Wei Yao's disquisition on boyi.

• Author: Lien, Y. Edmund
• Position: Critical essay

Wei Yao (204?-273?), (1) a scholar-official in the Wu court during the Sanguo period, is said to have written "Boyi lun" or "A Disquisition on boyi" upon command of the heir-designate Sun He (224-253). At the time, he served the prince as a close advisor with the official title of palace cadet (shilang) and, according to Lu Kanru, wrote the piece in 242. (2)2 Cai Ying, another scholar-official also serving the heir-designate, had an obsessive passion for the game of boyi. The prince felt that the game was a useless pastime and asked Wei Yao to write a critical disquisition on it. This account of the circumstances surrounding Wei Yao's composition is documented by Chen Shou in the "Wu zhi". (3)

The work itself is quoted in its entirety in the "Wu zhi." (4) It is also included in the great sixth-century anthology, Wen xuan. (5) Textual differences between the "Wu zhi" and two popular editions of the Wen xuan, namely the Li Shan and the Wuchen editions, are insignificant and do not alter the main theme of the disquisition. Here I shall follow the text in the Li Shan edition of the Wen xuan.

Our first task will be to examine the term boyi. In so doing, we shall find that prior to the Han period it referred to the board game known as liubo, although by Wei Yao's time it was understood as referring to the game we now know as weiqi and that scholars then and afterward mistakenly attached that meaning to earlier occurrences of the term. The compound boyi first appears in the Lun yu 17/20, in which Confucius says, "If one eats to satiety all day long, and has nothing to contemplate, it is hard [to have any virtue]. Aren't there people who boyi? (6) If one does that, he would at least be better off" We can see from the context that boyi must be some kind of non-scholarly activity. However, there is no evidence for us to ascertain exactly the type of activity; nor do we know if this compound of two characters refers to one or two activities. In the Zuo zhuan the syllable bo is never used to mean a specific activity, but the syllable yi appears in the compound yiqi zuo zhuan, Xiang 25, also has a passage saying that "a game player who holds a draughtsman and cannot decide [on the move] will not defeat his opponent" (7) The third-century commentator Du Yu (222-284) glossed the syllable yi here as the board game weiqi.

The compound boyi also appears in the Mengzi 4B/30, in which Mencius declares that there are five kinds of violations of the virtue of filial piety, the second of which is "to boyi and to indulge in drinking to the point of neglecting the support of one's parents" Again, we do not know if the term here refers to one or two types of activities. Moreover, Mengzi 6A/9 says: "Now, yi as a skill is a minor one. But if one does not concentrate one's attention and focus one's mind, one cannot master it. The Chessmaster Qiu is the best player of yi in the entire state" The Eastern Han commentator Zhao Qi (d. 201) here glossed yi as bo or weiqi and also refers to the Lunyu passage quoted above. (8)

Living in the late second century A.D.,Zhao Qi seems to want to keep the option open for the game yi: it may mean either bo or weiqi, or perhaps he was equating the two. For Du Yu, less than a century later, it unequivocally means weiqi. But in the third century B.C., the syllable bo seems to have referred specifically to the game known as liubo. This was a two-person board game, with each player having six draughtsmen (qi ) to place on a predefined board. The "Zhao hun" poem in the Chu ci refers to the game as liubo (9) In the commentary by Wang Yi (fl. A.D. 114-120) we read "One tosses six sticks and places six draughtsmen, so it is called liubo or six bo." (10) Professor Lien-sheng Yang was among the first to have identified the liubo game board depicted on a mirror of the Han or Sanguo period. (11) Today, thanks to archeological findings, we know fairly well what the board and draughtsmen were like and what auxiliary items, such as bamboo or jade sticks and dice, were needed to play the game. Although the exact rules of the game are still unclear, we also know from the Hanfeizi that each player had one draughtsman designated as a xiao "owl," (12) which represented the nobility and was the leader of the other five draughtsmen. The goal of the game was probably to "kill" the opponent's xiao.

