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The Nine Songs: A reexamination of shamanism in ancient China

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The Nine Songs: A reexamination of shamanism in ancient China

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Content THE NINE SONGS: A REEXAMINATION OF
SHAMANISM IN ANCIENT CHINA
by
David Tze-yun Chen
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
December 1986
UMI Number: DP22550
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, written by
under the direction of hT.f. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
Ph.D.
Co
C 5/8
3 B /-
D avid T ze-yun Chen
D O C TO R OF PHILOSOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
D a te > l b M .
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . • • iii
PREFACE • • « • • • • • . iv
Chapter
I: A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF CH’U • • 1
II: SHAMANISM IN ANCIENT CHINA • • 18
III: THE FUNCTIONARIES OF SHAMANISM• • 45
IV: THE ARCHAIC TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY 61
V: THE CHARIOT AS A RITUAL VESSEL• • 87
VI: AUTHORSHIP AND DATING • • 101
VII: TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY • • 121
FIGURES • • • • • • • • 166
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • • 168
GLOSSARY • • • • • • • • 176
ii
LIST OF FIGURES
1 Reconstruction of a Shang horse chariot 166
2 Reconstruction of a horse wearing a frontlet 166
3 Bronze fitting used to decorate the chariot shaft 167
4 Bronze horse frontlet 167
PREFACE
This dissertation, as the title clearly indicates, is
a follow-up to Arthur Waley*s The Mine Songs; A Study of
Shamanism in Ancient China. His study of the Mine Songs in
the context of shamanism was an investigation in the right
direction, for the Nine Songs had been misunderstood in the
past two thousand years because the Confucian commentators
had imposed an allegorical interpretation on them. But as
a pioneer in this field, Waley was often hampered by the
lack of evidence to support his theory. It is strange to
observe that he complains that "for even the most meagre
description of a shamanistic seance we have to wait till
the fourth century A.D.," while what he is translating, the
Nine Songs, is a shamanistic seance on a grand scale.
There are at least five reasons for my reexamination
of shamanism in ancient China and translating the Mine
Songs anew. First, a great amount of material on shamanism
in ancient China is available in historical records and
other texts. But only a small portion of it has been
tapped by Waley. My familiarity with the classical Chinese
texts, the bronze and the oracle inscriptions enables me to
make a fuller use of it.
iv
Second, a new wealth of information on the Ch'u culture
has been unearthed by archaeologists in the past thirty
years. With this new information we shall be able to re
write the cultural history of Ch’u more accurately.
Third, in his introduction to the Mine Songs, Waley
deliberately avoided voicing his opinion on the authorship
of the Songs, for one of his students, David Hawkes, was
writing his Ph. D. thesis, "The Problem of Date and Author
ship of Ch!u Tz'u," at that time, HawkesT discussion on
this problem, unfortunately, turns out to be quite careless
and illogical. He asserts, for example, that the author of
the Nine Songs was a Ch'u poet writing not long after Ch'fl.
Yiian and familiar with his work. My research shows that
these poems were probably written before the sixth century
B.C., at least two hundred years before Ch'tl Man's time.
Fourth, not unlike the authorized version of The Song
of Songs, the Nine Songs are sometimes difficult to under
stand because the speakers are not identified in the origi
nal text. David Hawkes confesses that "most of the diffi
culties of translation arise from the fact that at any given
point in a poem we do not know for sure who was singing and
what he was doing while he sang." The difficulties are
partly caused by the confusion of the sex of the gods. Both
Waley and Hawkes, for example, follow the traditional com
mentaries and make Hsiang Chtin female. But I believe Hsiang
v
Chtln is male and Hsiang Fu-jen his divine consort. These
two songs, Hsiang Chiin and Hsiang Fu-jen, are a celebration
of their divine union. Another reason for the difficulties
lies in the incomplete knowledge of how and by whom is the
ritual performed on the part of some Ch'u Tz'u scholars.
Most of the songs have two speakers, and occasionally,
a third voice, the chorus. One of the speakers is an im
personator. He is there to be possessed by the god; and
when the god does descend to take possession of him, he and
the god are one. The other speaker is a female invoker, whc
exercises all her charms to win the favor of the god.
The invoker functions as a sort of master of ceremony.
She is often the principal speaker of the song. When the
god does come down and speaks through his mouthpiece of the
impersonator, the invoker will invariably implore him to
stay. Unfortunately the god is so busy that he can stay
for only so short of a time that Waley describes this
ephemeral love relationship between the god and the invoker
as a "manitc honey-moon."
Fifth, the most important contribution I will make to
the study of Ch'u Tz'u is probably my discovery of the granc.
chariot which is used in all grand-scale shamanic seances.
In the words of Kwang-chih Chang, an outstanding Chinese
archaeologist, "both chariot and horses were richly deco
rated with bronze and turquoise ornaments, and the chariot
vi
body was perhaps painted with animal designs." As the
ornaments are usually in the shape of horned dragons or
hornless ones, a chariot in Chfu Tz'u is often figuratively
referred to as a dragon or dragons. This is the use of
synecdoche, a figure of speech commonly employed in classi
cal Chinese poetry. Unfortunately this particular figura
tive use of dragon has gone unnoticed and has been taken
simply on its face value in the past two thousand years.
Mircea Eliade points out that it is probable that "the
pre-ecstatic euphoria constituted one of the universal
sources of lyric poetry." This is especially true in the
case of the Nine Songs. The pattern of a Song style line,
"turn turn turn hsi turn turn," is divided by the carrier sound
hsi, which Waley suggests "may represent the panting of a
shaman in trance." All the poems in the anthology, with the
exception of T1ien Wen, have a meaningless carrier sound
either in the middle of the line or at the end of the line.
In most cases the carrier sound is a hsi; while in the
Summons of the Soul it is a so and in the Great Summons a
chih. But they all amount to the same thing, the panting of
a shaman in trance. The anthology, therefore, is a collec
tion of shaman songs and poems written in imitation of the
shaman songs.
Ch'u Tz'u has a far-reaching influence on Chinese lyric
ipoetry. While the Song style poem is unmistakably the
vii
ancestor of the regular pentasyllable poem, a favorite me
dium used by Chinese poets throughout the ages, the Sao
style was first developed into the rhymed prose, fu, of the
Han dynasty, and later the heptasyllabic poem of the T'ang.
Dr. Hu Shih was a major advocate of the vernacular literary
movement in modern China. But when he translated Byron's
"The Isles of Greece" into Chinese, he used the Sao style
line as his medium. This is certainly a testimonial to the
power of the Ch'u shaman song.
viii
CHAPTER I
A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF CH’U
The traditional assumption that the Ch'u culture came
to a sudden flowering in the 4-th and 3rd centuries B.C. and
that the Ch’u people were barbarians or semi-barbarians is
1
far from being true. With the recent discoveries of ar
chaeologists and historians of ancient China, we are, now in
a position to revise this erroneous traditional assumption.
As far as recorded history, or to be more exact, re
corded legend, goes, the Ch'u people were an ancient clan
who coexisted with the Hsia and the Shang people. Because
jit was an ancient clan, its descendants were numerous.
They were constantly attacked by their strong neighbors,
first the Hsia, then the Shang, and finally the Chou peo
ple. Fu Ssu-nien points out that among the ancestors of
Ch'u there was one by the name of Li. When the Li clan was
conquered, its people became subjects or servants of the
conqueror. The fact that during the Warring States Period
(4-53-221 B.C.) the common people or subjects were often
referred to as li-min i ^0$ ) is an indication of the
2
■numerousness of the Li people.
Two pieces of the oracle records indicate that the
Ch'u people were quite active during the Shang dynasty.
1
One of them reads: "On the day of Wu-hstt divination [by the
King]. Question: Will our attacking Mi be sanctioned (no.
3
338)?" About this inscription Tung Tso-ping has the fol
lowing comments:
Mi ( jf- ) written as ^ in the oracle in
scription, is the name of a state in Shang times.
"The Royal House of Ch'u," the Historical Records
(Shih chi) states: "Lu-tsung begot six sons. The
first was called Kuen-wu, the second, Tsan-hu,
the third, P'eng-tsu, the fourth, Hui-jen, the
fifth, Tsao-hsing, the sixth, Chi-lien. Chi-
lien’s surname was Mi. The Ch'u people were his
descendants." And continues: "The clan of Kuen-
wu was a baron in the Hsia dynasty... The clan of
P’eng-tsu was a baron in the Shang dynasty...
Chi-lien begot Fu-chfl, Fu-chii begot Hsileh-hsiung.
The descendants of Hsileh-hsiung began to decline.
Some of them stayed in China proper, the others
became frontier barbarians. It is impossible to
record their generations." Since the descendants
of Kuen-wu and P'eng-tsu were barons in the Hsia
and Shang dynasties, Mi must have come into exis
tence before the Hsia dynasty, and it was not
surprising to find the state of Mi in the Shang
dynasty. But since it was not recorded by the
histories, we cannot verify it.4-
The conclusion that Tung Tso-ping draws from this ora
cle inscription and the Shih chi is a far-reaching one. Fu
Ssu-nien was inspired by Tung and did a very thorough re
search on the ancestors of the Ch'u people. He was able to
establish that Ch'u was an ancient and populous people.
They occupied many places in the Yellow river and Huai
river basins. All Three Dynasties, Hsia, Shang, and Chou,
2
had attacked them and they became either small satellite
5
states in China proper or frontier barbarian tribes. But
the relationship between Shang and Ch'u was not always
hostile.' Among the oracle inscriptions, we find the record
of a lady by the name of Lady Ch'u (Menzes, 2364 and Yi,
3086). Lady Ch'u, according to Wang YiL-tse, was one of the
consorts of the Shang king Wu Ting (reigned c. 1339-1281
6
B.C.). From this we learn that Shang and Ch'u sometimes
made war, and sometimes made peace through marriage.
But by the time of the Chou dynasty, the Ch'u people
were pushed to the south. One of its branches, called
Ching-ch'u, which occupied the Yangtze and the Han river
basins, became quite strong in the Western Chou, and several
expeditions were sent against them by the Chou kings. This
fact indicates that the royal house of Chou had never had a
firm control over the Ch'u people.
Two early Chou bronze inscriptions indicate that the
subjugation of the Ch'u people took years. The inscription
on Ch'in Tuei reads: "The King planned to attack the Baron
of Ch'u. Duke Chou counseled Invoker Ch'in. Ch'in presided
over a grand ceremony. The King rewarded him with one
hundred units of bronze. Ch'in used them to make this
7
precious vessel."
The King was King Wu (reigned 1111-1105 B.C.). Ch'in
was the eldest son of Duke Chou, so he was also called Po
3
Ch’in, or Ch’in, the first born. His formal name was Ming.
His official title was Grand Invoker, one of the six most
important posts in the Shang goverment system. He was later
enfeoffed as the Duke of Lu. It was customary to hold a
grand sacrifice to Heaven or the God of Soil before a mili
tary expedition. The event described in this bronze in
scription took place shortly after the conquest of Shang and
before the ascension of King Ch’eng (reigned 1104-1068 B.C.)
to his throne, for the subjugation of Ch'u was not completed
until King Ch'eng's reign.
The next inscription is that of Ming-kung Tuei. This
bronze vessel was also made by Ch'in. It reads: "The King
ordered the Duke of Ming to lead three clans in a campaign
against the eastern countries. At the city of Mi ( $g ) the
Baron of Lu won great merit and therefore made this vessel
8
to make sacrifice to Heaven." The inscription indicates
that the campaign was successfully concluded. But now in
this very short space Ch'in was addressed once as the Duke
of Ming, and another time as the Baron of Lu. This Jamesian!
style seems to be the forerunner of the narrative style of
the Tso Commentary.
During the reign of King Chao (reigned 1041-1024 B.C.)
of Chou the King himself led two expeditions against Ch'u.
The first expedition was completed in 1027 B.C. So far we
have found three bronzes cast to commemorate this victory.
4
They are Ting Tuei, I-p'ien Tuei, and Kuo-po Tuei. All the
inscriptions on them are very brief. They are as follows.
(1) Ting Tuei: "Ting followed the King to attack Ching, got
booty to make this sacrificial vessel." (2) I-p’ien Tuei:
"I-p’ien followed the King in the Southern Expedition to
attack Ch’u-ching, had gained booty to make this vessel in
honor of his father Wu. Signed . (3) Kuo-po Tuei: "Kuo-
jpo followed the King to attack the rebellious Ching, got
9
bronze to make this vessel for use in the temple." These
inscriptions betray the real motive of the Chou people,
which is to acquire the precious metal,' the bronze of the
south (nan ching) from Ch’u.
King Chao's victory was sweet but short. Three years
later, in 1024 B.C., when he was on his second expedition
against Ch'u, he was drowned in the Han River. The Bamboo
Annals writes, "In the nineteenth year of his reign, heaven
was in great commotion, pheasants and hares were frightened,
10
the King lost his six hosts by the Han River." Another
tradition says that when the King reached the Han River, the
boat people disliked him and gave him a glued boat. When
the boat got to the midstream, the glue was dissolved and
11
the boat fell apart and the King was drowned. Did the
Ch'u people defeat the great army of the Son of Heaven and
kill him? We do not know. But if they did, it would be
quite embarrassing for the grand scribe to put down the
truth. The practice of cover-up (wei |t£ ), or to keep the
skeleton in the closet, did not begin with the Annals of
{spring and Autumn of Confucius. This might be one of the
precedents that Confucius followed.
King Chao’s untimely death in his second expedition
against Ch'u is confirmed by two very reliable sources. One
of them is the following two lines in Tien wen: "King Chao
was fond of travelling; where did he reach in the southern
land? /What did it profit him to have met the white phea-
12
sant?" David Hawkes correctly observes that the Ch'u poet
13
asks these questions in an ironical tone. The other
source is the Tso Commentary. In the fourth year of Duke
Hsi (656 B.C.) Duke Huan (reigned 685-643 B.C.) of Ch'i led
the joint forces of several states to invade Ch'u. One of
the excuses for his invasion was to demand an explanation
for why King Chao did not return from the southern expedi
tion. The messenger of Ch'u replied, "For the non-returning
of King Chao, you go and inquire by the water margin."
After King Chao, King Mu (reigned 1023-983 B.C.) also
engaged in attacking Ch'u. King Mu is the hero of the first
Chinese historical romance, Mu t' ien-tzu chuan ( ).
The accounts of his expedition are at great variance and
supernatural in nature. Here are three examples: (1) King
Mu of Chou in the thirty-seventh year of his reign attacked
Ch'u. He sent nine hosts to Chiu-chiang and built a bridge
6
with turtles; (2) In the seventeenth year of King Mu the
great host reached Chiu-chiang with turtles as a bridge; and
(3) [The King] attacked Ch'u in the forty-seventh year. He
sent nine hosts east to Chiu-chiang and built a bridge with
U
turtles. As these are not reliable historical sources,
we will pass them over without further comments.
Historians of the Western Chou generally agree that
the dynasty began its decline with King Chao, and that among
the last Western Chou kings, King Hstlan (reigned 827-781
B.C.) was an exception. He was the only king who was able
to wage many campaigns against the barbarian tribes with
varying success. One of his successful campaigns was com
memorated by poem 178, "Ts'ai ch'i," of the Book of Songs;
Lo, we were plucking the white millet
In that new field,
In this fresh-cleared acre,
When Fang-shu arrived
With three thousand chariots
And a host of guards well-trained.
Yes, Fang-shu came
Driving his four dappled greys,
Those dappled greys so obedient,
In his big chariot painted red,
With his awning of lacquered bamboo and his
fish-skin quiver,
His breast-buffers and metal-headed reins.
Lo, we were plucking the white millet
In that new field,
In this middle patch,
When Fang-shu arrived
With three thousand chariots,
With banners shining bright.
7
Yes, Fang-shu came
With leather-bound nave and metal-studded yoke,
His eight bells jingling,
Wearing his insignia—
The red greaves so splendid
The tinkling onion-stones at his belt.
Swoop flew the hawk
Straight up into the sky,
Yet it came here to roost.
Fang-shu has come
With three thousand chariots
And a host of guards well-trained.
Yes, Fang-shu has come
With his bandsmen beating the drums,
Marshalling his armies, haranguing his hosts.
Illustrious truly is Fang-shu,
Deep in the roll of the drums,
Shaking the hosts with its din.
Foolish were you, tribes of Ching,
Who made a great nation into your foe.
Fang-shu is old in years,
But in strategy he is at his prime.
Fang-shu has come,
He has bound culprits, captured chieftains.
His war-chariots rumble,
They rumble and crash
Like the clap of thunder, like the roll of
thunder.
Illustrious truly is Fang-shu,
It was he who smote the Hsien-yiln,
Who made the tribes of Ching afraid.15
For a better understanding of the above poem, it should be
pointed out that the chariot (With leather-bound nave and
netal-studded yoke, /His eight bells jingling) Fang-shu
rides is not a war chariot. It is the jade chariot that the
I
Chou people used for sacrifice as we shall see in the fifth
chapter , "The Chariot as a Ritual Vessel." The ornaments,
the insignia, the red greaves, and the onion-stones that
(Fang-shu wears are also for the ceremony, not for the war.
It was customary to make a sacrifice before the hosts
marched out on the expedition. Commentators all agree that
the theme of this poem is King Hsilan’s southern expedition
against Ch’u, which is derogatorily referred to as the
tribes of Ching. But a careful study of this poem makes me
feel that it was written before the campaign to boost up the
morale of the hosts rather than after it to celebrate their
triumphant return. It is obvious that Fang-shu cannot con
duct two campaigns at the same time, the Hsien-yiln being to
the north-west of the royal domain of Chou while the tribes
of Ching to her south-east. The last two lines of the poem
seem to mean that it was Fang-shu who smote the the Hsien-
yiln and hopefully with the momentum of that victory he
would make the tribes of Ching afraid.
But the tribes of Ching were foolish indeed! They made
a great nation into their foe but they went scot-free. From
Lnother source we learn that King Hsiian lost his hosts in
the southern land and he had to make a census at T’ai-yilan
despite the remonstrance of his minister Chung-shan Fu, for
•he was badly in need of more soldiers to make up for the
I ^ ^
lloss. In other words, King Hsiian fared just a little
better than King Chao, for he did manage to return from the
southern expedition against Ch’u.
I have presented hitherto a few pieces of evidence to
9
show that the Ch'u people were, from a military standpoint,
a powerful state throughout the whole Western Chou period,
otherwise there would be no need for the various Chou kings
to send expeditions against them. I shall next endeavor to
show that the Ch'u people, at least their ruling class, once
lived in the Yellow River basin and were in every aspect
Chinese, not barbarians.
According to the Tso Commentary, in 660 B.C., the
people of Wei were almost completely wiped out by the Ti
tribes. The remnants, seven hundred and thirty persons in
all, were forced to abandon their capital, Chao-ko (Chi
Hsien, Honan), north of the Yellow River and managed to
cross the Yellow River under the cover of the night and
17
encamped at Tsao. Two years later, Duke Wen (reigned 659-
35 B.C.) of Wei, helped by his maternal uncle, Duke Huan
(reigned 685-4-3 B.C.) of Ch'i, began to build a city at
Ch'u-chiu ( ^Ft ) or the Mound of Ch'u. The building of
this city was commemorated by poem 50, "Ting chi fang chung"
(When the Ting star is at the zenith) of the Book of Songs
as follows:
When the Ting star is at the zenith,
We begin to build the temple at Ch'u.
Measuring it by the shadows under the sun,
We begin to build the chambers at Ch'u.
We plant hazels and chestnut-tress;
And catalpas, powlawnias, and lacquer trees
That we may make zithers and lutes.
10
We climb up the ancient ruins
To take a look at Ch'u.
Looking at Ch’u and the roofed altar,
We find a tall hill and a fine mound.
We descend to inspect the mulberry grove.
The oracle of the tortoise-shell is auspicious
Everything will turn out to be good.
The divine rain has stopped.
We order our grooms to yoke,
By starlight, the horses to the chariots,
And drive to the mulberry field.
Are they not men indeed?
Their hearts are staunch and true.
They have given us three thousand mares.18
Ch’u-chiu, according to Gh'tt Wan-li, is at the present-day
Gheng-wu Hsien, Shangtung Province, south of the Yellow
River. In translating this poem, Arthur Waley confesses
that he does not fully understand two of the expressions.
0ne is t'ang, which I translate as ’roofed altar,' and the
19
other is ching shan, which I translate as 'tall hill.’ I
believe the following passage from Mo Tzu can be very illu
minating to the understanding of this short poem:
In ancient times, on the day when the rulers of
Yil, Hsia, Shang, and Chou, the sage kings of the
Three Dynasties, first established their states
and set up their capitals, they always selected a
site for the main altar of the state, and con
structed an ancestral temple there. They would
select a site where the trees were particularly
fine and luxuriant, and there in the grove set up
the altar of the soil.20
When we study the second stanza of the poem carefully,
11
we notice that everything is almost custom made for the Wei
people. There is a tall hill at Ch'u on which to build the
temple, with a mound on which to build a roofed altar. And
below the ruins there is a mulberry grove, in which the Wei
people could set up the altar of the soil. They used it
immediately to make divination on the tortoise shell. All
these indicate that Ch'u-chiu was once the capital of the
Ch'u people. Just like the Wei people who abandoned Chao-
co, once in the remote past the Ch'u people were forced to
abandon Ch'u-chiu and migrated to the south.
Since the Ch'u people had once lived by the Yellow
River, it is only natural that they would worship the River
God by including him in the Nine Songs♦ We learn from
modern history that when people migrate, they carry their
jbelief with them. This can explain why the worship of the
River God is not an imported cult late in the Warring States
iperiod, but a long tradition maintained by the Ch'u people.
In the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 B.C.) the Ch’u
people became more powerful and annexed many small states of
the Chi clan (the Chou people). In the war of expansion the
Ch'u people often came within the domain of the River God
and had dealings with him. The Tso Commentary records three
such incidents.
First, in 632 B.C. (Duke Hsi, 28th year), on the eve of
the battle of Ch'eng-p'u between Chin and Ch'u, Tzu-yil, the
12
Prime Minister of Ch'u, who had a very smart riding hood
made with strings of threaded jade to be worn on the day of
the battle, dreamt that the River God came and said to him,
"Give me this, and I will bestow on you the swamps of Meng-
ch'u," meaning that he would aid him to conquer that area in
Honan. But Tzu-yii ignored the demand of the River God and
consequently the army of Ch'u suffered a great defeat.
The second incident took place in 597 B.C. (Duke Hsttan,
12th year) during the reign of King Chuang (613-591 B.C.) of
Ch'u. This was the battle of Chin and Ch'u at Pi (a battle
ground south of the Yellow River). The table was turned and
many Chin soldiers were slaughtered. P'an Tang, a Ch'u
general, suggested to King Chuang to collect the corpses of
the Chin soldiers to make a war memorial to celebrate the
victory. King Chuang declined and gave him a very learned
lecture on the true meaning of military virtues. The king
made sacrifice to the River God, built a temple for his
ancestors to report his accomplishment and returned.
Third, in the seventh month of the last year of his
reign, King Chao (reigned 515-4-89 B.C.) of Ch'u went to save
Ch'en (a small state in Honan, west of Meng-ch'u), for Ch'en
was attacked by Wu. He stationed his troops at Ch'en-fu.
In the eleventh month King Chao became sick. In that year,
there was a cloud like a flock of red birds which flew
around the sun for three days. The King dispatched a mes-
13
senger to consult with the Grand Scribe of Ghou. The Grand
Scribe said, “The omen bodes ill for the king. If he makes
a propitiation, his sickness may be transfered to the prime
minister or the minister of war." The king said, "What good
will it do to me to transfer the sickness from my heart to
my legs and arms (referring to his prime minister and the
minister of war)? I have not committed any serious crime,
would Heaven send me an unnatural death? If I were guilty
and must be punished, there is no need to transfer it." And
ihe did not make a propitiation. When he became sick, he
also made a divination. The diviner said that the king was
possessed by the River God. The ministers urged the king to
include the River God in his suburban sacrifice. The king
said, "According to the rites of the Three Dynasties, one
should not make sacrifices beyond one’s own territory. The
Yangtze, the Han, the Chuei, and the Chang are the rivers of
Ch'u. They alone can affect our fortunes. Even though I am'
not virtuous, I have never offended the River God." And he
did not make sacrifice to the River God. Confucius was at
Ch'en at that time. When he was informed of what King Chao
21
had done, he praised him for knowing the great tao.
In short, the Ch'u people had a long history. They
coexisted with the Hsia, the Shang, and the Chou. Once they
occupied many places in the Yellow river and Huai river
basins. At the rise of the Chou dynasty, they were pushed
14
to the south. One of its branches, Ching-Ch’u, became so
strong that it posed as a thread to the royal house of the
Chou. Because the Ch'u had a distinct culture different
from that of the Chou, some scholars assume that they were
barbarians, meaning that they were non-Chinese. But this
^difference is due to the different heritages from the Shang.
