Speaking with the Learning of Odes: Cao Zhi's Representation of the Shijing and Its Hermeneutic Traditions in the Contexts of Han-Wei China.

• Author: Gu, Yixin

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. -----T. S. Eliot (1) METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTION

"One who does not learn about poetry (shi) has nothing to speak with/of" [phrase omitted]. (2) What this quotation, attributed to Kongzi, called shi It ("poetry") was traditionally conflated with Shi as a generic name for a diachronically changing range of poems and poetic utterances that were gradually stabilized as a corpus consisting of around three hundred odes, much later known as the Shijing [phrase omitted] (Classic of Poetry). (3) If this quotation is a useful guide for the reception and representation of the Shijing at its early stage and beyond, this corpus had played a role not merely as a legacy passed on through the practices of "learning" but also as a constellation of poetic material from which a variety of verbal and literary compositions ("speaking" in its broadest sense) derived their utterances and meanings. Such a notion is supported by copious textual evidence parallel or corresponding to the Shijing, constituting one of the most common phenomena in Chinese literary culture from the Warring States period onward. (4)

These intertextual connections manifest in a spectrum of literal, syntactic, and thematic repetitions or correspondences between the Shijing, its surrounding interpretations and hermeneutic traditions, and a variety of texts apart from them. Within this broad context, this paper undertakes a case study of the literal and hermeneutic correspondences with the Shijing found in the poetic writings of Cao Zhi [phrase omitted] (192-232 CE), one of the most productive and accomplished poets of the early third century CE, who lived through the last decades of the Eastern Han (25-220 CE) and the early reigns of the Wei dynasty (220-265 CE). This period witnessed not only a dynastic transition with drastically changing sociocultural milieus but also the shifting foundation of literary culture and intellectual activities across a longer time span, which involved fundamental transformation and reorientation of the reception of the Shijing. Toward an inquiry into the nature of the Shijing as a corpus with both linguistic and hermeneutic significance, this case study will also invite methodological reflections on relevant Shijing studies in both traditional and modern scholarship, as well as literature studies that concern intertextual correspondences and beyond.

To begin with, it is necessary to achieve some clarity about terminology beyond the study of Chinese literature. The terms employed to describe intertextual verbal correspondence can be generally divided into two groups: neutral terms such as "correspondence," "repetition," and "parallel" for synchronic intertextual comparison, and terms such as "quotation," "citation," "imitation," "allusion," and "appropriation," which indicate the purpose of a particular practice in dealing with a comparatively earlier text. (5) To be more specific, the terms of the second group are embedded with a series of preconceptions and diachronic understandings about identifying a particular text as the "source" regarding its own history of composition, circulation, and reception, hence defining the intention of a given practice that consciously draws upon the "source." (6)

In dealing with early textual correspondences with the Shijing, most existing studies assume the odes of the Shijing were the source texts from which utterances and meanings were extracted or borrowed. These studies, therefore, define the various forms of correspondence as quotations/citations, allusions, imitations, recompositions, and so on of those odes. (7) Such a preconception is based on textual evidence indicating the prominence of odes under the name of Shi in general, and it specifically coheres with the common occurrence of explicit textual markers that identify this corpus as the source being "quoted" or "cited"--most typically, "Shi yue" [phrase omitted] and "Shi yun" [phrase omitted] ("the Shi says") and, to a lesser extent, the marker of a secondary category or a particular ode of the Shijing. However, equally prominent is the existence of a great number of correspondences with the Shijing that are not accompanied by any explicit or implicit textual marker. This inevitably leads to a significant methodological question: To what degree, and by what means, can we ascertain that there truly was a practice of quoting, referring, or alluding to the Shijing (Shi) in a context where no specific source was mentioned or even implied?

This common preconception is problematic in more than one aspect. On a practical level, it operates with a habitual procedure of identifying textual correspondences primarily by comparison with the Maoshi [phrase omitted]--the single complete transmitted Shijing corpus since medieval times--as well as citations in several transmitted sources that were likely standardized in accord with the Maoshi version. However, the received Maoshi represents only one among a series of early Shijing traditions, and it is a tradition that itself had changed over time as well. It is, therefore, far from offering a full picture of the reception and circulation of the Shijing at an earlier stage. (8) The issues become more complicated and miscellaneous as one investigates traditions other than the Maoshi, such as sources attributed to the "Three Schools" (sanjia [phrase omitted], i.e., Lushi [phrase omitted], Qishi [phrase omitted], and Hanshi [phrase omitted]), (9) as well as a growing number of unearthed manuscripts--all of which survived only as fragments, with their own questions and ambiguity.

On a conceptual level, the common preconception involves two interrelated assumptions. First, it assumes the Shijing as the oldest origin for the phrases and utterances it contains, so that material was constantly derived from but not mixed into it. Second, it privileges the Shijing as a distinct, self-contained, and fully recognized text for any verbal composition that came after. Such notions are not without controversy. Speaking of the pre-imperial era, as David R. Knechtges suggests, any specific ode in the Shijing could have had its own history prior to its incorporation into this corpus. (10) This is particularly true for comparatively minor textual units such as a specific line or a cluster of utterances. As further shown in pre-Qin manuscripts, there were possibilities other than a lineal process of reproduction stemming from a single textual model (of a complete ode) by which poetic materials were shared, appropriated, and instantiated in particular forms. (11)

For one influential opinion regarding this issue in Han and post-Han literature. Stephen Owen--in his study of a series of "Han" (or, as he suggests, constructed as such in the fifth and sixth centuries) poems--argues for a synchronic mode of reading Shijing-related utterances in those later poems as neither quotations of the Shijing nor allusions to specific meanings attached to particular odes by previous hermeneutic traditions. Instead, he takes them as a cluster of "commonplace lines" or "tags" with formulaic functions drawn from a larger, shared repertoire. (12) This opinion works in concert with Owen's conceptualization of "One Poetry," a term he uses to capture these "Han" or medieval poems altogether as produced from a shared repertoire of poetic material and shared compositional procedures. (13) With emphasis on the "grammars" of "poetic material" throughout his study, Owen tends to regard the making of those poems as a collaborative process guided by a series of overarching principles. This conception is, however, comparatively detached from the empirical foundation of literary proficiency and scholarly cultivation on an individual basis. The cost for the totality of Owen's "poetic material" is a risk to erase the diversity of various repositories which differed not merely in kind but also in status of reception, as well as a risk to miss the significance of the boundary of specific collections of utterances--for example, those related to the Shijing.

This indeed deserves some further reflection. During the eras when these "Han" or medieval poems were produced, the Shijing as a corpus had already reached its canonical status as one of the most familiar texts for the well-educated literate community, around which a variety of readings, interpretations, and exegetical materials linked to specific odes had been developed and transmitted by generations. This is not to deny that any single utterance corresponding to the Shijing could have and would continue to have its own life in the living language. However, it calls for equally open-ended engagements with these utterances in relation to the Shijing as a corpus with both literal significance and hermeneutic diversity. Fully acknowledging Owen's groundbreaking contribution, I would like to push it further and consider the potential risks involved in his paradigm when it comes to the Shijing. For, on the one hand, it underrates a specific range of meanings that could have been understood through particular utterances. On the other hand, it risks overlooking a not insignificant aspect within the scholarly inquiry--namely, any given practice of "sharing" a specific utterance, theme, or symbol with the canonized Shijing inevitably reinforced the relation with the Shijing, and precisely because of that, it opens the Shijing into a broadened realm of critical reflections on its canonical status in the history of reception. The question can be, at least in some cases, reversed in such a way: "Was it not...