An online conversation from 12/05/2020:
Jack
We should build our own qīngtán platform
Daolun
Name if after Wang Bi.
Jack
But seriously, I'm thinking it'd be cool to set up some sort of online thing where we have invited debaters argue and counter-argue positions in detail, and then have an invited master of ceremonies compile the final debate dialogue into a unified paper like Zhong Hui compiling the Four Arguments of Fu Gu, Li Feng, himself, and Wang Guang
Zhèngshǐ
Alright, I’m sure a good number of you have no idea about what any of the above conversation means. Time for a crash course that will hopefully make it slightly less confusing.
First, a note on the calendar. Traditionally, the dynastic states of China did not maintain a single epoch comparable to the BC (before Christ) to AD (anno Domini) cut off. During Hàn and the Three States, years were instead counted by niánhào “Year Names” issued by the Imperial Court.1 In Wèi, 240 AD was Zhèngshǐ Inaugural Year, 241 AD was Zhèngshǐ Second Year, and so on. The time period of Zhèngshǐ as a whole corresponds to 240 to 249 AD. The name Zhèngshǐ 正始 can be interpreted to mean “Correct Beginning.”
The decade of Zhèngshǐ is very important to the history of Wèi. It was a pivotal epoch, and Wèi was never the same again after Zhèngshǐ ended.
A Little Background
In 220, Cáo Pī formally ascended as Emperor, with grand ambitions to complete his father’s unfinished work, but in 226 he suddenly fell ill and died, aged forty.2 At the time Cáo Pī’s eldest son Cáo Ruì was about twenty, and though Cáo Pī had installed a group of four men to serve as a regency, Cáo Ruì was able to take power into his own hands relatively quickly, reassigning his supposed regents to other positions.3 Disaster struck again, however, as Cáo Ruì fell seriously ill, and on the first day of the lunar new year in 239, he hastily established his adopted son Cáo Fāng, at the time aged eight, as his heir, under the guardianship of two regents, Cáo Shuǎng and Sīmǎ Yì. Cáo Ruì died and Cáo Fāng was enthroned that same day.
In keeping with tradition, the Year Name was not changed until the next lunar new year,4 corresponding to 240 AD, which became the first of Zhèngshǐ, the “Correct Beginning.” The name was probably meaningful.
The question of the legitimacy of Wèi had not been simply solved by the abdication ceremony of 220. Not only was there the problem of the continued existence of Shǔ-Hàn and Wú, arguments surrounding the political theories of dynastic succession and abdication and the metaphysics of government legitimacy continued through the reigns of Cáo Pī and Cáo Ruì in the form of debates on Court rituals and dress, Court music, sacrifice ceremonies, calendar reforms, and the genealogy of the Cáo clan. The “Correct Beginning” was perhaps intended to resolve the problems once and for all.5
Cáo Shuǎng had been a close and personal friend of the Emperor Cáo Ruì from youth, and moreover was the eldest son of a famed and celebrated military officer. Shuǎng's father Zhēn was a third or fourth cousin of Cáo Pī, and more importantly was a veteran who had been on the battlefield since the days of Cáo Cāo. At the time of his death, Cáo Zhēn was the highest ranking military officer of all of Wèi. Shuǎng himself however yet had no great achievements under his own name. Sīmǎ Yì meanwhile was of the same generation as Cáo Pī and Cáo Zhēn, and after Cáo Zhēn’s death Sīmǎ Yì had succeeded Zhēn’s position as most senior military officer in Wèi. Though Cáo Ruì had appointed Cáo Shuǎng as the principal regent and Sīmǎ Yì as his assistant, Cáo Shuǎng petitioned the new Emperor Cáo Fāng to promote Sīmǎ Yì to a higher rank, and for a time deferred to and treated Sīmǎ Yì as a father.6
Lacking the prestige of his father Zhēn or of his assistant regent Sīmǎ Yì, Cáo Shuǎng sought to bolster his influence through other means, namely by recruiting the most famed and influential thinkers of the time into his service. The regency of Cáo Shuǎng came to be staffed by philosophers like Hé Yàn, Wáng Bì, Shuǎng's cousin Xiàhóu Xuán,7 and Zhèngshǐ became remembered later as a golden age of philosophical thought and debate, the time of the first wave of Xuánxuē thinkers.