The religion of the Shang consisted of ancestor worship and
the cult of nature gods. While the Chou inherited ancestor
worship from the Shang, the Ch'u inherited the cult of
nature gods. This will be the subject of our discussion in
the next chapter, 1 1 Shamanism in Ancient China.”
15
NOTES
1 Henri Maspero, for example, holds that as a man of
Ch’u, Ch'ti Ytlan was a barbarian. See his China in
Antiquity, trans., Frank A. Kierman Jr., p. 367.
2 Fu SSu-nien, "Hsin huo p ’u tz'u hsieh pen hou chi pa,”
Fu Ssu-nien ch1 flan chi, vol. Ill, p. 265.
3 Ibid.. p. 224.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 226.
6 Wang Yii-tse, "Gh'u tsu ku ti chi chi chien i lu hsien,”
Chung-kou shang-ku shih lun-wen hsflan-chi, p. 626.
7 Chao Ying-shan, Ku ching-tung chi ming-wen yen-chiu (A
Study on Ancient Bronze Inscriptions) , pp. 25-33.
8 Ibid.. pp. 71-78.
♦
9 Ibid.. pp. 148-62.
10 Hsu Cho-yun, Hsi Chou shih (A History of the Western
Chou), pp. 179-80.
11 Ltl Ssu-mien, Hsien Ch’in shih (A History of the Pre-
Ch1 in China), p. 141*
12 The white pheasant is equivalent to a pink elephant, a
rare creature considered a good omen. David Hawkes
follows Wen I-to and emends the word ’pheasant' to
’ox.’ See T'ai Ching-nung, Gh'u Tz'u t'ien wen hsin
chien, p. 94 and cf. David Hawkes, the Songs of the
South, pp. 53i 190.
13 Hawkes, p.53.
14 Wang Yil-tse, p. 632.
15 Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, pp. 128-29.
16 Hsu Cho-yun, Hsi Chou shih, pp. 300-301.
17 Tso Chuan, Duke Min, 2nd year.
16
18 This poem is my own translation. For the Chinese text,
see Ch’- f t Wan-li, Shih Ching chuan shih. pp. 90.
19 Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, pp. 281-82.
20 Burton Watson, trans., The Basic Writings of Mo Tzu,
pp. 100-101.
21 Tso Chuan, Duke Ai, 6th year.
CHAPTER II
SHAMANISM IN ANCIENT CHINA
The original territory of the Shang people, according
to Fu Ssu-nien was in Manchuria and the ancient Yan Pro-
1
vince, the north-eastern part of China. In a hymn to their
ancestors composed by the descendants of Shang, we find the
following two lines: "Hsiang-t'u was very glorious; /Beyond
2
the seas he ruled." Hsiang-t'u was the grandson of Hsieh
and one of the pre-dynastic Shang kings. If he indeed ruled
beyond the seas, the most likely place would be Korea, for
it was the closest place to his own territory. At the fall
of the Shang dynasty (1750-1112 B.C.), Chi Tzu, uncle of
the last Shang king Chou (reigned 1174-1112 B.C.), after
being released by King Wu (reigned 1111-1105 B.C.) from
Chou’s prison, led the remnants of the Shang people to
Korea. Fu points out that what Chi Tzu did was not to
establish a new colony, but to return to the native place of
his former kings, just like at the fall of the Yiian dynasty
(1260-1368 A.D.) some of the Mongolians returned from China
3
to Mongolia.
Fu also points out that the origin myths of the Shang,
the Manchus, and the Koreans are similar. The Shang were
descended from a lady called Chien Ti, who swallowed an egg
18
dropped by a ’dark bird1 (swallow). In the origin myth of
the Manchus, it was a magpie that dropped a red fruit. The
Koreans have several versions of their origin story. But
they all have one thing in common: the legendary king was
born out of a huge egg, which was exposed to many dangers
without receiving a single injury.
In my research I have found two striking similarities
between Korean shamanism and Chinese shamanism. First, one
of the non-datable Shang kings was called Ta Wu ( ),
which, according to Ch’en Meng-chia, simply means ’great
shaman’( )• In the ’ ’Mountain God" of the Nine Songs we
notice that the shaman who plays the role of the impersona
tor is addressed as ling-hsiu (spirit-guardian) and this
very form of address is used by Ch’il Ytlan in his Li sao to
address his sovereign, King Huai (reigned 328.-299 B.C.) of
I ^
Ch'u. In the same way, Namhae, the second ruler of Silla
(one of the three ancient Korean kingdoms) was called Cha-
cha-ung ( ) or Ja-chung (^3fe ), which is the Silla
7
dialect for 'shaman.' These three cases show that in
ancient -China and Korea the ...king was ^s.om.etimes„„.th.e.. hep.d
Second, Lee Nung-hwa, a Korean scholar of ancient Ko
rean shamanism, gives us a brief but vivid description of a
4
5
shaman
shamani
19
In a common household when sacrifice was made,
although there were many female shamans, it was
invariably the male shaman who presided over the
ceremony. The master of the sacrifice and all
participants welcomed him with reverence. From
evening till dawn they sang and danced to enter
tain the gods. As men and women were mixed, they
exchanged sexy talk and made lewd gestures; noth
ing was beyond them. They made the audience
happy by making them laugh heartily.8
This Korean seance, though crude and vulgar, has a few
parallels with the seance described by the Nine Songs. To
begin with, in "the Lord of the East," we find that there
are a number of female shamans who perform the dance, but
there is only one shaman who impersonates the sun god, the
Lord of the East. In the second place, the seance depicted
by "the Lord of the East" also lasts the whole night, for
when the sun god is about to leave, the day has already
dawned. In the third place, the male and female shamans in
the Nine Songs also sing and dance to entertain the gods.
And finally, in songs such as "the Lady of the Hsiang," "the
Senior Lord of Lives," and "the Mountain God," sex between
the impersonator (the shaman) and the invoker (the female
shaman) is implied, which is actually not too far removed
from the sexy talk and lewd gestures of the Korean shamans.
From the preceding paragraphs we may conclude that the
shamanisms of Ch'u, of Korea, and of the Manchus are prob
ably of the same origin— the shamanism of Shang.
20
Xks, religion j>f Shang can be divided into two distinct
parts. One of them was the cult of the nature gods, and the
other was the worship of ancestors^, Tlje nature gods can be
further divided into two groups. One group were the heaven
ly gods,_which included God on High, the God of the Sun, the
Mother of the East, the Mother of the West, the God of the
Cloud, the God of the Wind (or the Phoenix), the God of
Rain, and the God of Snow. The ojther group were the terres
trial gods, which included the God of the Soil, the Gods of
the Four Directions, the deified shamans, the gods of the
9
mountains, and the gods of the rivers. The nature gods
formed a heavenly court with God on High as the absolute
ruler just as the court established by the Shang king and
his ministers on the earth.
Side by side with this cult of the nature gods went a
highly organized and cyclical ritual performed to the royal
ancestors, ancestresses, and former ministers. The ritual
was based on the celebration of five sacrifices in turn:
-iung ( ^ ) , i ( Jg ), chi ( ^ ), tsa ( |g) , and hsieh ( % ) ;
the repetition of these made up a regular cycle. A complete
10
cycle was called one shih ), or a year.
Ancestor worship was central to the Shang religion.
The reason for its importance is very convincingly explained
by/iDavid N. Keightleyin the following passage:
21
Shang religion was inextricably involved in
the genesis and legitimation of the Shang state.
It was believed that Ti, the high god, conferred
fruitful harvests and divine assistance in battle,
that the king's ancestors were able to intercede
with Ti, and that the king could communicate with
his ancestors. Worship of the Shang ancestors,
therefore, provided powerful psychological and
ideological support for the political dominance of
the Shang kings. /The king's ability to determine
through divination, and influence through prayer
and sacrifice, the will of the ancestral spirits
legitimized the concentration of political power
in his person. All power emanated from the theo-
crat because he was the channel, "the one man,"
who could appeal for the ancestral blessings, or
dissipate the ancestral curses, which affected the
commonality. It was the king who made fruitful
harvest and victories possible by the sacrifices
he offered, the rituals he performed, and the
divinations he made. If, as seems likely, the
divinations involved some degree of magic making,
of spell casting, the king's ability to actually
create a good harvest or a victory by divining
about it rendered him still more potent political
ly . 1 1
From the oracle records we learn that the Shang king often
made divinations, invocations, rain dance, and interpreta-
| 12
bions of his own dreams in person. When divination was
performed, according to the Li Chi (Book of Rites). "the
iiviner fixed the tortoise-shell to be used, the scribe ap
plied the ink, and the king determined the cracks produced
13
by the fire." The Shang king was doubtless the head
shaman.
The ancient Chinese used the shoulder blades of cattle
and the carapaces of turtles for divinations. But why did
they use them? A possible reason is that the shaman be
22
lieved that these animals were his helpers. As to the
turtle, there seems to have been a belief that the turtle,
especially the large ones, had the power of prophecy. This
can be inferred from a fable by Chuang Tzu:
Lord Yilan of Sung one night dreamed he saw a
man with disheveled hair who peered in at the side
door of his chamber and said, "I come from the
Tsai-lu Deeps. I was on my way as envoy from the
Clear Yangtze to the court of the Lord of the
Yellow River when a fisherman name Yii Chii caught
me!"
When Lord Yflan woke up, he ordered his men to
divine the meaning, and they replied, "This is a
sacred turtle." "Is there a fisherman named Yii
Chil?" he asked, and his attendants replied, "There
is." "Order Yii Chii to come to court!" he said.
The next day Yii Chil appeared at court and the
ruler said, "What kind of fish have you caught
recently?"
Yii Chii replied, "I caught a white turtle in
my net. It's five feet around."
"Present your turtle!" ordered the ruler.
When the turtle was brought, the ruler could not
decide whether to kill it or to let it live and,
being in doubt, he consulted his diviners, who
replied, "Kill the turtle and divine with it— it
will bring good luck." Accordingly the turtle was
stripped of its shell, and of seventy-two holes
drilled in it for prognostication, not one failed
to yield a true answer. 14-
In another fable Chuang Tzu mentions that there is a sacred
tortoise in Ch'u that has been dead for three thousand
years. The king keeps it under lock and key, and stores it
I 15
in the ancestral temple. Of course these are fables, but
nontheless they do reflect that both Sung and Ch'u, who had
close relationship with Shang, kept the practice of divina
23
tion with the turtle shell very much alive at that time.
Generally speaking the heritage of Shang to the Chou
people was ancestor worship, while her heritage to the Ch’u
people was the cult of nature gods.
Now let us turn to the shamanism of the royal house of
Chou. Much information on this can be found in Part Three,
"Ch'un kuan" (Officials of Spring) of the Chou Li (Rites of
Chou). Very different from the simple threefold division of
the Ch’u religious system we shall see in the next chapter,
the Chou system was highly departmentalized. Under the
leadership of the Lord of the Temple (ta. tsung yo), there
were sixty-nine officials. All of them in one way or
another had something to do with the rites. Among these
3ixty-nine officals were the Director of Shamans (ssu wu),
the Male Shaman (nan wu), and the Female Shaman (nil wu). As
the functions of these three officials can serve as a defi
nition of the Chou shaman, I will translate their job des
criptions in their entirety:
The Director of Shamans is to administer all
shamans. If a great drought occurs, he leads the
shamans to perform the rain dance. If a great
calamity occurs, he leads the shamans to consult
Shaman Huan (a deified shaman). At sacrifices he
provides the soul-tablets for the altar, the drug
gets for the roads, and the straw mats for the
lodges. At a sacrifice he sees to it that all
offerings are buried. AIl a funeral he takes
...charge o f s o i T l i r o - f Lthe
dead.
24
The Male Shaman is to take charge of the
sacrifice to the Four Directions, to watch the
atmosphere for good or bad omens, to pass the
invocation to the invoker, and to ward off evil
spirits by waving a rush wand. In winter he
ejects evil spirits from the hall by dancing the
wan dance and the jade dance. In spring he in
vites felicity to avert diseases. When the king
pays a visit of condolence he and the invoker walls
before him.
The Female Shaman is to perform exorcism at
fixed times annually, using aromatic ablutions.
In times of drought she performs the rain dance.
When the king's consort pays a visit of condo
lence, she and the female invoker walk before her.
When a great calamity of the state occurs, she en
treats the spirits with chanting and wailing.16
While these job descriptions show that the functions of'
the Chou shaman were practically the same as those of the
Ch'u shaman, the Chou shaman held very lowly position in the
court. We learn from the Rites of Chou that the highest
ranking court official was called ching (pgp ) or cabinet
minister. Next to ching was tai-fu ( ^5^ ) or minister,
which was subdivided into three ranks, i.e., shang tai-fu 01
minister of the first rank, chung tai-fu or minister of the
second rank, and hsia tai-fu or minister of the third rank.
Beneath tai-fu was shih (jt ) ov scholar, which was also
subdivided into three ranks. The head of the Officials of
Spring was called the Senior Lord of the Temple (ta tsung
po), and the position was filled by a cabinet minister.
Next to the Senior Lord of the Temple were two Junior Lords
of the Temple (hsiao tsung po). These two positions were
25
filled by two ministers of the second rank. There were two
t1ai chu (grand invokers). Their positions were filled by
two minister of the third rank. Then we are told that there
were an indefinite number of male shamans and female sha
mans; their masters were four scholars of the second rank,
with two storekeepers, four scribes, four assistants, and
17
forty apprentices. With four scholars of the second rank
Ls their masters, the shamans were obviously relegated to
the positions of petty officials. But we should take the
above information with a grain of salt, for we are told that
when the king pays a visit of condolence, the shaman and the
'invoker walk before him. It would have been illogical for
someone who could accompany the king to hold such a low
position.
The rites of Chou were said to be a continuation of
those of Shang with revisions. One of the most drastic
revisions must have been the promotion of the temple offi
cial to the exalted position of the Lord of the Temple and
the relegation of the shaman to the position of a petty
official. The main reason for this revision is that ances
tor worship became more important than the worship of the
nature gods to the Chou people, for even in the worship of
Heaven, the Chou king usually called upon his ancestors as
■intermidiaries to convey his request to Heaven. This prac
tice can be amply documented by the Shu Ching (Book of
26
Documents) and the Shih Ghing (Book of Songs).
In the following paragraphs I shall use carefully-
chosen examples to illustrate Ghou shamanism at work.
Duke Chou, a man both of counsel and action, was the
fourth of King Wen's ten sons. He assisted King Wu (reigned
1111-1105 B.C.), one of his brothers, in the conquest of
Shang. After King Wu's death, he acted as regent for seven
years for King Ch'eng (reigned 1104--1068 B.C.), who, at the
time of ascension, was only thirteen years old. He was
responsible for the legislation and consolidation of the
Chou dynasty, and much admired by Confucius. Many histo
rians consider him the greatest statesman of ancient China.
"The Bronze Casket" (Chin t1 eng) is one of the most
interesting documents in the Book of Documents. It contains
|a vivid description of how Duke Chou performed a sacrifice
to his ancestors— T'ai Wang, his great grandfather, Wang
jChi, his grandfather, and King Wen, his father— for the
dying king, his brother King Wu. In the invocation, the
jiuke asks the three ancestors to take him as a scapegoat for
King Wu. This reminds us of the popular legend of King
■T'ang, the founder of the Shang dynasty, who in the time of
a great drought was prepared to sacrifice himself to Heaven
in order to obtain rain for his people. When King T'ang was
about to set fire to burn himself, he was saved at the nick
of time because Heaven was moved by his great virtue and
27
compassion and sent down a great shower.18 Duke Chou, in
addition to pointing out the reasons why it would be better
for him to die in the king’s stead, uses the precious jade
disc and jade tablet as bargaining chips to coax his ances
tors to grant him his request. After the delivery of the
invocation, he performs divination with three tortoise
shells and prognosticates the cracks on them. Then he con
sults the book in the bronze casket, which must be a book of
divination, to confirm his prognostication. All these show
that Duke Chou was doubtless a head shaman.
So far as I know, ’ ’Chin t1 eng” has three English ver-
19
sions. The reason for my hesitating to use a readily
available translation and taking some pains to do a new one
is that none of them can be used without considerable emen
dation. Interested readers who make comparison between my
version and the three others will find that my interpreta
tion of the key word chiao (^5 ) at the end of the document
is very different from that of the others. I believe that
Duke Chou had died before the miracle, the flattened grain
being straightened up by a wind of the opposite direction,
took place. I translate the sentence, "Wang chu chiao," as
"The king went out to perform the suburban sacrifice," in
which the king will call upon (ni, or greet) the spirit of
Duke Chou in person. In doing so, I return to a very old
interpretation made by Ssu-ma Chien, who writes, "After the
28
ieath of Duke Chou, autumn, before harvest, there was a
=jreat thunder storm, all the grain was flattened, all large
20
trees were uprooted." But the traditional interpretation
of the sentence is "The king went out to the suburb to meet
21
the duke," implying that the duke was still alive. Here
is a complete translation of "the Bronze Casket:"
Two years after the conquest of Shang, King
Wu became ill and would not recover. The two
other dukes said, "Let us make a reverent divina
tion for our king." But Duke Chou said, "That
might not be enough to move our late kings."
Therefore the duke took the burden upon himself.
He had three altars constructed on the same
cleared ground. Then he had another altar con
structed to the south, facing north. Standing
there, having put down the jade disc and holding a
jade tablet, he addressed his ancestors, T'ai
Wang, Wang Chi, and King Wen. The scribe recorded
his invocation, which read, "Your great descen
dant, whose name I dare not utter, has suffered
from a severe and violent disease. You three
kings in Heaven are really responsible for your
distinguished son. Take me as a substitute for
his person. I am kind and obedient. I have many
talents and skills, and can serve the ghosts and
spirits. Your great descendant is not as talented
or skilled as I, nor can he serve the ghosts and
spirits. Furthermore, he was given a mandate by
God in his heavenly court to hold sway over the
four quarters so that he might firmly establish
your offsprings here on the earth below. There
are no people from the four quarters who do not
stand in awe of him. Oh! do not let that precious
mandate from Heaven fall. With him, our late
kings will always have a place to turn to. I
shall now consult the great tortoise. If you
grant my request, I shall offer the jade disc and
and the jade tablet to you. If you do not, I
shall put them away."
He divined with three tortoises, and they
were all auspicious. He then opened the lock and
consulted the book, and it was auspicious too.
29
The duke said, "The cracks show that the king will
suffer no harm, and that I, the small child, have
obtained a renewed mandate from the three kings to
prolong the life of our king. So let us wait,
hoping that they will take pity on me, the one
man.” The Duke returned and put the scribe's
record in the bronze casket. By the next day the
king recovered.
After the death of King Wu, the duke's older
brother, Kuan Shu, along with his younger broth
ers, spread rumors around the country that the
duke would do harm to the young King. Duke Chou
informed the other two dukes, saying, "Had I not
taken the sacred ceremony upon myself, I would not
have been able to report to our late kings." The
duke then lived in the east for two years and the
criminals were caught. Later he composed a poem,
"the Owl," and sent it to the king. The king did
not blame the duke at all.
In the autumn when a plentiful crop had rip
ened but had not yet been harvested, Heaven sent
down a wind accompanied by thunder and lightning.
The grain was completely flattened and even large
trees were uprooted, and the people of the land
were in great fear. The king and the ministers
all put on their ceremonial robes and went to open
the bronze casket for the book. Then they discov
ered the burden that Duke Chou had taken on him
self, how he had wished to substitute himself for
King Wu. The two other dukes and the king then
asked the scribe and all the officials whether
this had in fact happened. They replied, "Oh yes,
it is true. But the duke commanded us not to
mention it."
The king held the book and cried, saying, "We
do not need to make a reverent divination now.
Formerly the duke worked diligently for the royal
family, but I was only a child and did not realize
it. Now Heaven has shown its awesome power to
reveal the virtue of Duke Chou. I, the small
child, must call upon him in person, in accordance
with the ritual of our royal house."
The king then went out to make the suburban
sacrifice, and Heaven sent down rain and a wind
from the opposite direction, so that all the grain
stood up straight again. The two other dukes
ordered the people of the land to raise up and
bank all flattened trees. Then the year turned
out to be plentiful.22
30
My second example is poem 282, "Yung,” of the Book of
Songs. This poem will show that there are impersonators of
;he dead in the sacrifice:
All have come in harmony,
And entered the temple reverently.
The impersonator represents the deified ancestor.
The bearing of the Son of Heaven is stately.
We offer a large male animal;
We submit the whole carcass to the impersonator.
"Oh, descend, my august father,
And bless me, your pious son!
"You were brilliant and wise as a man,
And skilled in war and peace as a king.
Through you our sacrifice will reach August
Heaven,
And thereby you make your descendants prosperous.
Grant us long life,
And enrich us with ample blessings."
Having waited upon my glorious father,
I also wait upon my model mother,23
jThe Son of Heaven is King Wu. The deified ancestor is King
/Jen. According to poem 235, "Wen Wang," "King Wen ascends
24
and descends /On God’s left hand, on His right," King Wen
therefore is able to act as an intermediary between the Son
of Heaven and Heaven. In other words, the Son of Heaven
cannot call upon God on High directly for favors. This idea
is borrowed from the Shang. Lines 7-14 are an invocation
delivered by King Wu to his father. There are at least two
impersonators in this sacrifice. One impersonates King Wen
and the other T'ai Ssu, King Wu's mother, for at the end of
31
the poem we find them plied with food and drink. Only one
impersonator, however, is mentioned in the beginning of the
Ipoem, the model mother being of less importance.
My third example is poem 272, "Wo tsiang," of the Book
of Songs. This poem will illustrate how a late king is made
a correlate of God on High in the sacrifice:
We present our offerings,
Our sheep and our bulls.
May Heaven come to enjoy them.
Our ritual is patterned on King Wen's rules.
Daily we bring peace to the four quarters.
Great indeed is King Wen I
He has come to enjoy them.
Let us day and night
Fear Heaven's wrath
And thus be protected.25
The sacrificer of this ode is probably King Wu. The sacri
fice is made to Heaven and King Wen. Therefore there are
two impersonators. One of them impersonates Heaven, and the
other King Wen.
My next example is poem 209, "Ch'u ts'i," of the Book
of Songs. This poem is a detailed description of a sacri-
jfice made to the ancestors of the Chou people, which include
Hou Chi, King Wen, King Wu, and others. It is a very good
example of how the invoker and the impersonators cooperate
'in such a sacrifice. The tone of the poem is dignified.
The movement of the poem is slow and stately, the result of
32
an effective use of parallelism. It consists of six stanzas
with twelve lines in each stanza, a comparatively long poem
of this type.
The important message in the first stanza is that the
year is extraordinarily good and that is why the people make
wine and food as a thanksgiving to the ancestors. Line 9>
"_I t1 o i yu, " literally means "to set someone at ease and to
urge him to have food and drink." The impersonators are the
implied objects of these two verbs, for at the beginning of
L sacrifice, it is the invoker's responsibility to make the
impersonators feel at home and to assist them to take drink
-and food.
In the second stanza, the victims, the bulls and sheep,
are introduced. These are killed, cooked, spread out on the
meat stands, and presented to the impersonators to eat.
Meanwhile, the invoker seeks the spirits of the ancestors by
the temple gate, for they might be away from the temple
between the sacrifices. They are then escorted by the
invoker from the gate to the feast table. What we should
know in order to fully understand this stanza is that the
spirit-guardians are but another name for the impersonators,
Lnd that the sacrificer is called the pious grandson (hsiao
tun). To call the sacrificer the pious grandson is rather
unusual, for in the other poems, the sacrificer is invariab
ly called the descendant (tseng sun, or great grandson).
33
The only other exception is poem 282, ’ ’Yung," in which the
Lacrificer called himself 1!pious son," As "Yung" is a poem
in which King Wu makes a sacrifice to his father, King Wen,
*re may. infer that the sacrificer in the present poem is King
Ch'eng, the son of King Wu. But this is only speculation.
The third stanza is the climax of the ceremony. We are
bold by the Book of Rites that the sacrificer, his wife, the
invoker, and some of the guests of honor all take turns
making pledges to the impersonators, and the impersonators
themselves also toast one another. The total number of
rounds that the impersonator has to drink is nine. Hence
the line "Healths and toasts go crisscross" is quite des
criptive of the scene. The following passage from the Book
of Rites may fill in what is left unsaid by the poem.
