [third c.]. In the Northern Dynasties their sounds were muddled, with only Lu Sidao [sixth c.] often flying high; in the Southern Dynasties they were overly light and refined, with only Yu Xin [sixth c.] writing poems that never fell to the ground.

精博爽麗,顏延之急病於江鮑之間;疏散風流,謝宣城緩步於向劉之上。北方重濁,獨盧黃門往往高飛;南國輕清,惟庾中丞時時不墜。

In final sentences here, Lu both recapitulates the Zhenguan vision, whereby the tradition of wen faltered in the sixth century, and also emphasizes that that tradition was, despite its decline, never fully extinguished. This point is necessary for substantiating his transference of the adjectives "numinous" and "sagely" away from any individual and to the tradition itself, and it will become important when Lu discusses the tradition's restoration.

At this juncture, Lu turns to a more detailed discussion of the tradition's pre-Tang decline. Literary men, he writes, have always competed inappropriately with one another and misjudged each other's virtues, but towards the end of the Period of Division, they also began issuing misguided critical judgments and arguing about the wrong things. Lu is thus left "worrying constantly that the forest of letters will come to ruin. And should the Elegantiae and the Lauds [of the Classic of Poetry] no longer be written, how would those who come after get to hear about them?" 常恐詞林交喪。雅頌不作,則後死者焉得而聞乎. The articulation of this possibility, that the tradition might come to an end, marks the crisis of Lu's narrative. At this moment, however, Taizong and his courtiers enter the picture.

In the Zhenguan period (627–649), Emperor Taizong grew tired of weapons and armor, and so let his robes hang down over the myriad domains [i.e. practiced the virtues of peace].139 He had ritual dances rehearsed in the palace,140 devoted his attention to governance, and promoted wen within the empire. Men like Yu Shinan, Li Baiyao, Cen Wenben, and Xu Jingzong gained places at court for their literary writings, and men like Wang Gui, Wei Zheng, Lai Ji, and Chu Liang used their talent and skill at it to become famous. They were all capable of rising from commoners' ranks to among the highest ministers, serving with [End Page 41] composure at the emperor's side and presenting advice to him morning and night. Our dynasty's employment of talented men truly reached its apex here!141 Yu Shinan had thoroughly memorized myriads of lines and so was never at a loss when asked something; Li Baiyao was excellent at poetry and so let fall his brush without any hindrance; Cen Wenben could discourse so fluently that his listeners never tired; Xu Jingzong wrote official documents so fleetly discussing them is not easy; Wang Gui was proficient in governmental affairs, thoroughly understanding the old precedents; Wei Zheng was upright and forthright, fully encompassing all ancient principles; and Lai Ji and Chu Liang were outstanding in their deportment, early making themselves known in the halls of writing. These men wrote transformed Airs and transformed Elegantiae [sections of the Classic of Poetry],142 establishing forms that were not confined to one path solely; both broadly learned and refined, in their scholarship wandering at ease among all the hundred thinkers.

貞觀年中,太宗外厭兵革,垂衣裳於萬國,舞干戚於兩階,留思政塗,內興文事。虞李岑許之儔以文章進,王魏來禇之輩以材術顯。咸能起自布衣,蔚為卿相;雍容侍從,朝夕獻納;我之得人,於斯為盛。虞博通萬句,對問不休;李長於五言,下筆無滯;岑君論詰亹亹,聽者忘疲;許生章奏翩翩,談之未易;王侍中政事精密,明達舊章;魏太師直氣鯁辭,兼包古義;來禇河南風標特峻,早鏘聲於冊府。變風變雅,立體不拘於一塗;既博既精,為學遍游於百氏。

If, as I suspect, Lu Zhaolin's contemporaries would have remembered the Zhenguan court narrative, his decision to focus here on the corporate glories of Taizong's courtiers, rather than on the sagely insight of Taizong himself, would have been marked. Taizong's good governance, Lu suggests, may have provided the necessary conditions for wen's salvation, but it was the literati at his court who actually saved it. And they did so not through supranormal insight into the obscure, but rather through such engagements with the tradition as "memorizing myriads of lines," "understanding old precedents," and "encompassing ancient principles"—engagements that would have been open to any literatus, not just born sages. Having thus established his rather different vision of the significance of the Zhenguan restoration of wen, Lu turns in the next paragraph to discuss Lai Ji specifically, depicting him as an exemplary literatus whose life and work [End Page 42] conformed to many of the normative examples from the literary and cultural tradition. The central point of the preface thus comes into focus: that even if Lai Ji was not a singularly numinous sage of the sort the Zhenguan court had claimed Taizong was, in Lai Ji's collection we can nonetheless find a continuance of the tradition that Lu has described as "sagely" and "numinous."

Lai, however, had lost favor in the years following Taizong's passing and had ultimately died in exile in 662, and his downfall turns Lu's thought in the preface's final paragraph in more melancholy directions. The contemporary political valences of this turn are difficult to pin down; the suggestion that Lai was slandered by rivals and underappreciated by the emperor (or perhaps Empress Wu) could have pointed in several different directions, depending upon when exactly Lu was writing. Whatever the case may have been, Lu's focus in the conclusion is at least in part on his own place within the tradition that Lai and his fellow courtiers had saved but that now seemed endangered once again. With the Zhenguan court a fading memory, the possibility arises again that future generations might not get to engage with This Wen.

Early in my life I roamed to Hao in the west [capital of the Zhou dynasty], to where the Zhou court scribes preserved lacunae [when they lacked reliable information];143 late I recline on an eastern mountain, thinking on the untransmitted affairs of the Han court.144 The stables at the Marquis of Pingjin's guest lodge are desolate and empty; and Director of Convict Labor Li's immortal boat is ruined and abandoned at dragon gate.145 Cross-flying are the yellow birds [as they do in the Classic of Poetry upon the unjust execution of three good men], perching on the chestnut tree, perching on the mulberries; and busy are the gray flies [figures for slanderers in the same Classic], pausing on the hedge and on the thorns.146 If only one could raise the dead from the [End Page 43] Nine Plains [as Zhao Wenzi once wanted to do],147 but the pine has taken the grave and the hare the mound; the man of the Xiang region [the exile Qu Yuan] cannot be called back, for the rivers have no bridges and the birds no path through.148 It is not only Zhuangzi who grieves to have given up the axe [i.e., lost a person who could appreciate his art], and not only Xiang Xiu who is saddened hearing a flute [because it reminded him of dead friends].149 In vain I have worked to observe the sea, but yet do not know the beginning of the surging waves; I have always loved to discuss heaven, but have not penetrated the secrets of cosmic creation.150 I have therefore taken my balding brush, in order to make this preface for Lai Ji.

余早遊西鎬,及周史之闕文;晚臥東山,憶漢庭之遺事。平津侯之賓館,馬廄蕭條;李司隸之仙舟,龍門荒毀。交交黃鳥,集於栩兮集於桑;營營蒼蠅,止於藩兮止於棘。九原可作,松有隧兮兔有埏;三湘不追,川無梁兮鳥無徑。輟斤之慟,何獨莊周;聞笛而悲,寧惟向秀。徒勤觀海,未知渤潏151之倪;永好談天,莫究氤氳之數。遂抽短翰,為之序云。

Both the beginning and the ending of this final section recall the distinction that the Zhenguan court had drawn between what is and what is not transmitted in wen. Lu seems to be acknowledging here that he is not a sage, and that as a result, he cannot know history that is not recorded152 or fully fathom the [End Page 44] obscurities of cosmic creation. Yet this acknowledgment does not amount, for Lu, to an acceptance of a two-tiered system of cultural production or a concession of authority over wen, and certainly not to Taizong, who features here only for his employment of talented literati. Instead, Lu is suggesting once again that the tradition is fragile and depends upon the continued participation of literati like him—whose relentless citations demonstrate the assiduousness of his learning—at yet another historical juncture where it seems to be endangered.

This preface thus gives answers different from those of the Zhenguan ideology of wen to each of the three questions discussed above. By turning Taizong's court narrative into a narrative about Taizong's court, for instance, Lu Zhaolin transfers authority for wen away from the emperor and towards the literati, thus effectively denying the Zhenguan claim that only an emperor can save culture. By suggesting, moreover, that such literati attained their culture-saving powers through study rather than inborn knowledge, Lu at least partly contradicts the Zhenguan ideology's claim that the proper source of values is so esoteric that it cannot be communicated to non-sages. And by holding that the tradition never fully collapsed, Lu breaks with the Zhenguan ideology's emphasis on the catastrophic decline of wen that is supposed to have characterized the recent past. Yet in answering these three questions at once, Lu's preface clearly recalls—and seems to have been designed to recall—precisely that Zhenguan ideology with which it disagrees so radically. By drawing these three questions together, that ideology had provided a model for answering why wen mattered, a model that could be adapted to valorize the literati just as it had previously been used to elevate the emperor above them.

A second example of this sort of adaptation can be found in Yang Jiong's 楊炯 (650–695?) famous preface to the literary collection of Wang Bo 王勃 (649–676). Though this preface likewise seeks to exalt the wen-work of a deceased literatus, it departs from Lu Zhaolin's model as dramatically as Lu's departed from Taizong's. Where Lu, that is, had suggested that the textual tradition itself obviated the need to inquire into the obscurities of the cosmic dao, Yang claims that wen has declined precisely because literary writers have stopped seeking its proper source in the more esoteric reaches of human knowledge. In direct contradistinction to both the Zhenguan ideology and to Lu, therefore, Yang praises Wang Bo for engaging both in literary writing and in Xuanxue, and suggests that it is only scholars like Wang, who see these projects as part of the same fundamental pursuit, that can save Chinese culture from a decline that goes back much further and was much more comprehensive than it had been for Lu Zhaolin. [End Page 45]

Great indeed is the significance of wen for the times! There is the wen of heaven, by which we examine the times and observe their changes, and there is the wen of mankind, by which we establish words to bequeath models.153 Over the many years [of the sage dynasties of antiquity, wen] alternated between embellishment and substance,154 responding to the cycles of fortune to give forth its brilliance and using individuals in order to communicate its essence. And even after Confucius died, Ziyou and Zixia leant brightness to the mores of the area between the Zhu and Si rivers; while after Qu Yuan drowned himself, Tang Le and Song Yu expanded his tracks along the Miluo. From this point forward, [however,] wen and Ru began to have different techniques, and [debased] ci and [normative] fu began at this point to have disparate sources.155 Thus when the Qin house burned the books, This Wen was abandoned by heaven; and even when the Han emperors changed the cycle, This Dao did not return. Though Jia Yi and Sima Xiangru [second c. BCE] flourished richly, they were already lacking something from the Elegantiae and Lauds; and though Cao Zhi and Wang Can [late second to early third c.] rose up distinctively, they had lost even more from Airs and Sao. At least, though, when it came to working hard at the Great Enterprise [i.e. governance], they did not have to be ashamed before previous ages. When we come, however, to Pan Yue and Lu Ji [third c.] struggling forth, to Sun Chuo and Xu Xun [fourth c.] following one another, and then succeeding them, to Yan Yanzhi and Xie Lingyun [late fourth to early fifth c.], extending down to Jiang Yan and Bao Zhao [fifth c.], the various talents of Liang and Northern Wei, the many writers of Northern Zhou and Sui—some of these merely worked carelessly at insect carving, without exerting their strength to imitate classical canons; others merely followed the waves, and did not seek the source in ritual and music. [Wen] thus changed continuously as it met with different times, and was not constant in following its ancient [models]. Many merely followed [hollow] rules out of caution; few defied the typical practices of their day to create new things.156 For when it [End Page 46] comes to soaring in a flicker,157 being outstanding and abundantly diverse, with fame whose stirring drumbeat encompasses the region within the four seas and a transformativity comprising the style of an independent master;158 treading ground no previous worthy has ever comprehended and exploring regions previous sages did not discuss;159 making the Classics one's heart, grasping the uninhibited tallies of [Xuanxue thinkers] Wang Bi and He Yan [third c.] or containing wind and cloud in one's thoughts, meeting spiritually with [Jin dynasty literary writers] Zhang Zai and Zuo Si [third c.]; making the various talents within the six extremes of space all submit in their hearts before one's artistic crafting,160 and making those who care about such things throughout the eight directions all receive inspiration from the pivot of one's wen; leaving behind established wheelruts and giving reign to oneself, speeding like a ray of light so as to move [literary] mores—if it were not for my lord's breadth of understanding, how could he have achieved these things?161

大矣哉,文之時義也。有天文焉,察時以觀其變;有人文焉,立言以垂其範。歷年滋久,遞為文質,應運以發其明,因人以通其粹。仲尼既沒,游夏光洙泗之風;屈平自沉,唐宋宏汨羅之跡。文儒於焉異術,詞賦所以殊源。逮秦氏燔書,斯文天喪。漢皇改運,此道不還。賈馬蔚興,已虧於雅頌;曹王傑起,更失於風騷。僶俛大猷,未忝前載。洎乎潘陸奮發,孫許相因,繼之以顏謝,申之以江鮑,梁魏群材,周隋眾制,或苟求蟲篆,未盡力於邱墳;或獨徇波瀾,不尋源於禮樂。會時沿革,循古抑揚。多守律以自全,罕非常而制物。其有飛馳倏忽,倜儻紛綸,鼓動包四海之名,變化成一家之體,蹈前賢之未識, [End Page 47] 探先聖之不言,經籍為心,得王何於逸契;風雲入思,叶張左於神交,故能使六合殊材,並推心於意匠;八方好事,咸受氣於文樞,出軌躅而驤首,馳光芒而動俗,非君之博物,孰能致於此乎?162

Throughout this opening paragraph, Yang echoes the Zhenguan ideology of wen, suggesting that Wang Bo, like Taizong in the original narrative, reversed the millennial decline of the tradition. Like Taizong, moreover, he did so by regrounding literary writing in the obscure dao—as Yang puts it towards the beginning of the narrative, restoring the severed link between wen and Ru and, as he puts it towards the end, reconnecting literary writing and Xuanxue. And this restoration, Yang claims, had a population-wide significance, changing scholarly and literary mores much as Taizong's governance was supposed to have done.

