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.

History, More Archaeology, Sima Qian and the Han Dynasty (Period 7 of 16)

The other feature of a culture after its politics and its mythology/religion that helps to mould (and inheres in) a culture is its self-history (in a way, derived from the other features). Since Sima, the first real historian of China, we can say China has had a self-conscious history and it is quite unusual for a culture to have developed that so quickly – he died in 90 BCE. Sima Qian’s (司馬遷’s) history, containing its distinctive poetry and models of heroism, is a culmination of an idea that has roots in Chinese religion so I’ll return to that for a bit to explain why we have it. We can also look back at what preceded him as we do to construct our own history from the fragments that remain from the earliest writings.

We can be fairly sure that before the first writings we now have there was a period when songs and dances that (among other things) told a kind of oral history were passed down through the generations. Earlier writings written on perishable materials such as silk may also have once existed. As I mentioned in an earlier post the first writing we can still see today was done for ritual purposes. What I didn’t note is how political that writing was and how we can still use it today to create partial early histories.

On oracular material opposing questions (such as: it will rain/it will not rain?) would be written before it was worked on by an official consulter of the oracles. Another slightly more complex example of such writing would be: we take 15 Xiang prisoners tomorrow/we take no Xiang prisoners tomorrow? The oracle’s answers would also be written on the bone or shell and also the actual outcome. That actual outcome is our first example of history (and also, over a period of years, a written reason for a ruler to dispose of a relatively unsuccessful consulter of oracles). In the second example, if the consulter’s people took, say, 9 Xiang prisoners and the oracle had said yes to “we take 15 Xiang prisoners” (given only the two options) that would be taken as a successful prediction. From what we have today it seems that eighty percent of all predictions were accurate (naturally there may have been a tendency to destroy the evidence of many unsuccessful predictions). Incidentally, this Shang era form of writing two opposing ideas such as rain/not rain may have survived into modern Chinese in a common question-form X not (bu - 不) X.

Writing was seen in its earliest form as magical and sacred because of the novelty of the power it could potentiate (as in every other early written culture, really). A king could discover without needing a great memory how good his oracle consulters were if only he had full access to it, for example. History was also already being rewritten by oracle consulters seeking to keep their jobs in this magical craft (and perhaps maintain the prestige of their families) by discarding actual written evidence of bad predictions. Dating suggests that this writing began in around the 13^th Century BCE – late Shang. It wasn’t really self conscious history, it was more holy relic, but today we can use it (for example we can work out that somebody took a certain number of prisoners having a certain name (e.g. Xiang) somewhere in the 13^th Century BCE).

This idea of the sacredness of writing is borne out by the next form of writing (chronologically) that we have discovered. It appears people wrote to the ghosts of ancestors on the insides of bronze vessels (called Hu) evidently used for special (mainly family) religious feasts to which the ancestors were welcomed. The ancestors would ‘eat’ the steam or smoke from the meal and be edified by the successes of their descendents via the writing on the inside of the Hu not otherwise readable once the Hu was made. The kinds of writing we have been able to decipher include especially things designed to impress the ancestor such as “the king gave me some land” or “the king gave me some fancy gear”. These vessels were handed down as heir looms and religious relics and objects in aristocratic families so that we now know a certain king gave certain things to certain aristocrats at (not entirely) certain times. Again, it’s a kind of history but not intended as the kind of history we write today. The likelihood of an aristocrat lying to his dead ancestors is as clear (or unclear) as the likelihood of a consulter of oracles destroying incriminating evidence.

Even in around 900 BCE we have a famous pot apparently belonging to a Shi Qiang (Shi in this case meant scribe rather than being a family name) containing a list of the names of the leaders of a clan dynasty in order from the founder (along with some of their alleged personal attributes). It begins by referring to rituals performed by the ‘son of heaven’ (the Emperor) to appease ‘spirits above and below’.

New vessels would be cast anytime someone had news for the ancestors so within an aristocratic family we can potentially trace (as could aristocrats) a succession of bits of good (generally) news. The next stage in the formation of the idea of history was probably prompted by this tangible if biased family history thus available to the aristocrats. That stage was the writing down of the Hu ‘histories’ (as collected over the generations) outside the Hu and in some kind of chronological order. One of these (apparently written in the 4^th Century BCE) was found near Hebei in the tomb of a King Cuo of Zhong Shan. It was written from bottom to top and right to left as traditional Chinese books still are.

Archaeologists have attempted to answer a few historical questions with the above data treated longitudinally about how Chinese religion and culture have branched off from any potential earlier common religions and cultures. A major distinguishing feature of the early Chinese religious observance is the marked centring on the family (and the apparently pervasive use of alcohol). Indications are (from peasant burial site data) that around 98% of the population were illiterate at around the time the ninth or tenth Century BCE pot was produced.