The impersonators of the Chou dynasty are
seated. Communicating through the invoker, they
are plied with food, drink, and the wan dance used
in the sacrifice to the Four Directions. The
rituals of the Chou are similar to those of the
Yin, because their ways are the same. The imper
sonators of the Hsia remain standing till the end
of the sacrifice. The impersonators of the Yin
are seated. The six impersonators of the Chou
make toasts to one another. Tseng Tzu (505-4-36
B.C.) remarked, "The rituals of the Chou are simi
lar to a Dutch treat drinking party, aren’t
they?"26
The wine used in such a sacrifice is probably the yil-fla-
vored wine made from black millet. It was the best wine
34
from the Ghou royal cellar.
Stanza four is the message which the invoker conveys
from the impersonators to the sacrificer, the pious grand
son. The message is usually a string of well-turned good
wishes which the invoker has polished over a lifetime. When
the message is conveyed, the sacrifice comes to an end.
The function of the invoker as the master of ceremony
is especially obvious in the fifth stanza. He gives a
succession of orders which are promptly carried out. First
he announces that the spirits are drunk and asks the imper
sonators to rise. Next he orders the band of bells and
drums to play music to retire them. Then he orders the
stewards and the noble wives to clear away the dishes with
speed to show reverence. Finally he proclaims that the time
has come for the lay feast.
The last stanza is a brief description of the lay feast
ending again with a blessing from the invoker. Here is the
entire poem:
Thick grow the thistles.
They begin to produce prickles.
What have we done since of old?
We plant wine-millet and cooking-millet.
Our wine-millet is a bounty;
Our cooking-millet, a bumper crop.
Our granaries are overflowing;
Our stacks are in their millions.
So we make wine and food
To make offering, to make sacrifice,
35
To ease and to wait upon the impersonators,
So as to obtain mighty blessings.
In due order, treading stately,
We bring our bulls and sheep
To perform autumn and winter sacrifices.
Some kill the victims, some cook them,
Some set them out, some present them.
The invoker seeks the spirits by the temple gate.
The sacrificial service is properly done
To glorify the august ancestors,
To wait upon the spirit-guardians.
The pious grandson shall enjoy happiness;
They will reward him with great blessings,
With longevity unending.
We mind our cooking with great care.
The carcasses in the stands are enormous;
Some are roasted, some are broiled.
The noble wives are duly reverent,
They have prepared so many dishes
For the visitors and for the guests.
Healths and toasts go crisscross.
All rules and rites are observed.
Every laughter, every word properly uttered.
The spirit-guardians have surely come
To requite us with great blessings,
And a myriad years as our reward.
We have striven very hard
To perform our rites without the slightest error.
The official invoker conveys the message,
Goes and gives it to the pious grandson:
"Fragrant are your pious offerings.
The spirits enjoy their drink and food.
They predict for you a hundred blessings
Just as you expect, just as you rightly deserve.
You have brought the purified wine, the purified
grain,
They are well placed, they are well set.
For ever they will reward your righteousness
With myriads and tens of myriads of blessings."
The rites have all been completed;
The bells and the drums are ready.
The pious grandson goes to his seat
And the official invoker proclaims:
"The spirits are all drunk.
August impersonators, please rise!
36
See them off with bells and drums!
The spirit-guardians are gone I
My stewards and my noble ladies,
Clear away the dishes without delay.
My uncles and my brothers,
Now it is time for the lay feast.”
The musicians go in and play,
To secure after-blessings.
Your viands are passed round;
No one is dissatisfied, all are happy.
They are drunk; they are sated.
The young and the old all bow their heads.
"The spirits enjoy their drink and food,
And will give our lord a long life.
You have been very gracious, very good,
You have done your utmost.
By your many sons and your many grandsons
Your line shall forever be continued."27
My last example is poem 211, "Fu t’ien," of the Book of
Songs. This poem describes a thanksgiving sacrifice made to
the Field Granddad. As the impersonator is used to imper
sonate the Field Granddad, it can be established unequivo
cally that the Chou people did not use only impersonators of
the dead, but also impersonator of gods.
"Fu t’ien" is a poem of forty lines in four stanzas,
tfith ten verses in each stanza. It contains four difficult
lines which have never been correctly explained, and conse
quently the available English versions are unsatisfactory.
These difficult lines must be explicated before we can
understand the whole poem.
First, verse 9, "Yu chieh yu ch1i," simply means "to
stop and to take a rest," the subjects of these verbs being
37
supplied by the context. The whole verse also appears in
poem 245, "Sheng min," which is about the miraculous birth
of Hou Chi, as its seventh verse. Let us take a look at
Waley's translation of the first ten verses of ’ ’Sheng min"
bo see if my explication makes better sense. The myth of
lou Chi begins as follows: "She who in the beginning gave
birth to the people, /This was Chiang Ytlan. /How did she
give birth to the people? /Well she sacrificed and prayed
|/That she might no longer be childless. /She trod on the big
toe of God’s footprint, /Was accepted and got what she
desired. /Then in reverence t then in awe /She gave birth,
I 28
she nurtured; /And this was Hou Chi." Waley’s transla
tion of this stanza as a whole is very readable. Only
verses 7 and 8, which I have underlined, are questionable.
To my mind, if we use "She stopped and she took a rest (Yu
shieh yu ch1i), /She became pregnant, she was in awe" to
substitute them, the whole stanza would make a better sense.
Karlgren's rendering of line seven, "she was (increased = )
enriched, she was blessed," also does not make good sense in
this context.
The second problem in "Fu t'ien" is verse 10, "Cheng wo
nao shih.1 1 All commentators agree that ’ mao shih ’ means
'handsome scholar.' But what does this handsome scholar do
aere? Waley's translation of the line, "Fine, my chosen
nen!" implies that he takes the noun to be in plural and
38
they are the outstanding field hands. Karlgren's "we offer
gifts to our fine officers” indicates that he takes the
aandsome scholars to be ’officers of the fields.' My guess
is that the word 'mao' originally means 'long-bearded1 and
'handsome' is a derivative meaning. The Chinese people in
general are not hairy, and a few of them who are are con
sidered handsome, and fit to be the impersonators of gods.
'Mao shih' reminds me of the long-bearded men who were
smployed by King Ling of Gh'u as impersonators in his shama-
jiic rites. Furthermore under "Officials of Spring," the
Rites of Chou, we find the following entry: "Shen shih
(spirit scholar): the spirit scholar takes charge of the
rites for the three celestial bodies, i.e. the sun, the
noon, and the stars. He distingushes their names and their
totems. On the day of the winter solstice, he brings down
the heavenly gods and human spirits. On the day of the
summer solstice, he brings down the earthly spirits and the
ninor deities so as to remove disasters from the state and
29
violent death from the people." The commentators maintain
that shen shih are those shamans that are particularly
learned and handsome. In my opinion, the handsome scholar
in this line is one of the handsome shamans (shen shih).
3eing long-bearded, he is fit to represent the Field Grand
dad. Therefore the handsome scholar in line 10, the Field
I
Granddad in line 17, and the Field Grandpa (t'ien tsiinJ
39
in line 24 all refer to one person.
Third, the word yeh in verse 23 j "Yeh pi nan mou," has
teen misconstrued. Waley1s translation of the line, "Bring
ing dinner to the southern acres" is traditional. Yeh used
is a noun is the name of a sacrifice. When used as a verb,
Lt means to perform a yeh sacrifice. In the Rites of Chou,
under "the Junior Lord of the Temple" we find that one of
nis duties is that "at the time of the royal hunt, he leads
the responsible officials to make yeh sacrifice to the ani-
nals in the suburb." But why should the animals be sacri
ficed to? Well, some of the animals are beneficial to
argriculture. For example, the lynx kills the rats, and the
tiger kills the wild boars. And both the lynx and the tiger
are on the list of the animals to be sacrificed to. But who
us the greatest benefactor of argriculture? Why, the Field
Granddad, of course. Therefore the yeh sacrifice is prima
rily a sacrifice dedicated to the Field Granddad.
Fourth, the last troublesome verse is line 24, "T'ien
tsiin chi hsi." The meaning of the line is "The Field
Grandpa is very pleased." The term t1ien tsiln is nothing
but another name for t1ien tsu (the Field Granddad). In
"Officials of Spring," the Rites of Chou, one of the offi
cials is entitled Official of the Flute (yileh chang). His
job description runs: "The Officer of the Flute takes charge
of the earthern drum and the Pin flute... When the state
40
prays for good year to t1ien tsu (the Field Granddad), he
plays the flute and beats the earthern drum to entertain
t'ien tsiln (the Field Grandpa)." Karlgren’s translation of
|this line, "The inspector of the fields comes and is
pleased," is the traditional interpretation. Waley's "The
labourers come to take good cheer" is quite ingenious but
incorrect. Here is the poem:
Far they stretch, those big fields;
Every year we pay ten thousand in tax.
We take our old crop
And feed our husbandmen.
For many years we have had good harvests.
And now we come to the southern acres,
Some are weeding, some are banking.
The wine-millet and the cooking-millet are lusty.
We stop and we take a rest,
And make an offering to our handsome impersonator.
With our strained bright wine,
With our victim bulls and sheep
We sacrifice to the Soil, to the Four Quarters.
Our fields have all done well,
That is the luck of our husbandmen.
We play zithers, we beat drums
To bring down the Field Granddad,
To pray for sweet rain,
So that our millets may be abundant,
Our men and women well fed.
The Descendant has come
With his wife and children
To make yeh sacrifice in the southern acres.
The Field Grandpa is very pleased.
He takes food from the right, from the left,
To taste if it is delicious.
"The grain is well-cultivated all over the acres.
All is fine and plentiful.
I don’t think the Descendant will be angry;
The husbandmen have been prompt in their work."
4-1
"The Descendant’ s crops
Shall be thick as thatch, long as a bridge;
The Descendant’s stacks
Shall be high as cliffs, high as mounds.
He shall need a thousand barns,
He shall need ten thousand carts
For millet, rice, and spiked millet.
The husbandmen are in luck.
The descendant is rewarded with mighty blessings
And a long life without ending!"30
To sum up, the shamanism of the Shang consists of the
cult of nature gods and the ancestor worship. The Chou
people put more emphasis on the worship of their ancestors
than the nature gods, for a great majority of the poems in
the Sung section of the Book of Songs are concerned with the
ancestor worship, while poems like "Fu-t’ien" in which the
Field Granddad is sacrificed to are ralatively few. But to
the Ch’u people, the cult of nature gods was more important
than ancestor worship. This we will find in our next chap
ter, "The Functionaries of Shamanism."
42
NOTES
1 Fu SSu-nien, "I Hsia tung hsi shou," Fu Ssu-nien ch1 tian
chi, vol. Ill, p. 85.
2 These two lines are Arthur Waley's translation. See
Waley, The Book of Songs, p. 277 or Ch'il Wan-li, Shih
ching chuan shih, pi o2U.
3 Fu, vol. Ill, p. 95.
4 Ibid. . pp. 89-97.
5 Ch1en Meng-chia, "Shang tai ti shen-hua yfi wu-shu,"
Yen-ching Hsfleh-pao, 20 (1936), 538.
6 David Hawkes translates ling-hsiu as 'the Fair One.’
See his The Songs of the South, pp. 23, 213*
7 Lee Nung-hwa, Ghao-hsien wu shu k ’ao, p. 5.
8 Ibid., p. 3•
9 Ch'en Meng-chia, P 'u-tz1u tsung-shu, p. 562.
10 Ibid., pp. 386-99.
11 David N. Keightley, "The Religious Commitment: Shang
Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture,"
History of Religion 17 (1978), pp. 212-13.
12 Ch’en Meng-chia, "Shang tai ti shen-hua yil wu-shu,"
Yen-ching Hstleh-pao, 20 (1936), p. 535.
13 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 14-75.
14 Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,
p. 298.
15 Ibid., p. 188.
16 Shih san ching chu shu, pp. 816-17.
Ibid., pp. 752-55.
18 Sun I-jang, Mo Tzu chien ku, pp. 76-77 and Burton
Watson, The Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, p. 45.
43
19 One was translated by James Legge, another by Bernhard
Karlgren, and a third by James Hart.
20 Ch'il Wan-li, Shang shu chi shih, pp. 132-33*
21 Clae Waltham, Shu Ching, p. 138.
22 Ch’ll, pp. 127-33*
23 This poem is my own translation. For its Chinese text,
see Ch'il Wan-li, Shih Ching chuan shih, pp. 576-77.
24- Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, p. 250.
25 This is again my translation. Its Chinese text can be
found in Ch'il, p. 562.
26 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 14-39*
27 This is also my translation. For its Chinese text, see
Ch'il, pp. 403-406.
28 Waley, p. 241.
29 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 828.
30 This is my translation. See Ch’il, pp. 409-11 for its
Chinese text.
44
CHAPTER III
THE FUNCTIONARIES OF SHAMANISM
Who were the functionaries of shamanism in Ch'u? The
test answer to this question lies in the "Ch’u Yil" (Dis-
jourse of Ch'u) chapter of the Kuo YtL (Discourses of the
States). This text records a conversation between King Chao
(reigned 515-4-89 B.C.) of Ch’u and his learned minister,
luan-she Fu. The king, after reading "Lti hsing" (The Mar
quis of Lil on Punishment) in the Shu Ching (Book of Docu-
Lents), was puzzled by the myth of the severence of communi-
1
cation between Heaven and Earth. He turned to his minister
for enlightenment. The minister's answer consists of a
threefold division of the functionaries of shamanism, namely
hsi (shaman) or wu (shamaness), chu (invoker), and tsung
(temple officer), and a brief history of Ch'u shamanism from
the remote legendary past to the late Western Chou time.
This text is one of the keys to the understanding of
shamanism in ancient China. Unfortunately only a portion
2
of it has been translated into English. This is the
reason why I have endeavored to translate the whole text
and quote it in its entirety here:
4-5
King Chao consulted Kuan-she Fu, saying, 1 1 The
Book of Documents maintains that Ch'ung and Li
were responsible for separating Earth from Heaven.
What does that mean? Had they not done so, could
people go up to Heaven?”
' ‘This is not what that statement means," re
plied the minister. "In ancient times people and
gods did not mingle. Only into a person who was
pure and single-minded, staunch in adherence to
principle, so wise that in all matters he always
took the right side, so sagely that he spread a
far-reaching radiance, so intelligent that he shed
light on things, so perceptive that he could hear
the minutest sound, would the bright god descend.
One who was male was called shaman (hsi); one who
was female was called shamaness (wu)."
"One who was responsible for providing seats
in a proper order for the gods, for providing for
them victims, ritual vessels, and seasonal vest
ments so that the descendants of the former sages
were made bright, and knew the titles of the
mountains and rivers, the tablets of the distant
ancestors, the rites of the ancestral temple, the
arrangement of generations in the chao and mu
order, the potency of purification, the appro
priateness of etiquette, the rules of bearing, the
solemnity of appearance, the essence of sincer
ity, and the vestments for pure sacrifices, and at
once showed great reverence for the gods, was made
invoker (chu).1 1
"One who was from a well-established family
and knew the produce of the four seasons, the
color of the victims, the classification of jade
and silk, the proper use of the colored vestments,
the quantity of the ritual vessels, the order of
the various tablets, the position of the sacrifi-
cers, the location of the altars and clearings,
the gods from above to below, and the origin of
family names and clan names, and at once earnestly
followed the ancient laws, was made temple officer
(tsung)."
"Therefore there were officers in charge of
Heaven, Earth, gods, people, and utilities, and
they were called the five officers. Each of them
had his own charge and did not interfere with the
others.s. The people therefore became loyal and
honest. The gods were therefore full of bright
virtue. The people and the gods all minded their
own business. Since the people were reverent and
4-6
not profane, the gods bestowed on them good
things. The people offered sacrifices, and no
disaster would come, and their resources would not
be exhausted."
"When Shao-hao was on the decline and the
nine Li tribes rebelled, the people and the gods
became mingled and nothing could be differen
tiated. Everybody offered sacrifices; every
household had a shaman and an invoker without
having the essential qualities. The people were
impoverished by sacrifices without obtaining any
benefits."
"The offerings were limitless and the people
and the gods were of the same rank. The people
defiled the sacred agreements and became irreve
rent. The gods became used to the dealings of the
people but did not rectify them. Good produce did
not descend and there was nothing to be used in
the sacrifice. Disasters came in succession and
few died of natural death. When Chuan-hsii came to
the throne, he ordered Ch’ung, Officer of the
South, to take charge of Heaven, which was duly
returned to the gods, and Li, Officer of Fire, to
take charge of Earth, which belonged to the peo
ple, so that Earth and Heaven returned to normalcy
and did not trespass upon each other. That is the
meaning of separating Earth from Heaven."
"Later the three Miao tribes revived the
deeds of the nine Li tribes. Yao terminated the
three Miao tribes and reinstalled the descendants
of Ch’ung and Li, who did not forget the ancient
laws, to their offices. They kept their offices
down to the dynasties of Hsia and Shang. There
fore the Ch'ungs and the Lis were in charge of
Heaven and Earth for many generations and were
responsible for their separation. During the Chou
Dynasty, Hsiu Fu, Lord of Ch’en, was one of their
descendants. In the reign of King Hstlan, the
offices were replaced by Ssu-ma (commander of
horses). To glorify their ancestors and to inti
midate the people, the descendants of Hsiu Fu
boasted: ’Ch’ung upheld Heaven; Li subjugated
Earth.' But they were helpless against the disor
der of their time. Otherwise since Heaven and
Earth have been formed, there would be no need to
separate them again."3
47i
According to this text, the history of Ch'u shamanism
from the remote past to the late Western Chou seems to have
been a record of constant struggle between goverment sha-
manism and popular shamanism. When the powerful legendary
ings, such as Chuan-hsli and Xao, came to the throne, reli
gion was firmly under state control and Heaven was severed
from the earth, for only the king had the privilege to
communicate with Heaven. But when the ruling king was less
powerful, ordinary people began to shamanize. This was the
situation when "everybody offered sacrifice; every house
hold had a shaman and an invoker."
The order in which the three functionaries of shaman
ism appear in Kuan-she Fu1s speech can be considered the
rank they held in the theocratic hierarchy that they had
formed. The shaman (hsi or wu) was of the highest rank.
This is quite understandable, for the king of Ch'u was the
aead shaman. No wonder the picture of the shaman was
painted in a very idealistic and flattering light. Next to
the shaman in rank was the invoker (chu). He assisted the
3haman in the ritual and acted as a master of ceremony. He
nade invocations for the master of the sacrifice and con
veyed the blessing speech (ku tz'u) from the impersonator
bo the sacrificer. The temple officer (tsung) was respon
sible for the supply of offerings in the sacrifice, which
Include, among others, seasonal produce, victims, jade,
48
silk, and ritual vessels. He was an important man behind
the scene. But his rank was obviously lower than those of
the shaman and the invoker.
This three-fold division of the functionaries of sha
manism in Ch'u was probably of Shang origin and the rank of
the shaman was higher than the invoker can be seen in the
following story:
Long ago, in the time of Pao, Duke Wen of Sung
[610-589 B.C.], there was a minister named Kuan-
ku the Invoker, who served in the ancestral tem
ple of the state. Once a shaman appeared from
the temple, bearing a club, and said, "Kuan-ku,
what does this mean? The sacramental jades and
circlets do not fulfill the proper standard, the
offerings of wine and millet are impure, the
sacrificial animals are not fat and flawless as
they should be, and the ceremonies appropriate to
the four seasons are not performed at the right
times! Is this your doing or Pao's?" Kuan-ku
replied, "Pao is an infant, still in swaddling
clothes. What does he know of such matters? I
am in charge, and it is my doing!" Then the
shaman raised his club and struck Kuan-ku, and he
fell dead on the altar.4
We know that Sung was a duchy enfeoffed by the Chou to the
defeated Shang people. The functions of the invoker in the
above story are very similar to those described in the
discourse of Kuan-she Fu. The fact that the shaman could
strike Kuan-ku, the invoker, with a club and kill him
indicates that the social status of the shaman was higher
than that of the invoker.
49
Because the shaman was the one into whom the bright
god would descend, he was often called by another name, the
impersonator (shih). The word shih and the word chu (in
voker) are often mentioned in the same breath by Chuang Tzu
(c.369-286 B.C.), the great Taoist philosopher in the book
that bears his name. In one of his many fables we are told
that Yao, the first sage king, wanted to cede the empire to
Hsii Yu, a hermit of great virtue. Hstt Yu declined the
offer of the rulership of the world, saying, "Though the
cook may not run his kitchen properly, the impersonator and
the invoker (shih chu) at the sacrifice do not leap over
the wine vessels and sacrificial stands and go take his
5
place." It is from this passage that the idiomatic ex
pression "ytieh chu tai pao" (to leap over the sacrificial
stands and go take the cook's place), an equivalent to
"back-seat driver" is derived. Passages in which the im
personator and the invoker are mentioned together can also
be found in chapter fourteen, "the Turning of Heaven" and
6
chapter nineteen, "Mastering Life."
From these passages we learn that the impersonator and
the invoker are partners who cooperate closely at the
sacrifice. Many good examples can of course be found in
the Nine Songs to demonstrate this. But for the sake of
sconomy, let us just examine one of them, "the Lord amid
the Clouds." The impersonator of this song is naturally a
50
male shaman, since ’ ’Lord" (ch.tin) is a male epithet. We may
assume that he has practiced austerities for seven days and
Ifasted for three days before the sacrifice, just as we are
told by Ghuang Tzu and the Book of Rites. In addition, he
is ritually immaculate, for he has ’ ’bathed in orchid water,
shampooed with perfume, /And dressed in a many-colored robe
like a flower.” Therefore the spirit of the Lord amid the
Clouds has descended into him right away. But who is there
to welcome and entertain the Lord amid the Clouds? From
the last two lines, "Longing for my lord, I heave a great
sigh. /My heart is troubled; I am very, very sad,” we may
■infer that it is the female invoker who welcomes and enter
tains the descending god. The entertainment may include,
as we can gather from this and the other songs, wine, food,
music, dance, sex, and the riding of the chariot.
y^\The shaman and the invoker also work together in re-
-
calling the soul of the sick. This is documented by the
Summons of the Soul (Chao hun). I believe this poem was
written as a manual for calling back the wandering soul of
ja sick king. In the prologue, God on High says to Shaman
jlang: "There is a man on earth below whom I would help.
His soul and his body are separated. Divine where his soul
is and call it back.” Shaman Yang points out that divina
tion is the job of the Master of Dreams and that the order
of God on High will be difficult to carry out, for after
51
the divination, the man's body might have decomposed, and
it might be too late to revive him. Therefore Wu Yang
immediately begins to summon the soul, saying, ”0 soul,
come back
But Shaman Yang does not summon the soul alone. She
or he is assisted by an invoker. The text of Chao hun
says, "0 soul, come back! and enter the gate of the capi
tal. /The invoker summons you, walking backwards to lead
you in. /The bamboo basket of Ch'in, the colored cords of
Ch'i, and the spirit banners of Cheng: /All soul-calling
articles are well-prepared; and with long-drawn cries he
summons you."
A detailed description of the close relationship be
tween the female shaman and her assistant can be found in
the Tale of the Nisan Shamaness. In this Manchu folk epic,
Teteke, the Nisan shamaness, is engaged in bringing back
the soul of Sergudai Fiyanggo from the underworld. Sergu-
dai Fiyanggo was the only son of a very wealthy man named
Baidu Bayan in the Lolo village. He died suddenly when he
was on a hunting trip. Baidu Bayan hired the Nisan Shaman-
When the Nisan shamaness begins to shamanize, she
finds the Lolo village shamans who accompany her on tambou
rines are out of tune, and she sends for her assistant,
Nari Fiyanggo, a seventy-year-old man of her own village.
7
8
9
ess from son
52
jWhen he comes, she asks him to help her by harmonizing
[beautifully with the tune, and entrusts the tambourine and
drum to him. At the very beginning of the seance, she
gives him many instructions, as can be seen from the fol
lowing lines:
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge.
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge,
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
Hoge
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
•Yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage.
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
yage
Lead assistant
standing to the side,
great assistant
standing next to me,
submissive assistant
standing near,
clever assistant
standing nearby,
having opened your
listen!
Having closed your
Listen!
Having fastened the rooster
to my head,
make ready!
Having tied to my
the striped dog,
make ready!
Place at my
one hundred
of old bean
thin ears
thick ears
foot
side
lumps
paste.
Having wrapped one hundred bundles
of coarse paper,
make ready!
I am going to pursue a soul
into a dark place.
I surmise that I will go
to the land of the dead.
I am going to fetch a life
in an evil place.
I am going to raise
a fallen soul.
Trusted assistant
take charge of leading me.
Truly try hard
to revive me when I come back.
Throw water
53
Hoge yage around my nose:
Hoge yage twenty measures.