At this point, a reader familiar with the Zhenguan court productions might well wonder whether Yang is claiming that Wang Bo was a sage, as Taizong's courtiers claimed he was. Yang turns to this question in the next paragraph. Here he breaks away from the Zhenguan narrative, suggesting that Wang was, in fact, not a born sage: he needed to engage in learning.163 Yet Yang also wants to blur the absolute division that the Zhenguan court had drawn between sages and worthies, suggesting that worthies too may be born with special talents and that they may, partly for this reason, attain through study to the knowledge of the obscure that the Zhenguan court had reserved for sages. To this end, Yang describes Wang as "gifted with beauties by birth, his spirit [having] descended from the exceptional [End Page 48] essence of the stars" 君之生也,含章是託。神何由降,星辰奇偉之精,164 and continues by explaining that

His talent was nimble even before he engaged a tutor [at eleven].165 At ten, he read Yan Shigu's Hanshu commentary, and wrote ten juan pointing out mistakes.166 At eleven, he completely internalized the Six Classics within a single year, seeming to understand without relying on anything, as if his understanding were gotten from heaven, naturally matching with the [established] pronunciations and glosses.

器業之敏,先乎就傅。九歲讀顏氏漢書,撰指瑕十卷。十歲包綜六經,成乎朞月,懸然天得,自符音訓。

Here, Yang hints at Wang's "worthiness" rather than "sageliness" by stopping just short of suggesting that he was "born knowing it". Instead, Wang seems to have been born with a preternatural ability to learn it. Yang elaborates on these hints later on in the preface.

Wang believed that displaying ornamentation and carving elaborate patterns derived from penetrating the incipient.167 He knew what was to come and remembered what had gone before; he explored the secret sources of the hidden truth.168 He thus wrote in accordance with the times and merely responded with skillful means; he scrutinized antiquity to complete [his endeavors] and was on the verge of examining the subtle.169 Visiting the Purple Palace [of heaven] through its northern gate [as had Confucius when he wrote the Classic of Filial Piety], he sought in mystery for the regulations of the sages; inquiring of the Xuanhu river in Luoyang [whence the ancient sage Cang Jie got the inspiration for creating the writing system], he indicated [the margin between] heaven and [End Page 49] man.170 Every time I look at his majestic writings, his thought magnifies the Great Yi [the dao].171 His comprehensiveness exhausts the eight trigrams [of the Yijing]; his transformations complete its four shifts.172 He thus wrote for [the Yijing] his Demonstrations, wherein he compiled his notes and explanations.173 Once of a night he dreamed that one whom [others] were calling Confucius said to him: "The Yi has a Great Ultimate; you should work at this."174 When he awoke he paced around and his thought got more than halfway there. After this point, he exhaustively investigated how milfoil divinations announced [the future] by means of images, and he examined how the line statements and judgments spoke the truth. Not only did he ride upon principle and get the obscure, but he also penetrated to the essential and followed the dao. [The earlier Yijing commentator] Yu Fan had exhausted thought, but only saw his "three line-statements"; and Han Kangbo completed his contribution, but merely advanced to the two halves of the Xici zhuan.175 Wang Bo's commentary thus wiped away all that had come before, matching minds with that which uncovers what was hidden in heaven and earth and knows the truth of the ghosts and spirits [i.e., the Yijing].176 His secretly aiding the gods and spirits, moreover, was not merely a matter of [attempting to participate] in the governance of human affairs;177 instead, he worked hard at his glosses as a way of wandering at ease in sagely creations [like Kong Fu, who would not serve in an era of disorder, [End Page 50] but devoted himself to scholarship instead].178 At this time, Wang [also] edited the Analects of Confucius, separating each saying into its proper category; he exhausted their source and reached their ultimate meanings, making glosses for them.179 He aspired to connect the text all together on one string so as to make known its basic purport; he aimed to embody [getting it at the] second stage so as to reach its remoter [significance].180 Putting the text in an appropriate order, the greater meaning was luminously clear.

君以為摛藻雕章,研幾之餘事。知來藏往,探賾之所宗。隨時以發,其唯應便;稽古以成,其殆察微。循紫宮於北門,幽求聖律;訪玄扈於都洛,響像天人。每覽韋編,思宏大易。周流窮乎八索,變動該乎四營。為之發揮,以成注解。嘗因夜夢,有稱孔夫子而謂之曰:易有太極,子其勉之。寤而循環,思過半矣。於是窮蓍蔡以像告,考爻彖以情言。既乘理而得玄,亦研精而徇道。虞仲翔之盡思,徒見三爻;韓康伯之成功,僅踰兩繫。君之所注,見光前古。與夫發天地之祕藏,知鬼神之情狀者,合其心矣。君又以幽贊神明,非杼軸於人事;經營訓導,迺優游於聖作。於是編次論語,各以群分;窮源造極,為之古訓。仰貫一以知歸,希體二而致遠。為言式序,大義昭然。

A number of details in this passage hint that Wang was not a born sage, as the Zhenguan court narrative claimed that Taizong was. Yet even as a worthy, Wang attained to notable sage-like achievements, including "knowing what was to come and remembering what had gone before," "riding upon principle and getting the obscure," and dreaming of Confucius as Confucius dreamed of the Duke of Zhou. Within the intellectual context of the early Tang, this blurring of the boundary between sages and worthies would have been marked.

Yang blurs this boundary, it would seem, partly in order to explain a paradox he notes in Wang Bo's writing and its impact on literati folkways. On the one hand, as we saw in the first paragraph of the preface, Yang wants to claim that Wang Bo played basically the role Taizong had played in the Zhenguan narrative, saving the tradition of wen from a millennial decline. On the other hand, however, Yang does not think that Wang Bo's intervention was actually decisive. As Yang [End Page 51] tells it, Wang responded to a proximate and deleterious "change in the forms of the literary arena in the first years of the Longshuo period [661–663]" 龍朔初載,文場變體. His work had a profound effect on other writers, and "once his steady wind was roused, the myriad sprouts all bent of themselves" 長風一振,眾萌自偃—an image that echoes Confucius' statement in the Analects that "the character of the gentleman is like wind, while the character of petty people is like the grass; when there is wind above the grass, it will bend" 君子之德風,小人之德草。草上之風,必偃.181 Yet even though "those who stole merely the form of Wang's writing were able to attain the pivot of the art, and those who absorbed his essence were further able to penetrate deeply into the regulations of sound" 竊形骸者,既昭發於樞機;吸精微者,亦潛附於聲律, nonetheless Wang could not singlehandedly dispel all the faults of contemporary writers.

Some who found [Wang's writing] wondrous and exceptional [took his model] their own unrestrained way, and those who sought [out his writings] only for their novelties vied in their exaggerations. [They claimed that] heaven and earth and sun and moon spread their writings and mountains and rivers and ghosts and spirits ran at the command of their thoughts. In long-line poems, they merely increased the form's tendency to get bogged down, putting on his airs to expand their pretensions. [These faults] having previously spread over the southlands, they became standard in the north as well. Wrongly [these writers] claimed to be transmitting [what Wang had initiated], and few saw the real source. They sought what was subtle and incipient from his pure essence, but as soon as they started out on the path they went astray; they saw only the partial virtues of one given to unrestraint and were bogged down in mind, oblivious of returning [to the true wellspring]. Thus they all followed each other's shuffing footsteps and never did practice [Wang's] comprehensive penetration. Yet it was not Mozi's fault that [later Mohists] all gave different glosses [of his writings], and it was not a failing of Zhuangzi's that in the end he increased the unrestraint [of some of his readers].182 Those who sing lofty songs can rarely find people who harmonize with them: this is something we know.183 One [thus] cannot blame me [i.e. Wang Bo] for what has become of wen!184 [End Page 52]

妙異之徒,185別為縱誕,專求怪說,爭發大言。乾坤日月張其文,山河鬼神走其思。長句以增其滯,容186氣以廣其靈。已逾江南之風,漸成河朔之制。謬稱相述,罕識其源。扣純粹之精機,未投足而先逝;覽奔放之偏節,已滯心而忘返。迺相循於跼步,豈見習於通方?信譎不同,非墨翟之過;重增其放,豈莊周之失。唱高罕屬,既知之矣。以文罪我,其可得乎?

In this description of how Wang Bo's literary revolution went awry, we can discern a possible reason why Yang Jiong might be concerned in this preface to deny Wang the distinction of full sageliness: that is, that a true sage would presumably have accomplished more than Wang seems to have done. As Yang describes his work, even though it reunited wen with its proper source in the understanding of the dao, it was not capable, on its own, of fully rescuing the tradition. It provided a model for that salvation, but that model could only play a beneficial role if other writers followed it correctly. Many did, Yang thinks, and they accounted for a temporary restoration of wen in the age. But others did not.

This account of Wang Bo—as the almost-sagely provider of a model for reuniting wen and dao that can either be followed or mistook—opens a space for still-living literati, like Yang Jiong himself, to play an important role in the tradition of wen. In the final paragraphs of the preface, therefore, Yang turns to the topic of inheritance and continuance. Wang Bo, Yang writes, had dedicated much of his own work to commenting on, preserving, and writing prefaces for his grandfather Wang Tong's continuations of the Classics.187 And after Wang Bo "died young like Yan Hui" 顏氏斯殂, his brothers have continued his literary revolution in their own writing. They, however, could not bear the grief of "taking up their brush to record [their brother, Wang Bo's] writings" 援翰紀文,咸所未忍, and so the task of compiling his collected works fell to Yang Jiong, who thus concludes his preface to that collection as Lu Zhaolin did his own for Lai Ji: by writing himself into the tradition.

Because we were friends who threw in our lots together, and not to expatiate grandiloquently, I wipe my streaming tears to examine [his works] and put them in order, splitting them into twenty fascicles and giving each piece its title. I regret that I did not provide a preface to his great works [resembling] [End Page 53] the "Three Capitals Rhapsody" [a work by Zuo Si] while he was alive and that I vainly compile his fine books of the "Seven Categories" [a bibliographical system created by Wang Jian] after his death.188 And yet, Wang Bo's spirit may not be far, and his dao may perhaps still remain herein.

蓋以投分相期,非宏詞說,澘然擥涕,究而序之。分為二十卷,具諸篇目。三都盛作,恨不序於生前;七志良書,空撰得於身後。神其不遠,道或存焉。

Having immediately before this conclusion outlined what survives of Wang Bo's writing, Yang follows up his suggestion there that his collected works may allow him to "have died but not decay" 歿而不朽.189 What this cliché means in Wang Bo's case, Yang suggests, is that his wen makes much of what he cared about and what was valuable about him, his dao and his spirit, available to the living, who can still encounter, learn from, and continue his projects through engaging with his writings. The particular phrasing of this suggestion, moreover, may be intended to bring the preface full circle. Insofar as Yang highlights among his collected works both "the literary writings Wang wrote throughout his life" 平生屬文 and the records of his investigations into the obscure—including an unfinished commentary on the Yijing and a complete commentary on the Daoist Huangdi bashiyi nan jing 黃帝八十一難經 ("The Classic in which the Yellow Emperor Answers Eighty-One Difficulties")190—the hint that Wang's dao can be found in his wen may intimate the point made throughout the preface, that Wang rectified the split between literary writing and insight into the obscure that Yang described as characterizing the post-sagely tradition. The potential equivocation of the penultimate phrase, wherein the term shen 神 can be interpreted as denoting either Wang Bo's "spirit" or the realm of the "numinous" into which his researches inquired, may also imply the same point.191 Read one way, something of Wang, perhaps his literary personality, remains with us; alternately, his intellectual goal, the understanding of the obscure, has through his efforts been brought within our reach. [End Page 54]

Although this preface is less explicitly dependent than Lu Zhaolin's was on the Zhenguan court narrative of wen, there are certain hints within it that Yang Jiong might have expected its echoing of that court narrative to be legible to contemporary readers. Not only does Wang's rescue of wen correspond to Taizong's, and not only does this rescue similarly answer the three questions that the Zhenguan court had linked together: whether the tradition had declined, who could intervene to save it, and how wen was related to the obscure dao. More pointedly, Yang's claim that Wang Bo was responding most proximately to a deleterious change in literary mores "in the first years of the Longshuo period," some ten years after Taizong's death, may suggest that he and his contemporaries would have assumed that the Zhenguan period was a relative high point in the tradition, but one that, like Wang's own restoration, could not last. If this implication was, indeed, one that Yang's contemporaries could have picked up on, then the point would have been clear. No individual, neither Taizong nor Wang Bo, could be expected to save wen on their own, since wen could only be saved by the literati community as a whole continuing to ground their literary composition in an understanding of the dao.

