SOURCE: Boltz, William G. “Myth and the Structure of the Shyy Jih.” In Asiatische Studien Etudes Asiatiques LVI.3.2002, edited by Kai Vogelsang and Robert Gassmann, pp. 573-85. Bern, Germany: Peter Lang, 2002.

[In the following essay, Boltz contends that shifts in content in the Shih chi also indicate shifts in sources used.]

The new and unprecedented establishment of the Chinese imperial state, founded as it was on the Hann consolidation of a far more traditional polity represented by the Chyn unification two generations earlier, roused dramatically new needs of political authority and legitimation in the Chinese court and among the Chinese intelligentsia and literati. In contrast to the clan-based hereditary legitimacy of the pre-imperial states, the new empire claimed its heritage and its legitimacy directly from high antiquity. The chief tangible expression of this is seen in the emergence in the early years of the empire of a set of interrelated textual developments, in particular, the formation of a historical canon, the rise of scriptural learning, the conscious differentiation and codification of scholastic lineages, and the creation of a new and particularly political mythology.¹

These developments are not limited to the creation and compilation of new texts alone, but encompass the editing, revising, and re-interpretation of a multitude of texts, extant from pre-imperial times, in the light of the intellectual perspectives and demands imposed by the new political order. We sometimes do not fully appreciate the fact that virtually all of the pre-Hann texts in the transmitted corpus have passed through the hands of Hann editors and in that process have undergone editorial alteration and revision to an extent that we generally cannot fathom. Those Hann editors, at least those of the Western Hann, did not simply know of political union as an academic fact of life, but were in all likelihood keenly sensitive to the dramatic social and political contrast that their own newly unified imperial world presented to them vis-à-vis their perception of a recent past fraught with disunion, political fragmentation and social discord. How they understood this contrast is likely to have affected how they understood and edited the abundance of Warring States period texts of which they were the intellectual custodians and that they preserved and transmitted. Whatever authority we may want to ascribe to the transmitted pre-Hann corpus, we must not lose sight of the fact that the received versions of these texts may present a Hann perspective, in the harshest terms we may call it a Hann distortion, of the pre-Hann world they purport to record.²

Speaking this way about the differences between pre-Hann and Hann texts cannot but bring to mind the well-known distinction between what have been called systematizing and free texts, a distinction we owe to Bernhard Karlgren, who coined the terms and identified the two types of texts in his classic article on “Legends and Cults in Ancient China” in 1946.³ Karlgren's observation was, to recapitulate a familiar point, that the body of transmitted pre-imperial and early imperial texts that deal with early history fall generally into two types: (a) free texts, which reflect a variety of diverse and disparate accounts of early history, myth and legend, reported ad occasionem, and unrelated in any systematic way to one another, and (b) systematizing texts, making up a second body of texts from the third century b.c. on, which try in one way or another to codify the diverse legendary and quasi-historical material from half a millennium's worth of earlier texts into a single, unified historical whole to create an integrated picture of early Chinese history. This distinction and the importance Karlgren attached to it is so well-known that we need not rehearse it further here. Notice only that if there is any validity to what was just suggested about a Hann editorial distortion, or even a Hann editorial view, however benign, affecting the transmitted versions of the pre-Hann texts that we now have, then sensu stricto the “free” texts may, like free lunches and free love, not really be so free after all. All the same, Karlgren's distinction remains useful in that it recognizes in principle what must have been historically an important development, even if now we have little extant direct evidence of genuinely “free” texts. And in this respect it is crucial to understanding the kind and extent of those changes that the newly consolidated empire provoked in the nature of written texts.

One of the earliest and certainly one of the most important of the so-called systematizing texts, as Karlgren himself emphasized, is Symaa Chian's Shyy jih.⁴ In his opening chapters Symaa Chian has tried to weave a multitude of different historical, legendary and what we would now call mythical accounts of the preceding centuries into a single, seamless historical record. This aspect of the Shyy jih is often discussed; even so, there are two related questions that are not often asked: (i) why did Symaa Chian have this impulse to weave such a systematized tapestry of ancient history in the first place and (ii) how exactly did he do the weaving. In the present experimental notes I will try to adumbrate what form I think the answers to these two questions might eventually take. Let me begin with the second question first: how did Symaa Chian actually go about his historical systematizing, i.e., his textual weaving.