Hoge yage Pour water
Hoge yage around my face:
Hoge yage forty buckets,
gofte yage10
It is interesting to note that the Nisan shamaness is a
young widow and her assistant is a widower of seventy. But
!in the tale she addresses him as ’my younger brother,’ and
he calls her ’my elder sister.’ They shamanize together
11
and are also sexual partners.
Armed with the knowledge that the shaman does not
shamanize alone but is always assisted by a partner, we
shall be able to solve one of the most controversial prob
lems in Li sao , that is, the identity of Nii Hsil in line 66.
'First, however, it is necessary to prove that Ch’fl Tflan,
the author of Li sao, was a shaman. Fortunately a few
pieces of good evidence are not too far to seek. They can
be found right in Li sao itself.
To begin with, in line 2, the poet states that he
’descended' on the day of keng yin. In other words, he
became a shaman on that day. The word hung ((^ ), as Cheng
Kang-min rightly points out, means 'to descend’ in archaic
Chinese. When someone begets someone or when someone is
12
born, the word used is invariably sheng ( ££ ) . For the
use of the word hung. let me just cite two examples.
First, it was recorded in the Tso Commentary that in the
54
seventh month, 32nd year (662 B.C.) of Duke Ghuang a god
descended (hung) at Hsin in the Kuo state. Second, in a
sacrificial hymn to the ancestors of Shang, we find the
following lines:
God’s appointment did not fail;
In the time of T’ang it was fulfilled.
T'ang came down (hung) in his due time,
Wise warnings daily multiplied,
Magnificent was the radiance that shone below.
God on high gazed down;
God appointed him to be a model to all
the lands.13
T'ang was the founder of the Shang dynasty. He was not an
ordinary human being. Like the Heavenly King Hwanung of
the Korean myth, he came down from heaven to rule over the
U
people. The day keng yin was a very important day in
Ch’u. According to the "Royal House of Ch'u," Shih chi.
"Gh'ung-li was competent and was able to illuminate the
whole world under heaven. Lord Ku bestowed upon him the
meritorious title Great Brightness, When the tribe of
Kung-kung rebelled, Lord Ku ordered Ch'ung-li to kill them.
When the tribe was not completely killed, the Lord on the
day of keng yin killed Ch'ung-li and made his younger
brother Wu-hui a Ch'ung-li. He took over the office of the
15
Officer of Fire and the title of Great Brightness."
In the Korean myth of Tangun from Samguk yusa, we are
informed that "in the fiftieth year of the reign of Emperor
55
Yao, on the day keng yin Tangun made P ’yongyang the capital
16
of his country.” Is this a coincidence? Probably not.
It is more likely that Ch’u shamanism and Korean shamanism
are of the same origin, and they both hold the day keng yin
as an important day.
In the second place, the phrase 'ch’u tu1 ( ) in
line 3 means ’initiation.1 Literally ch’u means ’first’ or
’beginning,’ and tu means ’to transcend’ as a verb and
'transcendence' as a noun. For example, the phrase ti. tu
(||J g ) means ’to become a monk, ’ but its literal meaning
is 'to shave (the hair from the head) and to transcend the
world of mortal life.' The word tu also appears in line 67
of the Far-off Journey (Ytlan Yu), which is translated by
Hawkes as "I wanted to leave the world and forget about
returning: /My thoughts were reckless with a heady free-
17
dom." Here Hawkes’ translation is quite close to the
original text, though not very exact. In short, if I were
to translate the first three lines of Li. sao , I would put
them as follows:
A descendant of Lord Kao Yang,
My august father was called Po Yung.
When Jupiter moved to the first month of the year
On the day of keng yin, I descended.
My father, overseeing my initiation,
Gave me an auspicious name.
56
In the third place, Ch'il Ytian was dressed as a shaman.
In lines 38-39> the poet says that he would emulate the
wise men of old and put on clothes which were not in accord
with the fashion of his day, for he would follow the pat-
18
tern that Shaman P 1 eng and Shaman Hsien have left. At
the end of the poem, when he is completely disillusioned,
ihe again says that he would go and join Shaman P'eng and
Shaman Hsien in the place where they dwell.
Finally, like the gods of the Mine Songs, the poet
makes two heavenly journeys in an airborne chariot in this
poem. He had to be a shaman to be able to make such magic
flights.
The evidence I have presented in the preceding para
graphs, I strongly believe, is concrete enough to prove
that Ch'il M a n was a shaman. Now when he engages in such
jflights, he is shamanizing and he needs someone to assist
jhim. This is where Nil Hsii comes in. She must be a sha
maness and Ch'il Yilan's assistant. She is there, like Nari
Fiyanggo in the Tale of the Nisan Shamaness, to revive the
shaman when he comes back from the journey. Her name is
one clue that she is a shamaness. In ancient China many
shamans took their name after the great shamans. For
example, there were many shamans by the name of Hsien.
During the reign of Emperor Wu (reigned 14-0-93 B.C.) of
3an, there was a famous shamaness by the name of Li Nil-
57
19
hsii. Thus the Nil Hsfl in Li sao is probably also a sha
maness .
In conclusion, the functionaries of shamanism in Ch'u
were the shaman (hsi or wu), the invoker (chu), and the
temple officer (tsung). Their functions were well-defined
by the text of the "Ch'u Y-fi" (Discourse of Ch'u) chapter of
the Kuo Yil (Discourses of the States). The shaman was of
the highest rank, for the Ch'u king was the head shaman.
Next to the shaman was the invoker, who assisted the shaman
in the seance. The temple officer was an important man
behind the scene, but his rank was lower than those of the
shaman and the invoker.
58
NOTES
1 Ch’il Wan-li, Shang Shu chi shih, pp. 250-61 and
Clae Waltham, Shu Ching, pp. 228-36.
2 Jan J. M. de Groot has translated a portion of this
text into English in his The Religious System of China,
VI, pp. 1190-91* But it contains many errors. The
most serious one is his mistaking a part of the invok
er’s job description for that of the shaman's. Groot's
translation was quoted by Mircea Eliade in his Shaman
ism ; Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, pp. 4-51-52.
3 "Ch’u Yii," Kuo 111, pp. 559-64-.
4 This is Watson's translation with slight emendation,
see Burton Watson, trans., Mo Tzu, p. 98.
5 This is Burton Watson's translation with emendation.
See Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,
P* 33.
6 Watson, pp. 150, 202.
7 Wang I, Ch'u tz'u chang chii, pp. 119-20. Cf. David
Hawkes, The Songs of the South, pp. 103-04* My inter
pretation of the Prologue is different from his.
8 These lines are my own translation. See Wang I, p. 122
and cf. Hawkes, p. 105.
9 Margaret Nowak and Stephen Durrant, The Tale of the
Nisan Shamaness; A Manchu Folk Epic (Seattle: Universi
ty of Washington Press, 1977), pp. 39-56.
10 Nowak and Durrant, pp. 57-59.
11 Ibid., p. 88.
12 Cheng Kang-min, "Li sao 'hung' tzu chileh," Chien-she
16: 12 (May, 1967), pp. 22-23 and 4*
13 These are lines 16-22 in poem 304> "Chang fa," the Book
of Songs. See Waley, p. 277.
14 For the Korean myth of the Heavenly King Hwanung, see
Peter H. Lee, ed. Anthology of Korean Literature: From
59
Early Times to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: The
University Press of Hawaii, T981)* p. 4 and II Yon,
Samguk yusa (in classical Chinese), vol. I, p. 2.
15 Lee, p. 3.
16 II Yon, vol. I, p. 2. The commentator in Samguk yusa
thought that keng yin was name of a year in the sexage
nary cycle, not the 27th day in that cycle and ques
tioned the correctness of the text. This is probably
the reason why the translator of the "Tangun" myth
omits keng yin in his translation. See Lee, p. 4*
17 Hawkes, p. 85.
18 Wu P'eng and Wu Hsien were two great shamans of the
Shang dynasty. They appear frequently in the oracle
bone inscriptions and the Classics of Mountains and
Seas (Shan Hai Ching). Like Ssu-ma Chien, who thought
Ch'ung and Li were one person, David Hawkes takes P'eng
Hsien as the name of a single shaman. See Hawkes,
p. 24-.
19 Han Shu, 25 A.
60
CHAPTER IV
THE ARCHAIC TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY
So far as we know there is not a single scientific or
systematic account of how the ancient Chinese shaman a-
chieved the state of ecstasy. As we cannot travel through a
time tunnel back to ancient China to do field study, the
best we can do perhaps is to gather as many data as possible
and then use them to speculate on how this could have been
done.
To achieve ecstasy, the ancient Chinese shaman had
three possible methods available to him. The first and most
ordinary way was to dance to the drum or the music of other
musical instruments until he was possessed. The second was
to use alcoholic drink. The use of alcoholic drink was
especially important in the ancestor worship ceremony, for
the shaman who played the impersonator of the dead did not
dance. He was usually seated throughout the whole ceremony.
The third possible way was to use the drug Cannabis sativa,
or hemp, commonly known as marijuana. Hemp was readily
available to the shaman, but textual references to its use
are so few and far between that I have simply thrown this
possibility in for good measure. In the following para
graphs I shall discuss each possible method in turn.
61
The basic technique to induce trance is to dance to the
rhythmic beat of the drum until one is possessed. The
definition of the word wu, which I translate as shaman, is
given by the Shuo-wen chieh-tzu (2nd century A.D.) as fol
lows :
Wu is a chu (an invoker), a woman who can serve
the invisible and bring down the gods by dancing.
The character wu ( /J a ) is an image of a person
dancing with two sleeves. It also means kung (a
professional). In antiquity Wu Hsien created the
profession of wu.1
Hsii Shen’s definition of wu is not entirely satisfactory.
First, as we have seen in our discussion on the functiona
ries of shamanism, the impersonator (wu) and the invoker
(chu) are partners in the seance, but they have different
functions. Second, not all shamans are female: the very
example he gives us, Wu Hsien (shaman Hsien) is a male
shaman, for shaman Hsien, according to "Chiin Shih" (The
Prince Shih) of the Book of Documents, was a minister of
2
Ta Wu (non-datable). But he is certainly right in saying
that a shaman is one nwho can serve the invisible and bring
down the gods by dancing.”
Many pre-Ch’in texts bear out the close relationship
between shamanism and dance. The legendary founder of the
62
Hsia dynasty, 111, is doubtless a shaman. Yii' s step (Yii pu)
3
is a synonym for the shamanic dance. Yil's son, Ch1 i,
according to T'ien wen, "often called upon God, /And ob-
U
tained the Nine Variations and the Nine Songs." The Nine
Variations is clearly another name for the wan dance, for Mo
Tzu says, "Ch'i gave himself up to pleasure and music,
eating and drinking in the fields. Ch'iang-ch1iang, the
flutes and chimes sounded in unison [for the Directional
Sacrifice]! He drowned himself in wine and behaved inde
cently by eating in the fields. Splendid was the Wan dance,
but Heaven clearly heard the sound amd Heaven did not ap-
5
prove." The Hai wai hsi ching of the Classic of mountains
and seas (Shan hai ching) informs us that on the plain of
Ta-yiieh, Ch'i, the king of Hsia, danced the Nine Tai. He
rode on two dragons, on three layers of cloud. He held the
pheasant-plumes on his left hand, and a jade ring on his
6
right, and wore jade girdle pendants. This seems to indi
cate that the wan dance is also called the Nine Tai and Ch'i
took an active part in it, for he was probably the leader of
the dance.
The nautre of the wan dance has been a subject of
controversy. The most reliable description of this dance is
poem 38, "Chien hsi," in the Book of Songs:
63J
Boom boom, boom boom!
The Directional Sacrifice and the wan dance.
When the sun is just at zenith,
He is at the head of the front row.
This tall man is so grand,
In the duke's court he dances the wan.
He has strength like as a tiger,
He holds chariot reins as if they were ribbons.
Now his left hand holds the flute;
His right hand, the pheasant-plumes.
He is so ruddy, as though smeared with ochre.
The duke says, "Give him a goblet."
"On the hill grows the hazel;
On the swamp the liquorice.
Of whom do I think?
Of a handsome man from the West.
Oh that handsome man
Is a man from the West."7
This short poem was collected from the state of Wei, where
the ruling class was from Chou and the subjects were the
defeated Shang people. Therefore the duke was one of the
descendants of Prince K'ang, King Wu1s younger brother. The
tall man, the leader of the dance, was probably a man of
Shang, for "The scholars of Yin are fine and nimble, /They
make libations and sacrifices at the capital (Mao 235, 11.
8
35-36)." The last stanza is obviously an improvised song
sung by the tall man to flatter the duke. We can learn
several features of the wan dance from this poem. First,
the most important musical instrument is the drum, but
during the dance, the dancers also play the flutes. Second,
the dance is used in the Directional Sacrifice, a sacrifice
6/
of Shang origin.9 Third, the paraphernalia of the dancers
are the flute and the pheasant-plumes. Fourth, the dance is
iperformed by many dancers in rows. It is also worth noting
that the duke of Wei is a spectator, not a participant in
the dance.
From another source we learn that eight dancers make up
a row and a grand wan dance needs eight rows, that is,
10
sixty-four dancers. According to the Spring and Autumn
Annals, in the fifth year of Duke Yin (718 B.C.), the build
ing of the temple for Chung Tzu, Duke Yin’s consort, was
completed and for the first time six rows of plume-dancers
were used in her honor. The Tso Commentary says that when
the wan dance was about to be performed, Duke Yin consulted
ihis minister Ch'ung Chung for the number of rows to be used.
Ch'ung Chung's reply was: "The Son of Heaven uses eight,
11
barons use six, ministers use four and scholars two." To
conform to the rites, Duke Yin therefore used six rows of
dancers to make sacrifice to Chung Tzu. This may explain
why when Confucius heard that eight rows of dancers danced
in the court of the head of the Chi Family of Lu he was
furious and said, "If this man can be endured, who cannot be
12
endured! 1 1
But why is this dance called the wan dance? We know
that the word wan denotes 'ten thousand.' But when used
loosely, it means 'a great many.' We also know that in the
65
bronze and oracle inscriptions wan is a pictogram of a
scorpion ). Quite a few interesting theories have been
proposed to explain the wan dance. Ho Hsiu, a Han commenta
tor of the second century A.D., for example, maintained that
the wan was the war-dance of ten thousand soldiers who
13
fought with King Wu in the conquest of Shang. Arthur
Waley, for another example, suggests that the dance was a
'scorpion' dance, for "the pattern the dancers traced may
U
have resembled a conventionalized picture of a scorpion."
The reason why the pictogram of a scorpion is used for the
word wan is very convincingly explained by Tung Ming, the
second son of the famous oracle inscription scholar Tung
Tso-ping. Tung Ming is a photographer by profession. He
points out that the scorpion is a very prolific insect. A
female scorpion will give birth to several scores or even
more than a hundred baby scorpions at a time. As soon as
the baby scorpions are born, they instinctively attach them
selves to the body of their mother. Most of the baby scor
pions ride on the back of the mother scorpion. They pack
together as sesames and seem uncountable. It was this scene
that made the ancient Chinese use the scorpion as an almost
15
uncountable number wan, ten thousand. With Tung Ming's
explanation of the word "wan" and the description of the
dance in "Chien hsi" we may conclude that the wan dance is
principally a plume dance performed by many dancers.
66
That the wan dance was a popular dance in Ch'u can be
seen in the following story. In the twenty-eighth year of
. ‘ Duke Chuang of Lu (666 B.C.), Prime Minister Tzu Yiian of
Ch’u intended to bewitch the widowed queen of his older
brother, King Wen (reigned 689-77 B.C.). He built a pavil
ion alongside her palace and struck up a wan dance. Hearing
the noise the queen wept, saying, "My late lord used this
dance to keep his soldiers in training for battle. Now our
Prime Minister, instead of directing it against the enemy,
1 6
aims it at the survivor. Isn't it strange indeed!" In
order to bewitch his widowed sister-in-law with the wan
dance, Tzu Ylian, like the tall man in "Chien hsi," must have
been the leader of the dance.
The Great Unique (T'ai-i) , the supreme god of the Ch'u
people, enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the second and first
17
centuries B.C. Emperor Wu (reigned 14-0-87 B.C.) of the
Han dynasty worshiped the Great Unique at Kan-chuan (Sweet
Spring Palace). "The worship begins at dusk and ends at
dawn. Shooting stars often pass over the altar. Seventy
boys and girls are made to sing together. In the spring
they sing 'ching yang (vernal sun);1 in the summer they sing
1chu meng (vermillion bright);' in the autumn they sing 'hsi
hao (western whiteness);' and in the winter they sing 'hsilan
18
ming (mysterious darkness).'" But in addition to singing,
they also performed the wan dance. This can be deduced fron:
67
the following two verses in number 8, "Heaven and Earth,” of
the Han Nineteen Sacrificial Songs: "A thousand boys dance
around in eight rows. /In high spirits and harmony they come
to entertain the Great Unique." Here the word ch'ien (one
thousand), like the word wan (ten thousand), is obviously a
hyperbole. Actually the dance was performed by sixty-four
dancers. Since the Han Nineteen Sacrificial Songs were com
posed after the model of the Nine Songs, Han’s worship of
the Great Unique was a revival of Ch’u’s belief, and the wan
dance was performed to entertain the Great Unique in Han
times, we have every reason to believe that the dance scenes
described in the prologue, "The Great Unique, Monarch of the
East," and "the Lord of the East" of the Nine Songs are also
a wan dance.
The dynastic legend of Shang is summed up succinctly in
two verses in poem 30/+, "Gh’ang fa," the Book of Songs: "Yu-
jung was making a Directional Sacrifice, /God appointed his
child to bear Shang" (11. 7-8). The meaning of these two
lines is very well explained by a passage from Ltl-shih
ch'un-ch’iu:
The clan of Yu-jung had two beautiful daughters.
They built a mound of nine tiers and beat drums
before every meal. God sent a swallow to see
them. The bird twittered gaily and the two
girls fell in love with it and scrambled to catch
it. They covered it with a jade basket. After a
68
little while, they opened the basket to take a
look. The swallow left two eggs and flew north
without returning. The two girls made songs, the
last line of one of them was "Away flew the swal
low." This was the beginning of the song style of
the north.19
We are informed that one of the girls was called Chien-ti.
She swallowed at least one of the swallow eggs and became
pregnant and gave birth to Hsieh ), who was the first
male ancestor of the Shang people. Since Chien-ti, the
ancestress of the Shang people, built a mound of nine tiers
and beat drums before every meal, she was doubtless a female
shaman.
Ordinary people also shamanized in ancient China. For
a description of the shamanism of the common people, we can
turn to a short poem composed in the state of Ch'en, which
20
was annexed by Ch’u in 4-79 B.C. This is poem 136, "Wan
chiu," of the Book of Songs:
You are mighty powerful
On the top of the Mound Bowl.
You are indeed full of feelings
More than we have bargained for.
K’an, you beat your drum
Beneath the Mound Bowl.
Be it winter, be it summer,
You hold upright your egret feathers!
K fan, you beat your earthern jar
Along the path to the Mound Bowl.
Be it winter, be it summer,
You hold upright your egret plumes 121
69
The Mound Bowl, according to Karlgren, was the traditional
22
pleasure-ground of the Ch1en people. The name suggests
that it is a building in the shape of an amphitheater. The
paraphernalia are the drum, the earthern jar, and the egret
plumes, very similar to those we have encountered in poem
38, "Chien hsi." Traditionally this poem is taken to be a
satire on an idle youth. But that of course is a narrow
minded Confucianistic view. It is, to my mind, in praise of
a competent and enthusiastic female shaman, who, oblivious
to the changes of the season, kept drumming and dancing to
shamanize.
A companion poem to "Wan chiu" is poem 137, "Tung men
chi fen," of the same anthology. Here our heroine is iden
tified as "The daughter of Tzu Chung" and "Miss Ytlan from
the southern side:"
Elms of the Eastern Gate,
Oaks of the Mound Bowl—
The daughter of Tzu Chung
Trips and sways beneath them.
An auspicious day is chosen.
Miss Ytian from the southern side
Instead of twisting her hemp
In the market place trips and sways.
The auspicious day being over,
Let’s go back together.
"You are lovely as the mallow
And give me a bouquet of pepper plants."23
70
Again this poem is taken as a criticism of a girl who neg
lects her duty— to twist her hemp. But the tone of the
speaker of the poem seems to indicate the contrary. My
impression is that the speaker is enamored by her dance, her
beauty, and is very proud of the gift, a bouquet of pepper
plants, that she gives him.
Some Chinese commentators feel uneasy about the word
shih (market place) in line eight, and maintain that it is a
loan word for p *ei ( ), meaning ’swift' and used to des-
24
cribe her dance. But I can see no reason for the emenda
tion. The "Book of Chou," Chan-kuo Ts’e says, "There were
seven market places in the palace of the Duke Huan of Ch'i,
with seven hundred female shamans. His people criticized
him. The prime minister Kuan Chung built three homes for
the female shamans to cover up Duke Huan’s wrong policy and
25
took the blame upon himself." From Samguk yusa of Korea,
we learn that the Heavenly King Hwanung descended with three
thousand followers to a spot under a sandalwood tree atop
Mount T'aebaek, and he called that place the market place of
26
god. Lee Nung-hwa suggests that in ancient times people
gathered at the market place at regular intervals to barter
and trade, and professional shamans went there either to
offer their service or to demonstrate their power to convert
people and therefore their altar was called the market place
27
of god. Thus there was nothing strange for the Chinese
71
female shaman to dance in the market place.
But dance is only one of the three possible means to
induce trance. Our next topic is the use of alcoholic drink
to achieve ecstasy. The effectiveness of alcoholic drink
naturally has much to do with the ritual conventions at that
time. Both the Book of Rites and Chuang Tzu inform us that
before the sacrifice, the impersonator and the invoker have
to practice austerities for seven days and fast for three
28
days. As asceticism greatly enhances sensitivity, it is
■not difficult at all for the impersonator to gain ecstasy
with just a small amount of alcoholic drink.
It is worth noting that the alcoholic drinks used in
Ch'u were different from those used in the royal house of
Chou. In the prologue of the Nine Songs, "the Great Unique,
Monarch of the East," cassia wine and pepper drink are used
to make libations to the supreme god. But in the case of
the Great Unique, alcoholic drink is only one of the induce
ments that finally bring him down to possess the impersona
tor. There are also food, music, and dance. From line 14-” 1 >
Li sao, "Hearing that Wu Hsien is about to descend in the
evening, /I prepare the strained pepper wine to invite
29
'him," we may infer that the strained pepper wine is in-
.strumental in bringing down the great shaman Hsien.
The Chou people were justly famous for their soberness,
for archaeologists inform us that after the fall of Shang,
72
the making of bronze wine vessels declined conspicuously.30
Despite this fact, there are a considerable number of offi
cials in the royal house of Chou who are involved with the
making of wine. Among them the most important person is the
director of wine (chiu cheng). He is in charge of the
policy of wine, supplies material for the making of wine
according to recipes, distinguishes five grades of wine by
the degrees of their purity, and classifies three kinds of
wine under the headings of the sacrificial wine, the old
31
wine, and the clear wine.
Another official who is related to the sacrificial wine
is the steward of the Son of Heaven's private domain (t1ien
shih). He is responsible for the supply of the wormwood
(Artemisia apiacea) and the white rush (Imperata cylindrica
32
var. ma.jor) at the sacrifice. We do not know the exact
functions of these herbs, but we can guess that probably the
wormwood is used as a spice to flavor the wine, and the
white rush is used to strain the wine.
The use of the white rush to strain wine is recorded in
the Tso Commentary. In the fourth year of Duke Hsi (656
B.C.), when Duke Huan (reigned 685-643 B.C.) of Ch'i led the
joint forces of several states to attack Ch'u, King Ch'eng
(reigned 671-627 B.C.) of Ch'u sent a messenger to the
invading armies to demand an explanation from Ch'i, saying,
"My lord is in the north sea. I am in the south sea. We
73
are just like the horse and the cattle: even when in heat,
we have nothing to do with each other. Why do you unex
pectedly come to my land?" Kuan Chung, the prime minister
of Duke Huan of Ch‘i, replied for the Duke, saying in part:
"Your tribute of the white rush did not come in. The Son of
Heaven had nothing with which to strain the wine in his
33
sacrifice. I demand you to supply it."
But the most well-known and highly-valued wine of the
Chou dynasty is called chil tsang ( )• Chil tsang
appears frequently in bronze inscriptions and pre-Ch'in
texts. It invariably heads the list of gifts from the Chou
king. This special wine, according to Shuo-wen, "made from
black millet formented with the yti herb, being fragrant and
34
soothing, is used to bring down the spirits." Yti tsang
therefore is a yil-flavored black millet wine.