Despite their pronounced differences regarding the ways they imagine the relationship between wen and the obscure, then, Yang's preface agrees with Lu Zhaolin's on a crucial point: that cultural authority for wen needed to reside with the literati as a transtemporal community, rather than with Taizong as a special individual. On this point, however, a third early Tang echo of the Zhenguan court narrative—the most famous and influential collection preface of the Tang—hews closer to the original. In this preface, written by Lu Cangyong 盧藏用 (ca. 660–ca. 714) for the collected works of Chen Zi'ang 陳子昂 (661–702), Chen is essentially slipped into Taizong's place.

In the past when Confucius, with the ability endowed in him by heaven,192 returned to Lu from Wei, he edited the Poetry and the Documents, explained the dao of the Changes, and rectified the Chunqiu. And for over a thousand years, his wenzhang have remained brilliant. After Confucius had been dead for two-hundred years, however, the writer of the Sao [Qu Yuan] rose up, and at this point, his gorgeous but frivolous method became popular. Then the Han flourished for another two-hundred years: Jia Yi and Sima Qian were its excellent writers, taking as their standard [normative] ritual and music and possessing a mature style, while people like Sima Xiangru and Yang Xiong were marvelous and ever-changing, truly special men. Yet it is a pity that the words of [the Han's] great officials all drowned in fluent verbiage, without any ever [End Page 55] looking back. After this, Ban Gu, Zhang Heng, Cui Yin, and Cai Yong, Cao Zhi, Liu Zhen, Pan Yue, and Lu Ji all arose, following the current. Although their writings did not have enough of the Greater Elegantiae, the lingering influence [of the sages] still shone in them, and they still had canonical form.193 By the end of the Song and Qi, however, [wen] had become quite haggard. It had become faint, had broken down, had become over-flowery, and had forgotten to return. When it reached Xu Ling and Yu Xin, heaven was really about to destroy This Wen.194 And those who came later, like Shangguan Yi [608–665], merely followed their tracks. At this point, the dao of the Airs and Elegantiae was almost swept from the earth. Yet the Yijing says, "Things cannot remain in a situation of Obstruction forever, therefore they are received into Peace."195 The dao had been lost for five hundred years, but then we got Lord Chen.

My lord's given name was Zi'ang, and his style was Boyu. He was a man of Shu. He rose towering from the Jiang and Han Rivers, and gazed like a tiger over the Chinese world. He towered over a thousand ages, vastly controlling the declining waves [of the literary tradition], and due to his influence, suddenly zhi and wen [substance and ornament] changed completely throughout the empire.196 If not for the refined essence of Mt. Emei, and the numinousness of Mts. Wu and Lu [in the region of Chen's hometown], how could such a one as Chen have been born?

Thus his written essays of remonstrance contain the first priorities of good governance.197 His inscription on Master Zhaoyi exemplifies correct discussion.198 His prose piece on the Nation's Dead is the kind of complaint that characterizes the Major Elegantiae.199 His discussion on the case of Mr. Xu attains the mean in questions of ritual and punishment.200 And when it comes to deeply stirred and sharply shifting writing that makes apparent the subtle [End Page 56] and elucidates the hidden,201 almost revealing the auspices of transformation and reaching to the margin between heaven and man—this is contained in his Ganyu poems.202 I watched his fleet hooves galloping along, riding upon the whirlwind and striding over the great void, treading upon the swift winds and brushing past the tallest mountains: I saw him advance and never saw him stop.203 Alas, though, he was mired in poverty in this age, and his way was not appreciated in his time. He left his bones in the mountains of Ba, his years and his ambitions cut short. Therefore, his wen never reached its complete fulfillment. Ah! He was brilliant and intelligent, refined and pure, and yet was repressed and mistreated, while the greedy and rapacious, overbearing and arrogant are raised to prominence and distinction. Oh heaven! I probably have not understood heaven.

In the past we had such a bond that we forgot our bodies; throughout the whole empire, there was only one person like this. My good friend is dead: heaven is destroying me!204 So now I collect what of his remaining writing can be preserved, and compile and put them into order, in ten fascicles. I regret that he has not met with a true sage, and that his writings thus cannot be listed among the Poets.205 How sad it is! Thus I have roughly discussed how he transformed wen, in order to make a preface for his works. When it comes to his talent for governance and his excellent conduct, these are discussed in his biography.206

昔孔宣父以天縱之才,自衛返魯,迺刪詩書述易道而修春秋,數千百年文章粲然可觀者也。孔子歿二百歲而騷人作,於是婉麗浮侈之法行焉。漢興二百年,賈誼馬遷為之傑,憲章禮樂,有老成人之風;長卿子雲之儔,瑰詭萬變,亦奇特之士也。惜其王公大人之言,溺其流辭而不顧。 [End Page 57] 其後班張崔蔡曹劉潘陸,隨波而作,雖大雅不足,其遺風餘烈,尚有典型。宋齊已來,蓋顦顇矣。逶迤陵穨,流靡忘返。至於徐庾,天之將喪斯文也。後進之士若上官儀者繼踵而生,於是風雅之道,掃地盡矣。易曰:物不可以終否,故受之以泰。道喪五百歲而得陳君。

君名子昂,字伯玉,蜀人也。崛起江漢,虎視函夏。卓立千古,橫制穨波。天下翕然質文一變。非夫岷峨之精,巫廬之靈,則何以生此?

故有諫諍之辭,則為政之先也;昭夷之碣,則議論之當也;國殤之文,則大雅之怨也;徐君之議,則刑禮之中也。至於感激頓挫,微顯闡幽,庶幾見變化之朕,以接乎天人之際者,則感遇之篇存焉。觀其逸足駸駸,方將摶扶搖而陵太清,躐遺風而薄嵩岱。吾見其進,未見其止。惜乎湮厄當世,道不偶時。委骨巴山,年志俱夭。故其文未極也。嗚呼!聰明精粹而淪剝,貪饕桀驁以顯榮。天乎天乎!吾殆未知夫天焉。

昔嘗與余有忘形之契,四海之內,一人而巳。良友歿矣,天其喪予!今採其遺文可存者,編而次之,凡十卷。恨不逢作者,不得列於詩人之什。悲夫!故粗論文變而為之序。至於王霸之才,卓犖之行,則存之別傳,以繼於終篇云耳。207

It is difficult to know whether Lu Cangyong would have had the fifty-year-old works of Taizong's court directly in mind when he composed this preface or whether its obvious echoes of the Zhenguan narrative—its depiction an epochal decline in wen reversed by an individual with supranormal insight into "the subtle" and "the hidden," "the incipiencies of transformation" and "the intersection between heaven and man"—would have been mediated by previous echoes. Even if the Zhenguan works discussed above were not on his mind, however, Lu's decision to skip over the supposed renaissance of wen in the Zhenguan period is clearly pointed, since it suggests that the establishment of the Tang did nothing to ameliorate the deficiencies of wen that had accumulated over the Period of Division, and indeed a poet Taizong originally raised to prominence, Shangguan Yi, represents the very nadir of the tradition's decline.208 Tang Taizong, therefore, was not a parallel for the [End Page 58] founding emperors of the ancient sage dynasties, who, according to an old idea, "completely changed zhi and wen throughout their empires" upon their founding in order to correct the vices of the decrepit dynasties they were overthrowing.209 That task, instead, remained to Chen Zi'ang, who, though he was not an emperor, nonetheless proved himself the sort of sage that—according to a theory advanced most prominently by Mengzi 孟子 (d. ca. 289 BCE)—appears in the world every 500 years to save it from decline.210 Chen was, in this sense, what Taizong claimed to be, but his empire was only of wen.

I suspect that it may have been this disaggregation of the political empire and the empire of wen that made this preface so famous throughout the rest of the eighth century, inspiring imitators who either accused Lu Cangyong of "deceitfully overpraising" Chen Zi'ang 傷於厚誣 when it was really the subjects of their prefaces who deserved this sort of praise or, alternately, claimed that their subjects were merely finishing the project Lu had Chen beginning, finally "wiping from the face of the earth" 掃地併盡 all remnants of the court style of the Liang and Chen dynasties 梁陳宮掖之風.211 Yet the cultural success of Lu's preface is revealing as to the continuing influence of the Zhenguan ideology of wen, especially given the preface's relative intellectual weakness compared to that court narrative and to the prefaces of Lu Zhaolin and Yang Jiong (not to mention the basic incoherence of its suggestion that, although Chen Zi'ang is a once-in-five-hundred-years sage, he is actually more like Yan Hui to Lu Cangyong's Confucius).212 It would seem that for those literati who found Lu Cangyong's preface compelling, a full intellectual justification was no longer necessary, for the figure of a sage reaching into the darkness to rescue the declining tradition of wen had taken on a kind of self-evident persuasiveness. Such literati were just more interested in that figure being one of them. [End Page 59]

Conclusions

These works by Lu Zhaolin, Yang Jiong, and Lu Cangyong represent three out of the four prefaces for literary collections that survive from the first ninety years of the Tang, with the fourth being another by Lu Zhaolin that outlines in a briefer space much the same narrative as the one discussed here.213 Although the magnitude of textual loss from this period should make us hesitant to draw too firm conclusions on the basis of what we have, it is striking nonetheless that every surviving early-Tang collection preface should narrate the decline and restoration of wen, and that each should do so in a way that either explicitly engages with or clearly echoes the narrative promulgated by Taizong's court. Many more collection prefaces survive from the eighth century, and in these works, the same themes are often evident. Taken together, these documents suggest that the Zhenguan wen ideology exerted a shaping influence on literati thought about the relationship between wen and the dao throughout the seventh century, and indeed, throughout much of the Tang.

More work is needed to trace the legacy of this ideology in other contexts outside of the genre of collection preface. It is, however, worth noting with regard to this one genre just how ironic it is that Taizong's court ideology of wen, which sought to curb the intellectual ambitions of the literati, set the paradigm for a whole series of arguments that intellectual authority ought really to lie with them. Equally ironic is the fact that, though that court ideology had drawn a hard line between the sage and everyone else, the prefaces that took up its model generally found one way or another to undermine that distinction—as we saw Lu Zhaolin, Yang Jiong, and Lu Cangyong all do, each in a different way. Not only, therefore, did Taizong's court projects end up providing the pattern for narratives, like Lu Cangyong's, identifying his court's literary output with the worst of the debased Southern Dynasties tradition, but those projects' elevation of Taizong as a singular sage created a model, perduring through much of the eighth century, for claims that one literatus or another possessed a "nature matching with the [esoteric] dao of heaven" 公性與道合 or used their wen to "investigate [the margin between] the human and the numinous, to elucidate the silent, and to reflect upon the hidden" 究人神,闡寂寞,鑑幽昧.214 Eventually, the commonality and perhaps the [End Page 60] increasing banality of these claims may have contributed to undermining the medieval sense that the world is usefully divided into esoteric and exoteric realms that are best mediated by wen.

In these ironies, we can discern two points regarding the intellectual history of the early Tang. First, I hope it is clear even from the few documents we have read here that the seventh century was not quite so devoid of intellectual contestation as Ge Zhaoguang suggests when he writes that thought, in this age, was "reduced to a set of meaningless texts and formulas to be memorized and recited." These documents might, perhaps, be read as evidence that its intellectual world could sometimes be fairly centripetal, but that centripetal focus did not translate to a lack of disagreement or a simple acquiescence on the part of the literati to the attempts made by Taizong's court to sum up the tradition and resolve its perplexities. On the contrary, Taizong's court ideology seems less to have dominated the discourse than to have unified what had previously been several debates into one that was more comprehensive and more complex.

