Wang tong and the compilation of the zhongshuo: a new evaluation of the source materials and points of controversy.

• Author: Warmer, Ding Xiang

In 1977, Howard Wechsler summarized the thousand-year-old Wang Tong controversy and surveyed the source materials that pertain to Wang Tong and the Zhonghshuo. Unfortunately, the problematic source materials that Wechsler noted but left unanalyzed have continued to discourage scholars from studying the Zhongshuo or trying to locate Wang Tong and his Zhongshuo in the history of ideas. The present study attempts to establish the relative reliability of the controversial textual sources relating to Wang Tong and the Zhongshuo, and suggests possible solutions to puzzles that Wechsler left unresolved: (1) the mysterious absence of Wang Tong's biography in the Sui shu; (2) the lack of any mention of Wang Tong or his academy in early Tang histories of the Sui; (3) the roster of Wang Tong's students; and (4) the history of the Zhongshuo's original compilation and transmission.

1. INTRODUCTION

   TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, Howard Wechsler published a landmark study of the Confucian teacher Wang Tong [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (584?-617), posthumously known as Master Wenzhong [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a figure who in Wechsler's words "has retained [such] a uniquely dubious reputation in the history of Chinese Confucianism" that "since the beginning of imperial times probably few philosophers of any persuasion have aroused such profound doubts concerning so many fundamental aspects of their lives, their teachings, and their careers."' It was Wechsler's accomplishment that he was able to correct what he found to be "a rather widespread conviction among many colleagues ... that the Wang question has been decisively resolved in the negative: that the man never existed, that his works were all forged, that he occupies no place whatsoever in the evolution of Chinese Confucianism" (p. 230).

   Wechsler's was the first study of any sort on Wang Tong to be published in the West. In summarizing the history of the Wang Tong controversy, he provided a comprehensive review of the relevant source materials and a useful description of the different scholarly camps in the centuries-old debate over Wang Tong's existence, as well as some of his own, tentative answers to questions relating to the controversy. Wechsler had hoped that his article would generate more interest in Wang Tong generally, and in particular "provide a background study for those scholars desiring to pursue the larger questions of Wang T'ung's possible influence on the Neo-Confucian movement and his place in Chinese intellectual history" (p. 231). (2) But though there has been some renewed interest in Wang Tong among Chinese scholars since the early 1980s, Sinologists in the West have still given only glancing attention to Wang Tong and the Zhongshuo. (3)

   This circumstance may, in part, reflect an understandable reluctance to treat a figure about whom so many crucial questions still remain. These are questions that Wechsler considered either impossible to resolve, given the evidence available to him, or that required more involved investigation than he could devote to them in his article. For instance, after outlining four equally likely scenarios that might explain the absence of an official biography for Wang Tong in the dynastic histories of the Sui and early Tang, he concluded that "further speculations would probably prove fruitless" (p. 249); and in regard to the number and names of Wang Tong's disciples at his academy, Wechsler conceded that these are questions "that still beg to be answered" (p. 266). Doubts also persist about the authenticity of the most famous text associated with Wang Tong, the Zhongshuo [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Discourses on the Mean). For lack of an alternative account of its composition, Wechsler endorsed t he guess of Qing scholars that "although many liberties have been taken with the text of the Discourses during the process of its compilation, transmission, and annotation . . . [it] essentially represents Wang's teachings as they were transmitted to his disciples, much as the Analects, despite repeated tamperings and extensive interpolations, remains relatively dependable as the basic source for the teachings of Confucius" (p. 258). This view is indeed plausible, but so long as the process of the Zhongshuo's compilation, transmission, and annotation--how and when it took its present form--is only guessed at, careful scholars will be discouraged from making claims about its significance for the history of ideas in China.

   Nevertheless, in recent years a number of studies on Wang Tong and the Zhongshuo have been published in China, including three monographs solely devoted to Wang Tong and a fourth, a study of Tang literary ethos, containing a substantive chapter on Wang Tong and the influence of his teaching. (4) The authors of these studies have as their aims defining Wang Tong's system of thought and showing that it played a key role in China's transition from traditional Confucianism to Neo-Confucianism. However, even as these scholars acknowledge serious authenticity and reliability problems that exist with many of the relevant source materials, their arguments are undermined by a routinely uncritical reliance on those very same sources.

   Here I shall re-open consideration of the controversial textual sources relating to Wang Tong and the Zhongshuo, though not in order to rehash the few already settled debates formerly at the center of the controversy, such as over Wang Tong's historical existence. (5) Instead my aim is to establish the relative reliability of the different sources, as well as to suggest possible solutions to those puzzles that Wechsler left unresolved and that subsequent scholars have not given sustained analysis: namely, the mysterious absence of a biography of Wang Tong in the Sui shu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; the lack of any mention of Wang Tong or his academy in early Tang histories of the Sui; the roster of Wang Tong's students; and finally, the history of the Zhongshuo's original compilation and transmission.

   In small part this endeavor is warranted because of the discovery in 1984 of the original five-juan edition of Wang Wugong wenji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the collected writings of Wang Tong's brother, Wang Ji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (ca. 590-644). This text contains evidence that was unknown to Wechsler, and so far it has been largely ignored by Wang Tong scholars in China. But it is also true that the problematic primary sources typically cited in studies of Wang Tong merit fuller analysis than Wechsler provided in his article. He identified the problems that these materials contain but ultimately offered too little evaluation of their integrity or of their usefulness as testimony to Wang Tong's life and the Zhongshuo's composition. Lacking such evaluation of these primary sources, scholarly work on Wang Tong must remain suspended, as it has in the West since Wechsler's study. In attempting to take that necessary next step in this essay, I shall first make explic it the criteria I have used in selecting and evaluating the relevant documents.

2. CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING SOURCES

   It is not uncommon to see writers on Wang Tong point out in one place contradictory or implausible statements that cast doubts on the authenticity of a certain source, but then in another place cite the same source for evidence to support their version of Wang Tong's career and influence. This might sometimes be defensible, if these writers were also to indicate that the source in question is not wholly unreliable. It is imperative that we have clear procedures for making such judgments, because only in a few cases can we judge a document to be entirely authentic or completely without authority.

   My first question in evaluating a source is whether it contains what I call original testimony, meaning it is based on personal experience or living memory of persons and events. There are numerous records of Wang Tong that predate the eleventh century, when it was first proposed that Wang Tong was a mythical rather than historical figure, and some of these records include detailed biographical data. They date from as early as within two decades after Wang Tong's death in the early seventh century to as late as the early tenth century, about six generations after his time. Some were written by members of his immediate family or their associates; others are official biographies of his siblings, children, and later descendants; still others are by associates of later generations of Wang Tong's family, and by his later admirers. The closer to Wang Tong's time a document was written, the more original the testimony is likely to be, and the more reliable, even though it is also true that we encounter more varied a nd even contradictory details in the earliest sources than in those dating from the eighth century onwards. Most of the records produced within the two or three decades after Wang Tong's death were written by those who knew Wang Tong personally and whose memory of him was based on firsthand experiences; while we certainly should expect some errors and exaggerations, it is less likely that these accounts contain outright fabrications. Their authors would have known that others were still alive who knew Wang Tong and could contradict fraudulent claims. By the end of the seventh century, in contrast, no one from Wang Tong's generation was still alive; those from the generation after him were reaching the end of their lives or were already dead, and his grandchildren were not yet born at the time of his death. Anyone writing on Wang Tong in the eighth century and afterward based his account on information that had already gone through several stages of oral or textual transmission. Consequently, we see a shift to ward a more uniform profile of Wang Tong in the eighth century, reflecting the transition...