According to another interesting passage in Hanfeizi, King Zhao of Qin (r. 305-250 B.C.) ordered artisans to climb Mount Hua and "use the core of pine and cypress trees [found there] to make a bo game-set, with arrows the length of eight feet and draughtsmen the length of eight inches. He inscribed at Mount Hua the following words: 'King Zhao and celestial deities used to play the game of bo here'" (13) Here the first use of the character bo must refer to the game liubo because of the reference to both jian and qi and the second occurrence of bo is clearly used as a verb, "to play the game of liubo"

In the shi ji there are at least eight references to bo, all of which clearly refer to the game of liubo. (14) The syllable yi on the other hand does not appear in the Shi ji, nor does the compound weiqi. In the Han shu we find an account of how the heir-designate of the Han throne killed the heir-designate of the prince Wu, Liu Pi (r. 195-154 B.C.), in a quarrel over a game of bo. (15) There are also three references to boyi, all of them related to Emperor Xuan (r. 73-49 B.C.), who was known to be a devoted player of boyi. One of these references recalls Lun yu 17/20. Another one is provided with a later commentary by the seventh-century scholar Yan Shigu (581-645), in which Yan glosses bo as liubo and yi as weiqi. (16) However, in the main text of Han shu there is no direct reference to weiqi or yi as a separate game. Yan Shigu's gloss seems to be anachronistic.

In another work from the Western Han, the Zhanguo ce compiled by Liu Xiang (77-6 B.C.), there are five references to bo or xiao. The context in all cases is clearly the game of liubo. Here again the syllable yi and the compound weiqi do not appear in the Zhanguo ce. Another work attributed to Liu Xiang is the Shuo yuan which contains two mentions of the bo game. In one case, the notorious Lao Ai (d. 238 B.C.) had an argument with eunuchs about a bo game during which he got drunk. In the other passage reference is made to the draughtsmen of bo. (17)

It is recorded in the Xijing zaji traditionally attributed to Liu Xin (d. 23), that Liu Bang (256-195 B.C.) played weiqi with his wife Lady Qi (18) However, the authorship of Xijing zaji has long been controversial and it is probably not a Handynasty text. Nienhauser's study of the work's authorship suggests that the extant Xijing zaji was probably compiled around A.D. 520. (19) Hence, we cannot credit this account of Liu Bang and Lady Qi playing the game weiqi.

Among major texts down to and including the Han shu, there seems to be no description of the weiqi game, even though commentators of later times like to assume that yi is weiqi. On the other hand, there are frequent references to the bo game with occasional details describing the game itself. Commentators such as Zhao Qi, Du Yu, and Yan Shigu all lived after the Former Han, and by then the word yi denoted the game of weiqi unambiguously, as we shall see. Hence their glosses for yi are anachronistic. If the game of bo was respectable enough to be played by immortals as depicted on bronze mirrors of the Han, (20) attractive enough to be an enticement for "summoning the soul" to return to the human world, and glorified enough for the king to play it with celestial deities, it seems likely that bo was the dominant board game in ancient times. Since in the game of liubo the players not only toss (ton ) a bo (a stick) but also place a draughtsman, the latter move may well be called yiqi a usage already present in the Zuo zhuan.

As far as I can determine, the first persons to refer explicitly to both liubo and weiqi and consider them different games are Yang Xiong (53 B.C.-A.d. 18) and Ban Gu (32-92). According to Yang Xiong's Fangyan, the throwing-stick bo had multiple names and one of them was qi. Futhermore he tells us, "Weiqi is called yi. To the east of the [Han'gu] Pass, in the area between Qi and Lu, it is always referred to as yi" (21) Ban Gu wrote an essay called "Yi zhi" (A Guide to Yi), which remains a useful source for what was known about yi in the Later Han. Ban Gu considers bo and yi separately, refers to passage 17/20 in the Lun yu, and treats the term boyi as a compound of two separate board games:

After the military senior (22) finished talking about the game of bo, someone came forward and asked, "Confucius mentioned that there were the games bo and yi. At present bo is in vogue by itself and yi has singly vanished. Since the meaning of bo has been well promoted and the meaning...