Three Kingdoms and Seven Sages

Why the Han unity evaporated is less important than other things about the Three Kingdoms period. From the Han period on, historians of China now have two basic methods of elucidating Chinese history (this is well illustrated in the period). There are now histories, the classic secondary sources, as well as the primary sources that have been discovered since antiquity but can now also be interpreted with the benefit of the secondary sources. Much of the primary material of special interest is in the form of poetry because poetry was a normal form of writing in the period and it also tended to encode messages that couldn’t be expressed unencoded. Deciphering the code thus provides more information than the histories could safely tell.

The Three Kingdoms period provides an illustration of that in the form of the history of the Kingdom of Wei – one of the three Kingdoms – that lasted only from 220 CE to 265 CE and the poetic work of one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, written, in code, about Wei.

The ruling family of Wei was the Cao family and its founder, who died as the Han unity dissolved, was Cao Cao (曹操). The other family that was in the Wei power mix and in the ascendant in this period was the Sima family (no relation to Sima Qian). The forced abdication of the final Cao ruler in favour of a Sima in 265 CE ended the Wei Kingdom and began the Jin dynasty of the Sima family.

The sages, including Ruan Ji, the sage and poet on whom I’ll concentrate as he was possibly the most noted of his era and had so much to say in code, were interested in Daoism and probably also Buddhism. The background to stories of the sages is the basic conflict between Confucian and Daoist ideals. One story of the sages tells that he opened his door to a stranger with no clothes on. When the shocked stranger thus confronted remonstrated, the sage retorted “my home is my trousers, what are you doing in my trousers?” When the mother of one died he first feasted when fasting was the expected custom but then cried ‘misery’, spat blood and died. This was a time when sons whose parents died competed with each other to be the most renowned for the extremity of their grief and thus their preeminent Confucian filial piety so this story (or that sage) was shedding light on that process. The sages questioned all prescribed behaviour of that kind because of the similar competition it promoted (the competition to be most ‘Confucian’ was in any case actually selfish and thus un-Confucian – it was really about gaining honours by a public pretence). One compared such poseurs to a louse in a pair of trousers keeping to a confined area and thus hoping to not be found out (this reference would be well understood as even the well-to-do in North China at the time exercising the best hygiene suffered from lice in clothing partly due to the cotton padding used). Whatever the louse did it was still after all a louse.

Ruan Ji’s writing included dialogues on such issues including one that involved a superior acting hermit. The problem with the hermit from Ruan’s point of view was that he actually believed in his ‘goodness’ and expected honours for it whereas Ruan considered the idea of good and bad itself to be problematic. That dialogue ends with the hermit’s lonely death. Another of the dialogues is between the sage and a Daoist wood gatherer concerning gaining greatness and avoiding disaster and ends with a bit of a cosmic ego trip signifying who can tell what, really?

The interesting bit about Ruan’s writing, though, from the point of view of Wei history is that it’s politically encoded and it’s partly done with the language of flowers that has political codes hidden within it. This kind of coding was common in autobiographies of the time.

As Ruan was writing much of his work, he worked for a Sima family that was seriously intriguing to replace the Cao family as rulers. This involved serious massacres of Daoists in 249 CE while a Sima was regent and in 254 CE. As a serious Daoist he had serious issues with thus being involved (a degree of self-hatred is evident, as you can imagine, as he was an honest author).

He expressed his emotions concerning his personal position in an encoded and none too personally flattering poem about a monkey (himself) being kept for the amusement of his captors (the Sima family). He portrays the monkey as a base animal with no conscience.

Another poem is about two doves in a cage after a dog gets into the cage and it appears to be a lament at the murder of a Cao regent and his brother. He also alludes to a story used by Sima Qian of two old men in ancient China that preferred to starve to death rather than serve the Zhou rulers. Sima expresses confusion at the story and Ruan also suggests that he would choose life.

So this valuable 3^rd Century CE poetry could contain irony and express veiled dissent and was often a coded discussion and indicator of problematic issues and divisions of the time.