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Chinese Poetry and Prophecy

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................................ixForeword............................................................................xiIntroduction........................................................................xx1. Ritual and Randomization.........................................................12. Chinese Oracles In Partibus......................................................73. Termina Technica.................................................................304. Modern Studies, Editions, and Translations.......................................345. New Evidence: A Clutch of Taoist Oracles.........................................476. New Evidence: The Oldest Buddhist Sequence.......................................577. La Trahison Des Clromanes: Divination in a Buddhist Setting.....................768. Writing and Chinese Ritual.......................................................879. Visions of Diffusion: Central Asia and the West..................................98Notes...............................................................................145Bibliography........................................................................185Index...............................................................................209

Chapter One

The Chinese are an ancient people Before us is a hard campaign. MANAS (Kirghiz epic)

Among its immediate neighbors, China has long enjoyed fame as the homeland of divination. Chinese mantic systems are legion and are found in the most diverse settings, from elaborate and formal temple altars to boisterous marketplace stands. In one form or another, fate-calculation appears in nearly every context, from the most solemn to the most mundane. This obsession with destiny (or what the future holds in store) is one of the most deeply rooted features of Chinese life. The art and science of fate has spread far beyond temple confines and the stalls of mantic professionals into the deepest matrix of Chinese culture: cuisine. What other culture could have welded its two chief concerns, eating and fate-reading, into the institution of the fortune cookie?

The central nature of divination in Chinese culture has been recognized by those neighboring societies most indebted to the Chinese example. A twelfth-century chronicle, the sBa-bzhed, repeatedly describes Tibetan envoys being sent to China in the eighth and ninth centuries to acquire mantic techniques or consult Chinese diviners. In the quadripartite schema of world monarchy propounded in an influential fourteenth-century Tibetan source, the ruler of India is King of Religion, Iran's ruler King of Riches, the monarch of the North is King of Armies, but the ruler of China, King of Divinatory Sciences. The awesome phenomenon of lasting Chinese empire was thought to rest upon a consummate mastery of mantic arts-a notion which we find reflected in the oral literatures of Central Asia. These depict the redoubtable Chinese troops as fearsome adversaries, and their Khan as a ruler who owed his sovereign powers to magic.

At the heart of China's reputation in the field of occult inquiry lies the I-ching, the Book of Changes; beneath it, supportively, the mantic tortoise. Still other systems flourished under the early Empire: divination, prognostication, hemerology, and medical diagnosis. Recent archeological discoveries have brought us closer to an appreciation of certain universally accepted methods and assumptions of fate-calculation that provided the underpinnings of daily life: beliefs and practices hitherto known chiefly from literary sources such as the Lun-heng and Ch'ien-fu lun. Yet already by the Later Han period, the religious situation in China had altered considerably from the time when tortoise and milfoil had supposedly reigned supreme. By the first century C.E., Buddhism had begun to make its way in China, and in the course of the second century, Taoism came into being as an organized socioreligious system. By the fifth century, the basic amalgam of Buddho-Taoist ritual was already in process-an amalgam that has influenced Chinese culture down to our time. By the end of the Early Medieval period, then, the moral climate of China had changed for good. A new set of otherworldly instances and sanctions had come into being, to evaluate and prescribe life and conduct in this world. This development radically affected all aspects of communication with the spirit-world, including, naturally, those practices subsumed under the rubric of "divination."

Into the new ritual system were incorporated many, perhaps even most, of the preexisting components of Han cosmology. As the consciously sinocentric Taoist system developed, progressively endowing older elements of Chinese culture with new significance, we find the classic cosmology being reassembled within a new theogony. Thus, in medieval Taoist sources, we are able to trace a large measure of continuity with, for example, the Ma-wangtui materials. Taoist ritual texts abound in references to the classic mantic systems of China and hallowed cosmological principles. We find the trigrams and hexagrams in use as spatiotemporal signposts in ritual and as symbolic emblems of good or ill fortune in hymnody. The asterisms, too, were portentous and central to Taoist cult. Yet curiously, early medieval Taoism strictly forbade its votaries to practice divination. Recourse to the mantic arts was lumped together with a host of common activities deemed undesirable by Taoists. These included offerings to deceased ancestors, blood sacrifice to local deities ("the gods of the profane," su-shen), and giving money to priests. Through allegiance to Taoism, the faithful had put themselves in the hands of a far higher power than the spirits invoked by diviners. Divination was superfluous or, worse still, a direct insult to the Tao.

For all of Taoism's absorbing interest as a crystallization and internal reform of Chinese tradition, Buddhism represents a far more imposing phenomenon in the history of Asia. Some may bridle at the notion of listing Buddhism among China's gifts to East Asia, but I think there can be little question regarding the essential originality of the Buddhist rites and institutions which China transmitted to Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Vietnam. The compartmentalization of our studies has regrettably drawn a cordon sanitaire around Chinese Buddhism, enabling many self-declared specialists to operate largely independently of Chinese social and cultural history as a whole. Here we have a truly massive body of primary sources cordoned off from the field at large. A more mature historiography, and one more fully liberated from native categories, would never tolerate the neglect of this material on the grounds that it somehow represents an alien intrusion into the culture. The history of Chinese Buddhism of course comprised a good deal more than a millennium of translation activity. The vast majority of the 3,360 works contained in the hundred volumes of the Taisho Sino-Japanese Buddhist Canon were written, not in India, but in China and Japan.

Small wonder, then, if many of the components of Chinese culture reached the encircling countries together with Buddhism-and may even have come there in...