But what is yil? In "Officials of Spring, the Lord of
the Temple (Gh'un Kuan Tsung Po)," of the Rites of Chou, we
find among the many subordinates of the Lord of the Temple a
yd specialist. A part of the job description of this yil
specialist is as follows: "The yil specialist takes charge of
the vessels of libation. When libation is performed in
sacrifices or in entertaining guests, the yil specialist puts
yil and the tsang (black millet) wine in the ritual vessels
and displays them...." One of the commentators points out
the obvious, that yil is a fragrant herb. Another vaguely
74
says, "ytI and tsang are the essence of a hundred plants.
They are a tribute from the distant land by the yil special
ist. The fragrant herbs are put in the wine to bring down
35
the spirits."
Obviously the commentaries are not much help to our
understanding of yil. I have consulted Tz1u Hai and Li Shih-
chen1s Pen-ts'ao kang-mu and found that the modern Chinese
name for yil is yil chin and this plant is identified as
I
[Curcuma aromatica. The Encyclopedia of Horticulture in
forms us that Curcuma has more than fifty species and it
belongs in the ginger family Zingiberaceae. Some species of
Curcuma are used as perfumes, and several are used in native
medicines and religious ceremonies. It also points out that
the most important species, tumeric, is an ingredient of
curry powder and is employed to color rice and other
37
foods. Li Shih-chen says that when yd is put into the
wine, the wine will turn yellow as gold, therefore chil tsang
is referred to as 'huang liu' (yellow flood or liquid
38
gold). This is a reference to poem 239, "Han lu," of the
Book of Songs, in which we find: "Fair is that jade-handled
I 39
spoon /And the yellow flood within."
To demonstrate the use of the yil-flavored black millet
wine and its religious implications, I have chosen two
interesting and reliable literary sources as examples. My
first example is four verses from poem 262, "Chiang han," of
75
the Book of Songs;
I bestow on you a jade-handled ladle,
And a yu vessel of yii-f lavored black millet wine.
Report it to your model ancestors
That I give you hills, lands and fields.4-0
(11. 33-36)
The speaker of these lines is King Hsiian (reigned 827-782
B.C.) of Chou. He was the only late Western Chou king who
was able to restore the power of the royal house to some
extent. The person whom he addresses is Hu of Shao, a
general just returned from a successful campaign against the
Huai barbarians. In addition to rewarding him with hills,
lands and fields, the king also gives him a jade-handled
ladle, which is used in making libations, and a yu vessel of
the yii-f lavored black millet wine, which of course is the
means to bring down the spirits of Hu’s ancestors so that he
can report his glory to them. The yu vessel is a bronze
wine container.
My second example is an excerpt from "the Announcement
Concerning Lo" in the Book of Documents. It is written in
the form of a dialogue between Duke Chou and King Ch'eng
(reigned 1104.-1068 B.C.) concerning the building of Lo, the
'new eastern capital:
76
The duke said, "the king has sent messengers to
admonish the people of Yin and at the same time to
inquire after me, along with two yu vessels of
yil-flaovored black millet wine, saying, 'This is
for pure sacrifice, which with my hands to my head
and my head to the ground I beg you to make use in
the sacrifice.' I dared not delay for a single
night but offered it to King Wen and King Wu..
On the day wu-ch'en the king, being in the
new city, performed the annual winter sacrifice,
offering King Wen one red bull and King Wu one rec.
bull. The king ordered the Recorder Yi to read
the invocation to the august ancestors, in which
it was announced that Duke Chou was to remain in
the new capital. The king was ready to call upon
his ancestors, killed the red bulls, burnt them or
a woodpile. Both spirits descended. The king en
tered the grand room and poured out the liba
tions . 4-1
Two sacrifices to King Wen and King Wu (reigned 1111-05
B.C.) are performed in the above quotation. The first one
is done by Duke Chou. No details about it are given except
that the yil-flavored black millet wine being used. The
second sacrifice is performed by King Ch'eng. Unlike the
first one, this provides us with much information and a few
quite graphic details. We are told the time and place and
the persons involved in the sacrifice. We are informed of
the number and the color of the victims. And we also learn
who was the invoker and the gist of the invocation. But the
most important part of this passage are the graphic details,
which are given in the original Chinese in a most laconic
style.
This style, to my mind, deserves a little digression.
77
The following is a transliteration of the original text with
a rough English equivelant word for each Chinese character
in parentheses. "Wang (King) pin (call upon), sha (kill),
yen (burn). Hsien ko (All descend)." Here is my transla
tion again: "The king was ready to call upon his ancestors,
killed the red bulls, burnt them on a woodpile. Both spir
its descended." Compared with the original, my translation,
which I have endeavored to make as terse as possible, seems
wordy. To return to the graphic details under our discus
sion, we find that the important part of the whole ceremony
is vividly described by these six Chinese characters. The
king was the master of the sacrifice. When he was ready to
communicate with his grand-father and father, King Wen and
King Wu, he took the ceremonial knife (luan tao) and killed
the Red Males. The carcasses of the bulls were then put
above the woodpile and roasted. When the smell of the roast
beef rose, the spirits of the king's ancestors would descend
to enjoy it, for we are told that the spirits, like human
beings, were very fond of food and drink.
The key word in the above passage is pin, which, so
far as I know, has never been correctly read until very
recently by K. C. Chang. As this is a very important dis
covery, Chang's explanation for his reading is well worth
quoting:
78
Was Shang divination an act of Shang shamansim?
The inscriptions make it clear that inquiries were
directed to long-departed ancestors, and that the
diviner served as an intermediary. The inscrip
tions often contain the word pin, which in later
classical texts usually means to receive as a
guest or to be a guest. In the oracle bone in
scriptions, the word is often placed between the
word for king and the name of a specific ancestor
or of Ti, the Supreme God. A phrase consisting of
these elements is sometimes interpreted as "the
king receives as a guest a specific ancestor," or
"the king receives as a guest the Supreme God."
But more likely it means that the king "called
upon " a departed ancestor or God. Shan Hai Ching[
states that "Ch'i went up to pin heaven three
times," making it clear that pin refers to the
human chief going to the deity rather than the
other way round. "4-2
But to understand this passage fully, we have to make
more effort. We have to visualize that there were two long-
bearded handsome men who impersonated King Wen and King Wu.
They were solemnly seated. When the smell of the burnt
victims reached their nostrils, they might, like God on high
in one of the odes, ask: "What smell is this, so strong and
4-3
good?" Then they were plied with the roast beef and the
yii-flavored black millet wine. Many (nine according to "Chi
t'ung," Li Chi) rounds of toasts were made to the impersona
tors. In the meanwhile the invoker, in this particular case
the Recorder Yi, would keep a close watch on their condi
tion. When they were drunk, the invoker would announce that
the spirits had descended and begin to read the invocation
to them. To which the spirits would respond through the
79
mouthpieces of the impersonators possibly in a cryptic lan
guage, which only the invoker could decipher. Then the
invoker would convey the message to the master of the sacri
fice. The common formula for the message would be something
like this: "Fragrant were your pious offerings, /The Spirits
enjoyed their drink and food. /They assign to you a hundred
44-
blessings." Finally the impersonators would be sent off
to the accompaniment of the music of bells and drums and the
ceremony would be over.
In our discussion on the use of alcoholic drink as a
means of ecstasy we are on solid ground, for we have ample
literary sources to document it. But unfortunately when we
deal with our last topic, the use of Cannabis or hemp as a
hallucinogen to induce trance, we can only make inferences.
The first time I suspected that the ancient Chinese shaman
might have used hemp to induce trance was when I read "the
Senior Lord of Lives" of the Nine Songs. In this song the
shamaness plucks "the gem-like flower of the sparse-hemp" as:
a present and gives it to the departing god. The sparse-
hemp (su ma) is explained by Wang I as 1spirit-hemp1 (shen
4-5
ma). But what does Wang I mean by spirit-hemp?
Li Hui-lin, a botanist, points out that hemp was so
widely cultivated in ancient China that the phrase ’land of
mulberry and hemp’ became a synonym for 'cultivated fields.'
As a fiber plant, the hemp was used to make rope, hemp-
80
cloth, fishnet, and later in Han times, paper. Hemp seeds
were edible and were a major grain. But the coverings of
the seeds, produced by the female hemp flowers, are called
ma-fen, and the male hemp flowers, which are called ma-p'o,
are toxic. Their medicinal and physiological effects are
recorded in the earliest pharmacopoeia in existence, the
Pen-ts1ao Ching. This work was attributed to the legendary
Emperor Shen-nung of about 2,000 B.C., but was actually
compiled in the first or second century A.D. Li believes
that the Pen-ts1ao Ching was based on early traditions
passed down from ancient, even prehistoric times. It says,
"if ma-fen or ma-p'o were taken in excess, it would make
the user see hallucinations [literally 'see ghosts'] and
run wildly. If taken over a long period, it makes the
4-6
user communicate with the spirits and lightens his body."
Li also quotes from Ming-i pieh-lu, a work by the
famous physician T'ao Hung-ching of the fifth century A.D.,
in which T'ao says, "Ma-fen is not much used in prescrip
tions nowadays. Shamans use it in combination with ginseng
47
to set forward time in order to reveal future events."
Li concludes that the medicinal use of the hemp plant
was widely known to the Neolithic peoples of northeastern
Asia and Cannabis played an important role in the shamanic
rituals, and the use of this hallucinogenic drug in China
48
slowly declined with the establishment of Confucianism.
81
As the Pen-ts’ao Ching was compiled in the first or
second century A.D., we may assume that the information on
the medicinal and physiological effects of the hemp flowers
were readily available to Wang I and his contemporaries. So
when Wang I used ’spirit-hemp1 to explain 'sparse-hemp,1 he
was very likely referring to the hemp which would enable one
to see or to commmunicate with the spirits.
To sum up, the ancient Chinese shaman relied primarily
on the dance to the drum to achieve ecstasy and the most
popular dance of that time was the wan dance. Alcoholic
drink was used both in the sacrifice to nature gods and in
the ancestor worship. While the Ch’u people used cassia
wine and pepper drink in their sacrifice to the nature gods
as those appear in the Mine Songs, the Chou people used the
Ytl-f lavored black millet wine to bring down the spirits of
their ancestors. As to the use of hemp or marijuana as an
intoxicant, we do not have direct evidence and therefore it
can only be inferred. The use of hemp could be esoteric and
resulted in our lack of literary records.
82
NOTES
1 Chil Tuei-chih, ”Shih wu,” in Chung-kou shang-ku shih
lun-wen hsilan-chi, pp. 993-7; Chow Tse-tsung, "The
Childbirth Myth and Ancient Chinese Medicine: A Study
of Aspects of the Wu Tradition," in Ancient China:
Studies in Early Civilization, p. 66. Chow’s transla
tion of the Shuo-wen passage is as follows: "Wu is a
chu (invoker or priest), a woman who is able to render
[herself] invisible, and with dance to invoke gods to
come down. The character symbolizes the appearence of
a person dancing with two sleeves. It also means kung
(a craftsman). In antiquity Wu Hsien created the pro
fession of the wu."
2 Ch’fl Wan-li, Shang shu chi shih, p. 205; Glae Waltham,
Shu Ching. p. 184.
3 Jao Tsung-yi, Ch’u tseng-shu shu cheng (Commentary on
the Ch’u Silk Manuscript), pp. 4-5. The text of A-10
reads, "Tsan hua fa tiao, wei yii wei wan," can be
rendered into English as "To digest the jumping pat
tern, to do YtL's step and to do the wan dance." Jao
thought wan was the name of a person and tried to emend
it with Ming, who was drowned when he tried to bring
the floods under control.
4 This is my translation. Gf. Hawkes’s translation: "Ch’i
was often the guest of God and obtained the Nine Pien
and the Nine Songs." See Hawkes, p. 50.
5 Watson, The Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, p. 116.
6 Yiian Ko, Shan hai ching chiao chu, pp. 209-11 •
7 This is my translation based on the text of Chil Wan-li,
Shih Ching chuan shih, pp. 69-70. But the interpreta
tion of the first two verses and the last stanza is
entirely mine. The phrase fang tsiang ( ^ ^ ), which
I translate as ’Directional Sacrifice’ appears in the
Book of songs three times. In poem 38, "Chien hsi,"
we have "fang chiang wan wu (The Directional Sacrifice
and the wan dance)." In poem 205, "Pei shan," 1. 16,
we have "Hsien wo fang tsiang," which means "they
appreciate my ability in doing the Directioanal sacri
fice." And in poem 304, "Ch’ang fa," 1. 7, we have "Yu
jung fang tsiang," which means "Yu-jung was making the
___________________________________83_
Directional Sacrifice." Waley's translation of these
three verses is as follows: "He is just going to do
the Wan dance (p. 221);" "[Everyone] Is surprised I am
still so strong (p. 320); and "The clan of Sung was
favoured (p. 277)."
8 Ch'ii, p. 4-51 .
9 Ch'en Meng-chia, P 'u-tz *u tsung shu, p. 576.
10 Waley, The Book of Songs t pp. 338-40.
11 Shih san ching chu shu, pp. 1727-28.
12 Waley, The Analects of Confucius, p. 94*
13 Waley, The Book of Songs, p. 340.
14 Ibid.
15 Tung Ming, Wan hsiang: Chia-ku wen shih hua chi, p. 25.
16 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 1781.
17 Han Shu, 25 A.
18 Chang Shou-ping, Han tai ylleh-f u yil yileh-fu ko tz'u,
p. 89.
19 Fu Ssu-nien, "Yi Hsia tung hsi shuo," Fu. Ssu-nien
ch' ilan chi, vol. Ill, pp. 87-88.
20 Tso Chuan, Duke Ting, 16th year.
21 This is my translation. For it’s original text, see
Ch'ii, p. 232. The commentators are prejudiced against
shamanism and explain the word tang in line one as
'reckless.' For example, Karlgren's translation of
the first two lines is "How reckless you are, /On the
top of the Yiln-k'iu" (The Book of Odes. p. 87). But
when the same word appears in poem 255, "Tang," line
one, it is explained as 'mighty.' Waley's translation
of the first two lines of poem 255 is "Mighty is God
on high, /Ruler of His people below." (The Book of
Songs, p.252) I believe my interpretation of the first
stanza is correct.
22 Karlgren, The Book of Odes, p. 87.
84
23 This poem is also my translation. For it's Chinese
text, see Ch'ii, pp. 233-34* Karlgren points out that
the pepper plants are used for magical purposes, in
inducing the spirits to descend. See Karlgren, pp. 87-
88.
24 Ch'ii, pp. 87-88; Mi Wen-kai and Pei Pu-hsien, Shih
ching hsin shang yil yen chiut vol. I, pp. 68-70.
25 Lii Ssu-mien, Hsien Ch'in shih (A History of Pre-Ch'in
China), p. 275.
26 II Yon, Samguk yusa (in Chinese), vol. I, p. 2.
27 Lee Nung-hwa, Chao-hsien wu shu k 1ao (Studies on An
cient Korean Shamansim. p, 85.
28 See James Legge, trans. Li. Chi (the Book of Rites),
vol. II, p. 292 and Burton Watson, The Complete Works
of Chuang Tzu, p. 202. In Chuang Tzu, the practice of
austerities is for 'ten' days, not seven days.
29 Hawkes' translation of this line, "I heard that Wu
Hsien was descending in the evening, /So I lay in wait
with offerings of peppered riee-balls" is based on the
traditional commentary. The word hsfl (fg ) is a
variant of $pf . It means ' strained wine" or 1 clear
wine.' Cf. The Book of Odes, poem 165, 11. 35-36,
"When we have leisure, /We drink this strained wine
(Karlgren, p. 109)."
30 Hsu Gho-yun, Hsi Chou shih (A History of the Western
Chou), pp. 244-48.
31 Shih san ching chu shu, pp. 668-70.
32 Ibid.. pp. 662-63.
33 Ibid., p. 1792.
34 Ibid., pp. 770-72; Hsu Cho-yun, Hsi Chou shih, p. 244»
and Ch'ii Wan-li, Shang shu chi shih, p. 188.
35 Ibid.. p. 772.
36 Tz 'u Hai, p, 446; Li Shih-chen, Tu chileh pen-ts ' ao
kang-mu, p. 512.
37 See Curcuma in Encyclopedia of Horticulture.
85
38 Li Shih-chen, p. 512.
39 Waley, The Book of songs, p. 213.
40 These lines are my own translation. Waley's version
of the same lines, "I bestow upon you a jade sceptre
and a jade goblet, /And a bowl of black mead. /Announce
it to the Mighty Ones /That I give you hills, lands
and fields," is questionable and unusable. See Waley,
p. 132 .
41 For the Chinese text of this passage, see Ch'ii Wan-li,
Shang shu chi shih, pp. 187-89. My translation is
based on Clae Waltham, Shu Ching, pp. 173-74 with
emendations.
42 K. C. Chang, Art. Myth, and Ritual, p. 54.
43 Waley, The Book of Songs, p. 243.
44 Ibid., p. 210.
45 See Ch ' u Tz ' u chang chil in Ch ' u Tz ' u chu pa chung,
p. 41.
46 Li Hui-lin, "The Origin and Use of Cannabis in Eastern
Asia: Linguistic-Cultural Implications," Economic
Botany. 28 (1974), pp. 293-295.
47 Ibid., p. 296.
4-8 Ibid. . pp. 296-301.
86
CHAPTER V
THE CHARIOT AS A RITUAL VESSEL
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to
establish, using reliable literary sources, that there is a
special kind of chariot used as a ritual vessel in ancient
China. Second, to explain why when dragons are mentioned
together with the chariot in the Songs of the South, dragons
are a figure of speech for horses. My discussion is prima
rily based on the text itself, but I will also use the
findings of the archaeologists to support my argument.
The two-wheeled, horse-drawn Chinese chariot must have
been a symbol of wealth and power in ancient China, for the
making of a chariot would have taken hundreds of techni
cians. In the excavations of An-yang, it was discovered
that exquisitely made chariots were buried with the dead
Shang kings. Some of them were pulled by two horses, some
by four. They were obviously luxury grave goods for the
dead kings to enjoy. It has been reported that remains of
seven chariots from various sites are available for detailed
study and reconstruction. Thanks to the tireless efforts of
Chinese archaeologists, accurate and detailed information on
1
the Shang chariot is available to us.
The Shang chariot consisted of five major parts:
87
wheels, axle, body mounted on the axle, shaft, and yoke
(figure 1). In the words of Kwang-chih Chang, a leading
Chinese archaeologist, "both chariot and horses were richly
decorated with bronze and turquoise ornaments, and the char-
2
iot body was perhaps painted with animal designs." What I
should add here is that most of the ornaments were in the
shape of dragons.
The most common ritual vessels were the ting (tripot),
the tsun (wine container), and the tsu (meat stand). But
the chariot was also one of the ritual vessels that the
ancient Chinese people used to make sacrifice to Heaven or
to their ancestors. In the "Ritual Vessels" chapter of the
Book of Rites, in a discussion of the value of simplicity,
there is a brief and rather obscure statement: "the grand
chariot has one round of breast-buffer (ta lu fan .yin i
3
chiu)." From the commentary on this passage we learn that
the grand chariot is the chariot that the Shang people used
to make sacrifice to Heaven, and the whole sentence means
that the grand chariot is drawn by horses wearing only one
round of breast-buffer. So far as I know, there are no
descriptions of how the Shang people used the chariot to
make sacrifice on the Shang oracle bones. We may infer
this, however, from a poem from the duchy of Sung, the state
where the descendants of the conquered Shang people conti
nued to make sacrifice to their ancestors. Poem 302, "Lieh
88
tsu," of the Book of Songs is a hymn to T'ang, the founder
of the Shang dynasty. Someone must be impersonating him so
that he can drink the clear wine in the first stanza, sup
the soup in the second stanza, and take a joy ride in the
grand chariot in the third. Notice that the chariot is
expressed by a formulaic synecdoche:
Oh, oh, the glorious ancestor!
Great are his blessings.
His repeated gifts are countless.
They reach all of you.
We have brought him the clear wine;
He will give us perfect happiness.
Here is also a well seasoned soup,
With the right ingredients and the right flavor.
He has descended in silence
And stopped all contentions.
He secures us a ripe old age
Long after our hair has grown yellow.
With our bronze axle caps, our bronze-clad yokes,
With eight bells jingling,
We come to entertain him.
We are appointed to perform this great sacrifice.
From Heaven prosperity has descended,
Good years that are abundant.
He has come and he has accepted,
He sends down endless blessings.
He looks favorably on the winter and autumn
sacrifices
That T'ang's descendant brings.4-
The above poem is my translation. It differs from Waley's
version in at least three important places. First, while I
take this poem to be a hymn to T'ang alone, Waley thought it
89
was to the ancestors of Shang collectively. As the object
of worship involves the whole poem, this difference is a
considerable one. Second, my translation of 11. 9—10 is "He
has descended in silence/ And stopped all contentions." The
first two words of line 9, "tsou chia,1 1 is a pitfall. It is
an idiomatic expression which can mean either "the descent
of the spirit," or "praying for the descent of the spirit,"
depending upon the context. Waley1s rendition, "Because we
come in silence,/ Setting all quarrels aside," seems to
indicate that he tumbled in the pitfall, for the descent of
the spirit becomes the coming of the worshippers. Third,
Waley's translation of 11. 13-14-, the formulaic synecdoche
for the chariot, "With our leather-bound naves, our bronze-
5
clad yokes,/ With eight bells a-jangle," is based on the
traditional commentary. The remains of the chariots discov
ered by archaeologists prove that the traditional commentary
was wrong, for the wheels of the chariot are kept in their
proper places not by leather, but by bronze caps with linch-
6
pins.
By the time of Chou, the ritual chariot is called the
jade chariot (yd lu). A very informative description of the
jade chariot can be found in the Rites of Chou under the
entry of "the director of covered chariots, officials of
spring (chin ch'e, ch'un kuan)": "The director of covered
chariots is in charge of the policy of the royal chariots.
90
He distinguishes their use and their flags, and arranges
them in ranks to control their entrances and exits. The
king has five kinds of chariots. The first is called the
jade chariot, with bronze frontlets, twelve rounds of
breast-buffers, bearing the great flag with the sun and moon
7
design, and twelve streamers, for sacrifice.” According to
the same source, the second is called bronze chariot (chin
Lu) , which the king uses to entertain his guests. The third
is called ivory chariot (hsiang lu), which the king uses to
give audience. The fourth is called the leather chariot (ke
Lu), which is a war chariot. The last one is called wooden
chariot (mu lu), which the king uses to hunt. We also learn
that different chariots bear different flags and are drawn
by horses with different decorations. It should be pointed
cut here that the bronze frontlets and the breast-buffers
are decorations and equipment for the horses that draw the
chariot.
How the Chou people used the jade chariot to make
sacrifice to their ancestors can be illustrated by poem 283,
"Tsai chien," of the Book of Songs. The deceased and dei
fied king in the poem refers to King Wu, the conqueror of
Bhang and founder of Chou:
They have come to see the deified king
To learn what is the established ritual.
The dragon banners are fluttering,
The chariot bells and the banner bells chime.
91
The bronze horse ornaments tinkle
And sparkle with a glorious shine.
They are led to see their chao ancestor
To pay their homage and filial piety to him.
He increases their long life,
Which is theirs to keep forever.
Fine are the many favors
Bestowed by the glorious deified ancestor.
May he grant us many blessings
Continuously in our great abundance.8
For a more detailed description of the Chinese chariot,
we have to wait until the middle of the third century B.C.,
when Hstin Tzu (312-221 B.C. ?), the greatest Confucian aftei
Mencius, wrote the book that bears his name. The grand
chariot depicted by Hsiin Tzu runs as follows:
Thus the Son of Heaven has his grand chariot
spread with soft mats to satisfy his body. By his
side are placed fragrant herbs to satisfy his |
nose, and before him the carved bronze decorations
on the shaft to satisfy his eye. The sound of the
phoenix bells and the Wu and Hsiang music when he
is proceeding slowly, the Shao and Hu music when
he is proceeding rapidly, give satisfaction to his
ear. Nine dragon banners fly to satisfy his de
sire for a symbol of trust. Painting of a recum
bent rhinoceros and a rearing tiger, horse girths
of water-dragon pattern, fine woven spreads, and
dragonhead ornaments satisfy his desire for awe
some spectacle. And the horses which draw his
grand chariot must be of the utmost reliability
and highly trained before he will consent to ride.
In this way he satisfies his desire for safety.9
The above passage is invaluable because it can be considered
an authentic witness account of the ancient Chinese chariot.