The passages given here, numbered 1 through 5, most with sub-parts, are, except for items 1-c and 1-d, the opening passages of Shyy jih chapters one through five respectively, with nothing omitted internally. These are the been jih chapters that deal with the time from legendary high antiquity down to the Chyn. By a careful analysis of the lines of these passages we can, I think, discern an underlying structure that reveals something of Symaa Chian's sources and method.

Number five is the opening of the “Chyn been jih”. I have marked it in the middle with a double slant line at the point where I think it divides itself into two sections by content. The first part traces the ancestry of the state of Chyn back to Juan Shiuh (known from other passages in these early chapters of the Shyy jih as a grandson of Hwang Dih.) This first portion also includes a miraculous birth story of a kind often seen in cultural origin legends and a statement to the effect that Dah Fey, i.e., “the Great Fey,” a principal figure in the Juan Shiuh line, aided Yeu in controlling the floods. The second part of the passage consists of an expression of praise to Fey and Yeu put in the mouth of Shuenn, followed by a sentence about providing a wife to Fey that can only have Shuenn as its subject. A compliant Fey is said to have then assisted Shuenn in rendering the “birds and beasts” submissive.

These two parts may be distinguished from each other in the following features: part 1 makes no mention of Shuenn at all, and includes a clear reference to what I would call a cosmic order myth in its statement that Dah Fey aided Yeu in controlling the floods. Part 2 centers in all of its components on Shuenn, serving to link Shuenn up with both Dah Fey and Yeu of the first part, and finally it includes another clear reference to a cosmic order myth, this time in the form of rendering the birds and beasts submissive. Notice that part 1 is exactly 66 characters in length. This is, I think a revealing number, because we are told by Ban Guh in the Hann shu “Yih wen jyh” that there were two standard tablet lengths of texts written on bamboo strips, one of 22 Hann inches with 22 characters per strip and one of 24.⁵ According to the first standard, a 66 character passage, then, would constitute exactly three bamboo strips. With the introduction of the statement attributed to Dih Shuenn in this passage (the part after the double slant line), the text no longer divides itself into segments that are multiples of 22.

Now look for a moment at passage 3-a. This is the opening of the “Yiin been jih” chapter. I have marked it in the same way, dividing it into two parts with a double slant line. Part 1 traces the ancestry of the Yiin ruling house to Dih Kuh, another major figure in Symaa Chian's construction of the Hwang Dih genealogical line, and includes another miraculous birth account. In both of these features it matches closely the first part of passage 5. The second half of 3-a begins with a reference to Shuenn, just as the second half of 5 did, and serves to link Shuenn up with the chief figure of the first half. This again is exactly the same pattern as in passage 5. The number of characters of the first portion of 3-a is precisely 44, which would be according to the same standard used for passage 5 exactly two bamboo strips. And again, as with passage 5, the second part does not resolve itself into 22-character lines.

I would like to suggest that Symaa Chian in compiling these passages relied for the first half of each on a now lost source that was written in strips of 22 characters each and that he simply appropriated two or three strips wholesale as the opening of his own passages. Then, because this now-lost source did not mention Shuenn, since Shuenn did not figure in the mythic accounts with which the lost 22-characters per strip source-text was concerned, Symaa Chian had to switch to a different source, one not written in strips of 22 characters, to introduce the Shuenn material in a way that allowed him to link Shuenn up with the lineage accounts of Chyn and Yiin, respectively. My claim is, in other words, that Shuenn originally had no relation to the miraculous birth or flood-control myths that we find reflected in both the Chyn and Yiin genealogical parts of these passages, but through the amalgamation of sources, sometimes no more than simply splicing lines in, Symaa Chian has produced an integrated, or so-called “systematized,” account that draws all of the mythic, or from his point of view the genealogical, options together into a single picture. In the “Yiin been jih” opening, once Shuenn has been satisfactorily woven into the narrative, Symaa Chian reverts to his 22-character per strip source with an 88-character account listing the sequence of rulers down to Cherng Tang. This is given here as passage 3-b, the second part of the opening account of the “Yiin been jih.” And 88 characters is, of course, exactly four 22-character strips.