The second point concerns why it is that the seventh century should be depicted in existing scholarship as essentially devoid of intellectual contestation. Of course, the major reason lies in how much has been lost of early Tang intellectual culture, coupled with the longstanding prejudice, dating back to the last years of the Qing, that China's most vibrant and creative periods were eras of turmoil rather than periods of stability and unification.215 Yet if relatively little attention has hitherto been paid to figuring out the intellectual positions of what does survive, it is perhaps because the conversation detailed in these pages advances through redirections, pastiches, and ironies rather than through explicit argumentative disagreement. Indeed, the reason that the texts studied here survive, when so much of early Tang scholarship does not, may be the same reason that they have not generally been seen as documents of intellectual history: namely, that they have been categorized as "literature" rather than as "thought" (that is, as [End Page 61] belonging to the category of ji 集 rather than to jing 經 or zi 子).216 Song-dynasty literati, who mediated the survival and loss of nearly all our texts from the Tang outside of the Buddhist and Daoist canons and certain specialist traditions, were notoriously much more impressed by Tang "literature" than Tang "philosophy." Yet as we have seen here, the relationship of wen and dao was precisely one of the issues being debated in the early Tang. It should not be surprising, therefore, that we can sometimes find "philosophical" conversations occurring in "literary" forms or that they should have advanced through processes that we tend to think of as characteristic of "literary" rather than "intellectual" history. [End Page 62]

Lucas Rambo Bender
Yale University
Lucas Rambo Bender

Lucas Rambo Bender is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and of Humanities at Yale University. His research focuses on the literary and intellectual cultures of the Six Dynasties and Tang.

Footnotes

A first version of this research was presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference in 2021; my thanks to Xiaofei Tian, Xiaojing Miao, Tony DeBlasi, Lu Kou, and the assembled scholars there for their comments. Subsequent drafts were greatly improved by Anna M. Shields, Paul W. Kroll, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal. I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Morrow Williams, who corrected many errors and guided an unruly manuscript into a publishable shape. Whatever mistakes remain are entirely my own.

1. Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光, Zhongguo sixiang shi 中國思想史, 3 vols. (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001), 1:451, 1:452, and 1:458. Note that the first of these quotes is misunderstood in the condensed English translation, Ge Zhaoguang, An Intellectual History of China, trans. Michael S. Duke and Josephine Chiu-Duke (Leiden: Brill, 2014, 2018), 1:369.

2. Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo sixiang shi, 1:465–66.

3. Ibid., 2:5, 2:10, 2:5, 2:5, and 2:5.

4. For a brief overview of trends in the study of early Tang thought in Chinese scholarship, see Feng Min 馮敏, "Tangdai qianqi de xueshu wenhua yanjiu zongshu" 唐代前期的學術文化硏究綜述, Ningxia shifan xueyuan xuebao 36.1 (2015): 119–23. This essay also relies on Feng's dissertation, "Tangdai qianqi xueshu wenhua yanjiu" 唐代前期學術文化硏究 (Ph.D. diss.: Shanxi shifan daxue, 2014).

5. It is important to emphasize here that the ideology I will be describing is found not primarily in works attributed to Taizong himself, but rather in writings by official scholars attached to his court discussing him in their own voices. This focus on voices other than Taizong's differentiates my subject matter from the preeminent scholarly work on the role of literature in the legitimation of Taizong's reign, Jack W. Chen's The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), which primarily centers on the rhetoric of the imperial voice. Alongside David L. McMullen, State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chen's book provides an introduction to much of the historical and institutional background of Taizong's court, and I refer the reader to these sources rather than repeating their discussions in detail here. The most powerful existing interpretation of the sources I will focus on is probably Peter K. Bol, "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 76–107, and it is this interpretation that I hope to supplement, and partly to challenge, in this essay. Other important studies of Taizong's court include Seike Eizaburō 淸家瑩三郎, Tō no Taisō to Zui Tō bunka 唐の太宗と隋唐文化 (Tokyo: Kōfūkan, 1942); Tanigawa Michio 谷川道雄, Tō no Taisō 唐の太宗 (Tokyo: Jinbutsu ōraisha, 1967); Nunome Chōfū布目潮渢, Zui Tō shi kenkyū: Tōchō seiken no keisei 隋唐史研究 : 唐朝政權の形成 (Tokyo: Tōyōshi kenkyūkai, 1968); Howard J. Wechsler, Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T'ang T'ai-tsung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Ma Qihua 馬起華, Zhen'guan zheng lun 貞觀政論 (Taipei: Hanyuan chubanshe, 1977); Howard J. Wechsler, "T'ai-tsung (Reign 626–49) the Consolidator," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Sui and T'ang China, 589–906, ed. Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 188–241; Luo Tonghua 羅彤華, Zhen'guan zhi zhi yu Rujia sixiang 貞觀之治與儒家思想 (Taipei: Guoli Taiwan shifan daxue lishi yanjiusuo, 1984); Lei Jiaji 雷家驥, Sui Tang zhongyang quanli jiegou ji qi yanjin 隋唐中央權力結構及其演進 (Taipei: Dongda tushu, 1995); Denis Twitchett, "How to Be an Emperor: T'ang T'ai-tsung's Vision of His Role," Asia Major, 3rd ser. 9.1–2 (1996): 1–102; and David L. McMullen, "The Big Cats Will Play: Tang Taizong and His Advisors," Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu xuebao 57 (2013): 299–340.

6. One major exception to this trend is Bol, This Culture of Ours, though this book treats early Tang discussions of wen as exemplifying the assumptions of the "medieval" period writ large, rather than as arguments.

7. I do not detail the Han precedents in what follows largely for reasons of space, but it is worth noting at least briefly here both how deeply rooted some of these ideas were and how particularly medieval their Tang implementation was. On the most general level, the Han saw the initial canonization of texts that would later be included in wen, the initial stages of their patronization by the state, and the consolidation of a class of cultured men whose prestige would derive in part from their mastery of what would eventually be considered wen. Throughout at least the Western Han, though, these texts were not discussed as wen; indeed, the term wen did not begin to take on its medieval meaning, centered around text and literature in particular (often within the compound wenzhang 文章), until the early Eastern Han. By the second century, we begin to find claims for the central civilizational or governing importance of wen per se, and by the end of the Han, it was possible for Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226) to argue that "wenzhang is the great undertaking for managing the state"文章經國之大業 (Wen xuan 文選, comp. Xiao Tong 蕭統, annot. Li Shan 李善 [Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986], 52.2271). Even at this point, though, there are no real Han precedents for the imperially sponsored compilation of massive projects in wen of the sort to be discussed below; these projects were a medieval development. For the Han history of the term wen, see Martin Kern, "Ritual, Text, and the Formation of the Canon: Historical Transitions of Wen in Early China," T'oung Pao 87 (2001): 43–91.

8. See Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), 111–25.

9. This opening echoes Xiao Tong's claim in his preface to the Wen xuan, that the "significance of wen for the age is great and far-reaching" 文之時義遠矣哉; see Wen xuan, "Wen xuan xu," 1. As Nicholas Morrow Williams has pointed out to me, Xiao Gang's preface seems throughout to be in dialogue with the Wen xuan preface.

10. These four phrases invoke classical texts containing the word wen. See Lunyu jishi 論語集釋, comp. Cheng Shude 程樹德, ed. Chen Junying 程俊英 and Jiang Jianyuan 蔣見元 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 9.318 (5/13); Shangshu zhushu 尚書注疏, annot. Kong Anguo 孔安國, Kong Yingda 孔穎達, et al., in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji 重刊宋本十三經注疏附校勘記, ed. Ruan Yuan 阮元 (Taipei: Yiwen yinshu guan, 1981), 2.19b; ibid., 11.160a; and ibid., 4.58b. For my translation of the text recalling the Lunyu passage, see Huang Kan's 皇侃 (488–545) gloss; Huang Kan 皇侃, Lunyu yishu 論語義疏, ed. Gao Shangqu 高尚榘 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), 3.110.

11. See Zhouyi zhushu 周易注疏, annot. Wang Bi 王弼, Han Bo 韓伯, Kong Yingda 孔穎達, et al., in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji, 3.62b.

12. My thanks to Nicholas Morrow Williams for clarifying this sentence for me.

13. "Holding up sun and moon" derives from Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋, comp. Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩, ed. Wang Xiaoyu 王孝魚 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 19.664 and 680. "Did this not all lie with Xiao Tong" echoes Analects 9/5, wherein Confucius says, "Since King Wen is dead, does not wen lie with me?" 文王既沒,文不在茲乎; see Lunyu jishi, 17.578.

14. Xiao Gang 蕭綱, Liang Jianwendi ji jiaozhu 梁簡文帝集校注, ed. Xiao Zhanpeng 肖占鵬 and Dong Zhiguang 董志廣, 4 vols. (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2015), 11.799–800.

15. Besides the passages quoted below, see also Bei Qi shu 北齊書, by Li Baiyao et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972), 37.601; Sui shu 隋書, by Wei Zheng 魏徵 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 41.1729; Zhou shu 周書, by Linghu Defen 令狐德棻 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1971), 33.742; and Zhangsun Wuji 長孫無忌, "Jin Wujing zhengyi biao" 進五經正義表, in Quan Tang wen 全唐文, ed. Deng Hao 董浩 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 136.1374b.

16. For a listing of lost encyclopedias from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, see Liu Quanbo 劉全波, Wei Jin nanbeichao leishu biancuan yanjiui 魏晉南北朝類書編纂硏究 (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2018), 4–9. See also Tian, Beacon Fire, 96–110. Courtiers and courts of the Northern and Southern Dynasties also produced a number of works of classical scholarship, none of which survive intact. See Jiao Guimei 焦桂美, Nanbeichao jingxue shi 南北朝經學史 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2009), 222–335.

17. For these loci classici, see Laozi jiaoshi 老子校釋, ed. Zhu Qianzhi 朱謙之 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 1.3, and Zhuangzi jishi, 13.490.

18. See John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 115–23, and Huang Kan, Lunyu yishu, 5.209, 6.272, and 8.433.

19. Huang Kan, Lunyu yishu, 8.433. For this point, see Makeham, Transmitters and Creators, 146.

20. This metaphor derives from the Zhuangzi; see Zhuangzi jishi, 26.944. In its original context, the point is that words are to meaning as fishtrap or snare are to fish and rabbits: "once you have the meaning, you can forget the words" 得意而忘言.

21. Huang Kan, Lunyu yishu, 3.110.

22. Ibid., 1.26. Huang cites previous commentators debating whether worthies can learn to be sages at various points of his commentary. See, for instance, 6.279–82 for a single passage with comments on both sides.

23. See Liu Xie 劉勰, Zengding Wenxin diaolong jiaozhu 增訂文心雕龍校注, ed. Huang Shulin 黄叔琳 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2012), 1.2.

24. The question of wen's capacity to adequately transmit meanings (often yi 意) was a longstanding topic of discussion in Xuanxue-influenced intellectual contexts. For a recent account of the debate, see Shen Weihua 沈維華, Wei-Jin sanxuan yu yanyi zhi bian 魏晉三玄與言意之辨 (Taipei: Wenshi-zhe chubanshe, 2018).

25. Liu Xie, Zengding Wenxin diaolong jiaozhu, 6.393.

26. Wenxuan, "Wenxuan xu," 1. Nan Qi shu 南齊書, by Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972), 52.908. Note that Xiao Tong has been seen as less radical in his acceptance of literary historical change than Xiao Zixian; see for instance Nicholas Morrow Williams, "Literary Controversy at the Liang Court Revisited," Early Medieval China 21 (2015): 63–92.

27. Preserved in Du You 杜佑, Tongdian 通典, ed. Wang Wenjin 王文錦 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), 16.389.

28. Preserved in Sui shu, 77.2614–15. For a complete translation and a useful discussion of Li E's memorial, see Jack W. Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty, 124–31. As Chen suggests, since Li, a northerner, claims that literary degeneration reached a nadir in Qi and Liang, he may have intended to establish a "contemporary" and thus "declined" literary style as a shibboleth for a southern cultural identity. Li's memorial may thus have been a request to initiate a purge of southern rivals in the newly unified, but poorly integrated, Sui empire. To anticipate, if indeed the question of whether the literary tradition had declined from or sustained the creativity of the ancient sages had become a tool in power struggles between regional factions at court, it is hardly surprising that Taizong's courtiers should have sought to answer it definitively in the ideology they promulgated to quell the recent warfare within the empire and the factionalism that had accompanied Taizong's bloody rise to power. For a suggestion along these lines, see, for instance, Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 19.

29. Liang shu 梁書, by Yao Silian 姚思廉 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 25.382. The memorial is attributed to Xu Mian 徐勉 (465–535), but the work it introduced was a corporate project.

30. "This Wen" derives from the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 5.211 (9/5). The phrase often stands in works from this period for the normative cultural tradition writ large.

31. The five types of rituals are defined in Zheng Xuan's comment at Zhouli zhushu 周禮注疏, annot. Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 and Jia Gongyan 賈公彥, in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji, 3.259a.

32. The phrase is literally "[a complete concert] with the resonance of jade [chimes] and the sound of metal [bells]"; for its source and an explanation, see Mengzi yizhu 孟子譯注, ed. Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), 10.167 (5A10).

33. Liang shu, 25.379–82. The full text of this memorial is translated and discussed in Andreas Janousch, "The Reform of Imperial Ritual during the Reign of Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (502–549)" (Ph.D. diss: Cambridge University, 1998), 85–100. I rely here on his interpretation.