92
By perusing this passage, we can understand why the horses
are figuratively called dragons. It can also illuminate
Lome of the obscure lines in the Nine Songs. To cite just
one example: By knowing that there can be a painting on the
sides of the box, in this particular case, of a rearing
tiger about to attack a recumbent rhinoceros, we realize
that line 12 of ’ ’the River God," "Shen po yilan hsi tsung
wen yh," has been misinterpreted. It should neither be
translated as "Riding a white turtle, followed by stripy
•fish" as Waley has done, nor as "Riding a white turtle, he
Lhases the spotted fishes" as Hawkes has rendered it. It is
a painting on the body of the water chariot. And the paint-
!ing is the scene of a white turtle chasing a spotted fish.
I know this might make the poem sound less exotic and read
ers who are fond of the fantastic might be unwilling to
forgo the traditional reading. But I believe mine is a
correct reading and it has the merit of making the poem more
logical and coherent. For one thing, it spares the River
God the trouble of changing his transportation and abandon
ing the water chariot, which has enough magic power to scale
Mount K'un-lun as well as to roam the Nine Rivers. For
another, it conforms with the other pieces of this set of
songs in which the gods descend and ascend in the same
chariot.
Why are the horses that draw the chariot in the Songs
93
of the South often referred to as dragons? Jessica Rawson’s
account of the Chou chariot provides us a very good answer:
The wooden chariot, which in shape the Chou took
over from the Shang, would have glistened with
bronze. Straight bands decorated the sides of the
box, and bronze parts were used as components of
the axle and the harness. In the early Western
Chou, the most important and decorative section of
the axle was a round shaft-holder attached near
the box of the chariot with its flat flange lying
along the axle towards the wheels (figure 3). On
the other side of the wheel was the axle cap, kept
in place by a linchpin. Such axle caps became
shorter during the centuries of the Western Chou.
At the same time, the shaft fitting was replaced
by a somewhat larger and completely circular set
of bronze fittings.
The system of yoking the horses to a cross-shaft
had always been important, and a bronze fitting in
the shape of an inverted V was used for this
purpose, reinforced at the top by a boss or tube.
At a later date, the other two ends of this V-
shaped yoke were decorated with two finials. A
jingle was attached to this yoke and shaft com
plex. The actual harness of the horses was richly
ornamented with a frontlet at the centre of the
face (figure 2), and bronze ornaments forming a
mask on the eyes and nose. A further mask was
often mounted above the ears. The thongs of the
harness were decorated with beads, cowries, or
bronze plaques, and passed through decorated
cross-tubes. A bit with rectangular cheek-pieces
was used from the late Shang period. By the end
of the Western Chou this plain form had been
elaborated, and a great variety of designs, parti
cularly of coiled dragons, was in use (figure 4)*
These copious and often hampering bronze ornaments
underline the ceremonial nature of the chariot,
which must have been an awesome sight.10
By examining figure 3 we understand the meaning of the
word,'dragon-shafted (1.5),’ in "the Lord of the East," for
94
the wooden shaft is decorated with a bronze fitting on which
coiled dragons can be seen. Similarly by looking at figures
2 and 4-, we understand why the horses are called dragons,
for the frontlet and the mask they wear are dragons. To use
an ornament of a horse to stand for the horse is the use of
synecdoche, a figure of speech commonly employed in classi
cal Chinese poetry. Unfortunately this particular figura
tive use of dragon has gone unnoticed and has been taken
literally for the past two thousand years.
An example of this misreading can be found in "the Lord,
of the Hsiang," the Nine Songs. Witness Waley’s transla
tion:
Driving her winged dragons she has gone to
the North;
I turn my boat and make for Tung-t’ing.
In the morning I gallop my horses through the
lowlands by the river;
In the evening I stay my course at that
northern shore.11
(11. 9-10, 29-30)
Here is another version of the same lines by Hawkes:
North I go, drawn by flying dragons,
Bending my course to the Tung-t’ing lake,
In the morning I gallop beside the river,
And stop at dusk in the northern island. 12
13
Waley’s version is probably based on Chu Hsi's commentary.
95
jit is a confused jumble. Hawkes gives us a better ren
dering. But it is still inconsistent. We wonder why Lord
Hsiang’s chariot, which is drawn by flying dragons in 11. 9-
10, becomes one drawn by horses in 11. 29-30. By reading
the synecdoche correctly, we can remove the inconsistency
and get a straight-forward version as follows:
I drive north on my flying-dragon chariot
By way of the Tung-t'ing Lake;
• • • • • •
At dawn I galloped beside the Great River;
At dusk I reined my horses on the northern isle.
Ch’tl Xiian is a good reader and a good imitator of the
Mine Songs. He understands fully that the flying dragons
are a synecdoche. When he describes the vehicle of his two
heavenly journeys in quest of a beauty in his long poem, "Li
sao." he uses "The Lord of Hsiang" as his model. He begins
by saying that his chariot is drawn by dragons. But as if
to forestall his being misunderstood, he would remind his
reader just a few lines later that they are horses. Here is
the vehicle of his first journey:
I yoked a team of jade dragons to a phoenix-
figured car
And waited for the wind to come, to soar up on
my j ourney.
• • • • « •
I watered my horses at the Pool of Heaven,
And tied the reins up to the Fu-sang tree.14-
(11. 93, 98)
96
Could jade dragons draw the chariot? Possibly yes, for
nothing is impossible in a shamanistic journey. But more
probably they were the decorations of the horses. In his
second journey Ch'tl Yflan has a different chariot:
Harness winged dragons to be my coursers;
Let my chariot be of fine work of jade and ivory!
• •••mm
My eight dragons flew on with writhing
undulations;
My cloud-embroidered banners flapped on the wind.
• • ••••
The groom's heart was heavy and the horses for
longing
Arched their heads back and refused to go on.15
(11. 170, 181, 185)
By the time when we come to line 185, we should realize that
the winged dragons and the eight dragons in lines 170 and
181 are figurative speeches. This is presumably difficult
for an inexperienced reader to discover, for the winged
dragons and the horses are separated by fourteen lines. His:
impression could be that the chariot was at first drawn by
dragons, but in one way or another, they were transformed
into horses by the end of the poem. But there is no excuse
for such a misreading in "Ytian yu (the Far-off Journey),"
where the horses follow the dragons immediately:
I harness eight dragons, coiling and curveting,
And bore a cloud banner that flapped in the wind.
97
I set up a bright standard made of the rainbow,
The five colours dazzling the eye with their
contrast.
Splendidly the yoke-horses bowed and tossed their
heads;
Proudly the trace-horses arched and curved
themselves.16
(11. 52-54)
To conclude, I believe I have cited sufficient examples
to demonstrate that when dragons are mentioned together with
the chariot, they are a synecdoche for horses. If I have
succeeded, my readers will certainly understand the follow
ing passage from "Monthly Instructions," the Book of Rites
("Yiieh ling," Li Chi) with perfect ease:
In the first month of spring...the Son of Heaven
occupies the apartment on the left of Ch'ing-yang
hall; rides in the phoenix chariot drawn by the
azure-dragons and carrying the green flag....17
98
NOTES
1 K. C. Chang, Shang Civilization. pp. 196-200; Shih
Chang-ju, "Yin Tai ti ch'e," Ta-lu Tsa-chih. 36, no. 10
(1968), 317-320; and Tseng Yung-i, Yi l_i ch' e ma k 'ao .
pp. 42-4-7.
2 Chang, p. 200.
3 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 14-32.
4- The text I use for my translation is Gh'ii Wan-li' s Shih
Ching chuan shih, pp. 620-21. Ch'ii's notes are very
useful but not flawless. Some of my interpretations
differ from his radically, for example, 1, 16, where my
translation is "We are appointed to perform this great
sacrifice," if I followed his notes, it would become
"Our charge is great and long."
5 Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs. p. 217.
6 Jessica Eawson, Ancient China: Art and Archaeology.
p. 101.
7 Shih san ching chu shu. pp. 822-23-
8 Ch'ii Wan-li, Shih Ching chuan shih. pp. 578-79. My
translation of this poem is again very different from
Waley's version, see Waley, The Book of Songs. p. 225-
9 This is Watson's translation with slight emendation. I
substitute 'grand chariot (ta lu)1 for his 'great car
riage' and 'a rearing tiger' for his 'a solitary
tiger.' See Burton Watson, Basic Writings of Mo Tzu.
Hstin Tzu. and Han Fei Tzu. p. 90 and Liang Ch'i-hsiung,
Hstln Tzu chien shih. pp. 254-55.
10 Rawson, pp. 101-103.
11 Arthur Waley, The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in
Ancient China, pp. 29-30.
12 David Hawkes, The Songs of the South, pp. 37-38.
13 Chu Hsi, Ch'u Tz'u chi chu. vol. II, p. 3-
14 This translation is Hawkes' with a slight emendation.
99
Probably in an attempt to keep up with the illusion of
dragons, Hawkes renders the word ma (horses) as 'dragon
steeds.' See Hawkes, p. 28.
15 Ibid.. pp. 33-34.
16 Ibid., p. 84*
17 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 1361 .
100
CHAPTER VI
AUTHORSHIP AND DATING
The authorship and the dating of the Nine Songs are two
closely related problems. On the one hand, if we accepted
the traditional view that Ch'ii Yilan (<;. 343-285 B.C.) was
the author, then it would be unnecessary for us to discuss
the date of their composition, for it would be reasonable
to assume that they were composed around 300 B.C. On the
other hand, if we can establish that they were written long
before Ch'ii Yilan' s time, then Ch'ii Yilan is naturally not
their author.
Before rejecting Ch'ii Yilan as their author and propos
ing a possible new date for their composition, I believe it
only fair to give the traditional view a brief account and
point out why it is incorrect.
The traditional view on the authorship of the Nine
Songs comes from Wang I (fl. 107-144 A.D.), the compiler
of Ch' u Tz'u, who alleged that Ch'ii Yilan wrote them. The
following passage is my translation of Wang's preface to
the Nine Songs:
The Nine Songs were composed by Ch'ii Yilan. For
merly the people who lived in the southern part of
101
Ch'u, between the Yfian River and the Hsiang River,
were very superstitious and fond of making sacri
fices. When they made sacrifices, they composed
songs, beat drums, and danced to entertain all
gods. When Ch'ii Yttan was exiled to this area, he
was very bitter and sad. He saw the ritual and
the music and dance of the common people. ' He
found that the words of their songs were crude and
composed the Nine Songs for them. On the one
hand, he related his reverence in serving the
gods; on the other hand, he revealed his being
wronged. And he also used them to remonstrate.
That's why there are many layers of meaning, and
some stanzas and lines are mixed up, and full of
different interpretations.1
Wang I's view has been accepted as true for almost two
thousand years. It has never been challenged until the
twentieth century when Hu Shih said, "The Nine Songs have
nothing to do with the legend of Ch'tt Yilan. When we take
la closer look, we will find that these nine pieces are the
oldest ones among the whole anthology. They are the songs
I 2
and dances of the people of Hsiang." Lu Kan-ju was the
first scholar who agreed with Hu's opinion. In his A Criti
cal Biography of Ch' 1 1 Yiian, Lu lists two important reasons
offered by Hu. First, if the Nine Songs were written by
|Ch'il Ytian, then nothing could be found as a source of the
Songs of the South. A literary history of Ch'u Tz'u would
become a record of miracles. Second, the Nine Songs are
clearly pioneering works earlier than Li sao and other
pieces. Hu and Lu would rather attribute this evolution to
the genre as a whole than to a single person called Ch'tl
1 02
3
liian.
Hu is certainly correct in maintaining that we should
attribute the evolution from the Nine Songs to Lj. sao to the
Igenre as a whole rather than to a single person called Ch'ii
Itian, for evolution is slow and usually takes more than a
man's lifetime to run its course. Later in my discussion on
the dating problem I shall build up the case for Hu's theo
ry. But I do not agree with him when he says that the songs
were the religious songs of the Hsiang people. I believe
the reverse is true. They were first composed for the court
and later became popular and available to the people. For
the time being, I shall first point out that Wang's allega
tion that the Nine Songs were modeled on the folk songs of
the south of Ch'u was unfounded and then discuss why Ch'ii
Xiian is not their author.
I would argue that the Nine Songs were primarily writ
ten for the court on the basis of the following three obser
vations. First, in the prologue, "The Great Unique, Monarch
of the East," a jade weight is displayed. This jade weight,
according to the Rites of Chou (T'ien-fu, Ch'un-kuan, Chou
Hi), is a great treasure of the state. Only on the occasion
of a great sacrifice or a great funeral does the t'ien-fu
official take it out and display it. After the ceremony, he
k
puts it away. For a commoner to possess such a precious
treasure is against the law and punishable by death. The
_____' ___________ 103
presence of the jade weight indicates that these songs were
songs of the court, not of the common people. Second, the
gods that the female invoker or shamaness brings down in
these songs all come in a grand style— each of them rides
in a chariot of a special design. If one performs the Nine
Songs to the letter of each song, one needs at least eight
luxuriously decorated chariots as props. In Han times, when
these songs were already misread, the Han court built wooden
dragons and wooden chariots as stage props. But either the
real chariots or the wooden ones are far beyond the economic
means of the common people. Third, the inclusion of a hymn
to "the Martyrs of the State" is also a piece of strong evi
dence that the ceremony is a national one, for the common
people do not have the right to hold a ceremony for the
soldiers who died in action, only the head of a state does.
Ancient China was a theocratic society. The monopoly of
sacrifice was the monopoly of political power. There were
rules governing the gods that one could worship. The higher
one's social status, the more gods one could worship. The
son of heaven could worship the God on High and all other
gods. But the barons could only worship those within their
territory. As to the commoners, all they could worship were
5
the household gods, such as the god of the stove.
Why is Ch'ii Yiian not the author of the Nine Songs? One
of the reasons can be deduced from the references he made to
104
them in his own works. He made three references to the Nine
Songs, one in T1ien wen and two in Li sao. The three refe
rences are as follows: (1) "Ch'i often called upon God, /And
obtained the Nine Variations and the Nine Songs (1. 65,
T1ien wen)." (2) "In the Nine Variations and the Nine Songs
of Ch’i /The House of Hsia made revelry and knew no res-
6
traint (l. 74., Li. sao.)," and (3) "I played the Nine Songs
and danced the Nine Shao dances /To have a holiday and to
while away my sorrows (l. 183, Li sao)." From the first
reference we know that there was a legend which maintained
that it was Ch'i, the second ruler of the Hsia dynasty, who
first obtained the Nine Songs from God and made use of them
long ago. From the second and the third references, we can
conclude that the Nine Songs were entertaining and even
licentious in nature, for Ch'i abused them and became dissi
pated and Gh'ti Yflan played them to while away his sorrows.
In short, these references imply that the Nine Songs had
come into existence long before his time and he is not their
author.
Incidentally, the nine songs could be a common name and
not a proper name. In the Han Nineteen Sacrificial Songs
number 8, "Heaven and Earth," we find the following verses:
"As stately as the old model, /To serve the Supreme God, /We
come together to entertain the Great Unique. /The nine songs
are played with an outstanding effect.../We make these new
105
7
tunes last forever." We all know that the Han Nineteen
Sacrificial Songs were composed after the model of the Nine
Songs. But few of us notice that these Han songs refer to
themselves as the nine songs. Because of this example, I
suspect that any set of songs that the king or the emperor
uses to make the suburban (chiao) sacrifice, or a sacrifice
to the Supreme God and other gods can be called the nine
songs. To put it another way, only the nature of the songs
counts, the texts are immaterial. Did the Ch’u poet write
the Nine Songs on the old model of Ch’i? I do not know.
But it is a possibility.
In his introduction to the Nine Songs, Arthur Waley
deliberately avoided voicing his opinion on the authorship
of the Songs, for one of his students, David Hawkes, was
writing his Ph. D. thesis, "The Problem of Date and Author-
8
ship of Ch1 u Tz 'u,1 1 at that time. Hawkes' discussion on
this problem, unfortunately, turns out to be quite careless
'and illogical. The greater part of the poems in this an
thology are written in one of two styles. The rest in a
mixture of both. One of them is called the "Song style,"
because all eleven pieces of the Nine Songs are written in
this form. A typical "Song style" line runs like this: "turn
itum turn hsi turn turn." The other is named "Sao style" after
Ch'ii Yiian's famous long narrative poem, Li. sao. A typical
"Sao style" line runs like this: "turn turn turn tee turn turn
106
bsi, turn turn turn tee turn turn,1 1 whose length is more than
double that of the "Song style." Hawkes is certainly right
in saying, "I think there can be little doubt that Sao-
style verse was evolved from the Song style." But when he
comes to discuss the authorship of the Songs, he hestating-
ly maintains: "This suggests to my mind that the author was
a Ch’u poet writing not long after Ch'ii Yilan and familiar
I 9
with his work."
My research shows that the Nine Songs were written
before the sixth century B.C., at least two hundred years
before Ch'ii Yilan' s time. In Shuo Yilan, or the Park of
Speeches, a collection of effective speeches compiled by
biu Hsiang (77-6 B.C.), there is an intriguing story about
a Ch'u prince, named E, who went on a state visit to the
state of Yileh. He was entertained by the Yiieh people with a
shamanic seance on board an exquisite boat which floated on
L river. At the end of the seance the Yiieh shaman leaned
on the oar and improvised a song. The prince could not
understand the song and summoned an interpreter. The inter
preter duly put the Yileh song into a Ch'u one. The prince
was pleased with the song and showered favor on the shaman.
3oth the Ch'u version of the song and a transliteration of
10
the Yiieh song are recorded in the story.
Prince E (committed suicide in 529 B.C.) was a histori
cal personage. King Kung (590-60 B.C.) was his father, and
107
King Kang (559-45 B.C.) and King Ling (54-0-29 B.C.) were his
elder brothers. The visit was politically motivated, for
Ch'u 's eastern neighbor, the state of Wu, was on the rise at
that time and had annexed many of Ch'u's former satellite
states; Ch'u wanted Yiieh, Wu's southern neighbor, to grow
powerful so that she could act as a check on Wu's expansion.
A great majority of Chinese scholars are convinced that the
story is true and take the Yileh-jen Song as one of the
forerunners of Ch'u Tz’u. Let us first take a look at the
words of the song:
What night is tonight to be floating in the
stream?
What day is today to be with the prince in the
same boat?
Being spoken evil or well, I do not care at all.
My heart is full of incessant longing to know the
prince.
The hill has trees and the trees have branches.
My heart delights in you but you don't know it.11
This little song has only six lines and the message is quite
plain. The Yiieh shaman, whose sex is not indicated by the
text, expresses his or her love for the guest of honor,
Prince E. What is more important is how this song is writ
ten. We find that the first four lines are written in a
halting Sao style and the last two in Song style, almost an
exact copy of "The Yiian has its angelicas; the Li its or
chids. /I think of my young lord, but dare not speak" (11.
108
3-10, HFJ).
Since the Sao style was evolved from the Song style, I
would rather take this little song as one of the links
Detween the Mine Songs and III sao in the evolution of Ch1u
■Tz1u. In other words, the Nine Songs must have been in
sxistence before 529 B.C. If the Nine Songs did not exist
oefore that time, we may legitimately ask, could the inter-
oreter of Prince E put the Yiieh-jen Song into the form as
it is? It is unlikely. To explain this, let me use a de
liberately chosen analogy. Let us suppose that Yilan Mei
(1715-1797), a major Ch1ing poet, had very good command of
Snglish and wanted to translate the Sonnets of William
Shakespeare into Chinese. Could he translate them into the
vernacular Chinese poetic form as Professor Liang Shih-chiu
did? The answer is no, because vernacular poetry did not
exist in Yiian's time, and the possibility of his inventing
a . new medium, the vernacular poetic form, would be very
slim indeed.
We can see at a glance that the "turn turn turn tee turn
turn hsi turn turn turn tee turn turn" verse pattern of the Sao
style is far more versatile as a medium of expression than
the "turn turn turn hsi turn turn" verse pattern of the Song
style and that the former evolves from the latter. But how
Long would it take for the Song style to evolve into the Sao
style? We may presume that no one can give us a definite
109
answer. But let us use another analogy. If we compare the
prose of the historical documents of early Western Chou
(11th century B.C.) such as "the Speech at Mu" and "the
Announcement Concerning Lo" in Shu (Book of Documents) with
that of the Tso Commentary (written in 4-th century B.C.),
we notice that the archaic Chinese prose takes about seven
centuries to develop from its incipient stage to its matu
rity. It is indeed a long and slow process. Therefore it
is no exaggeration to say that it may take decades of years
or even centuries for the Song style to evolve into the Sao
style. But some conservative scholars may not be convinced
by the theory of literary evolution. We have to produce
something more concrete to persuade them. Fortunately we
can find a few pieces of internal evidence to make our case
stronger.
One piece of evidence that I want to present first is
the use of the war chariot described in "the Martyrs of the
State." This war chariot has two wheels and is drawn by
four horses. It is identical with the war chariots men
tioned in the Book of Songs. The latest piece in the Book
of Songs is poem 1 53 > "Hsia chdan" of the Kuo feng section,
which, according to Chti Wan-li, was composed around the
12
twenty-seventh year of Duke Chao (515 B.C.). Historians
of ancient China generally agree that the chariot had been
is use in wars since the late Shang dynasty around the 13th
110
century B.C. and that its importance in military operation
had decreased considerably by the end of the Spring and
Autumn period (770-476 B.C.). In other words, at the be
ginning of the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.) the
mounted soldiers, because of their greater mobility, had
gradually come to replace the war chariots. We learn that
in 302 B.C. King Wu-ling of Chao (reigned 325-299 B.C.)
introduced a military innovation. He discarded the war
chariots entirely and adopted the riding habit of the north
western barbarians for his soldiers and made them learn to
shoot on horseback. The innovation had an instant success.
He conquered the State of Chung-shan, invaded Lin Hu and Lou
13 |
Fan, and Chao became one of the big powers. All the other
states immediately followed King Wu-ling's suit.
The reason for the decline of the war chariots and the
rise of the mounted soldiers has been clearly pointed out
by Jessica Rawson. In her words, the "chariots cannot have
been very practical. It must have been impossible to take
large numbers of them long distances to campaigns on the
frontiers. Ruts in poor roads, bad terrain, the summer
rains with floods, and broad rivers would have completely
14
incapacitated them." Likewise, the poet of "the Martyrs
of the State" writes, "My left trace horse is dead; my
right one, wounded. /The two wheels are sunk; the four
horses, stuck." It is clear that the poet fully realizes
111
the cumbersomeness and the vulnerability of the war chariot.
Of course it is possible for the poet to have depicted a
battle scene of long ago. But it is more likely that he
composed it while the chariot was still an important weapon.
Therefore I would suggest that he was a poet of the late
Spring and Autumn period. Because the eleven pieces of the
Nine Songs are homogeneous in style, if one of them was
composed in the late Spring and Autumn period, naturally the
other pieces would have been composed at the same time.
My next piece of evidence is also from "the Martyrs of
the State." We notice that the Ch'u soldiers use imported
weapons, the Wu halberds and the Ch’in bows. Both were the
best available at that time. The state of Ch1 in had a long
history and is therefore of no use in our detective work.
But the state of Wu had an usually short history. As a
matter of fact, it is the shortest-lived of the powerful
states. The rise of Wu is recorded in the seventh year of
Duke Ch'eng (584- B.C.), when Wu waged a war against a neigh
boring small state, Tan. At that time she was looked down
upon as a barbarian tribe. The fall of Wu is dated 4-73
B.C., when she was completely extinguished by Yileh. There
were only seven kings: Shou-meng (reigned 585-561 B.C.),
Chu-fan (reigned 560-54-8 B.C.), Yu-chi (reigned 54-7-531
B.C.), Yu-mei (reigned 530-527 B.C.), Liao (reigned 526-515
B.C.), Ho-lil (reigned 514--496 B.C.), and Fu-cha (reigned
112
4-95-4-73 B.C.); the state lasted only 113 years. Wu became
really strong under the last two kings. Ho-lii was able to
sack Ying, the capital of Ch'u, in 506 B.C., and King Chao
of Ch'u (reigned 515-4-89 B.C.) fled. Fu-cha defeated Yiieh
in 4-94- B.C. and Kou-chien, the king of Yiieh, was forced to
beg for a peace treaty, which was signed in the same year.
Then Fu-cha engaged himself in the north to contend for
hegemony against Chin. While he was thus occupied, Kou-
chien, the defeated king of Yiieh, was slowly but patiently
preparing for his revenge. After twenty years of prepara
tion, he finally terminated Wu in 4-73 B.C.
We do not know the exact date when the sharp Wu halberd
became famous and a great quantity of them began to be
exported to the other states. But we can guess that, not
unlike the arms sales of the United States of America, the
sale of the halberds could have given an edge to Wu over the
other states, and the sudden surge of power of the last two
kings in the political arena of ancient China might have
been at least partly the result of the sale and the use of
this deadly weapon. Since the use of the Wu halberds by the
Ch'u soldiers has a definite upper limit of 584- B.C. and a
possible lower limit of 4-73 B.C., it would be reasonable to
assume that "The Martyrs of the State" very likely was
composed in the second half of the sixth century B.C. This
correlates well with the use of the war chariot.