If we look now at passages 1-a and 1-b, together constituting the opening account of the whole Shyy jih, we find the structure here is a little different from 3-a and 5. Here we have an initial 34 character encomium to Hwang Dih (the part labelled as 1-a), followed by a longer passage laying out the sorry state of affairs when Hwang Dih, who is called here by his ostensible ming, Shiuan Yuan, first appeared on the scene (this is part 1-b). The 34 character opening encomium is found almost verbatim in the “Wuu Dih Der” chapter of the Dah Day Lii Jih. The first portion of passage 1-b is again taken over wholesale from a source written in 22-character per strip bamboo tablets, as is evidenced by the fact that it starts out with a 66-character portion, beginning with the phrase “at the time of Shiuan Yuan” down to “the various marklords gave their collective allegiance to Shiuan Yuan” (marked in the text with a double slant stroke, as before.) Notice that this 66-character portion divides internally by context into 44 plus 22, the break coming where I have put a double slant line. The second part, beginning with the phrase “and Chy You was the worst of the bad,” even though it is 22 characters and therefore looks to be from the same source as the preceding 44-character part, also looks stylistically a bit like a non sequitor and repeats, with Chy You and Yan Dih mentioned specifically, the same basic message as the latter half of the preceding passage, to wit, that in the end all of the marklords gave their allegiance to Shiuan Yuan. This suggests to me the possibility that this strip was either already misplaced in a version of its original source text or was misplaced by Symaa Chian in his appropriation of passages from that source.

This is followed by a passage consisting of 43 characters that divides itself into a seven-character line that says “Shiuan Yuan spruced up his Der and boosted the morale of his troops” and a 36-character part that matches exactly a passage in the received text of the “Wuu Dih Der” and which amounts to a brief account (twelve characters) of a cosmic order myth, ending with the phrase “measured out the four quarters,” followed by a 24-character part (marked here with curly-brackets) that describes the teaching of ritual or martial dances named after exotic and phantastic beasts and a battle with Yan Dih for supremacy over the realm. Notice that no subject is given in this 24-character passage; we assume it is Hwang Dih only because of its placement in the larger context. By itself it is a single strip of 24 characters, suggesting that it came from an original written source other than the 22-character per strip source from which the 66 characters at the beginning of paragraph 1-b came and may in origin have had nothing to do with Hwang Dih. This same analysis and its implications about source texts applies mutatis mutandis to the “Wuu Dih Der” passage as well, from which this seems to have been taken.

At the end of passage 1-b there is still another 24-character strip (again marked with curly-brackets), clearly a kind of concluding affirmation of Hwang Dih's success in establishing cosmic and social order. Notice that in this strip he is called Hwang Dih, not Shiuan Yuan as in the ones a few lines earlier. This is, I think, another indication that we have here a piece from a source different from the earlier one. Symaa Chian again has simply woven these strips into his account wholesale, providing the necessary links and transitions as he saw fit, to tie them together forming in the end some kind of “scissors-and-paste” unified whole. If the extant received text of the “Wuu Dih Der” is in fact the same as the “Wuu Dih Der” text that Symaa Chian seems to have used (as suggested by his own postface to this Shyy jih chapter), then he was taking over a text that was already a composite of different sources.

