Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China.

• Author: Holcombe, Charles
• Position: Reviews of Books

Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China. By ALAN J. BERKOWTTZ. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. 296. $55.

This wonderfully erudite and meticulously researched new volume examines the image and reality of the recluse in China during the period of its greatest prominence, the centuries of political division that elapsed between the grandly unified Han (202 B.C.-A.D. 220) and Sui-Tang (unified 589-907) imperial dynasties. In China, remarkably, the recluse has been an important figure not only in the romantic realm of artistic imagination--epitomized by the story of Tao Qian (also known as Tao Yuanming, 365-427), who resigned from office rather than compromise his spirit for a salary, and spent the remainder of his life writing exquisite poems celebrating the simple pleasures of country life. In China the recluse has also, paradoxically, at times been an influential actor in political history as well.

Unlike in some other cultures, in China reclusion was more typically motivated by political rather than religious concerns. Berkowitz, in fact, specifically defines Chinese reclusion in terms of refusal to hold government office. Moreover, precisely because the spurning of political power was a way of demonstrating one's integrity, added prestige and cultural authority accrued to those who publicly shunned office. Reclusion was therefore a political act that began with the rejection of office, and which not infrequently resulted in renewed and intensified offers of government employment.

In the final years of the Han dynasty the imperial government allegedly became corrupt, and holding oneself aloof from court service acquired a special cachet of moral probity. The standard dynastic history remarks at this point that gentlemen who "did not discuss such things" were "ridiculed personally by even farmers and herd boys" (p. 118).

By the fourth century it had become almost de rigueur for leading Chinese statesmen to profess their lofty detachment from mundane affairs. This was most notoriously the case with Wang Yan (256-311), who "cultivated a reputation for remaining aloof from politics, yet he nevertheless held the most prestigious positions, one after another" (p. 145). Wang's seemingly perverse--if not completely hypocritical--posture has been blamed by later historians for the subsequent loss of imperial unity and so-called "barbarian invasions." Clearly, the social, political...