Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael J. Puett is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Humanities at Harvard University.

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The Ambivalence of Creation

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction....................................................................................................11. Domesticating the Landscape: Notions of Ancestors and Innovation in the Bronze Age...........................222. The Craft of Humanity: Debates over Nature and Culture in Warring States China...............................393. Sages, Ministers, and Rebels: Narratives of the Emergence of the State.......................................924. The Creation of Empire: The Emergence and Consolidation of Imperial Rule in China............................1415. The Tragedy of Creation: Sima Qian's Reconstruction of the Rise of Empire in Early China.....................177Conclusion......................................................................................................213Appendix: The Semantics of Creation.............................................................................217Notes...........................................................................................................225Bibliography....................................................................................................275Index...........................................................................................................289

Chapter One

Let us begin at the beginning, or at least at the beginning as described by an Eastern Han scholar:

In ancient times Baoxi [i.e., Fuxi] was the king of all under Heaven. Looking up he observed the images in Heaven, and looking down he observed the models on Earth. He looked at the patterns of the birds and beasts and the proper order of the Earth. Near at hand he took from his body, and at a distance he took from things. He thereupon first raised up [zuo] the eight trigrams in order to display the exemplary images.

This passage is taken from the post face to Xu Shen's Shuo wen jie zi, a dictionary composed in the first century A.D. Xu Shen is discussing here the invention of trigrams, divinatory signs consisting of a series of broken and unbroken lines. According to this passage, the ancient sage Fuxi invented these trigrams after being inspired by the patterns of the natural world. His act of invention involved "raising" or "lifting up" (zuo) the patterns found in the natural world and bringing them to the world of humanity.

Xu Shen then goes on to describe how Cang Jie, the scribe of the ancient sage Huangdi, invented characters through a similar process: just as Fuxi introduced trigrams by "raising up" (zuo) the patterns of nature, so did Cang Jie introduce characters by imitating the distinctions found in the tracks of birds and beasts. By so doing, Xu Shen claims, Cang Jie was the "first to raise up [zuo] writing."

In this narrative, neither the trigrams nor the writing is presented as an artificial construct, and neither one is in any way discontinuous from nature. Indeed, they were not created in any strong sense of the term at all: instead, sages invented them by raising patterns from the natural world and bringing those patterns into the realm of humanity.

The Chinese term used to describe this act of invention is zuo [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]-a term commonly used in the Warring States and Han periods to describe the sages' invention of culture. A translation of this term as "raising up" or "lifting" is the one given by Xu Shen himself: Xu Shen defines zuo in his dictionary as qi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "to rise," or in a causative form, "make arise." Thus, references to the ancient sages as zuo-ing various aspects of culture should be understood not as "creating" but as "causing to arise."

This definition of zuo would become highly influential. In later literary theory, for example, authors were frequently said to zuo in this sense: not to create fictions or artifice but to take things from the natural world (patterns in nature or the natural feelings of the poet) and distill them into a poem. The act, in other words, involved no fabrication, no conscious creation, no introduction of discontinuity or artifice.

This is the strain of Chinese thought that so strongly influenced the authors quoted in the Introduction. And the fact that such a vision is found so clearly in the Shuo wen jie zi points to an issue that I alluded to above, namely that continuity between nature and culture is not simply a false Orientalist idea imposed by European scholars on early Chinese culture: it is most certainly a view that has its roots in early China itself. Indeed, I argue in Chapter 2 that Xu Shen's definition of zuo may well have been influenced by the Xici, the third-century B.C. work from which Xu Shen also took the above-quoted discussion of the invention of trigrams by Fuxi.

But this definition was developed in opposition to several other views that explicitly defined culture as an artificial fabrication of sages. In those other writings, zuo was indeed employed with the sense of "create" and was used with a strong connotation of artifice and the introduction of discontinuity. The definitions found in works like the Xici and the Shuo wen jie zi were presented in response to these other usages, and it was only over the course of the Han dynasty that the definition "to create" came to prominence.

But if Xu Shen's definition of zuo cannot be accepted as necessarily indicative of the "basic" meaning, then what exactly was the early semantic range of the term? In the appendix to this study, I discuss the etymology and early usages of zuo and argue that the term had a wide range of meanings in the early inscriptional literature, including not only "arise" but also "be active," "do," "build," "make," and "create." And all of these definitions were utilized in the debates of the Warring States and Han periods as well: thinkers in the early period exploited the full semantic range of the term in their efforts to define their respective positions on the emergence of culture. Here, as with other terms that were widely debated in early China, studying the depth of usage that the word was given in each text and exploring how the word was defined and redefined for particular purposes will well repay the effort expended.

The point about the meaning of zuo can be made for the larger issue of how early Chinese figures conceptualized the relationship between nature and culture. The claim that Xu Shen made in the narratives quoted above was that cultural artifacts like the trigrams and writing were based upon an imitation of the patterns of the natural world. In Chapter 2, I refer to a similar argument in the Xici that everything, from hunting and agricultural implements to boats and houses, was similarly invented by sages in imitation of the patterns of the natural world. But this specific claim of continuity between nature and culture actually developed quite late, like the definition of zuo, and emerged out of a widespread debate in the Warring States period.

In order to provide a background for understanding this debate, I devote the remainder of this chapter to texts and inscriptions...