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SEVEN Beyond the Seas: Other Kingdoms and Other Materials “Pre-modern” Chinese historians related what is seen by their modern counterparts as the re-centering of “key economic areas” with the oscillations of “order and chaos” (zhiluan). This pair of concepts, as Liang Qichao (1998 [1921–1926], pp. 137–144) pointed out long ago, formed a kind of temporality, neither cyclic nor linear; it was applied in traditional historiography to compare different dynasties and reigns from ethical and political standpoints. In these “order and chaos” historical narratives, history was a sequence of constant inversions constrained by the pentological framework of “quarters surrounding the center.” Partly following this “native line,” and partly following its modern reifications in the works of Fu Sinian, Gu Jiegang, and Ji Chaoding, I have sought in the previous chapters to recast the pasts of China. In the early imperial period of Qin and Han, the Central Kingdom turned away from the Westernism of Kunlun and faced itself toward the Easternism of the Immortality Mountains. However, in the phase of partition or “chaos,” Chinese Westernism regained its vitality. India as the West became a sacred direction, and in some areas (such as the Southwest) the imaginary of Buddha became mixed with that of Xi Wangmu. No matter whether the re-orientation of the “Western Heaven” was a reaction to the rigidity of imperial bureaucracy or a response to the hardships induced by partition, it added a Buddhist dimension to the religious life of the Chinese. By the eighth century at the latest, TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 179 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 179 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 180 Buddhism had become mixed with popular Confucian ethical principles such as filial piety (xiao) (Teiser, 1988). The long-term result of this fusion of religious civilizations was, as Granet (1975) observed, In a courtyard next to yours you hear a Buddhist mass being sung for a dead man: do not imagine that the dead man had faith in the Buddha or that someone among his kin is a Buddhist, or even that the family is more or less vaguely tied to the Buddhist faith by its traditions. You will soon hear the music and voices of a Taoist [Daoist] mass and, if your neighbours are the sort of people who do things on a grand scale, bonzes and tao-shih [daoshi] will take turns at their masses night and day. When the moment comes to dot the dead man’s tablet, it is a literatus who will be called in. The service asked of him is a religious service, quite different from that which we ask of a scholar in giving him the task of composing an epitaph. His stroke of the writing brush will give the tablet all that makes it a sacred object and the centre of the ancestor cult. It all happens as though the literatus, acting in the name of the body of officials, in the name of the State, authorized the family to possess an Ancestor. At the very moment when he makes the dot he is, we might say, a priest; the moment after, he is nothing but a layman: his position in society, it is true, makes him at all times respectable, but nothing would be more deprived of sense than to consider the body of literati as a clergy. (pp. 144–145) Beginning as early as in A.D. 25, one further pair of directionological concepts came to influence Chinese conceptualizations of history and geography—the North and the South. Ji Chaoding (1936), who explained the emergence of the North-South dualism in terms of the post-Han movement of key economic areas from the North to the South, deliberately or unconsciously played down the directionology he in fact applied. Many “pre-modern” Chinese historians described this shift as the southward movement of civilization. In their eyes, during the age of partition, the “Central Plain” (zhongyuan) was “chaotic”; its “original peace” was disrupted by the invading “Northern barbarians.” Because of that, many of the aristocratic (jinshen) and shi families were pushed South. The kind of migration was called yiguan nandu. The phrase was a vivid description of how the aristocrats and shi in their good “hats and clothes” crossed the river and went South. This movement of the “civilized classes” to the South took place mainly in two periods of “chaos”—that of Yongjia (Yongjia zhi luan) and that of Anshi (Anshi TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013...

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