What If Zhao Dun Had Fled? Border Crossing and Flight into Exile in Early China.

AuthorVan Auken, Newell Ann

INTRODUCTION: THE STORY AND THE PROBLEM

An entry in the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu [phrase omitted]) from the second year of Lord Xuan [phrase omitted] of Lu [phrase omitted], 607 BCE, records the assassination of the ruler of the ancient Chinese state of Jin [phrase omitted]:

[phrase omitted]. Autumn. The ninth month. Yichou. Zhao Dun of Tin assassinated his ruler, Yigao. (CQ, Xuan 2.4, 650) (1) Yet the corresponding story in the Zuo zhuan is somewhat different. That account tells us that Tin ruler Lord Ling [phrase omitted] (whose personal name was Yigao [phrase omitted]) was murdered not by Zhao Dun [phrase omitted], senior member of the Zhao lineage and chief minister of Jin, but by one Zhao Chuan [phrase omitted], his junior kinsman. This discrepancy creates a problem, as the Spring and Autumn pins the assassination on an ostensibly innocent man.

According to the Zuo zhuan, Lord Ling was a capricious and unfair ruler, and when his chief minister Zhao Dun (also known as Xuanzi [phrase omitted]) remonstrated with him, he did not change but instead dispatched someone to kill Zhao Dun. The would-be killer was so awed by Zhao Dun's righteousness that he opted to commit suicide rather than fulfill his mission. Zhao Dun fended off further assassination attempts in which Lord Ling first set a large dog on him, and then sent armed men to carry out a surprise attack on him. Previously, Zhao Dun had fed a starving man in the wilderness, and when he was in danger, this man mysteriously appeared and saved his life. (2) Despite these attacks, ultimately, it was not Zhao Dun but his younger relative, Zhao Chuan, who killed Lord Ling. (3) Zhao Dun himself is not directly implicated in the killing in the Zuo zhuan narrative, and accounts in other texts concur that he did not personally commit the murder.

The Zuo zhuan narrates as follows:

[phrase omitted]. [phrase omitted] Yichou. Zhao Chuan attacked Lord Ling in the Peach Garden. Before Xuanzi [Zhao Dun] had emerged from the mountains [across which he was fleeing], he turned back. The court scribe recorded, saying, "Zhao Dun assassinated his ruler," and showed it to the court. Xuanzi said, "It is not so!" He responded, saying, "You serve as the chief minister. You fled but did not cross the border; you returned but did not punish the offender. If it is not you, then who is it?" Xuanzi said, "Alas! The Odes say, 'It is what I cherish, he has brought this grief.' (4) These words refer to me!" (Zuo, Xuan 2, 663) (5) By recording Zhao Dun as the assassin, the court scribe assigned responsibility to him, despite the fact that he did not actually commit the murder. The scribe then displayed the record in the Tin court, presumably to make public his judgment that Zhao Dun bore responsibility for the assassination. (Although a similar record appears in the Spring and Autumn, the official record of Lit, the Zuo zhuan account refers to the Jin record.) At no time were the facts of the murder disputed. That is, the court scribe did not allege that Zhao Dun had personally killed his ruler but observed that he had neither crossed the border nor punished the offense upon his return. Apparently, these failures rendered him culpable for the crime.

This account is followed by a remark ascribed to Confucius:

[phrase omitted] Confucius said, "Dong Hu was a good scribe of old; his rules for recording did not conceal [responsibility]. Zhao Xuanzi was a good nobleman of old; on account of these rules [of recording] he accepted humiliation. (6) What a pity, had he crossed the border, he would have avoided blame!" (Zuo, Xuan 2, 663) This remark, and in particular the closing reference to crossing the border, will serve as the point of departure for this study.