34. Yan Zhitui 顔之推, Yanshi jiaxun jijie, ed. Wang Liqi 王利器 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), "fu lu er," 679. My reading of Yan's prescriptions for the newly unified empire is indebted a yet-unpublished paper by Pablo A. Blitstein, "The Chains of Transmission: Authority and Mobility in Yan Zhitui's Family Instructions."

35. I say "seems" because it is difficult to parse the genuine from the spurious in surviving records of Wang's teachings. On the problematic transmission of Wang Tong, see Ding Xiang Warner, Transmitting Authority: Wang Tong (ca. 584–617) and the Zhongshuo in Medieval China's Manuscript Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

36. By "Classicist," here and throughout, I mean scholarship on the "Confucian" Classics. I use the term "Classicist" rather than "Confucian" merely to acknowledge the wide variety of intellectual approaches to these Classics in the period, some of which would not be considered truly "Confucian" in later periods. As Nicholas Morrow Williams has pointed out, Wang Tong was himself faulted by later "Confucians" for his tolerant attitude towards Buddhism and his avowal that the Buddha was a sage; see Williams, review of Transmitting Authority: Wang Tong (ca. 584–617) and the Zhongshuo in Medieval China's Manuscript Culture, by Ding Xiang Warner, Journal of the American Oriental Society 136.1 (2016): 151.

37. Crucial passages concerning Wang's critique of Classicist tradition include Wang Tong 王通, Wenzhongzi Zhongshuo 文中子中説, ed. Qin Yueyu 秦躍宇 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2017), 2.18 and 5.48. For the most direct claim of Wang Tong's sageliness, see ibid., "Wenzhongzi shijia," 103.

38. See Jack W. Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty, 131–34. Chen suggests that in the years preceding his coup, Taizong had already begun the work of shifting his identity from a warlike conqueror to an enlightened consolidator of what had been conquered. This work crucially involved the establishment of his "Institution of Wen and Learning" 文學館 in 621 and its replacement in 626 by an expanded "Institution for Magnifying Wen" 宏文館, with which several of the influential literary men of his court were originally associated. For more background on these institutions, see Yinggang Sun, "Princely Patronage in the Scholarly World of Sui and Early Tang China (581–713)" (Ph.D. diss.: Princeton University, 2009), especially 68–83, and Christopher J. Dakin, "Xie Yan: Master of the Early Tang Fu" (Ph.D. diss.: University of Washington, 2009), especially 33–47. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that Xie Yan 謝偃 (d. 643), one of the scholars of the "Institution for Magnifying Wen," wrote his "Zhengming lun" 正名論—a dialogue in which a "Master Who Magnifies Wen" 宏文先生 encourages Tang subjects who had previously devoted themselves to wu to cast off their martial ambitions and turn their attentions to wen—in these years as part of the effort to shift Taizong's image. See Quan Tang wen, 156.1596b–97b.

39. For a work completed in Gaozu's reign, see the 624 preface to Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚, comp. Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢, ed. Wang Shaoying 汪紹楹 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), "Yiwen leiju xu," 27; see also Gaozu's rhetoric in commissioning such scholarly projects, such as that recorded at Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書, by Liu Xu 劉昫等 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 50.2134–35 and 73.2597. For Sui works, see Lu Deming's 陸德明 preface for his Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文, Jingdian shiwen xulu shuzheng 經典釋文序録疏證, annot. Wu Chengshi 吴承仕 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2008), "Xu," 8–9 (the completion date of this work is debated; it was likely begun, and may have been finished, in the Chen); Xiao Ji's 蕭吉 preface to the Wuxing dayi 五行大義, in Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han sanguo liuchao wen 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文, comp. Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), "Quan Sui wen," 13.4093; Li Delin's 李德林 preface to the Bachao zaji 霸朝雜集, Sui shu, 42.1200–1202; Pan Hui's 潘徽 preface to Yang Jun's 楊俊 Yun zuan 韵纂, Sui shu, 76.1744–45; and Lu Fayan's 陸法言 preface to the Qieyun 切韻, in Quan shanggu sandai, "Quan Sui wen," 27.4180a–b.

40. See, for instance, Yu Shinan's 虞世南 inscription for the renovation of the Confucius temple, preserved in his Yu mijian ji 虞祕監集, in Siming congshu 四明叢書, ed. Zhang Shouyong 張壽鏞 (Ningbo: Zhang Shouyong's yueyuan, 1932), 13a–18a, to be discussed below. The exact date of this text is uncertain, but it must have been written between 628 and 633; see He Anping 何安平, "Dide Rufeng, yongxuan jinshi: Tangdai Kong miao de cengji jiegou yu zhengzhi gongneng" 帝德儒風,永宣金石:唐代孔廟的層級結構與政治功能, Lishi jiaoyu wenti 2021.4: 36–43.

41. See, for instance, Zhangsun Wuji's 653 memorial on the submission of the Wujing zhengyi, in Quan Tang wen, 136.1374b–75b, and the prefatory comments on the Sui shu "Jing ji zhi" 經籍志, to be discussed below. For other scholarly works completed early in Gaozong's reign where this narrative is not highlighted, see Zhangsun Wuji's memorial and preface on what is now known as the Tang lü shuyi 唐律疏議 (Taipei: Hongwenguan chubanshe, 1986), "fulu," 577–79 and 1.1–3; Jia Gongyan's 賈公彥 preface to the Zhouli zhengyi 周禮正義, Quan Tang wen, 164.1671a–73b (commissioned at an unknown time but completed under Gaozong); and Li Yanshou's 李延壽 memorial on the submission of his Northern History and Southern History 南北史, Bei shi 北史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 100.3343–45. This last text does, however, note Taizong's sagely intervention in the compilation of the Jin shu 晉書, stating that he resolved that history's problems through his "mysterious understanding" 玄覽, a term that will be marked in several texts discussed below.

42. The preface to the Sui shu "Wen xue" 文學 chapter, for instance, suggests that there was a partial restoration of the declining tradition of wen in the Sui, rather than its complete ruination, and does not discuss the current situation in the Tang; see Sui shu, 76.1729–31, along with Jack W. Chen's translation and discussion in The Poetics of Sovereignty, 134–44. Something closer to the standard narrative is, however, found in the adjacent "Rulin" 儒林 chapter; Sui shu, 75.1705–7.

43. For McMullen's discussion of this project, see State and Scholars, 212. See also Liu Quanbo 劉全波 and He Qianglin 何強林, "Wensi boyao bianzuan kao" 《文思博要》 編纂考, Huaxia wenhua luntan 2 (2017): 96–110, and Liu Quanbo 劉全波, Tangdai leishu bianzuan yanjiu 唐代類書編纂研究 (Xinbei: Huamulan, 2018), 31–50. For a readable account of the proximate history of leishu up to the time of the Wensi boyao, see also Liu Quanbo 劉全波, "Zai lun zhonggu shiqi leishu bianzuan de yinxi yu tidai" 再論中古時期類書編纂的因襲與替代, Xueshu lunheng 24 (2020): 82–93.

44. These phrases derive from the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.147b and 9.182a.

45. These phrases recall the "Great Preface" 大序 to Mao's Odes 毛詩; see Maoshi zhushu 毛詩注疏, annot. Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, Kong Yingda, et al., in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji, 1.12b.

46. This last phrase echoes the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.147a.

47. All citations of this preface derive from Wenyuan yinghua 文苑英華, ed. Li Fang 李昉 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1966), 699.3606b–7b.

48. For these references, see Han shu 漢書, by Ban Gu 班固 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 100b.4244, and Jin shu 晉書, ed. Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 92.2391.

49. "Subtle words" 微言 are sometimes specifically ascribed to Confucius, as for instance in the preface to Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義; see Ying Shao 應劭, Fengsu tongyi jiaozhu 風俗通義校注, ed. Wang Liqi 王利器 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), "Xu," 1. It is not clear to me whether Gao intends this connection here.

50. "Treasures worth ten cities" is obscure. My guess is that it probably refers to the jade traded for fifteen cities in an anecdote from the Shiji 史記 ("fifteen" being impossible for the parallelism; elsewhere this treasure is often called a "jade worth several cities" 連城之璧); see Shiji, by Sima Qian 司馬遷, annot. Pei Yin 裴駰 et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 81.2439. Nicholas Morrow Williams has also suggested to me a different parallel in a work by Zhenguan 真觀 (538–611); see Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han sanguo liuchao wen, "Quan Sui wen," 34.4227a. The three pearl trees of the immortals derive from the Shan hai jing 山海經; see Shan hai jing jianshu 山海經箋疏, annot. Guo Pu 郭璞 and Hao Yixing 郝懿行, ed. Zhang Dingsan 張鼎三 and Mou Tong 牟通 (Ji'nan: Qi-Lu shushe, 2010), 6.4889.

51. The "ten schools of thought" 諸子十家 derives from Han shu, 30.1746. The "seven categories" was the bibliographical classification system employed by Liu Xin 劉歆 (d. 23 CE).

52. The previous encyclopedias mentioned and criticized in the omitted section here are the Huanglan 皇覽 of Wei Wendi 魏文帝 (Cao Pi, r. 220–226); the Hualin bianlüe 華林遍略, completed under Liang Wudi; the Leiyuan 類苑, also compiled by Liang officials; the Genglu 耕錄 (uncertain, perhaps a mistake for Yuan Hui's 元暉 [sixth c.] Kelu 科錄); the Yao lüe 要略 (uncertain, perhaps a mistake for the Yaolu 要錄 or perhaps the Zhushu yaolüe 諸書要略 by Wei Dan 魏澹 [580–645]); and the Xiuwendian yulan 修文殿御覽 (also known as Shoushengtang yulan 壽聖堂御覽), produced by officials of the Northern Qi. These examples are clearly intended to represent the genre as a whole.

53. "Mysterious powers of understanding" 玄覽 derives from the Laozi; see Laozi jiaoshi, 10.37. For medieval interpretations of the term, see Wang Bi 王弼, Wang Bi Daode jing zhu 王弼道德經注, ed. Bian Jiazhen 邊家珍 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2017), 1.7; Laozi Daode jing Heshang gong zhangju 老子道德經河上公章句, ed. Wang Qia 王卡 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), 1.35; Cheng Xuanying 成玄英, Laozi Daode jing kaiti xujue yishu 老子道德經開題序訣義疏, Zhonghua daozang 中華道藏, ed. Zhang Jiyu 張繼禹 (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2004), vol. 9, 241; and Li Rong 李榮, Daode zhenjing zhu 道德真經註, Zhonghua daozang, vol. 9, 300. My translation follows the Heshang gong 河上公 gloss: "[The adept's] mind dwells in a place of mysterious darkness and observes and knows the myriad affairs; thus this is called 'mysterious understanding'" 心居玄冥之處,覽知萬事,故謂之玄覽也.

54. Penglai was one of the legendary islands of the immortals in the eastern ocean, and immortals characteristically rode carriages made of clouds. The comparison of the emperor to an immortal was another common feature of early Tang court rhetoric.

55. Here follows a list of the courtiers who contributed to the compilation of the encyclopedia. The "writings of sages and worthies" is literally "transmission and creation," the characteristic activities of these two classes of person according to medieval thinkers. For this distinction and a collection of medieval comments on it, see Huang Kan, Lunyu yishu, 4.153–54 (7/1). The phrase translated as "the textual tradition" is more literally "writing and editing" 筆削, which by this point had come to mean simply "composition." Like "transmission and creation," the phrase originally derives from a context connected with Confucius' work in compiling, preserving, and editing the Classics; see Shiji, 47.1944.

56. "The margin of heaven and man" is a common phrase; its first surviving use seems to be Shiji, 27.1344 and 130.3319.

57. The Xiping Stone Classics 熹平石經 were carved at the command of the Han court between 175 and 183. The reference to the legal code derives from Han Feizi jijie 韓非子集解, ed. Zhong Zhe 鍾哲 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), 46.418.

58. That is, to the Zuozhuan 左傳 and the Shi ji 史記.

59. Taizong does not, in fact, seem to have been widely or deeply learned. For a discussion of the limited extent of his personal engagement with the written tradition, see McMullen, "The Big Cats Will Play," 307–15.

60. Claims that Taizong was not just a sage, but a sage surpassing all previous sages, are found throughout the compilations of his court. See, for instance, the Sui shu essay appended to its account of the northern barbarians: "When our sagely ruler's wondrous strategies revolved in the depths and his numinous intelligence secretly stirred, he wiped out at a stroke barbarians that had not been controlled for a hundred generations, incorporated [the previously barbarian] Hanhai and Longting regions into the Chinese state, and made the folk of [the far distant] northern regions into taxpaying citizens. This is in truth something no primeval godking ever accomplished, [an achievement] never recorded in any ancient document" 聖上奇謀潛運,神機密動,遂使百世不羈之虜一舉而滅,瀚海、龍庭之地畫為九州,幽都窮髮之民隸於編戶。實帝皇所不及,書契所未聞 (Sui shu, 84.1884).