113
From the arguments I have presented in the preceding
paragraphs, we may conclude that the most probable date for
the composition of the Nine Songs is in between the rise of
the state of Wu in 584- B.C. and the death of Prince E of
Ch'u in 529 B.C. We may assume that it was during this
period that one of the Ch'u kings commissioned a court poet
to compose the Nine Songs for him. The Ch'u kings who
reigned during this period are King Kung (590-60 B.C.), King
Kang (559-4-5 B.C.), King Hsia-ao (54-4--4-1 B.C.), and King
Ling (54-0-29 B.C.). I have examined thoroughly all avail
able historical records on these four kings and discovered
that the best candidate is King Ling.
King Ling was the second son of King Kung (reigned 590-
60 B.C.). Ling ("the spiritual") is a posthumous title.
His name was Wei, alias Hsiung-chien. Among all the Ch'u
kings, King Ling is probably the most well-known for his
indulgence in shamanism. Therefore the posthumous title is
significant and a fit description of his life.
For example, King Ling built a mound at Changhua sur
mounted by a new palace, solely for the purpose of perform
ing shamanic rituals such as those described by the Nine
Songs. We do not know the exact date when he began to builc
it, but it was completed in 535 B.C. This construction wort
must have been a considerable one, for we find it recorded
in the Tso Commentary, Records of the Grand Historian of
1 U
China, and the "Discourse of Ch'u" in the Discourses of the
States (Kuo yil). The Tso Commentary says, "The King of Ch'u
entertained Duke Chao with the ritual on the newly built
mound. He used long-bearded men as impersonators of gods
and gave Duke Chao a bow of Ta-ch'tt as a gift of goodwill
15
(Duke Chao, 7th year)." The "Discourse of Ch'u" contains
much more information on the building of the mound, and I
will translate and quote it in its entirety:
King Ling built a mound at Changhua and as
cended it with Wu-chti [his senior minister],
asking: "Isn't the mound beautiful?" Wu-chtl re
plied, "I have heard that the king of a state
considers it beautiful to bestow favors on worthy
officials, pleasurable to bring peace to his peo
ple, intelligent to listen to virtues, and dis
cerning to win the good will of the distant peo
ple. I have not heard of any who consider it
beautiful to have a tall building with red-lac
quered woodwork, or pleasurable to listen to the
thrilling, loud, cacophonous, and multitudinous
musical instruments, or discerning to watch the
spectacular, to see the luxurious, and to gaze at
the licentious; nor have I heard of any who con
sider it intelligent to be able to distinguish the
various qualities of tones."
"My former sovereign King Chuang built a
mound called Pao-chii. Its height was just enough
to watch the good or bad omens of the atmosphere,
its size was just enough to display the ritual
vessels, the wood it used would not interfere with
the defence of the cities, its expenses needed no
support from the state coffer, the people went
about their daily routines as usual, and the offi
cials did not change their usual audiences. Who
were at the state dinner? They were the Duke of
Sung and the Baron of Cheng. Who acted as the
impersonators of gods in the ritual? They were
Hua-yiian and Ssu-fei. Who assisted in the
115
ritual? They were the Baron of Ch'en, the Baron
of Ts'ai, the Viscount of Hsil, and the Count of
Tun, who were in turn waited upon by their respec
tive high officials. My former sovereign was
therefore able to remove disorder and conquer his
enemies without incurring any enmity from the
various feudal lords. Whereas in building this
mound, my sire, the people of the state were worn
out, the revenue was exhausted, the crops were
ruined, the hundred officials were disturbed, the
whole state all chipped in for the work, yet
several years had elapsed before it was completed.
I know that you wanted the other feudal lords to
participate in the opening ceremony, but all of
them refused and none had come. Then you dis
patched Grand Chamberlain Chi-chien to invite the
Duke of Lu, and intimidate him with the Incident
of Shu, and he was the only guest you had got.
You made the charming, languorous young maidens
invokers and the handsome long-bearded men imper
sonators of gods. I really couldn't see anything
beautiful in it."16
So King Ling got a sound lecture from his senior minister.
jBut the lecture reveals much about the personality of King
(Ling. We learn that he was quite good at music, for he was
Lble to "distinguish the various qualities of tones." We
Llso learn that he was a sensual man, for he loved "to watch
the spectacular, to see the luxurious, and to gaze at the
licentious." But what are the spectacular, the luxurious,
land the licentious? To my mind, they refer to the decent of
gods with a dazzling light, the richly decorated chariots,
and the love scenes between gods and maidens described in
the Nine Songs respectively. Furthermore, we learn that he
made innovations in the shaianic rites. Wu-chii points out
116
that King Chuang (reigned 613-591 B.C.) used Hua-ydan, a
cabinet minister of Sung, and Ssu-fei, a prince of Cheng,
as impersonators of gods, and the Baron of Ch'en and others
Lssisted in the ritual as invokers. Instead of following
this well-established convention, King Ling made "the
charming, languorous young maidens invokers and the handsome
long-bearded men impersonators of gods," who were obviously
professional shamans. The purpose of these innovations, I
Ltrongly believe, was to meet the requirements of the text
cf the Nine Songs. For example, in "the Junior Lord of
Lives" it is mentioned that the altar is filled with fair
Ladies and the god is referred to as "my bonny one." To put
such a poem into performance, an all male cast of barons and
aigh officials would of course be less effective and aesthe
tically less satisfying than the one made up of the charm
ing, languorous young maidens and the handsome long-bearded
nen. And what do "the thrilling, loud, cacophonous, and
multitudinous musical instruments" refer to? I suspect that
they refer to "Tune the zither strings and beat the drums in
unison. /Strike the bells until the bell-stand rocks. /The
flutes are piping, the reed-organs blowing" in "the Lord of
the East."
Another source can be quoted to show that King Ling was
probably the head shaman and he took an active part in the
seance:
117
Formerly King Ling of Gh’u was proud and disdain
ful to his inferiors. He was insolent to the wise
and devoted himself to serving the spirits. He
believed in shamanism. He fasted and purified
himself to sacrifice to God on High and all other
gods. He held the feather plume and danced in the
altar. When the Wu people attacked Ch’u and the
news was brought to him, King Ling kept on drum
ming and dancing as if nothing had happened and
said, "We are serving God on High and entertaining
the other gods. Surely we will be blessed." He
did not send troops to rescue the besieged city
and the heir apparent and the queen and his concu
bines were taken prisoners by the Wu people. It
is indeed a great pity.17
When the king "held the feather plume and danced in the
altar," he was obviously an impersonator trying to bring
down a certain god. This incident took place shortly before
his death in 529 B.C. King Ling, a staunch believer in
shamanism till death, was probably responsible for the com-
nision of a court poet to compose the Nine Songs.
118
NOTES
1 Gfr1 u Tz * u chang chd in Gh ' u Tz'u chu pa chung , p.33«
2 See "Tu Ch'u Tz'u1” in Hu Shih wen ch'un, vol. II,
p. 94> quoted, by Yu Tse-ch'eng, Gh1 u Tz1 u kai lun,
p. 72.
3 Yu Tse-ch'eng, p. 72.
4 Shih san ching chu shu, p. 776.
5 See Kuo Yd, p. 567 and. "Chi fa," Li Chi in Shih san
ching chu shu, pp. 1588-90.
6 This is Hawkes' translation. See Hawkes, p. 26.
7 Ghang Shou-ping, Han tai yiieh-fu yd yileh-fu ko tz'u,
(Taipei: Kuan-wen Bookstore, 1970)7 p. 89-
8 See Arthur Waley, The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism
in Ancient China, pp. 16-17 and Geoffrey R. Waters,
Three Elegies of Ch'u, p. 5•
9 Hawkes, The Songs of the South, p. 36.
10 The story of Prince E is quoted in full by Ling Shun-
sheng, "Kuo Shang and Li Hun of the Nine Songs and the
Ceremonies of Head-hunting and Head-feast," Bulletin of
the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 15 (1961T7
4-1 6-7.
11 The text of the Ydeh-jen Song can be found in Chu Hsi's
Ch'u Tz'u hou yd, vol. I, p. 10 in Ch'u Tz'u chu pa
chung and Yu Tse-ch'eng, p. 30.
12 Chd Wan-li, Shih Ching chuan shih, p. 259.
13 Tz'u Hai, p. 1946.
14- Jessica Rawson, Ancient China: Art and Archaeology, p.
101. The ineffectiveness of the war chariots on a
certain terrain was discovered as early as the first
year of Duke Chao (541 B.C.). The Tso Commentary says,
"Chung-hang Mu-tzu of Chin defeated the Wu-chung and
other Ti tribes in T'ai-ydan by the use of foot sol
diers. When they were about to fight, Wei Shu said,
119
'They are all foot-men, while our force consists of
chariots. We must meet them in a narrow pass. Let us
substitute ten men for each chariot, and we shall
overcome them. Even straitened in a pass, we shall
overcome them. Let us all turn ourselves into foot
soldiers. I myself will take the lead.' Accordingly
he put aside his chariots, and formed the men into
ranks, five chariots furnishing three ranks of five men
each. A favorite officer of Hsiln Wu [Chung-hang Mu-
tzu] was unwilling to take his place among the foot
soldiers. Shu beheaded him as an example... He in
flicted on the Ti tribes a great defeat.''
15 Ta-ch'd is a place name. The bow was obviously a very
precious one. After having given it away, King Ling
regretted. The Grand Chamberlain Chi-chien heard about
it and went to see the Duke of Lu. The duke informed
him of the gift. He bowed and offered his congratula
tions. "On what do you congratulate me?" asked the
duke. "Ch'i, Chin, and Yiieh," replied Chi-chien, "have
wished to get this bow for a long time. Our ruler did
not see it fit to give it to any of them but to you.
You must be prepared to defend against these three
neighbors to keep this treasure. The duke was fright
ened and returned the bow to King Ling.
16 Kuo Yti, pp. 541-42.
17 Quoted by Peng Yi, "Ch'u tz'u chiu-ko ti ming-yi wen-
ti," Shu-mu chi-kan, p. 120 from Huan tan hsin lun.
120
CHAPTER VII
TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY
Not unlike the Authorised (King James) Version of the
Song of Songs, a majority of the songs in the Nine Songs
are difficult to understand because the speakers are not
identified in the original text. I have demonstrated clear
ly in Chapter II, "the Functionaries of Shamansim," that the
impersonator (shih) and the invoker (chu) cooperate closely
in the shamanic seance and the text of the Nine Songs is one
of the best evidences of this practice. To make the Nine
Songs easier to understand for the general reader, I have
followed the good examples set by Aoki Masaru and Hugh J.
Schonfield. Aoki, in his Soji Kyuka no Bukyokuteki Kekko
(The Dramatic Construction of the Nine Songs), suggests that
the Nine Songs is a set of operetta and in some of the songs
the shaman and the shamaness sing in duet and dance togeth-
1
er. Schonfield, on the other hand, in his translation of
Song of Songs. divides the Song into Cantos and verses,
and allocates the parts to three speakers, He, She, and
2
Chorus. I find Schonfield's structure very illuminating.
It is helpful to the intelligent reading of the poem. This
is why I have divided eight pieces of the Nine Songs into
stanzas and identified the speaker of each stanza. In doing
121
so, I am guided by my own perception of the feeling and
import in the original text. This is arbitrary and there
fore can only be tentative, for I am only one of the inter
preters of the Nine Songs.
122
ABBREVIATIONS
When no speaker is indicated, the speaker is the cho
rus. This happens in the cases of Tung Huang T'ai I and Li
;Hun, which function as the prologue and the epilogue of this
set of sacrificial songs. When the speaker is the very god
of a given song, with the exception of Hsiang Fu Jen, who is
doubtless a goddess, it is assumed that the actual speaker
is the male impersonator who plays the role of the god.
CRS Chorus
FI Female Invoker, the Shamaness who administers the
THTI
SSM
HFJ
TC
KS
SK
LH
HC
HP
ceremony
Hsiang Chiin, the Lord of the Hsiang
Hsiang Fu Jen, the Lady of the Hsiang
Ho Po, the River God
Kuo Shang, the Martyrs of the State
Li Hun, a Tribute to the Spirits
Shan Kuei, the Mountain God
Sao Ssu Ming, the Junior Lord of Lives
Tung Ghiin, the Lord of the East
Tung Huang T'ai I, the Great Unique, Monarch of
the East
TSM Ta Ssu Ming, the Senior Lord of Lives
Yiin Chung Chiln, the Lord amid the Clouds ICC
123
THE GREAT UNIQUE, MONARCH OF THE EAST
(TUNG HUANG T'AI I)
On this lucky day and in this hour so auspicious,
Let us in reverence entertain the Monarch on high.
He holds his long sword by its jade pommel;
His girdle-gems tinkle with a lin-lang.
From the jewelled mat with its jade weight
Why not now take the precious bouquet?
We offer basil-flavoured meat laid on strewn orchids;
We make libations with cassia wine and pepper drink.
Now the sticks are raised; the drums are struck.
The singers in a slow and measured time gently sing;
Then, when the pipes and zithers join in, they sing aloud.
The Spirit moves proudly in his glorious vesture;
Gusts of fragrance fill up the hall.
The five notes chime in a rich array.
The Lord is pleased and bestows on us joy and health.
124-
COMMENTARY
The prerequisite to performing an important sacrifice
is the choosing of an auspicious day. The Rites of Chou
("Kuei-jen, Ch1un-kuan," Chou li) maintains that divination
be made before performing sacrifice. Many instances of p'u
chiao (divining the suburban sacrifice) are recorded in the
Tso Commentary. The purpose Pf the divination is often
twofold: to determine whether the day chosen is auspicious
or not and to determine the number of victims to be used in
the sacrifice. Even in an obviously less formal shamanic
seance, the one described by poem 137, "Tung men chi fen,"
in the Book of Songs, we find the line, "An auspicious day
3
is chosen." The poet reverses liang chen to chen liang in
the first line, using poetic licence for the sake of rhyme.
This song is an objective description of the sacrifice
made to the Great Unique, Monarch of the East, and is in
all likelihood sung in chorus. The person who holds the
long sword by its jade pommel is the impersonator of this
supreme deity of the Ch'u people. He is appropriately
dressed to befit the rank of the god he impersonates. He
takes a standing position. At the very beginning of the
ceremony he probably stands still. But gradually he begins
to sway. This is why the tinkling of his girdle gems can
be heard.
125
The jade weight, or the tablet of power, as Berthold
4
Laufer puts it, is a great treasure of the state (T’ien-fu,
Ch'un-kuan, Chou li). Only on the occasion of a great
sacrifice or a great funeral does the t'ien-fu official take
it out and display it. After the ceremony, he puts it away.
The presence of the jade weight in this song is an indis
putable evidence that the Nine Songs are primarily written
for the use of the Ch'u court.
The cassia wine and the pepper drink are the counter
part of the yii-flavored black millet wine of Chou, the
reigning royal house. As we find that the cassia wine is
mentioned twice in the Nine Songs, once here and the other
time in "the Lord of the East," and the cassia spray in "the
Senior Lord of Lives," and the cassia flower in Li_ sao. we
may begin to suspect that the cassia has much to do with
Chinese shamanism. The same is true with the pepper plants.
At the end of the shamanic dance described in "Tung men chi
fen," the shamaness gives her company a bouquet of pepper
plants as a gift. Hearing that Shaman Hsien is about to
descend in the evening, Ch'tl Ydan prepares the strained
pepper wine (chiao hsil) to invite the deified shaman (Li
sao, 1. 141)* The use of pepper drink seems widespread and
long-lasting. In the poem entitled "On Hearing a Shamanic
Seance Performed in Some Chiangnan (the south of Yangtze)
Household at Night" by the T1ang poet Li Chia-yu, we find
126
jthe following couplets: "After the rain the breeze is fresh
and the river isle quiet. /Having recovered from the intoxi-
I 5
cation of pepper drink, people return from the seance."
When food and drink are offered and songs and music are
performed, the invited god comes down and takes possesion of
the impersonator. At this very moment, the god and the
impersonator are one. Therefore the impersonator is refer
red to as the Spirit, who now moves about proudly in his
splendid attire. Very likely he takes a lead in a dance
which is the climactic finale of this prologue.
127
THE LORD OF THE EAST
(TUNG CHUN)
FI: The sun is about to rise in the east.
It shines upon my railings, the sacred mulberry tree.
TG: I rein my horses and drive slowly.
The night sky glimmers, and the day has dawned.
Dragon-shafted, with a car of thunder design
Bearing cloud banners that twist and trail,
And I, heaving a great sigh, my chariot is ready to
take off.
I cannot make up my mind and look back with longing.
The music and the spectacle are so entertaining
That all beholders forget to return.
CRS: Tune the zither strings and beat the drums in unison.
Strike the bells until the bell-stand rocks.
The flutes are piping, the reed-organs blowing,
The spirit-guardian is clever and lovely.
Whirling around, the dancers are like kingfishers
on the wing.
Verses are chanted to accompany the dance;
The tune and the time are in perfect harmony.
When the Spirit descends, He covers the sun.
128
TC: In shirt of blue cloud and skirt of white rainbow,
I gather my reins and heavenwards my chariot zooms.
Lifting my long arrow, I shoot the Wolf of Heaven;
Wielding the Ladle, I pour myself some cassia wine.
Then with the bow in hand, I plunge deep down
To start the dark and murky journey to the east again.
129
COMMENTARY
In the traditional text of the Nine Songs, "the Lord of
the East" is number seven. By a close comparison with the
Han Nineteen Sacrifical Songs (Han chiao shih shih chiu ko),
Wen I-to discovered that this song should follow the pro
logue, "Tung-huang T’ai-i," immediately and take the lead
6
before all the other songs. By this rearrangement, we can
have the eight gods in four pairs. The leading pair are the
Lord of the East, the sun god, who is a giver of the sun
shine, and the Lord amid the Cloud, who is a giver of the
rain. The second are the god and the goddess of the Hsiang
River. Next come the Senior Lord and the Junior Lord of
Lives. And the last pair are the River God and the Mountain
God. Since this new sequence is more logical and better
organized, I have adopted it without reservation.
The Lord of the East is doubtless a sun god. I assign
the first two lines to the female invoker, the next eight
lines and the last six lines to the sun god himself. Lines
11 to 18 can be sung either by the chorus or by a single
voice, the invoker alone. These eight lines are a brief but
vivid description of the shamanic seance. All necessary
elements are there. The music played by many instruments,
the zither, the drum, the bell, the flute, and the reed-
organ is probably in a crescendo. The clever and handsome
130
shaman is impersonating the sun god. Many dancers are
whirling around, each of them holding a pheasant-plumes in
her hand, so when they raise the pheasant-plumes together,
they look like a flock of kingfishers in flight. There are
singers accompanying the dance. As the ritual is well re
hearsed, everything is in perfect harmony. And in due
course, the spirit of the sun god descends to take posses
sion of the impersonator. Some commentators maintain that
the sun is blocked out because many spirits descend at the
same time. Others say that the sun god descends with a
7
large entourage. However, I believe that the descent of
one god is enough to block out the sun. We should remember
that this song is dedicated to the Lord of the East alone.
Line 2. Fu-sang is the sacred mulberry tree or the lane,
where this sacred tree grows. In the famous Ch *u Silk
Manuscript ten suns are depicted against the background of
this sacred tree, with one of them above the tree and the
other nine suns in its branches, representing the ancient
ten day week (hstln) . The land of Fu-sang or the land of
sunrise was later identified with Japan, because Japan is
to the east of China.
Line 5. Lung-chou ( fj ipH ) is a wooden shaft with a
bronze fitting which is decorated by many dragons. Sheng
lei ( HF ): Sheng refers to the car, and lei is leiwen
(S )» a very popular decorative motif in the bronze age
131
next only to the t1 ao-t1 ieh ( :§§ ,51 ) design. The box of
the car is decorated with the leiwen pattern. Chu Hsi’s
assertion that the car is on wheels of thunder is purely a
8
creation of his own imagination.
Lines 20-23. The lines here are misplaced. I have
followed Waley’s rearrangement and made line 23 my line 20,
9
line 20 my line 21, and line 21 my line 23.
Line 21. The Wolf of Heaven is the name of a star, the
culprit responsible for the eclipse of the sun, for when the
Wolf of Heaven is hungry, he will swallow the sun.
Line 22, The Ladle is a group of six stars which form
10
the shape of a dipper (nan tou).
132
THE LORD AMID THE CLOUDS
(YUN CHUNG CHUN)
CRS: He's bathed in orchid water, shampooed with perfume,
And dressed in a many-colored robe like a flower.
The Spirit, zigzagging, has descended into him.
The blazing light shines without an end.
Why not sojourn in the Hall of Long Life
And glow bright as the Sun and the Moon?
In a dragon chariot drawn by divine horses
He takes a joy ride to have a good time.
The Spirit has descended in bright majesty,
When all at once He soars again into the clouds.
He looks down on the province of Chi and far beyond.
Traversing the Four Seas, his flight knows no end.
FI: Longing for my lord, I heave a great sigh.
My heart is troubled; I am very, very sad.
133
COMMENTARY
The worship of the Lord amid the Clouds was recorded in
the oracle inscriptions of the Shang dynasty and continued
to early Han times. The first twelve lines objectively
describe how the spirit of the god descends into the imper
sonator, the male shaman of the first two lines, and after
taking a joy ride in the chariot suddenly flies away, leav
ing the invoker to sigh and to pine endlessly.
Lines 3 and 4* "The Spirit, zigzagging, has descended
pinto him. /The blazing light shines without an end." Arthur
Waley, in translating the Sung Section of the Book of Songs,
encounters the same phenomenon. He says: "The spirits of
the dead, in these hymns as in the bronze inscriptions, are
'very bright'; a dazzling radiance surrounds them. The same
conception, extended to living monarchs, dominates early
Iranian religion, and was taken over by the Buddhists,
Manicheans, and Nestorians, to be embodied in the nimbi and
haloes of their divinities. It is still currently expressed
11
in the haloes of Christian saints."
I do not know how this effect is to be achieved. The
method by which the "blazing light" was portrayed in the
ritual may have been similar to that of the shamanic Dancers
of Evil of Sri Lanka, who dance to a quick drum beat in the
dark, holding a torch. Once in a while they throw certain
134
chemicals into the air, which, when lit by the torch, burst
12
into bright flame, very much like miniature fireworks.
Line 5. The word ' chien1 (g|g ) is not a meaningless
exclamation, but an interrogative adverb. It can mean ’why1
or 'who' depending on the context.
Line 6. Ti-fu ( ) , divine yoke-horses, is a
synecdoche. The existence of the yoke-horses implies the
presence of the trace-horses,
135
THE LORD OF THE HSIANG
(HSIANG CHUN)
HFJ: Playfully my lord chooses not to come.
For whom did he descend to the mid-stream isle?
Thinking of his gentle eyes and winsome smile,
I speedily set out on my cassia boat.
I bid the Ytlan and Hsiang still their waves,
And the water of the Great River flow gently.
I strain my eyes but fail to find my husband.
Blowing my bamboo pipe, of whom do I think?
HC: I drive north on my flying-dragon chariot
By way of the Tung-t'ing lake;
My flag is of fig-leaves, bound with basil,
Its curved halyard, of iris; its canton, of orchids.
I gaze towards the farthest shore of Ts'en-yang,
And in a dazzling light I cross the Great River.
But before my power is fully displayed,
You have heaved many a sigh for my sake.
HFJ: Aslant my tears flow in purling streams;
Bitterly I long for my lord and am in distress.
Oars of cassia and steering-plank of magnolia
Do but chip ice and pile up snow.
Like plucking fig-leaves in the stream
Or gathering water-lilies on the tree-top,
Estranged hearts belabor the matchmaker;
And flighty love is easily broken.
The water over the stony shallows foams and spumes;
The flying-dragon chariot dallies with ease.
Insincere friendship begets long sorrow,
You break your tryst and tell me you've no time.
HG: At dawn I galloped beside the Great River;
At dusk I reined my horses on the northern isle.
The birds were perching on the roof,
And the water encircled the roofed altar.
I dropped my thumb-ring into the Great River,
I cast my girdle-gem on the shore of the Li.
I have plucked the galingale on the fragrant isle
To give to the one there below.
BOTHrGood times are few and far between,
Let’s make the most of this rare reunion.