Let me give one more example of what looks to me like evidence of Symaa Chian's composing out of pieces of disparate sources. This is the opening of chapter four, the “Jou been jih” given here as items 4-a and 4-b. Part 4-a is the well-known story, familiar especially from the “Sheng min” poem (Mau no. 245) of the Shy jing, of How Jih's miraculous birth and how he survives, Moses-like, against all the odds. The myth itself occupies the first paragraph, as printed here, and is exactly 110 characters long. That is, clearly, five 22-character strips. Paragraph two, item 4-b here, divides itself into two pieces where I have put another double slant line. The first part is a 44-character passage, that is, two strips of 22 characters each, that records the rest of the How Jih myth, namely, the part about his role as the founder of agriculture and by implication, of Chinese civilization in toto. From the double slant line on we have a passage that describes how Yau became aware of How Jih and employed him as a kind of Minister of Agriculture, and how Shuenn came to recognize his talents, and ended up enfeoffing him. In other words, in this part Symaa Chian has incorporated How Jih into the overall systematized picture of antiquity with Yau and Shuenn as the principal players, and it will come as no surprise that this part of the text does not resolve itself into 22-character strips. It was either Symaa Chian's own composition or drawn from a source other than that from which the How Jih myth itself was taken.

The only opening passage remaining yet to be analyzed and discussed is that from Shyy jih 2, the “Shiah been jih”, as given here consisting of items 2-a and 2-b. The second part, 2-b, can easily be shown to illustrate the same kind of composition as already seen in the opening passages of chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5. The passage begins with lines familiar from both the Yau Dean and the Mencius descriptive of universal Chaos in the form of a deluge, of Yau's consequent search for someone to bring order to the world, and his peremptory rejection of Kun, whom his “ministers” (the Syh Yueh “Four-Peaks” had recommended for this undertaking. This much of the passage takes exactly 44 characters and ends where I have put a double slant line. From this point the text again records the advice of the mythic figure of Syh Yueh, the “Four-Peaks,” who seems to press the earlier recommendation that Kun be given a fair chance. Yau, being a decent sort, agrees only to find that his original expectation is borne out and Kun is not up to the task. Thereupon we are introduced to Shuenn who, of course, succeeds in bringing order to the world and banishes Kun to the remote reaches of Feather Mountain to live out his days in exile. This portion of the account, here enclosed in curly-brackets, is exactly 72 characters in length. This suggests a source that had three strips of 24 characters each and was distinct from the 22-characters per strip source of the preceding portion. We can see then that the two recommendations of Kun by Syh Yueh, “Four-Peaks,” do not reflect a kind of whiny insistence on the part of Yau's minister(s), but come from two separate sources that Symaa Chian has amalgamated here. And by the same token, Yau should not be seen as of a fickle and changing mind, but is represented as having simply found Kun unacceptable; only the amount of detail given in the two different sources varying. The last short passage links Shuenn to Yeu who is identified here as Kun's offspring. This line is 22 characters, and represents I suspect, a single strip from the same source as the first part of the passage. The whole of 2-b, then, is a composite text consisting of two strips from a 22-character per strip source, followed by three strips from a 24-character per strip source, followed finally by a concluding strip from the earlier (or a different) 22-character per strip source.

As with the other passages I have tried to analyze this way,—and this is the significance of the whole enterprise,—the places where the character count suggests a shift from one source to another match precisely with the places where the content shifts. This kind of textual analysis could be repeated many times over throughout the first five chapters, and parts of many others, of the Shyy jih. The result would never prove that this is how Symaa Chian put together his great work, but it would provide what I think may be fairly regarded as persuasive circumstantial evidence that the Shyy jih is in these respects very much a textual mixtum compositum.

In suggesting an answer, now, to the first of our two questions, that is, what was the impulse behind Symaa Chian's systematizing enterprise, we must once more remember that for Symaa Chian as for all subjects of the new empire there was no previous example of a political “union” that could be called on to provide a model of what to expect, or of how to operate in and preserve the integrity of the new empire; there was no comparable political past to look back to in order to know where the empire's frailties and vulnerabilities might lie, and perhaps most importantly, there was no conceptual guide from past experience to aid in determining how to define and defend political legitimacy or to justify imperial authority. As a basis for the political structuring of society in China the empire must have been as new and as shrouded in unpredictablity and uncertainty to Symaa Chian as the American republic was to Thomas Jefferson, and the continuing question of justifying its claim on authority to rule was likely just as crucial to Symaa Chian a hundred or so years after the empire's founding as the same issue was to Abraham Lincoln about a century after the founding of the American nation. It was a bold political experiment; how it might turn out was anybody's guess.