So how did state history develop? It might be fairly guessed that it probably progressed naturally from oracular results as I’ve mentioned to the biased family histories of the senior families that eventually led state structures in the late Zhou era of Spring and Autumn. The increase in fighting in this period and concomitant taxes and laws produced a raison d’être for the state and hence also for the loosely based-on-truth but one-sided state propaganda that the family histories were conveniently suited to producing. Naturally the historical value of these was augmented by the contemporaneous recording of a king’s orders (the laws) by specially appointed recorders and a recording of matters that bear on how well and loyally aristocrats especially followed them.

Clan loyalties became a further subject for written discourse (also especially in connection with the general loyalty question). Finally brief somewhat stilted state histories (like Kong’s own Spring and Autumn Annals) often written in antique language were written. Commentaries were later written on and included with these to ‘flesh them out’ somewhat. Cyril Birch’s Anthology of Chinese Literature Volume 1 provides some examples of the style of such state histories as well as Sima Qian’s.

Sima can best be described as a Han court astrologer/astronomer and scribe. The bulk of his work concerned the correct ascertainment of lunar calendar dates and appropriate intercalations for both astrological and court reasons so he was already a dater of events for multiple purposes. His was the first real China-wide history and a template for all later histories (especially up to the modern period). Many of the records he used in the history’s production had first been collected by his father (apparently in anticipation of producing a similar work so it became a family project). When Sima was accused of an offence that was capital for non-eunuchs it is said he emasculated himself, so important did he consider his continuation of his father’s work. The usual practice of those of his class in such a situation would have been suicide.

The work contained 130 chapters including chapters like: Annals (the general history), chronologies in relation to specific issues, treatises on things like music and the science of hydrology, genealogies and biographies. That was the template.

After more than 400 years of relative unity over China, I’ll next briefly examine the Three Kingdoms period and a bit of literature.

History and Historiography Again

I've discussed historiography as an aspect of religious science but I also want to discuss it as a 'secular' science that has contributed to the writing of Arab history even until today. I say 'secular' because I want to emphasise that its religious origins make it impossible to consider it as a science divorced in every way from the religious impulse. Nevertheless, attempts were made to achieve a method that reflected worldly epistemological concerns precisely in order that it might support the religion of the historiographer in the hope that the religion was the true revealed religion.

Ibn Khaldoun, who lived in the 14^th Century, has been regarded as the greatest Arab-Islamic historian of the the pre-modern era (or at least the latest serious one). However, as mentioned in earlier posts, histories were quite important from the very beginning of the Islamic Era, firstly as a means of reliably authenticating Hadith transmission. The life of the prophet himself is among the earliest subjects of biographical history. One form of history that in a significant sense formed its basis was the Arab genealogy that had preceded the Islamic Era. The early Islamic conquests were also historically attested by Islamic as well as non-Islamic writers in and beyond the Islamic world. The origin of the Arabs was also considered religiously relevant history and world history (from Adam on) was an early historical interest. At-Tabari, living in the late 9^th and early 10^th Centuries, produced a famous version of such a global and comprehensive history.

Historical schools developed in Medina, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere and regional histories and histories of cities were produced (as I've mentioned before). History thus became quite varied in its subjects but was nevertheless often based on the same model of biography and validated with the same scholarly genealogy (borrowing a method from Hadith scholarship which in turn owed something to pre-Islamic methods).

Al-Mas’udi’s famous 10^th Century history was both thematic and encyclopaedic and also drew upon the author’s extensive travel experience. Al-Ya’qubi (9^th Century) and Miskawayh (10^th Century) were also notable early historians.

Ibn Khaldoun produced the great Introductions (Muqaddima) to History. His historiography is potentially a culturally satisfying model for explaining history for the Arabs and Islamic groups today. The essence of his theory is that certain triggers have inexorably led to a cycle of civilisations and that environment (along with religious revelation) plays a role in the different regional forms of civilisation. In particular, he examined the role of both the cities and the uncivilised Bedouin desert-dwellers in this process in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Study of the Analytical Religious Sciences and Historiography

Study of the Qur’an as the direct word of Allah was the foremost foundation of the Islamic religious sciences. Commentary (Tafsir) was the elucidation and exegesis of its script and required extensive training to master.

The prophet and his companions (including his wives) were the first and considered the most authoritative commentators. ‘Abdullah Ibn ‘Abbas (ancestor of the ‘Abbasid Caliphs) was a young cousin of Muhammad who became his companion and a major early commentator. He died in the Umayyad period.