61. This inscription is famous as a surviving example of Yu Shinan's calligraphy. See Jinshi cuibian 金石萃編, comp. Wang Chang 王昶 (Taibei: Yiwen yinshu guan, 1966), 41.19a. Several inscriptions for Confucius temples survive (sometimes in fragmentary form) from the pre-Tang period; see, for instance, Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han sanguo liuchao wen, "Quan Hou Han wen," 99.1004b–5a and 101.1018b–19a; "Quan sanguo wen," 17.1144a–b; "Quan Hou Wei wen," 58.3806a–7a; and "Quan Sui wen," 28.4189a–b. While these precedents share certain themes with Yu Shinan's, none features anything quite like the full Zhenguan ideology of wen so clearly exemplified in his inscription.

62. All citations of this inscription are from Yu Shinan, Yu mijian ji, 13a–18a. The first clause here is quoted from the Xici commentary to the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.171a. "Cannot be fathomed" also derives from the same text; see ibid., 7.147b (though note that in the Zhengyi subcommentary, the point is specifically that the numinous cannot be fathomed "through an account yin and yang" 陰陽不測). "Tenuous and faint" comes from the Laozi; see Laozi jiaoshi, 14.52.

63. The Three Landmark Texts and the Five Canons are the legendary records of the reigns of the Three Thearchs and Five Godkings.

64. "Times of enlightenment and darkness" is literally Zhun 屯and Heng 亨, two hexagrams from the Yijing (nos. 3 and 32).

65. "Inherit the position of emperor" is more literally "responded to the cycle of fortune [so as to accede to the position symbolized by] the yang line in the fifth position [of the Qian hexagram, i.e., that corresponding to the ruler's position]"; see Zhouyi zhushu, 1.10a. For the significance of a "seven-hundred-year dynastic reign," see Zuozhuan zhushu 左傳注疏, annot. Du Yu 杜預, Kong Yingda 孔穎達, et al., in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji, 21.367b (Xuan gong 3).

66. These phrases derive from the Shi jing; see Maoshi zhushu, 18.693b and 17.606b.

67. "A third with heaven and a pair with earth" quotes the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 9.1872a.

68. "Truly wen" and "truly wu" derive, respectively, from the Shi jing and from the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書; see Maoshi zhushu, 27.737b and Yi Zhou shu jiaobu zhushi 逸周書校補注譯, ed. Huang Huaixin 黄懷信 (Xi'an: SanQin chubanshe, 2006), 7.45.

69. "Benevolence and longevity" derives from the Lunyu; see Lunyu jishi, 12.410 (6/23).

70. "To craft learned ministers" is literally, "to fletch arrows with feathers and complete implements." The phrase "to fletch arrows with feathers" derives from an anecdote in the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語; see Kongzi jiayu shuzheng 孔子家語疏證, comp. Chen Shike 陳士珂, ed. Cui Tao 崔濤 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2017), 5.140.

71. For the "Golden Mirror," see Li Shimin, Tang Taizong wenji jiaozhu 唐太宗全集校注, ed. Wu Yun 吴雲 and Ji Yu 冀宇 (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 2004), 125–29. For a translation and discussion, see Twitchett, "How to Be an Emperor," 8–33; see also Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty, 81–91.

72. These phrases describing the standard virtues appropriate to the position of crown prince derive from the Liji 禮記; see Liji zhushu 禮記注疏, annot. Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, Kong Yingda, et al., in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokan ji, 20.399b and 398b.

73. Chu and Pei refer to the warring powers at the founding of the Han. The point here is that Taizong has fully unified a once-fractious empire, and done so in a way that the mores of the empire now all follow the Classics. For the nine early Han masters of the Yijing employed by Liu An 劉安 (ca. 179–122 BCE), see Han shu, 30.1703.

74. This image derives ultimately from the Lunyu; see Lunyu jishi, 25.866 (12/19).

75. "To raise one's hems" derives from Han shu, 67.2913, where it describes a Ru-scholar confidently ascending a hall to teach. "Entering the inner chambers" may suggest advancement in learning, based on Analects 11/15; see Lunyu jishi, 22.772.

76. The translation of these phrases is tentative.

77. The figure of dyeing white silk may derive from the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 2.56–58 (3/8).

78. These images allude to the Shangshu; see Shangshu zhushu, 13.184a–85a.

79. The second clause here likely derives from the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 8.409 (15/29). We may also be intended to hear an echo of the Xici's warning, "If someone tries [to enact the dao] who is not the right person for it, the dao will not operate in vain" 苟非其人,道不虛行; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.174a.

80. The "six institutes of learning" was the school system of the ancient Zhou dynasty; see Da Dai li ji huijiao jizhu 大戴禮記彙校集注, ed. Huang Huaixin 黄懷信 (Xi'an: SanQin chubanshe, 2005), 3.337–43.

81. Zhouyi zhushu, "Zhouyi zhengyi xu," 4a. As noted above, although the Wujing zhengyi series was commissioned by Taizong in 638 and the primary work seems to have been done during his reign, revisions were not completed until 653, under Gaozong. It is not possible to tell with certainty how the unrevised series completed under Taizong would have differed from our current version. For a summary of what is known about the compilation of the Wujing zhengyi, see Zhang Baosan 張寶三, Wujing zhengyi yanjiu 五經正義研究 (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2011), 17–27; for a more detailed account, see Noma Fumichika 野間文史, Gokyō seigi no kenkyū: sono seiritsu to tenkai 五經正義の研究:その成立と展開 (Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan, 1998), 7–38.

82. Zhouyi zhushu, 7.148a.

83. See Lucas Rambo Bender, "The Corrected Interpretations of the Five Classics (Wujing zhengyi) and the Tang Legacy of Obscure Learning (Xuanxue)," T'oung Pao 104.1 (2019): 76–127.

84. The Sui shu Treatises were submitted to Gaozong in 656. As is the case with the Wujing zhengyi, there appears to be no way to confidently differentiate those portions of the treatises completed under Taizong from the revisions finished under his successor. I cite these texts here on the hypothesis that at least large sections of them were initially crafted with the Zhenguan ideology in mind, but that they refrain from emphasizing it explicitly in their most prominent summaries of their contents—for instance their prefaces—because it was no longer useful to Gaozong. For the Sui shu Treatises, in English see Daniel Patrick Morgan and Damien Chaussende, eds., Monographs in Tang Official Historiography: Perspectives from the Technical Treatises of the History of Sui (Sui shu) (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019). Scholarship on the jingji zhi is extensive, though much relates to reconstructing the texts it mentions (for this work, see particularly Kōzen Hiroshi 興膳宏 and Kawai Kōzō川合康三, Zuisho keisekishi shōkō 隋書經籍志詳攷 [Tokyo: Kyūko shōin, 1995]). For introductions to its bibliographical principles and its place in the history of Chinese bibliography, see (for instance) Xing Shanhong 興膳宏 and Lian Ching-tyi 連清吉, "Sui shu jingji zhi jieshuo" 《隋書•經籍志》 解說, Shumu jikan 書目季刊 33.1 (1999): 1–13 and 33.2 (1999): 1–14, and Du Yunhong 杜雲虹, "Suishu jingjizhi yanjiu" 隋書經籍志研究 (Ph.D. diss.: Shandong daxue, 2012).

85. This sentence echoes the Zhouyi zhengyi interpretation of the Xici; see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.148a.

86. This sentence paraphrases the Xici's comment, "The benevolent see the dao and [mistakenly] call it benevolent; the wise see the dao and [mistakenly] call it wise; the common folk use it on a daily basis but do not know that they do" 仁者見之謂之仁,知者見之謂之知,百姓日用而不知. See ibid., 7.148b.

87. The final two phrases of this sentence derive from the Laozi; see Laozi jiaoshi, 10.41 and 51.204.

88. This last phrase draws upon the discussion of sagely communication in the Xici; see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.158a.

89. The distinction of what lies "beyond the bounds," fangwai 方外, and "within the bounds," fangnei 方內, derives from the Zhuangzi; see Zhuangzi jishi, 6.267. For discussions of the significance of these terms in Chinese intellectual history, see Willard J. Peterson, "Squares and Circles: Mapping the History of Chinese Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas 49.1 (1988): 47–60, and Robert Ford Campany, "On the Very Idea of Religions (in the Modern West and in Early Medieval China)," History of Religions 42.4 (2003): 287–319.

90. Sui shu, 34.1003.

91. "Harmony and constancy" translates zhongyong 中庸 according to the glosses given in Lunyu yishu, 3.149–50 and Liji zhushu, 52.880a. The phrase, however, can also have the meaning of middling, normal, or unexceptional; this valence may also be in play here.

92. Sui shu, 35.1099.

93. The most likely source for this sense of the "middle path" is probably the Zhongyong 中庸 chapter of the Liji; see Liji zhushu, 31.894a–b.

94. "Major Elegantiae" translates Daya 大雅, technically a section from the Classic of Poetry, here used metonymically for the most orthodox teachings of the Classics.

95. "Teaching and being taught" derives from the Laozi; see Laozi jiaoshi, 27.109.

96. This phrase derives from a comment of Zheng Xuan's on the Liji, to the effect that "if one does not understand what one studies with one's mind, then one will forget it easily" 學不心解,則忘之易; see Liji zhushu, 18.652a.

97. Here follows a list of specific techniques of Classical studies that, according to the authors of this section, represent merely "methods for competing with and overturning [the work of other scholars]" 翻競之說. For an attempt to reconstruct the (partly obscure) significance of these terms, see Fan Changchang 范晶晶, "Dui Sui shu jing ji zhi jingbu houxu yiduan pinglun de jiedu" 對 《隋書.經籍志》 經部後序一段評論的解讀, Zhongguo dianji yu wenhua 89 (2014): 55–59.

98. Sui shu, 32.947–48.

99. Ibid., 35.1090–91.

100. The text does, however, offer a template for that restoration, one that resembles remarkably closely the account of Taizong in Gao Jian's preface and Yu Shinan's stele inscription, but that does not specify Taizong as the sage; see ibid., 32.903.

101. See Wei Zheng 魏征 et al., eds., Qunshu zhiyao 群书治要, annot. Lü Xiaozu 吕效祖 (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2004). The Qunshu zhiyao has been extensively studied from several different angles. For a comprehensive listing of publications on this collection, see Guo Yanling 郭妍伶 and He Shuping 何淑蘋, "Minguo yilai (1912–2020) Qunshu zhiyao yanjiu lunzhu mulu" 民國以來(1912–2020) 《群書治要》 研究論著目錄, Shumu jikan 55.1 (2021): 99–119. For recent work on the intellectual positions of the series, see, for instance, Liu Yuli 刘余莉, Pingzhi tianxia: Qunshu zhiyao zhiguo lizheng sixiang yanjiu 平治天下: 《群书治要》 治国理政思想研究 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2019); Poon Ming-Kay 潘銘基, "Lun Qunshu zhiyao jingbu suo jian chuTang jingxue fengshang" 論 《群書治要.經部》 所見唐初經學風尚, Shumu jikan 53.3 (2019): 1–27 (along with a number of other works by Poon); and Huang Li-Ping 黃麗頻, "Lun Qunshu zhiyao dui Laozi de qujing yu shijian: yi Zhenguan zhi zhi wei zheng" 論 《群書治要》 對 《老子》 的取徑與實踐-以貞觀之治為證, Donghua Hanxue 13 (2020): 1–31.

102. This phrase echoes Liu An 劉安, Huainanzi jishi 淮南子集釋, ed. He Ning 何寧 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), 8.582 as well as Lu Ji's 陸機 "Wen fu" 文賦, Wenxuan, 17.764.

103. The idea that the many misguided paths of the world reach the same point derives from the Xici; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.169a.

104. Both halves of this sentence allude to the Laozi; see Laozi jiaoshi, 79.304 and 39.154–55.

105. This sentence involves three references to the Analects, each discussing the special character of sages. For a medieval understanding of these passages, see Lunyu yishu, 5.212 (9/6), 8.433 (16/9), and 3.110 (5/13).

106. Hanhai and Longting are historical toponyms, associated with the northern and western frontiers of the Han. Fusang and Ruomu are described in Shan hai jing, 9.4919 and 17.5017.

107. This phrase inverts a saying attributed to Confucius in the Zhuangzi; see Zhuangzi jishi, 5.193.

108. "Understanding principle and completing one's nature" is a quotation from the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 9.183a. "Widely learned but impoverished when it comes to the essentials" quotes Shi ji, wherein it is used as a description of the Ru; see Shi ji, 130.3289.

109. Preserved in Cefu yuangui 册府元龜, comp. Wang Qinruo 王欽若 et al. (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2006), 607.6999.

110. Wei Zheng et al., eds., Qunshu zhiyao, 830. Robert Ford Campany, "Two Religious Thinkers of the Early Eastern Jin: Gan Bao and Ge Hong in Multiple Contexts," Asia Major, 3rd ser. 18.1 (2005): 183.

111. For a representative statement regarding the assumed "comprehensiveness" of early Tang scholarly projects, see McMullen, State and Scholars, 8; see also 211–12.