Among the most crucial considerations must have been the question of maintaining a claim on governmental legitimacy, not just as a matter of political expediency, but also as a genuine issue of principle and belief. The right to authority was no longer defined by the old rules, either in theory or in practice, of the Warring States period. These early chapters of the Shyy jih, from the very first lines, constitute I think an attempt to set out an unarguable and incontravertible empirical basis from which to claim political legitimacy. The basis is geneaological; the intent is to establish a historical pedigree for the founders of the empire that justifies their right to rule; and the design traces the genealogy, the pedigree, and therefore the right to rule back ultimately in an unbroken line to Hwang Dih.

Look again at the opening encomium to Hwang Dih, which Symaa Chian has borrowed from the “Wuu Dih Der” (or perhaps we should say from a source that shares a common origin with the current extant “Wuu Dih Der”), given as passage 1-a. This is the opening of the whole of the Shyy jih, and the first thing Symaa Chian does is to identify Hwang Dih by parentage and clan name. In the rest of the chapter he then moves through the four subsequent rulers of high antiquity, Emperor Juan Shiuh, Emperor Kuh, and Emperors Yau, and Shuenn. The final lines of the chapter are given here as item 1-d. In this short passage Symaa Chian's only concern is with establishing the fact that all five of these rulers shared the same clan name. For good measure he throws in the sixth great ruler, Yeu, with whose genealogy and ostensible history he begins chapter 2. (This is item 2-a, on which see below.)⁶

This pattern with its explicit delineation of genealogy and denomination of ancestors is carried on all the way down to the Chyn. There might even have been a distinct written genealogical source, apart from all of the other sources on which we have surmised Symaa Chian drew. Look for a moment at the genealogical record given in chapter one, that I have put here as item 1-c. It is a self-contained passage tracing the lineage of Shuenn back seven generations to Chang Yih, giving little more than a list of names. And it is exactly 69 characters long, which to someone looking for patterns suggests three strips of 23 characters each. Now look at the opening of the “Shiah been jih,” item 2-a. This passage starts off with a record of Yeu's genealogical line, again giving essentially nothing but names, and ends with a phrase affirming that Yeu is indeed a legitimate descendant of Hwang Dih (marked with a double slant line in the text.) This part of 2-a is exactly 46 characters long, and looks therefore like another two strips of the putative 23-character per strip genealogical source.

When we set aside the stories, legends, myths, and real pre-Hann history from these first five chapters we are left with a genealogical record fully as detailed and fully as tedious as the Old Testament Book of Chronicles spelling out the Israelite ancestors of the House of David. This, I think, is Symaa Chian's effort to construct a new body of political myth, the purpose of which was nothing less than to guarantee the political legitimacy and authority, and therefore to insure the political viability, of the House of Liou and, indeed, of the empire itself.

I think it is correct to call this construction a myth. Prior to the founding of the empire, myths in ancient China reflected, as they did in the ancient Mesopotamian and Classical Mediterranean worlds, the twin concerns of cosmic order and the survival of human society. By reducing the manifold ongoing, vague and poorly-understood anxieties people always feel over their welfare and their capacity to endure to a concrete, punctual and comprehensible form that illustrates how the same threats and anxieties were confronted and overcome in the past, myths make these anxieties manageable and controllable. Before the empire such anxieties arose primarily in connection with the people's welfare and survival in the face of a not-always-benign power of the spirits, however the spirits may have been conceived, and with the natural forces of the cosmos: floods, draught, seasonal irregularities, earthquakes, windstorms, plagues and infestations, and so forth. After the founding of the empire these anxieties, while still surely present, become overshadowed by concerns arising from new conceptions of historical pedigree, new anxieties over maintaining a claim on political legitimacy, and a growing need to affirm a sense of cultural homogeneity, unity and tradition. These concerns and anxietites in the aggregate called for a new kind of myth that could be invoked to reassure society's confidence in its continuing legitimacy and integrity, and in its own capacity to survive.