Qīngtán
The seeds of the Xuánxuē wave had already been planted in the final decades of the declining Hàn regime. As the government became increasingly ineffectual, intellectuals naturally made criticisms of the current system and speculations on how the problems should be resolved. From these earlier conversations of criticism of the Hàn regime, known as qīngyì “pure commentary” to contrast with the corruption of contemporary Hàn politics, eventually evolved qīngtán “Pure Conversation,” a cultural practice that would continue through the intellectual trends of the Six Dynasties. Qīngtán was a rigorous verbal debate on “pure” topics such as philosophy and political theory, like a competitive chess game of words. A participant would make an argument, the opponent would offer a counter-argument, and the debate continue until one side conceded defeat.8
Xuánxuē
Xuánxuē, “study of the mysterious,” is a term retroactively applied to the intellectual currents that began during Zhèngshǐ and continued through the rest of the Six Dynasties period.9 To oversimplify things, Xuánxuē was concerned with rejecting the orthodox theories that had formed during Hàn, which had been discredited in the minds of many intellectuals by Hàn’s decline and collapse, and go back to the basics. That is, Xuánxuē was concerned with studying the most fundamental and therefore most obscure principles of the world and how it worked, to try to understand the Dào.
For the first wave of Xuánxuē thinkers such as Hé Yàn, the lessons obtained from understanding the obscure and mysterious were to then be applied to reforming government and society. After all, if one could understand fundamental principles well enough to understand what a sage was, perhaps one could learn the ways to become a sage or at least improve oneself to be more like a sage, and perhaps a sage leader, or at least a higher quality of bureaucracy officials, would be able to finally end the chaos and warfare and establish an ideal peaceful society.
Few details survive on exactly how the Zhèngshǐ Xuánxuē thinkers applied their theories to reform efforts, but three general goals can be inferred from extant records of a series of opinions written by Xiàhóu Xuán:
Reforming Bureaucracy Recruitment, namely by reducing the power of the regional Rectifiers and strengthening the central Secretariat’s personnel selection department.
Streamlining Geographic Administration, namely by reducing the three level system (zhōu, jùn, xiàn) to a two level system (zhōu, xiàn).
Enforcing restrictions on extravagance and excessive consumption.10
Whether the third goal was effectively pursued might be questioned, given the accusations of the incredible extravagance of Cáo Shuǎng and many of the intellectuals surrounding him. Hé Yàn in particular was noted for his heavy drug use, which he believed helped purify his thinking, and many Xuánxuē intellectuals embraced alcoholism as a way to break down social inhibitions in their pursuit of understanding the natural ways of human behavior.
Not everyone was happy with the new wave of thinking. Many of the Zhèngshǐ intellectuals like Hé Yàn had already been famous during the reign of Cáo Ruì, but Cáo Ruì had sided with conservative groups and actively suppressed the reformist thinkers. The radical ideas of the intellectuals, particularly surrounding rejecting traditional social restrictions and embracing “naturalness” in ways including alcoholism and drug abuse, were considered an embarrassment by the more conservative groups, who denounced the radicals as “floaty and superficial.” But even setting aside discussions on political ideology and philosophy, the very nature of the reform efforts must have rankled the established powers by the implied power shifts. Centralizing the recruitment process would weaken regional interests, namely those of the upper class gentry clans who had co-opted the Rectifier system to staff the bureaucracy with members of their own social class at the expense of lower classes. Streamlining and simplifying the geographic administration system would also mean fewer bureaucracy positions available for ambitious politicians of the upper class looking for stepping stones.
The Beginning’s End
Opposition to the reformist pursuits of Cáo Shuǎng’s group coalesced around the assistant regent Sīmǎ Yì, who as the head of a wealthy and powerful gentry clan, seemed a natural leader. However, Cáo Shuǎng’s group took steps to gradually push members of Sīmǎ Yì’s faction from power, reassigning them to regional positions in the provinces or outright dismissing them. Under political pressure and nearing seventy, Sīmǎ Yì seemed to concede and withdraw into a quiet retirement in Zhèngshǐ Eighth Year, or about 247.
In the first moon of Zhèngshǐ Tenth Year, 5 February 249, Cáo Shuǎng and the Imperial Court left the capital on a visit to Gāopíng, the tomb of Cáo Ruì. While they were away, Sīmǎ Yì led private troops in a sudden coup d’etat, seizing control of the city and issuing an impeachment against Cáo Shuǎng. Lured by promises he would only be removed from power and permitted to retire, Cáo Shuǎng agreed to surrender. On February 9th, Cáo Shuǎng and his closest supporters, including Hé Yàn, were all executed along with their clans.
At the time of the execution of Cáo Shuǎng, his supporters and associates were all exterminated to the third degree of relation, males and females without regard to young or old, the aunts and sisters and daughters that had been married to others were all killed, and so [Sīmǎ Yì] indeed took away Wèi’s regalia.11
A new Year Name was issued. 249 was changed to the first year of Jiāpíng “Commendable Pacification.” Zhèngshǐ was over.
Thereafter, Wèi was under the control of the Sīmǎ faction.