112. Another indication that Taizong's court projects were ideologically selective in this way can be found in the Jingji zhi's modifications of the bibliographical precedent provided by the Liangdynasty Qi lu 七錄, especially its suppression of what had been a significant bibliography regarding the apocrypha, occult arts, and discourse on ghosts and spirits, all of which topics would have been associated with "study of the obscure." See Yao Mingda 姚明達, Zhongguo muluxue shi 中國目錄學史 (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1964), 94–97.

113. See, for instance, Chen shu 陳書, by Yao Silian 姚思廉 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972), 6.120.

114. This dictum derives from the Zuozhuan; see Zuozhuan zhushu, 36.623b.

115. Confucius' saying is preserved in the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 5.210 (9/5).

116. This quotation derives from the Analects; see ibid., 4.201 (8/20).

117. Ziyou and Zixia are singled out for their wen-xue 文學 in the Analects; see ibid., 6.267 (11/3). The phrasing suggesting that Yan Hui was "almost on the verge" of being a sage derives from the Xici; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.171b.

118. This figure derives from the Zhuangzi; see Zhuangzi jishi, 12.414.

119. This phrase derives from the so-called Great Preface to Mao's Odes. Some modern scholarship (e.g., Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], 58–60) treats this statement as descriptive of poetry in general, rather than as prescriptive. The Maoshi zhengyi interpretation, however, is clearly prescriptive; see Maoshi zhushu, 1.13a–b, which discusses both this passage and the possibility that non-normative poetry might involve "faked emotion" 矯情.

120. Confucius is described as being "endowed by heaven with sageliness" 天縱之將聖 in the Analects, and though he denies in the same text being "born knowing it" (as sages supposedly are), medieval commentators characteristically thought he was not telling the truth in this statement. Confucius also suggests that a worthy person would not be fooled by a deceiver because he would "perceive [the deception] in advance" 先覺. See Lunyu yishu, 5.213 (9/6), 8.433 (16/9), and 7.377 (14/31; note, however, that the explanation Huang Kan gives for this final passage does not obviously fit the usage in this citation).

121. I am interpreting guanjian 關鍵 here in the sense in which it is used in Liu Xie, Zengding wenxin diaolong jiaozhu, 6.365.

122. "Looking up at and boring into" and "friends who improve one" derive from the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 5.216–17 (9/11) and 8.428 (16/4). My interpretation of this section of the Bai Qi shu follows Huang Kan's gloss on the former passage: "Even if a thing is high, if one gazes up at it, one can see it; even if a thing is hard, if one chisels into it one can enter it. But for Yan Hui with regard to Confucius's dao, the more he gazes at it the loftier it seems, and the more he drills into it the harder it becomes. Thus he cannot attain [that dao] no matter how hard he works at it" 夫物雖高者,若仰瞻則可覩也;物雖堅者,若鑚錐則可入也。顔於孔子道,愈瞻愈高,彌鑚彌堅,非己厝力之能得也.

123. "Learning through study" is second best to being "born knowing it" according to the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 8.433 (16/9), and Huang Kan's commentary there, which explains that "learning through study" is the province of "worthies of the superior grade" 上賢 rather than sages.

124. Bei Qi shu, 45.601–2.

125. Sui shu, 34.999.

126. Sui shu, 34.999–1000.

127. Ibid., 34.999 and 35.1099.

128. Beyond the texts cited here, a number of other works by Taizong's court recapitulate pieces of the ideology. Most of the histories, for instance, eulogize sagely wen and narrate its catastrophic decline through the Period of Division, in particular though the rise of Xuanxue (see Zhou shu, 41.742–45 and 45.805–6; Sui shu, 75.1705–7 and 76.1729–31; Jin shu, 91.2345–46; Liang shu, 48.661–662 and 49.685–86; and Chen shu, 27.433–34); the same decline of wen is also narrated in Taizong's 639 edict promulgating new ritual and music for the dynasty (Cefu yuangui, 564.6771a–b). The Zhenguan court also produced a considerable amount of discourse about the nature of sages and sage emperors, much of which fits with the wen ideology's focus on their special relationship with the obscure and their teaching through wen; see for instance Yu Shinan's "Doleful Brevet of Investiture of Gaozu, [the Tang's] Divine Emperor Yao" 高祖神堯皇帝哀冊文, written in the voice of Taizong (Wenyuan yinghua, 435.4406b–7b); Xie Yan's "Rhapsody on the Sage"述聖賦 (Wenyuan yinghua, 41.181b–83a); Zhangsun Wuji's 長孫無忌"Discussion of Confucius' Investiture by Previous Emperors"先代帝王及先聖先師議 and his 647 memorial urging Taizong to undertake the Feng and Shan sacrifices (Wenyuan yinghua, 764.4012a–3a and Cefu yuangui, 35.388b–91a); Zhang Wengu's 張蘊古 "Admonition on the Great Treasure" 大寶箴 (Jiu Tang shu, 190a.4992–93); Kong Yingda's discussion of the Analects with Taizong near the beginning of his reign (Jiu Tang shu 73.2601–2); and Yan Shigu's 顏師古 "Laud of Sagely Virtue" 聖德頌 (Quan Tang wen, 147.1487b–81a). Claims about the mysteriousness of sagely insight are also found pervasively in prefaces for Buddhist and Daoist works and inscriptions on Buddhist and Daoist sites, among which perhaps the most interesting parallel for the Zhenguan court narrative is Taizong's (probably ghostwritten) preface to Xuanzang's 玄奘 (602–664) translations of the Buddhist texts he brought back from India (Wenyuan yinghua, 735.3825a–b).

129. For an argument that the relationship between the emperor and the literati changed dramatically in the 650s under Gaozong, see Shang-Tseh Chou, "Emperorship Redefined: Developments of the State Ritual Program in Seventh-Century China" (Ph.D. diss.: Harvard University, 2003). If Chou is right, literati might have felt some nostalgia for the Zhenguan ideology of wen, which was both directed at the literati and implicitly afforded them an important place in the governance of the empire.

130. Xiao Gang, Liang Jianwendi ji jiaozhu 11.800. Ren Fang's preface is preserved in Wen xuan, 46.2702. "Getting it at the second stage" seems to derive from Han Bo's 韓伯 (317–420) comment to a passage from the Xici zhuan describing Yan Hui: "He was ignorant of ultimate truth but would understand when encountering a fully-formed [situation]—such was Yan Hui's [limited] portion. So he would lose it at incipiency [i.e. before a situation took shape], but when he made a mistake, he would get it at the second stage [when it had taken shape], returning after not going too far" 在理則昧,造形則悟,顏子之分也,失之於幾,故有不善,得之於二,不遠而復 (Zhouyi zhushu, 8.171b). If this is the right reference, Ren is depicting Wang as a worthy rather than a sage.

131. Lai Ji has a biography in the Jiu Tang shu, 80.2742–43, and in the Xin Tang shu 新唐書, by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, Song Qi 宋祁, et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995), 105.4031–32.

132. Literally: "The dao by which Qi could be changed into Lu and Lu could be brought into accordance with the dao." The allusion is to the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 3.145 (6/24).

133. The final phrase here recalls Lu Ji's "Wen fu"; see Wenxuan, 17.764.

134. This sentence echoes the Laozi and the Xici; see Laozi jiaoshi, 43.177, and Zhouyi zhushu, 7.147a.

135. All citations of this preface derive from Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰, Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 盧照鄰集校注, ed. Li Yunyi 李雲逸 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), 6.311–34.

136. Confucius is described as a crouching dragon in one of the Chunqiu apocrypha; see Qi wei fu Lunyu chen 七緯附論語讖, comp. Zhao Zaihan 趙在翰, ed. Zhong Zhaopeng 鍾肇鵬 and Xiao Wenyu 蕭文鬱 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2012), 371. The first emperor of Qin is compared to a beast in Shi ji, 6.230.

137. These phrases derive from the Yijing, and I have interpreted them according to their Zhouyi zhengyi glosses; see Zhouyi zhushu, 9.182a and 7.148a. "Numinous" for the Zhengyi is another name for the dao. The dao is also that which is "unchanged through yin and yang."

138. Some of the sections of this preface that are omitted here are translated in my monograph, Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021), 11–13.

139. The figure of "letting robes hang down" echoes the Xici; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.167b.

140. These ritual dances derive from "The Counsels of Great Yu" 大禹謨 from the Shangshu; see Shangshu zhushu, 4.58.

141. This sentence echoes Han shu, 58.2634.

142. "Transformed Airs and Transformed Elegantiae" are sections of the Classic of Poetry deriving from the period when the influence of the ancient sages had begun to wane in society at large; see Maoshi zhushu, 1.16b.

143. The practice of preserving lacunae is discussed in Lunyu yishu, 8.408 (15/26).

144. "Reclining on an eastern mountain" likely alludes to Xie An's 謝安 (320–385) "loftily reclining on an eastern mountain" 高臥東山 and refusing court summons; see Liu Yiqing 劉義慶, comp., Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏, annot. Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標 et al., ed. Zhou Zumo 周祖謨 et al. (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1984), "juan xia zhi xia," 801 (25/26).

145. These allusions imply that Lu has lost a worthy patron akin to the Han figures Gongsun Hong 公孫弘 (199–121 BCE), the Marquis of Pingjin, and Li Ying 李膺 (d. 169 CE). See Han shu, 58.2613–24, and Hou Han shu 後漢書, by Fan Ye 范曄 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 68.2225.

146. See "Huang niao" 黃鳥 and "Bao yu" 鴇羽 (Mao nos. 131 and 121), Maoshi zhushu, 6.243a–44a and 6.224b–25b.

147. This sentence alludes to an anecdote in the Liji wherein Zhao Wenzi speculated about associating with past luminaries; see Liji zhushu, 10.199b.

148. For the biography of Qu Yuan, see Shi ji, 84.2481–86.

149. For these allusions, see Zhuangzi jishi, 24.843, and Wen xuan, 16.719–20.

150. The first half of this sentence alludes to Mengzi's comment: "Just as those who observe the sea find it hard [to be interested by] other bodies of water, those who roam at the gate of the sage find it hard [to be interested by] the words of others" 故觀於海者難為水,遊於聖人之門者難為言; see Mengzi yizhu, 13.229 (7A24). The pre-Qin thinker Zou Yan 鄒衍 was known for "discussing heaven" 談天 and its obscure mechanisms; see Shi ji, 74.2348.

151. Li Yunyi's edition reads 渤瀚 and does not note a variant. Early texts (including Wenyuan yinghua, 700.3610b) read as above, which makes more sense.

152. The courtiers of the Zhenguan reign seem to have imagined that sages could know such history, as they (at least sometimes) considered the sages functionally omniscient. See, for instance, the discussion in the Maoshi zhengyi of Confucius' decision not to include the texts of poems that had been lost by his time: "When Confucius established the text of the Shi, the thirty years that had passed [since one of these poems was last performed] was enough for the poem to be lost. Although, as a sage, there was nothing that he did not know, he could not merely record it based on his own knowledge [since that would have set a deleterious precedent for non-sagely historians (for this point, see Zuozhuan zhushu, "Chunqiu xu," 7a)]" 至孔子定詩三十餘年,其間足得亡之也。聖人雖無所不知,不得以意錄之也 (Maoshi zhushu, 10.348a). For another evocation of the sages' omniscience, see Shangshu zhushu, 4.53a.

153. These first two sentences recall the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 2.48b and 3.62b.

154. This idea derives from the Li sanzheng ji 禮三正記, preserved in Baihu tong 白虎通; see Ban Gu 班固 et al., comp., Baihu tong shuzheng 白虎通疏證, annot. Chen Li 陳立 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994), 8.362.

155. The distinction between ci and fu seems to derive from Yang Xiong's 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) arguments about the debased character of much of the fu genre in his time; see Yang Xiong 揚雄, Fayan yishu 法言義疏, annot. Wang Rongbao 汪榮寶 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 2.49–50.

156. "Hollow rules" may specifically refer here to tonal regulation 聲律. It might also be possible to translate the second clause here as "Few followed the inconstancy [of the dao] to create new things [as the ancient sages had done]," which would read Yang as drawing upon the Wenzi 文子, where we read that "the sages… create things and are not constrained by things… thus it is said, 'The dao that can be used to lead others is the inconstant dao'" 聖人…制物者,不制於物…故曰:道可道,非常道也. See Wenzi shuyi 文子疏義, ed. Wang Liqi 王利器 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 12.511. The sages also "create things" (zhi wu) in Huainanzi jishi, 11.791.

157. "In a flicker" recalls the movements of the Daoist gods and immortals through the heavens.

158. The "style of an independent master" derives ultimately from Shi ji, 130.3319.

159. "What previous sages did not discuss" recalls the Analects, wherein we read about various topics that Confucius did not address; see Lunyu yishu, 3.110–11 (5/13), 4.169–70 (7/21), and 6.273–74 (11/12). Also at play here may be the Zhenguan-era ideas discussed above, specifically those of Sui shu, 34.1033 and 35.1099.