Earlier cosmic order myths and creation myths were likely to have been the oral counterparts to ritual or ceremonial performances. This is especially true for that subset of pre-imperial myths that register dynastic victories. The new, genealogical and heroic-pedigree myths do not seem likely to have had dramatic or ritual counterpart performances, and are instead myths whose primary form is perfectly suited to written texts. Better than any other text we know of, Symaa Chian's Shyy jih supplies a rich record of just such a new type of myth, tracing a direct line of descent from a glorified Hwang Dih to the founders of the empire, just as Virgil traced a line of descent from Aeneas to Augustus, a line that in the West endured and served to maintain a claim to political and imperial authority and cultural unity down to the Hapsburgs of yesterday. In his determination to construct a single, unassailable genealogical line to guarantee the primacy and integrity of his imperial world and the legitimacy of its rulers Symaa Chian was intent to do no less.

Notes

1. These developments were surveyed in a set of papers presented orally at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Boston in the Spring, 1999, on a panel organized by Martin Kern. The wording I have used in this opening paragraph paraphrases in one or two places that of the panel abstract as it was prepared at that time by Professor Kern. A preliminary version of the present paper was given on that panel. I am grateful to Professor Kern not only for allowing me to appropriate his wording, but also for his inspired proposal for such a panel in the first place and for his perceptive responses to my initial presentation of this material.

   Michael Nylan, who also participated in the same panel, has argued in an as yet unpublished paper that the “conscious differentiation and codification of scholastic lineages” I refer to here as coming in the early years of the empire is not actually documentable until the late Eastern Hann, somewhat less “early” than I have presumed, and that the earlier concern, as expressed in the Shyy jih, is with “the effect of state sponsorship on the enterprise of learning.” (Paper jointly authored with Mark Czikszentmihalyi, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions in the Shiji”; the citation is from page 2 of the typescript.)

   In Munich, where a second version of this material was presented in July, 2000, I was the beneficiary of thoughtful and cogent responses from, among others, Ulrich Unger, Wojciech Simson, Hans van Ess, Michael Friedrich and Robert Gassmann. Most recently Michael Nylan has, through her twin qualities of expertise and kindness, given me a number of valuable suggestions and corrections at this latest stage of the work. For all of these assistances and encouragements I am most grateful. Mistakes of fact and of reasoning are entirely my own responsibility, of course.

2. We may be indulging an unverifiable and perhaps unwarranted predisposition even to assume that the purpose of texts was to record aspects of the pre-Hann world, inasmuch as the term ‘recording’ may suggest that the practice of writing was an ancillary archival pursuit and was somehow divorced from the central events of daily life. Instead, texts may have been central instruments of the political and ritual world functioning in a way and serving a purpose that a modern western bias does not readily allow us to recognize.

3. Bernhard Karlgren, “Legends and Cults in Ancient China,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm), No. 18 (1946), 199-365.

4. The role of Symaa Chian's father, Symaa Tarn, in the initial compilation of what was to become the Shyy jih is well-known, and therefore for convenience I will simply refer to Symaa Chian as the author without further elaboration on the Symaa père/Symaa fils collaborative effort.

5. The received text of the “Yih wen jyh” has 25 as the alternative to 22, not 24, and only implicitly, not explicitly, extends its comments about the structure of the particular chapters of the Shu jing discussed there, to apply to bamboo-strip texts generally. The evidence that Chavannes long ago assembled suggests that Ban Guh's 25 is an error for 24. See Edouard Chavannes, “Les livres chinois avant l'invention du papier,” Journal Asiatique, ser. 10, vol. 5 (Janv-Fevr, 1905), 5-75, especially pages 36-38.

6. Somewhat perplexingly Symaa Chian adds two comments pointing out that Shieh, the founder of the Yiin, and How Jih, the founder of the Jou, both had what appear to be different surnames. A satisfactory explanation for this inconsistency remains yet to be proposed.