Abstract
The Guodian texts that appear to follow a Ruist (Confucian) line of thought are noteworthy in their special emphasis on the relationship between the spiritual world of Heaven and the world of humans. The Wuxing 五行 text is one of the main texts that clearly prioritizes such a divine–human connection. This chapter examines the way in which the author of the Wuxing establishes “Sagacity” (sheng 聖) as a key psychological marker of moral realization—associated with the divine Way of Heaven. I show how Sagacity epitomizes the ideal of harmony among the Five Conducts (wuxing 五行) by merging human, mundane realms of moral thought and feeling with divine apprehension of moral perfection. Through an analysis of musical metaphors that reveal the nature of the human–Heaven relationship in the human body, I demonstrate how some early Chinese Ruist thinkers grounded their ethics in a highly spiritual attitude towards the human psyche.
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Notes
- 1.
The standard, academic translation for wuxing in Warring States thought is “five phases,” referring to a particular ca. fourth to third centuries bce development in cosmology that explains all natural phenomena in terms of set relationships among the five primary elements water, earth, metal, wood, and fire. The Guodian Wuxing text, however, is an exception to this, perhaps because at the time of its composition the concept of wuxing was still being debated and developed, and was not at all settled. We might therefore wish to view the Guodian concept of wuxing as a challenge to contemporary concepts of wuxing, in which the author consciously attempts to redefine xing in terms of moral attributes, and not amoral natural processes. Scott Cook has translated the title as “Five Conducts,” showing how the text defines xing by referencing the “Virtuous Conducts” (de zhi xing 德之行).
- 2.
Intriguingly, the Analects does not once contain the pairings ren-yi or li-zhi, let alone the four listed together. We see all four together as a list in Mencius 6A6 and 7A21 and once in the Liji’s “Sangfu” 喪服 chapter. Most of the focus in the Mencius, however, is more exclusively on the pairing ren-yi, which occurs over twenty times in the text. In Mozi and Zhuangzi as well, ren-yi occurs over twenty times in each text, while li-zhi makes no appearance. Of the texts in the Guodian corpus, however, Five Conducts is not the only one to highlight the term sheng 聖. In Tang Yu zhi Dao the author often makes parallel statements using the terms sheng and ren 仁 as a philosophical pair.
- 3.
I am not the first to talk about the text’s links to music, which are certainly not subtle and pervade the text. Cook relates “happiness” to “musical contentment” (le 樂) and also translates ji da cheng 集大成 as “assembled the great symphony” (Cook 2012: 1:467, 469–70).
- 4.
In the fourth century bce, we see the development of debates concerning morality in relation to inner and outer sources of the self. The language of nei/wai (inner/outer) becomes prevalent throughout in the literature, and differences in opinion arise about whether something like sagacity counts as a virtuous conduct when it does not take shape from within. The Mawangdui version of this text differs from the Guodian version on sagacity taking shape within, which might suggest that various people thought differently on this point (Csikszentmihalyi 2004: 312–14).
- 5.
It is helpful to differentiate the two types of de德 in the text by referring to de of the human Way adjectivally, as a virtuous conduct, on the one hand, and De-virtue of Heaven’s Way, as a noun that describes a sacred way of being in the world. Similarly, in this chapter I will capitalize all letters that refer to the sacred realm in some way, so as to help clarify the crucial distinction between human and Heaven in the text.
- 6.
- 7.
See Analects 2.1 and 12.19, respectively.
- 8.
The graph in the Guodian manuscript has been transcribed, and hence translated, in many ways. In this paper I follow Csikszentmihalyi’s understanding of the graph in question as jing 徑 (direct) and not qing 輕 (light), as opposed to “heavy,” which is the graph Cook uses in his translation (Csikszentmihalyi 2004: 73).
- 9.
- 10.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 1998: 150 (Strip 25).
- 11.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 1998: 150 (Strips 25–27).
- 12.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 1998: 150 (Slips 18, 19).
- 13.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 1998: 149 (Strips 6, 7).
- 14.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 1998: 150 (Strip 28).
References
Brown, Miranda. 2002. “Did the Ancient Chinese Attempt to Preserve Corpses? A Reconsideration of the Elite Conceptions of Death.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 4:1–4, 201–23.
Cook, Scott. 2012. The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mark. 2004. Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. Leiden: Brill.
Jingmenshi Bowuguan 荊門市博物館, ed., 1998. “Exegisis on the Wuxing Text 郭店楚墓竹簡.” In The Guodian Chu Bamboo Slip Texts 郭店楚墓竹簡, 149–54. Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe.
Wu, Hung. 1989. The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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Brindley, E. (2019). “Sagacity” and the Heaven–Human Relationship in the Wuxing 五行. In: Chan, S. (eds) Dao Companion to the Excavated Guodian Bamboo Manuscripts. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04633-0_10
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