On the authenticity of the "preface" to the collection of poetry written at the Orchid Pavilion.

• Author: Holzman, Donald

On the 22nd of April, 353, the great calligraphist Wang Xizhi (307?-365?) invited forty-one of his friends to gather in his garden, the Orchid Pavilion, Lanting in the mountains near what is now Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Their aim was to celebrate a festival (called xi) that originated in antiquity as a lustration ceremony carried out towards the end of spring to wash away winter's pollutions by bathing in a meandering, eastward-flowing stream. In the early Middle Ages the festival had long lost its ancient religious meaning and had become a secular outing of cultivated aristocrats who chatted about philosophy and composed poetry to amuse themselves as they observed the surrounding countryside. There are a large number of poems in Tang and Song encyclopedias that were composed during outings of this kind, but Wang Xizhi's preface to the collection of the thirty-seven poems written at the Orchid Pavilion that he took the trouble to assemble is by far more famous than any of the poems written earlier or, indeed, than any in his collection. The poems are, however, precious examples of the so-called "metaphysical poems," xuanyanshi, that accounted for much of the output of poetry during the fourth century but have for the most part disappeared today. Wang Xizhi's outing is famous above all because of the preface he wrote to these poems, a preface that is one of the most loved short pieces of prose in the whole of Chinese literature. And, in the copies made throughout the ages, Wang Xizhi's handwritten calligraphy of the text has been given the most exalted status ever attained by any piece of calligraphy. So exalted were the reputations of the prose and the calligraphy, indeed, that Guo Moruo (1892-1978) seems to have felt that he could find no better traditional icon to destroy as a prelude to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1965.(1)

In the number of the Guangming ribao for the tenth of June, 1965, Guo Moruo cast doubt not only on the authenticity of the attribution to Wang Xizhi of the original calligraphy of "Preface to the Lanting Collection of Poetry" ("Lanting shiji xu", one of the titles given to the piece), but also on the authenticity of the attribution of over half of the preface itself. I do not want to detail all of his arguments that attempt to prove that the latter part of the preface was not written by Wang Xizhi and that the calligraphy could not be from his hand either. Suffice it to say that Guo follows and develops the ideas of Li Wentian (1834-95), found in a colophon to a rubbing of an engraving on stone of an early Tang copy of the preface. Li Wentian felt that the form of the characters was so little in keeping with the characters engraved on tombstones of the Eastern Jin period (he mentions two that had been found at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries) that they could not have been written by Wang Xizhi, and that the text of the preface, said in the Shishuo xinyu to be modeled on the preface to the outing in Jingu by Shi Chong (249-300), actually resembles it so little that it could not be authentic.(2) Guo Moruo's arguments have been attacked and, above all, defended by numerous scholars in the pages of the Guangming ribao and Wenwu, but I do not want to pursue them here.(3) My main interest is to show that Guo Moruo has called into question two key phrases in the preface because he has misunderstood Wang Xizhi's attitude towards the philosophy of Zhuangzi and because he has not taken seriously into account Wang Xizhi's fervor in his pursuit of Daoist religion.

The textual history of the preface is fairly complicated, but, to simplify, there are two recensions - one, short, is found in the commentary to the Shishuo xinyu by Liu Jun (zi Xiaobiao, 462-521),(4) and the other, long, is found in the biography of Wang Xizhi in the Jinshu(5) and contains 167 supplementary characters that introduce a total change of mood. The first section of the preface common to the Jinshu and the Shishuo xinyu versions describes the unadulterated joy Wang Xizhi and his friends share during their outing, viewing the scenery, writing poetry, drinking wine together. Their joy can justifiably be called "metaphysical" (like the poetry most of them indulged in) because it is procured by "contemplating the vastness of the universe, and observing the abundance of the different species that inhabit it", as Wang says in the preface. The 167 supplementary characters of the second section, on the contrary, are all devoted to the description of the passage of time, the mutability of our existence, the ephemeral quality of what we most enjoy and, especially, of our friendships: all will be brought to an end by the coming of old age and death. "It is death, as the ancients said, that is the great thing: how could one not be pained by the thought of it!". Wang Xizhi follows his cri de coeur with the remark that he has found absolute confirmation of the gloom caused by his meditation in the works of ancient writers who echo his feelings exactly, and he then adds two phrases that Guo Moruo believes prove beyond doubt that this section of the preface was not written by Wang Xizhi: "Thus I know that it is groundless and preposterous to equate life and death, absurd to say Pengzu and a youth cut off in his prime had equal life-spans".

These two phrases are, of course, allusions to Zhuang-zi, to his view of the relativity of all under heaven that is not conceived in terms of the absolute, the dao.(6) Our lives, sub...