160. "Talents" here is more literally "timbers" 材, matching with the carpenter-like "crafting" 匠 of Wang's writing.

161. This last phrase may echo the Huainanzi; see Huainanzi jishi, 2.113 and 12.892. In the Kongcongzi 孔叢子, Confucius is recognized as resembling the ancient sages on account of his "breadth of understanding" 博物; see Kongcongzi jiaoshi 孔叢子校釋, ed. Fu Yashu 傅亞庶 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), 1.1.

162. All citations from this preface derive from Yang Jiong 楊炯, Yang Jiong ji jianzhu 楊炯集箋注, ed. Zhu Shangshu 祝尚書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2016), 3.249–94.

163. In making this point, Yang may have been taking his cue from Wang Bo himself, who had written one of the clearer early Tang echoes of the Zhengguan court narrative of wen that I have found outside of the genre of collection prefaces: his preface for his grandfather Wang Tong's Continuation to the Documents 續書. Wang Bo begins by discussing the civilizational importance of written documents; the wonder of the Classic of Documents in particular; and thus the necessity that its creator, Confucius, should have been a sage. Yet over the ensuing centuries, "the great models were dispersed and human wen went awry, disagreements proliferated and people's understanding became faulty" 大典散而人文乖,是非繁而取舍謬. At the nadir of this decline was born Wang Tong, who was "truly endowed with deep sapience" 實秉睿懿, "saw how later works had departed from the correct" 覩後作之違方, and thus, echoing Confucius himself, "sighed, saying 'Now that Confucius is dead, does not wen lie with me?'" 喟然曰宣尼既没,文不在兹乎. Wang Tong then proceeded to compile his new Classics to reground the tradition, but unfortunately, the Sui collapsed shortly thereafter and his works were damaged or lost. It was left to Wang Bo, who proclaims himself a worthy rather than a sage—someone who "is almost to the point of knowing it by studying" 庶幾乎學而知之者—to recompile his Continued Documents. See Wang Bo ji 王勃集, ed Yang Xiaocai 楊曉彩 (Taiyuan: SanJin chubanshe, 2017), 4.46–47. For another work of Wang's that also echoes the Zhengguan narrative and proclaims himself a worthy, see also his letter to Pei Xingjian 裴行儉, ibid., 8.92–93.

164. "Gifted with beauties" echoes the Yijing; see Zhouyi zhushu, 1.19a–b.

165. See Li ji, 1.16b.

166. Yan Shigu's 顏師古 (581–645) commentary, compiled during the Zhenguan period on the command of the crown prince, is extant and accompanies the standard printing of the Han shu.

167. "Penetrating incipiency" derives from the Xici, wherein it is said to be the work of the sages; see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.155a.

168. These phrases also derive from the Xici; see ibid., 7.156a and 7.150b.

169. "On the verge of" echoes Confucius' description of Yan Hui in the Xici; see ibid., 8.171b. "Examining the subtle" is said to be the work of the great ancient sages in Shiji, 1.13, and in Da Dai li ji huijiao jizhu, 62.744. "Scrutinizing antiquity" echoes Shangshu zhushu, 2.20b.

170. The legend of Confucius visiting heaven derives from the lost apocryphal text Xiaojing zhong qi 孝經中契; the relevant fragment is preserved in Taiping yulan 太平御覽, comp. Li Fang 李昉 et al. (Taibei: Taiwan shangshu yinshu guan, 1975), 610.2876b. The story of Cang Jie 倉頡 comes from a different lost apocryphal text, the Hetu yuban 河圖玉版, which is cited in Li Daoyuan 酈道元, Shui jing zhu jiaozheng 水經注校證, ed. Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 15.363.

171. This is the meaning of the term "Great Yi" in the Zhouyi zhushu; see 14.278a. "Magnify [the dao]" echoes Confucius in the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 8.409 (15/29).

172. For the "four shifts," see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.153b.

173. Wang's Zhouyi fahui 周易發揮 in five juan is recorded in the Jiu Tang shu bibliography, 46.1968. It does not survive.

174. Wang's dreaming Confucius recalls Confucius' dreams of the Duke of Zhou; see Lunyu yishu, 4.155 (7/5).

175. Yu Fan's 虞翻 (164–233) Yijing exegesis survives in fragmentary citations within Li Dingzuo's 李鼎祚 (8th c.) Zhouyi jijie 周易集解, ed. Wang Fengxian 王豐先 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2016). Han Bo (zi Kangbo) wrote a commentary on those parts of the Zhouyi that were not annotated by Wang Bi, most importantly the Xici zhuan; his work survives in Zhouyi zhushu.

176. These phrases derive from Zhouyi zhushu, 7.147a/b.

177. "Participate in the governance of" is literally "to engage in the weaving of."

178. The first half of the sentence echoes Zhouyi zhushu, 9.182a/b. The story of Kong Fu 孔鮒 (3rd c. BCE) is found in Kongcongzi jiaoshi, 6.410.

179. The Jiu Tang shu bibliography lists Wang Bo's Ci Lunyu 次論語 in five juan; see Jiu Tang shu, 46.1981. The work has long been lost.

180. "Connecting it all together on one string" echoes the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 2.90 (4/15). "Getting it at the second stage" 體二 may derive from Li Kang's 李康 "Yunming lun" 運命論, Wen xuan, 53.2299: "Mengzi and Xunzi embodied the second best in aiming at sageliness" 孟軻、孫卿體二希聖. In context, the meaning of the phrase is not entirely clear. Li Shan 李善 (630–689) glosses it according to the Han Bo comment cited in note 130 above; I have translated accordingly.

181. See Lunyu yishu, 6.314 (12/19).

182. These figures derive from the Zhuangzi and from a letter of Xi Kang's 嵇康 (223–263); see Zhuangzi jishi, 33.1079 and Wen xuan, 43.1925.

183. This cliché derives from Song Yu's "Dui Chu wang wen" 對楚王問; Wen xuan, 45.1999–2000.

184. A contrast seems to be drawn here with Confucius' claim that he could be appropriately blamed for the Chunqiu; see Mengzi yizhu, 6.106 (3B9).

185. The cited edition reads 好/妙 despite this variant not appearing in any transmitted edition of Yang Jiong's collection. 好 is the lectio facilior and I have thus recorrected back to 妙.

186. The cited edition emends 客/容 based on Quan Tang wen; I have recorrected to follow transmitted editions of Yang's collection.

187. Much of this section is translated in Warner, Transmitting Authority, 140–45.

188. For Zuo Si's 左思 (250–305) rhapsody, see Jin shu, 62.2377. For Wang Jian's 王儉 (452–489) "Seven Records" 七志, see Nan Qi shu, 23.433.

189. "To not decay" echoes Zuozhuan zhushu, 35.609b.

190. Wang's preface to this Daoist scripture is preserved in Wang Bo ji, 4.47–48. No record survives of a full annotation. Of Wang's work on the Yijing, all that survives is a single essay, his "Discussion on the Eight Graphs, Divination, and the Great Expansion" 八卦卜大演論; see ibid., 10.112–14.

191. For the use of the term shen as a synonym of dao, denoting the obscurities sages understand but most people cannot, see Zhouyi zhushu, 7.154a.

192. This description echoes the Analects; see Lunyu yishu, 5.212 (9/6).

193. I translate the phrase yifeng 遺風 according to its use in much early Tang rhetoric, e.g. Maoshi zhushu, 1.15a.

194. This statement echoes Lunyu yishu, 5.211 (9/5).

195. "Obstruction" 否 and "Peace" 泰 are hexagrams of the Yijing (nos. 12 and 11). For this statement, see Zhouyi zhushu, 9.187a.

196. For the changing of zhi and wen at the outset of a new dynasty, see Baihu tong shuzheng, 8.362.

197. A number of works entitled "remonstrance" 諫 are preserved in Chen Zi'ang ji 陳子昂集, ed. Xu Peng 徐鵬 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), juan 9.

198. Chen's "Zhaoyi zi Zhao shi beisong" 昭夷子趙氏碣頌 is found at ibid., 5.91–93.

199. For Chen's "Guo shang wen" 國殤文, see ibid., 7.145–46.

200. This probably refers to Chen's "Fuchou yizhuang" 復讎議狀; ibid., 7.152–53.

201. This phrase is a quotation of the Xici, where it describes the function of the Yijing itself; see Zhouyi zhushu, 8.172b.

202. Chen's famous "Ganyu" series is found at Chen Zi'ang ji, 1.2–13. "The auspices of transformation" is a quotation from Guiguzi 鬼谷子, where "observing the auspices of transformation" 見變化之朕 is regarded as the work of the ancient sages; see Guiguzi jijiao jizhu 鬼谷子集校集注, ed. Xu Fuhong 許富宏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010), 1.1.

203. This sentence quotes Confucius' praise of the untimely deceased Yan Hui, see Lunyu yishu, 5.225 (9/21).

204. This lament echoes Confucius' upon the death of Yan Hui; see ibid., 6.271 (11/10).

205. Lu is contrasting his work editing Chen's collection to Confucius' work compiling the Shijing. Note, however, that Confucius had himself several times denied being a sage—a denial medieval readers often took as dissimulating his true sageliness. See for instance Lunyu yishu, 8.433 (16/9).

206. Lu's biography of Chen, "Chen Zi'ang biezhuan" 陳子昂別傳, survives; see Wenyuan yinghua, 793.4191a–92b.

207. Preserved in ibid., 700.3611; for variant versions, see also Chen Zi'ang 陳子昂, Chen Zi'ang ji 陳子昂集, ed. Xu Pengjiao 徐鵬校 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), "fulu," 260–61, and Yao Xuan 姚鉉, Tang Wen cui 唐文粹, in Zhonghua chuanshi wenxuan 中華傳世文選 (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1998), 92.939–40.

208. Once again, the politics here are difficult to gauge precisely. Shangguan Yi actually reached the highest levels of government only under Gaozong, and according to surviving sources, he was executed for opposing Empress Wu. Given that this preface was probably written shortly after 702, during the period Empress Wu reigned as emperor of the Zhou dynasty, the identification of Shangguan Yi as a particularly pernicious poet may have been politic, as may have been Lu's decision not to honor the founding of the Tang as a significant break with the unstable and short-lived dynasties of the Period of Division.

209. For medieval discussion of this idea, see for instance Huang Kan, Lunyu yishu, 1.42–44.

210. See Mengzi yizhu, 4.75 (2B12) and 14.344 (7B38). The theory is found in several other early texts as well.

211. The first quote here comes from Yan Zhenqing's 顏真卿 (709–785) "Shangshu xingbu shilang zeng shangshu you pushe Sun Ti wengong jixu" 尚書刑部侍郎贈尚書右僕射孫逖文公集序, in Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿, Yan Lugong ji 顏魯公集, in Sibu beiyao 四部備要 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1933), 5.1a. The second and third are from Li Yangbing's 李陽冰 (fl. 762) preface to Li Bai's 李白 (701–762) collection; see Li Bai 李白, Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), "fu lu yi," 1445.

212. This suggestion is articulated through the program of Lunyu references throughout Lu Cangyong's preface.

213. See Lu Zhaolin, Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu, 6.301. This list could perhaps also be expanded to include Lü Cai's 呂才 "Afterword for the collection of Master Donggao [Wang Ji]" 東臯子後序, Quan Tang wen, 160.1638b–40a, which does not echo this narrative.

214. These quotes derive from what are, chronologically, the next two collection prefaces that survive from the Tang after Lu Cangyong's, Han Xiu's 韓休 (673–740) "Tang jinzi guanglu dafu libu shangshu shang zhuguo zeng shangshu youzheng xiang xu guowen xianggong Su Ting wenji xu" 唐金紫光祿大夫禮部尚書上柱國贈尚書右丞相許國文憲公蘇頲文集序, Quan Tang wen, 295.2987b, and Zhang Yue's 張說 (663–730) "Tang Zhaorong Shangguan shi wenji xu" 唐昭容上官氏文集序, Zhang Yue ji jiaozhu 張説集校注, ed. Xiong Fei 熊飛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), 28.1318.

215. For some sense of the magnitude of loss that circumscribes our understanding of Tang intellectual culture, see the list of (mostly lost) works of Classical scholarship in Zhang Quancai 章權才, Wei Jin nanbeichao Sui Tang jingxue shi 魏晉南北朝隋唐經學史 (Zhaoqing: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1996), 283–337. For a discussion of the development, in the late Qing, of interest in the philosophy of the pre-imperial period, see John Makeham, "The Role of Masters Studies in the Early Formation of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline," in Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China, ed. John Makeham, 73–102 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013), especially 90–91.

216. For the development of these categories and their meaning at the beginning of the Tang, see Pablo Ariel Blitstein, "The Art of Producing a Catalogue: The Meaning of 'Compilations' for the Organisation of Ancient Knowledge in Tang Times," in Morgan and Chaussende, eds., Monographs in Tang Official Historiography, 323–342.

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