The change was not limited to the political realm. The philosophical realm changed as well after the destruction of Cáo Shǎung in 249, a change further confirmed when the execution of Shuǎng's cousin Xiàhóu Xuán in early 254 ended any hope for a restoration for the first wave Xuánxuē thinkers. Whereas the first wave Zhèngshǐ Xuánxuē thinkers pursued active application of their ideas to government and society, the second wave Zhúlín “Bamboo Grove” Xuánxuē thinkers tended to reject society entirely. The most famed of the second wave were the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, named after the bamboo groves where the sages would meet to drink and debate. Most of the sages rejected government and society at large as corrupt, at least for a while. The account of one of the seven, Ruǎn Jí, is perhaps informative:
[Ruǎn] Jí originally had ambition to save the world. Between Wèi and Jìn, the world had many problems, of the famed scholars few survived. [Ruǎn] Jí because of this did not participate in worldly affairs, and was always drunk.12
The extent that the sages were able to avoid society varied, however, with one (Jī Kāng) quite famously falling victim to political maneuvering and execution by Sīmǎ Yì's son Zhāo, and a few others sages did eventually end up taking service under the Jìn regime under Zhāo's son Yán.
An Invitation
And now we come back to where we began: “We should build our own qīngtán platform.”
Giving some leeway to iterate and improve over time, the initial specifications will be rather loose:
Someone proposes a subject
Debater A offers an argument on the subject
Debater B offers a counter-argument/criticism to A
Debater A (or a new Debater C) offers a counter-argument to B
Repeat until someone concedes
A Master of Ceremonies writes up a conclusion based on the debate
This is the start of the Fǔsì Tán 輔嗣談 (named after the brilliant Zhèngshǐ era philosopher Wáng Bì, as recommended). I will be seeking volunteer debaters to offer up their thoughts and opinions in long form arguments and counter-arguments. If interested:
Or reach out through other channels, for those of you early subscribers who have other ways to contact me.
The first topic I would propose is, naturally, Zhèngshǐ itself. What can we say about it? What should we say about it? Dissenting opinions welcome!
We won’t be launching the next Fǔsì Tán immediately, in order to have enough time to recruit debaters and give them time to prepare their arguments. In the meantime, I’ll be launching another series of articles that will hopefully be a lot of fun too.
Some people translate these as “Reign Titles,” but this is misleading, since during Hàn and the Three States, Emperors were not restricted to one niánhào per reign. The translation is probably due to the Míng and Qīng dynasties, which did use one niánhào per Emperor’s reign.
Cáo Pī has annals in Sān Guó zhì (SGZ) 2. Based on the numerous campaigns and projects mentioned in the records of his six year reign, one might wonder if over-work may have been a factor in his early death. Alternatively, ill-health may have run in his family through his mother’s side: all three of Cáo Pī’s full brothers died relatively young. Cáo Pī’s three full brothers have biographies in SGZ 19. Cáo Zhāng died in his thirties, Cáo Zhí died at forty one, and Cáo Xióng probably died in his teens or twenties.
Cáo Ruì has annals in SGZ 3. The four regents were Cáo Xiū, Cáo Zhēn, Chén Qún, and Sīmǎ Yì. Cáo Xiū and Cáo Zhēn have biographies in SGZ 9, Chén Qún in SGZ 22, Sīmǎ Yì has annals in Jìn shū (JS) 1.
Though this was the accepted practice, there were several recorded violations of this tradition. For example, SGZ 33 records that at Liú Bèi’s death and Liú Shàn’s ascension, Shǔ-Hàn’s Year Name was changed immediately rather than waiting for the next year.
For English language discussions see Howard L Goodman, Ts’ao P’i Transcendent and Xun Xu and the politics of precision in third-century AD China.
Cáo Shuǎng is attached to the biography of his father Cáo Zhēn in SGZ 9.
Wáng Bì is attached to the biography of Zhōng Huì in SGZ 28. Xiàhóu Xuán is included in SGZ 9.
See Yuet Keung Lo, “Qingtan and Xuanxue,” chapter 23 of The Cambridge History of China: Volume 2, The Six Dynasties, 220-589.
See Yeut Keung Lo “Qingtan and Xuanxue,” and Alan Chan “Neo-Daoism.”
See Timothy M. Davis “Ranking Men and Assessing Talent: Xiahou Xuan’s Response to an Inquiry by Sima Yi” for an English translation of Xiàhóu Xuán’s written opinions.
誅曹爽之際,支黨皆夷及三族,男女無少長,姑姊妹女子之適人者皆殺之,既而竟遷魏鼎云。 From JS 1.
籍本有濟世志,屬魏晉之際,天下多故,名士少有全者,籍由是不與世事,遂酣飲為常。 From the biography of Ruǎn Jí in JS 49.