The Qur’anic language was confusing even to Arabs and it has become a tradition that not all of it can be understood (at least until some time in the future). This difficulty led to an interest in the linguistic sciences which aimed to aid in the elucidation of as much as was possible especially in the 8^th and 9^th Centuries. At-Tabari (d. 923) probably produced the most comprehensive commentary of the early period. Commentaries began to be preferred on the basis of the theology (which I discuss in my next post) that had previously been decided upon by the reader leading to competing partisan commentaries in the following centuries.

Thus specialised theological school-approved and general commentaries came to co-exist. The new law was also naturally dependent upon this commentary science and thus each legal school also tended to have preferred commentaries. Philosophers skilled in Greek logic such as Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) also contributed commentary coming from this logical view-point. Commentaries even served the purposes of a multitude of other factions throughout the history of Islam including Sufis and two of the most noted commentaries (of many) in the modern tradition are those of Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), incidentally written before his radicalisation.

The correct reading of the Qur’an was also a subject of disagreement and therefore studies were required to be made of this aspect of the Qur’an. Recital from memory also naturally required study to master. The language had to be altered to standardise readings, as mentioned in the last post. Melodic reading also became an art-form. There are about four major regional styles of reading the Qur’an today.

The Hadith were also subject to much dispute especially before there were written collections and therefore they were studied in order to verify and correctly interpret them. The Hadith were considered mainly important legally as elucidators of the Qur'an. The major collections of Hadith also required travel to meet possible hearers at the ends of the hearer-chains of the until-then oral Hadiths for the purpose of verification of their validity.

The alleged hearers of Hadith also had to themselves be studied extensively to ascertain their truthfulness, memory and the likelihood of them having been in a position to have heard the Hadith from the source in the chain alleged. Chains of transmission were thus studied over the many years before the Hadith were formally written in accessible collections. Some of the companions (sahāba) of Muhammad had collected and written down what Muhammad both ruled and said presumably for the purposes of understanding better what Islam required. It could also be used potentially to cite a legal precedent. These early notes (the sahifa) were then either communicated to many others or known to relatively few and mostly collected much later by scholars into various written collections.

At first the scholars focused on attributions to a single companion and that compilation was referred to as the companion’s musnad. Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), the renowned lawyer, produced an early version of a more comprehensive collection. Malik (c. 715 – 795), also one of the major lawyers, included the first more or less comprehensive collection arranged thematically in his unique (at the time) law book.

Eventually six major collections were made that are usually accepted (and debated over) by at least Sunni Muslims. Al-Bukhari (d. 870) produced his Sahih (True [Ones]), Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875) produced his and Abu Dawud, at-Tirmidhi, an-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah rounded out the most accepted large collections also in the 9^th Century. There are three major Shi’a works: those of al-Kulaini (d. 939), al-Qummi (d. 991) and at-Tusi (d. 1067) typically produced a little later.

Scholars criticised Hadith based on the collection of the biographies of all of the transmitters in chains. From that they reasoned whether a specific transmitter may have an ulterior motif when transmitting a version that suited him (or her) or a particular viewpoint (and the weakness of character to follow through with the deception). It quickly became apparent that Hadith and their collectors could not always be trusted and sectarian interests and loyalties were often at the heart of the matter, hence the tendency for a variety of collections rather than one authoritative one accepted by all. The science could also ascertain the possibility of the Hadith being a fraud by testing the chain (isnad) of transmission. For example one link may be that person A told the Hadith to person B. If it could be shown by science that person A had died before person B could understand (e.g. person B was a baby at the time) or that one of these people had never been in the same place at the same time as the other or one had become deaf or perhaps senile before the alleged transmission would have been possible the Hadith could be thus invalidated. The scholars regarded face-to-face oral transmission at all points in a given purported chain as necessary for the chain to be a valid Hadith chain.

The science of biography, then, became vital to the religious sciences. Various forms of work appeared including lists of the important transmitters of a generation or generations in chronological order or of a city or region or more comprehensive works arranged alphabetically (all arranged for ease of checking the logical possibility of isnads). Histories of cities were appended to these lists (basically to provide context) so that we now have this type of work and related histories for many cities and regions including Damascus, Egypt, Baghdad, Aleppo, Bukhara, Isfahan, Cordova, Fez and many others. With these resources scholars were able to focus on specific transmitters and thus criticise the unique musnad (i.e. any Hadith only known via that person) of that transmitter and 'disprove' the validity some chains 'scientifically'. This science, of course, is essentially a form of historiography. The dictionaries of transmitters continued to be refined until the 15^th Century.

Separate schools for Hadith studies proliferated from the 10^th Century throughout the Islamic world and were still common in the 20^th Century. The methods of source citation and criticism and the focus on biography arrived at in these schools thus significantly contributed to and influenced the science of historiography in the Islamic world.

In coming posts, I discuss the other religious sciences of theology, Sufism and Islamic jurisprudence (legal philosophy).