Over the centuries much has been made of the obvious fault lines between assignment of blame in the Spring and Autumn and the "true story" given in other works such as the Zuo zhuan. To some extent, such discrepancies are unsurprising, since in origin and nature, the Spring and Autumn differs substantially from the Zuo zhuan. The Spring and Autumn is a register of selected events recorded from the perspective of the ancient Chinese state of Lu, covering 722 to 479 BCE. (7) It almost certainly originated as an official record of Lu, but the provenance of the current text is disputed. Tradition ascribes it to Confucius, and much of the associated body of commentary assumes that many of its records conveyed his "praise and blame" (baobian [phrase omitted]) by means of "subtle words" (weiyan [phrase omitted]), that is, slight variations in phrasing. An alternative view associates the Spring and Autumn with religious practice, including ritual announcements (gao [phrase omitted]) and the ancestral cult. (8) This understanding of the Spring and Autumn is attested quite early--the earliest surviving references to it appear in a set of commentarial passages embedded in the Zuo zhuan--but it never became the dominant view. (9) Nonetheless, the connection of the Spring and Autumn with religious practice appears to be supported by its highly regular structure and formulaic language together with its attention to hierarchy and apparent ritual avoidances.

The Zuo zhuan is one of the three primary commentaries or "traditions" (zhuan [phrase omitted]) to the Spring and Autumn and, as such, is closely related to the Spring and Autumn, but it diverges significantly in form and content. Whereas Spring and Autumn records are brief, formulaic notations, as illustrated by the record of Lord Ling's assassination, the bulk of the Zuo zhuan comprises narrative accounts, many (but not all) of which correspond to Spring and Autumn records, albeit with significantly more detail. The two works do not always agree; that is, there are cases in which the information given in the Spring and Autumn appears to conflict with that in the Zuo zhuan. Among these discrepancies, perhaps the best-known category is that of death records of Lu rulers: although other early historical accounts, including the Zuo zhuan, maintain that some were murdered, the Spring and Autumn records these (and indeed all) deaths of Lu rulers as natural deaths. Such discrepancies may be the result of ritual avoidances--for example, prohibitions against recording murders or subjugations of Lu rulers--rather than diverging views of events or deliberate attempts to deceive or mislead. As I propose in this paper, it is likely that similar religiously based conventions determined how Lord Ling's assassination was recorded and what Zhao Diin's role was said to have been.

Much ink has been spilled concerning the discrepancy between the details of what allegedly happened--Zhao Dun never touched the murder weapon, nor did he instigate the plot--and what was recorded, and it has been claimed that the record treated Zhao Dun as morally culpable because, as chief minister, he failed to punish the actual killer. This much seems reasonable: it corresponds to what the scribe said, and (as discussed below) it is echoed in other versions of this story. But Dong Hu also said, "You fled but did not cross the border," and in his comments recorded in the Zuo zhuan, Confucius does not mention Zhao Dun's failure to punish Zhao Chuan but instead laments that he did not flee, "What a pity, had he crossed the border, he would have avoided blame!" The statement ascribed to Confucius clearly implies that if Zhao Dun had left Tin, he would not have been assigned blame.

Recent scholarship concerning Zhao Dun (discussed below) focuses primarily on the apparent problem of an innocent man being assigned responsibility for a crime committed by someone else and tends to accept the suggestion, implicit in Dong Hu's comments, that he was held responsible because he failed to uphold his obligation to punish the actual criminal. But the question "what if Zhao Dun had fled?" remains unexamined. Would flight have simply provided Zhao Dun an escape from the problems created by his junior relative? Or is there more to it than that?

To address this and related questions, the first part of this paper examines Zuo zhuan accounts of Spring and Autumn-period flights into exile together with practices associated with crossing borders between states. Border crossing had religious ramifications, and flight into exile, that is, crossing into another state without the proper ceremonial steps, entailed political and religious consequences for the person who fled. I propose that the case of Zhao Dun likely involved formal rules that connected flight (or in Zhao Dun's case, failure to flee) with assignment of responsibility in official records such as the Spring and Autumn or the Tin record referred to in this account, and that Confucius's remark was aimed at pointing out that both the record made by the good scribe Dong Hu and Zhao Dun's begrudging acceptance of that record complied with these rules. (10)

The second part of this paper explores other versions of this story and its early reception, and reveals a shift in emphasis from lamenting Zhao Dun's failure to flee to asserting that he bore responsibility because he did not punish the true murderer. This shift points to a broader transformation in Spring and Autumn interpretation. Although its records were originally made by Lu scribes in accord with recording rules that were probably connected to religious practice, they came to be understood as having been composed or edited by Confucius in order to convey moral judgments on events and actors. The reception history of the story of Zhao Dun illustrates how, as cultural and religious practices changed, the understanding of particular events was transformed and early recording practices were forgotten and displaced.

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