137
COMMENTARY
This song, "the Lord of the Hsiang," and the next one,
"the Lady of the Hsiang," are companion poems. They cele
brate the hierogamy of the god and the goddess of the Hsiang
River. Their courtship seems to be a complete reversal of
the courtship between the human maiden and the god in the
other songs. In the beginning they look for each other in
vain. The road to love is full of frustrations, misunder
standings, and complaints. But at the end they rush to meet
each other and have a happy ending. The formula for the
courtship in the other songs, by contrast, is love at first
sight with a disastrous ending. Here the god, like a drag
onfly that skims over the surface of a pond and leaves the
agitated water rippling for a long time, descends to give
favors to the human maiden. But in a flash he is gone,
leaving the forlorn maiden pining and wailing.
Both Waley and Hawkes were led astray by the tradition
al interpretation and made Hsiang Chtln a goddess. I do not
think it necessary to discuss why they were wrong. I have
dividied this poem into five stanzas. The Lady of the
Hsiang and the Lord of the Hsiang sing the first four stan
zas in turn and sing the final couplet together.
Line 2. The mid-stream isle is a likely location for a
seance. Like some of the Greek gods, Hsiang Chlin is very
138
likely a playboy and enjoys making love to human maidens.
The Lady of Hsiang's tone in the first two lines is a
jealous one.
Line 7. Fu-chtln ( ^ ^ ), literally means 'lord
husband,' can be used as a guide-post to identify the sex
of the speaker.
Line 8. This is a rhetorical question. The one that
the speaker thinks of is obviously the Lord of the Hsiang.
Line 9. Flying dragon (fei lung ^ fg ) is a synec
doche, for the chariot is decorated with many bronze orna
ments in the shape of dragons.
Line 10. Wang I's assertion that the word chan (5W )
13
is synonymous with chuan (to turn, to bend) is unfounded.
The Hsiang river flows north to the Tung-t'ing lake and the
Great River (Yangtze River) is to the north of the lake.
Hsiang Chiln1 s journey starts from the Hsiang river. He
flies over the Tung-t'ing lake, and finally crosses the
Great River. The journey is from the south to the north;
there is no need to turn or to bend. Ghan simply means
'by way of' or 'en route.'
Lines 11-12. "My flag is of fig-leaves, bound with
basil, /Its curved halyard, of iris; its canton, of or-
chird." These two lines are a description of the flag that
the chariot of the Lord of the Hsiang bears. But they used
to be taken as a description of a boat. My translation is
139
u
based on the explication of of Wen I-to. There is a
pattern in the description of a chariot. The horses and
the car come first, often followed immediately by the flag
or banners which that chariot bears. To cite two examples:
the Junior Lord of Lives came "In a whirlwind chariot with
cloud banners," and the chariot of the Lord of the East is
"Dragon-shafted, with a car of thunder design /Bearing clouc
banners that twist and trail." Originally the flag identi
fied the social status of the owner of the chariot. The
closest modern counterpart that I can think of is the make
of a motor wehicle followed by its specific model name,
such as Ford Mustang.
Lines 29-30. "At dawn I galloped beside the Great
River; /At dusk I reined my horses on the northern isle."
These two lines are irrefutable evidence that the flying
dragon is a chariot.
Line 31• "The birds were perching on the roof" indi
cates the time. It is evening, the time to begin the
seance. Compare "Hearing that Shaman Hsien is about to
descend in the evening, /I prepare the strained pepper wine
to invite him (La sao, 1. 1/1)."
Line 32. "And the water encircled the hall" Indicates
the place where the god, the Lord of the Hsiang, will be
landing. It is the same place where the bridal chamber is
built in the next song.
1/0
Lines 33-34-* A possible reason for dropping the thumb-
ring and the girdle-gem is that the Lord of the Hsiang is
rushing to meet his beloved goddess. It is easy for people
to drop things when they rush along. Compare a passage in
"Fit for Emperors and Kings," Chuang Tzu: "In Cheng there
was a shaman of the gods named Chi Hsien. He could tell
whether men would live or die, survive or perish, be fortu
nate or unfortunate, live a long time or die young, and he
would predict the year, month, week, and day as though he
were a god himself. When the people of Cheng saw him, they
15
dropped everything and ran out of his way." Another
possible reason is to jettison albeit symbolically so that
the flying chariot would be lighter and faster.
Line 36. The one there below (hsia . 1 il) , like the
distant one (yilan cjhe, 1. 38, HFJ) , is a term of endearment.
Similar terms are ’the separated one' (li_ chil, 1. 18, TSM) ,
'dear iris' (sun, 11. 6 and 26, SSM), 'the one from the
distant shore' (chi pu, 1. 8, HP), and 'the one I miss'
(shou ssu, 1. 8, SK).
K1
THE LADY OF THE HSIANG
(HSIANG FU JEN)
HFJ: The Prince of God descends on the northern isle.
It saddens me to strain my eyes without seeing him.
Soft and gentle the autumn wind blows.
The waves of Tung-t'ing rise and the leaves of trees
fall.
HC: Up on the white-sedge knoll I survey.
I have a tryst with my fair one at sunset.
Why do the birds gather in the duckweed?
And what is the fish-net doing on the tree-top?
HFJ: The Yilan has its angelicas; the Li its orchids.
I think of my young lord, but dare not speak.
In a daze I look at the distance;
All I see are the swirling waters.
HC: Why does the elk browse in the courtyard?
Why does the dragon come to the water brink?
At daybreak I galloped my horses on the river bank;
At sunset I reached the western shore.
I heard that my fair one had summoned me.
I wish I could take off with her in my chariot.
14-2
CRS: Let us build a bridal chamber in the water,
And thatch it with a roof of lotus leaves,
With walls of iris, an altar of purple shells,
And the hall is strewn with sweet-scented pepper,
Beams of cassia, rafters of tree-orchids,
Lintel of magnolia, a bower of peonies.
Fig leaves woven to make a curtain.
Split basil plaited into a mat
To be held with a weight of white jade,
And strewn with rock-orchid, that it may smell sweet.
Angelicas laid on the lotus roofing
And twined with bast of asarum.
A hundred fragrant plants shall fill the courtyard,
And of delightful perfumes are the porch and gate.
Many-colored is the Chiu-i surrounded with welcomers.
The descending of the Spirit looks like clouds.
HFJ: I threw my sleeves into the Great River,
I cast down my chemise on the shore of the Li.
Oh the sand bar I have plucked the galingale
To give to the distant one.
BOTH:Good times are hard to come by,
Let’s make the most of our reunion.
1 4-3
COMMENTARY
The lyricism of "the Lady of the Hsiang" is difficult
to convey in an English translation. But it is generally
acknowledged that the first four lines of this poem is the
best of the Nine Songs, and perhaps also the best of the
entire entire anthology.
This song, like the previous one, is a duet, to be sung
in turn by the goddess and the god of the Hsiang. I have
divided the poem into seven stanzas of unequal lengths.
Stanza 5, the longest one, which is about the building of
a bridal chamber for the sacred marriage, can of course be
sung by the Lord of Hsiang. But as the stanza is a com
pletely objective narration, it is more reasonable to assign
it to the chorus.
In the first four stanzas the goddess and the god of
the Hsiang are looking for each other in vain, which I
believe is a commonplace theme in love poetry. As this song
is dedicated to the Lady of the Hsiang, she is the invited
goddess who descends from the sky. Naturally the Lord of
the Hsiang will play the role of the host (or the invoker)
to welcome her. So when the building of the bridal chamber
is completed, she rushes down from the blue.
Line 1. The phrase, 'the Prince of God (jbi tzu) , 1 has
created great havoc in the interpretation of this song.
U 4
Many commentators use this as a piece of evidence to support
1 6
the theory that Hsiang Chtln is the daughter of Yao, not
realizing that if this were indeed the case, both poems
would become an account of the lesbian love between the two
daughters of Yao, or the two concubines of Shun. "The
Prince of God," like "young lord (kung tzu)" in line 10,
refers to the Lord of the Hsiang.
Line 33* Chiu-i ( ^ ), or the Nine Precipitous
Peaks, is a part of the Hsiang Mountain on an island in Lake
Tung-t’ing. This, to my mind, could be represented by a
raised platform on the stage. The Lord of the Hsiang and a
host of female shamans surrounded this imagined mountain to
welcome the descent of the goddess.
Lines 35-36. "I threw my sleeves into the Great River,
/I cast down my chemise on the shore of the Li" are perhaps
the earliest literary record of streaking. The Lady of the
Hsiang is anything but conservative. The Gonfucian commen
tators are embarrassed and maintain that the words for the
sleeves (mei) and the chemise (t1ieh) are corruptions of
17
one kind or another.
14-5
THE SENIOR LORD OF LIVES
(TA SSU MING)
TSM: Open wide are the gates of Heaven!
My chariot is of black cloud design.
I bid the gusty winds be my vanguard,
And order the sharp rain to lay the dust.
FI: My lord is descending in a. spiral.
I'll overpass the Mulberry Grove to follow you.
TSM: Teeming with people are the Nine Lands.
Why is their life-span for me to decide?
FI: High we soar, serenely we glide,
Pure air-borne, driving yin and yang.
Speedily, lord, we go together.
I will conduct you to Chiu-kang.
CRS: Floating is the long vestment of God.
Dangling are his jade pendants.
TSM: One yin and one yang.
The mass do not know what I am doing.
146
FI: I pluck the gem-like flower of the sparse-hemp
To give to the separated one.
Very soon I will grow old,
Not to stick closer is to drift further apart.
CRS: The harness bells jingle and jingle again.
Heavenwards the dragon chariot zooms.
FI: Long I stand, twisting a cassia spray.
Why the more I think of him, the sadder I grow?
CRS: What is the use of growing sadder?
If only the present could stay forever the same!
But man’s fate is fixed;
His meetings and partings are not his to arrange.
147
COMMENTARY
Structurally this song is the most complicated one
among the Nine Songs. It has only 28 lines. But to make
sense out of it, I have divided it into ten stanzas. The
god, the Senior Lord of Lives, and the female invoker sing
in duet with the chorus wedging in a few lines of comments.
Line 2. The chariot body, or the box of the car, is
decorated with the cloud pattern, or yilnwen (g|j ^ ), one
of the popular decorative patterns of ancient China. Both
Waley and Hawkes take the word 1sheng’ ^ ) as a verb, and
consequently in their translations the god is riding on a
18
dark cloud, not in a chariot.
Line 6. 'K'ung-sang1 ( g? |~| ) means the mulberry
grove, being synonymous with 'sang-lint1 the altar dedicated
to the God of Soil of the Shang people. The reference to
k 1ung-sang suggests that the worship of the Senior Lord of
Lives might have been of Shang origin. All important public
events took place on the altar of the God of Soil, the
performance of the suburban sacrifice was just one of
19
them. But in different states the altar of the God of
Soil had different names. A passage in Mo Tzu says, "Tsu
in Yen is like She-chi in Ch'i, sang-lin in Sung [the duchy
given to the descendants of the defeated Shang people], and
Ytin-meng in Ch'u, a place where men and women gather to
14-8
20
sightsee.” As we have seen in Chapter IV, the Mount Bowl
of the state of Ch'en was also the altar of the God of Soil.
Line 12. 'Ti' ( 0 ) in this context is a term the
female invoker uses to address the Senior Lord of Lives. It
is not God on High. Chiu-kang is Mount Kang in Ch!u. It
must have been a well-known sacred place, for in 531 B.C.
King Ling of Ch'u extinguished the state of Ts'ai and in the
eleventh month of that year he used Prince Yin of Ts'ai as
a victim to make sacrifice to Mount Kang (Tso Chuan, Duke
Chao, 11th year).
Lines 15-16. These two lines are ambiguous and sug
gestive. The god and the female invoker are in the same
chariot.
Line 18. 'The separated one1 is a term of endearment.
Line 21. Ling-ling is the sound of the bells, not the
sound of the wheels. One should remember that the chariot,
like a modern fighter, zooms into the sky. No sound of
wheels could be heard.
14-9
THE JUNIOR LORD OF LIVES
(SHAO SSF MING)
FI: The autumn orchid and the deer-folder
Grow thick below the roofed altar.
From green leaves and white stems
Gusts of fragrance assail me.
As all men are to have their lovely children,
Dear iris, why should you be downcast and sad?
The autumn orchid is in its splendor;
Green its leaves, purple its stems.
Filled is the altar with fair ladies.
But with mine only his eyes meet and his heart twines!
CRS: He came in without a word and left without notice
In a whirlwind chariot with cloud banners.
No sorrow is greater than being separated alive;
No joy greater than the moment of falling in love.
FI: In a lotus robe with a basil belt
Swiftly you came, and as swiftly went.
At night you lodge in the suburb of the City of God.
Lord, for whom are you waiting amid the clouds?
I will wash your hair in the Pool of Heaven,
And dry your hair in the Valley of Sun.
1 50
In vain I await my bonny one to come.
Against the wind I wildly shout my song.
CRS: With peacock canopy and kingfisher streamers
Your chariot mounts to the ninth Heaven, where you
subdue the Broom-star.
Brandishing the long sword to protect the young,
You alone, dear iris, are fit to be the judge of man!
1 51
COMMENTARY
The speakers of this song are not difficult to identify
if we are willing to take the cue from line 11: nHe came in
without a word and left without notice.1 1 He refers to the
Junior Lord of Lives. Therefore only two voices are heard.
One is that of the female invoker. The other is that of the
chorus.
Line 2. T1ang ('Hr ) is the roofed altar. It is often
built upon a mound, which is called ching (^ ). The Ch'u
people were mound builders.
Line 6. Sun ( ), or Dear Iris, is a term of
endearment.
Lines 19-20. ’I will wash your hair' and ’I will dry
your hair1 are conventional expressions showing willingness
to serve. But the base metals are transmuted into gold when
combined with ’in the Pool of Heaven’ and ’in the Valley of
Sun. '
Line 24. The Broom-star is Hailey’s comet, considered
as an inauspicious omen.
152
THE RIVER GOD
(HO PO)
HP: With you I roam the Nine Rivers;
The head-wind rises and the waves dash.
We ride in a water chariot with lotus canopy.
The yoke-horses are dragons; the trace, hornless ones.
Scaling K’un-lun, I survey in all directions.
My heart soars up with the vastness of the world.
The sun is about to set, but I am too happy to return,
To part with the one from the distant shore.
FI: In the fish-scale house and the dragon hall,
Through the purple-shell portal of the pearl room,
What is the god doing there in the water?
HP: In a chariot of white turtle chasing the spotted fish
I wander with you on the isle of the river.
The ice thaws and the freshet begins to rush down.
FI: You fold your hands and journey eastwards.
I see my bonny one off on the southern shore.
HP: The waves, surge on surge, come to meet me.
Fishes, shoal after shoal, escort me on my way home.
153
COMMENTARY
The [Yellow] River God is a god the Ch'u people
carried with them when they were forced to migrate to the
south. He is usuallly very greedy and unpredictable. But
he appears quite amiable here. That the River God takes a
wife each year is a well-known myth. It is unfortunate
that some translators would read that myth into the end of
this innocent little song, where I could not find a single
21
trace of human sacrifice.
Line 1. The Nine Rivers refer to the delta of the
Yellow River. The names of the Nine Rivers appear in
22
"Tribute to Ytl," the Book of Documents. But they are
mythological geographical names.
Line 4 • The water chariot is drawn by four horses.
While the yoke-horses wear frontlets of dragons, the trace-
horses wear frontlets of hornless dragons.
Line 5. The mythic mountain K ’un-lun is supposed to be:
the source of the Yellow River.
Line 8. 'The one from the distant shore (chi pu)' is
a term of endearment, referring to the female invoker.
Line 9- I have discussed this line in detail in Chap
ter V, "The Chariot as a Ritual Vessel."
154
THE MOUNTAIN GOD
(SHAN KUEI)
FI: There seems to be someone in the mountain fold
Clad in fig-leaves, with a belt of mistletoe.
Gentle are his eyes; winsome is his smile. ,
"Do you adore me for my lovely ways?"
SK: In a chariot of red leopard chasing the spotted lynx,
With a cover of magnolia and a flag of cassia,
Clad in rock-orchid, with a belt of galingale,
I have gathered a bouquet to give to the one I miss.
I live in a dark bamboo grove, where I never see
the sky.
The way was perilous and that's why I am so late.
CRS: High on the mountain top the banner pole stands alone;
Below it the clouds gather in droves.
All is dark and murky even in day time,
The east wind sweeps and the divine rain falls.
FI: Dallying with a certain Spirit-guardian he forgets
to return.
The year being advanced, who will beflower me?
I pluck the Thrice-blossoming in the mountains
155
Among tall boulders and entangled wine-creepers.
I complain of my lord’s forgetting to return.
Surely he misses me but he has no time to come.
The person in the mountains is as fragrant as
galingale;
She drinks from the rocky spring and shelters under
the cypress shade.
I know he loves me, despite all misgivings that arise.
The thunder rumbles; the rain darkens the sky;
The monkeys chatter; the apes scream all night;
The gusty wind soughs; the trees rustle;
To think of my lord is to incur endless sorrow.
1 $6
COMMENTARY
The title of this song, shan kuei, has been misleading
since the Ch1u Tz'u or the Songs of the South was compiled
by Wang I in the second century A.D. This is because by
then the word kuei denoted nothing but the ghost of a dead
person and its archaic usage, which means an invisile being
and is interchangeable with shen (god) or ling (spirit), was
forgotten. Many commentators are thus led astray. Wang I,
for example, suggests that shan kuei is similar to k'uei, a
one-legged beast, or hsiao-yang, a monster mentioned in
23
Huai-nan Tzu. Chu Hsi, for another example, says, "Ac
cording to Kuo yfl, the nymphs of trees and stones are callec
k 1uei and wan-lien (the shapeless). Do they refer to this
24
(shan kuei.)?"
A number of examples of the archaic usage of the word
kuei can be found in Mo Tzu. For example, Heaven, or God
on High, is referred to in part II of "the Will of Heaven"
chapter as t'ien kuei or heavenly ghost. Also In the sec
tion entitled "Explaining Ghosts," Mo Tzu plainly says:
"The ghosts of past and present are of three kinds only: the
ghost of Heaven, the ghosts of the mountains and rivers, anc.
25
the ghosts of men who have died." Shan kuei is doubtless
a mountain god. He was worshipped by the Shang people as
26
yileh in the oracle inscriptions. I believe shan kuei is a
157
male god, although many modern Chinese critics maintain
27
that shan kuei is female. The Goddess of Wu Shan (or
ylount Shaman) is another matter unrelated to shan kuei.
Line 5* I take the first word sheng as a noun and the
■rest of the line as an adjectival phrase. The correct
Leading of ts'ung should be 'to chase' or 'to pursue.' The
syntax of this line is exactly the same as line 12 of "the
liver God. "
Line 7. In line 2 the Mountain God is seen by the
female invoker from a distance, and she thinks he is "Clad
!in fig-leaves, with a belt of mistletoe." But when the god
describes himself, he is "Clad in rock-orchid, with a belt
of galingale." The discrepancy is intentional and artistic.
Lines 11-14* The banner pole is part of the paraphre-
nalia that the shamaness uses to bring down the spirit.
This short stanza is sung by the chorus right after the
invoker and the Mountain God have come together. Clouds
and rain are euphemisms for sex.
Lines 15-27. We may assume that the meeting was over
from line 15* The female invoker begins to make complaints
right away. The way she makes her complaints and the way
she describes herself, "The person in the mountain is as
fragrant as galingale, /She drinks from the rocky spring
and shelters under the cypress shade," must have been an
inspiration to Ch'tL Yiian when he composed his Li_ sao.
1 58
THE MARTYRS OF THE STATE
(KUO SHANG)
We wield the Wu halberds and wear the rhino armours.
When the hubs of the chariots clash, we combat with short
weapons.
Flying colors darken the sun; the foe come like droves of
clouds.
Through the cross-fire of arrows our warriors press forward.
They have crossed our line; they have broken our ranks.
My left trace-horse is dead; my right one, wounded.
The two wheels are sunk; the four horses, stuck.
We raise the jade sticks and beat the rolling drums.
The time is against us and the awesome Spirits are angry.
Many of our warriors are killed and lie dead on the open
field.
They have gone out, but are never to return.
The plains are wide and the way home is distant.
The long swords are at their waist; the Ch'in bows, under
their arm.
Though their heads were severed, their hearts felt no
regret.
Martial was their spirit; and so well did they fight.
Strong and steadfast to the end, they could never be
vanquished.
159
Their bodies have perished, but their spirits are potent.
Their souls are the heroes among the dead.
160
COMMENTARY
’ ’The Martyrs of the State” is a hymn to the Ch'u sol
diers who died in action. The inclusion of this hymn in the
Nine Songs is a very strong argument against the theory that
they are of folk origin, for the common people are not
likely— indeed do not have the right— to perform a ceremony
for the fallen warriors. Only the head of a state has this
privilege.
Line 1. The Wu halberds are halberds imported from the
state of Wu, Ch’u ’s eastern neighbor. The rise of Wu was
recorded in 584 B.C., and her fall in 473 B.C. Wu was the
most short-lived state among the powers. This gives us a
useful guide-post in our dating of the Nine Songs. See
Chapter VI, ’ ’Authorship and Dating."
Line 4» The word shih ( zfc ) denotes that the warriors
are officers. It is reasonable to assume that those who
went to war in chariots were noblemen, and those who went
on foot as foot soldiers were commoners.
Line 13- The Ch’in bows, like the Wu halberds, are
imported weapons. Gh’in is Ch'u’s western neighbor, and is
the state which finally unifies China. As the dead have
long swords at their waist, one suspects that they are
officers.
161
A TRIBUTE TO THE SPIRITS
(LI HUN)
The rites are accomplished to the beating of the drums;
jThe bouquet passes from dancer to dancer in the Tai dance;
The lovely maidens sing in a slow and easy measure.
'Like orchids of spring and chrysanthemums of autumn
The rites shall go on until the end of time.
162
COMMENTARY
This short poem is an epiloque. It is used to see off
all participating gods and the souls of the dead. The
title, ljl hun, is appropriate. In its narrow sense, the
word hun means soul. The soul is invisible, but it can
animate p'o, or the body. When a man is sick or dreaming,
his hun wanders away from his p ’o. But when he dies, his
hun and p 1o are separated forever. Therefore when a man's
hun and p 1o are separated for too long a time, he is in
danger of death. But in its broad sense, hun includes all
invisible beings, the Supreme God and all nature gods. All
of them need something, an impersonator, a tree, or a stone,
to manifest themselves. In this sense, hun is a synonym of
ling (the spirit) or shen (god).
163
NOTES
1 Aoki Masaru's So.ji Kyuka no Bukyokuteki Kekko has been
translated into Chinese by Sun Tso-yiln. See "Ch'u
Tz'u chiu-ko chih wu ch'il ti chieh-kou," in Chung kou
wen-hsileh shih 1 un-wen hsiian chi (Taipei, 1978) ,
pp. 189-201.
2 Hugh J. Schonfield, trans., The Song of Songs (New
York, 1959), pp. 87-128.
3 See Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, p. 88.
4. Berthold Laufer, Jade; A Study of Chinese Archaeology
and Religion, p. 88.
5 Tz’u Hai. p. 13U.
6 Wen I-to, Shen-hua ytl shih (Mythology and Poetry), p.
273 and Chen Shih-hsiang, "On Structural Analysis of
the Ch'u Tz’u Nine Songs," Tamkang Review 2 (April
1971): 7-1 4-.
7 Waley, for example, renders this line as "The coming
of many spirits covers the sun." See Waley, The Nine
Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China, p. 4-5*
Wang I asserts that the sun god descends with a large
entourage. See Ch 'u Tz 'u chang chil, p. 4-4-.
8 Chu Hsi, Ch 'u Tz!u chi chu, vol. II, p. 8.
9 Waley, p. 4-6.
10 Ch'il Wan-li, Shih ching chuan shih, p. 392.
11 Waley, The Book of Songs, p. 226.
12 This was observed in a public television documentary
series, "Explore," aired by KCET in August, 1986.
13 Wang I, Ch1 u Tz 1 u chang chil, p. 36.
14- Wen, p. 288.
15 Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang
Tzu, pp. 94.-95.
1 64.
16 Wang I, p. 38.
17 David Hawkes, for example, was influenced by the Confu-
cianistic view and translated these two lines as fol
lows: "I’ll throw my thumb-ring into the river, /Leave
my thimble in the bay of the Li." See Hawkes, pp. 39
and 185.
18 Arthur Waley, The Mine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in
Ancient China, p. 37 and David Hawkes, p. 39.
19 Ling Shun-sheng, "P'u-tz’u chung she chih yen-chiu,"
and Chil Tuei-chih, "She," both in Chung-kou shang-ku
shih lun-wen hsilan-chi, pp. 1011-1031 and 1033-4-0 res
pectively.
20 Burton Watson, trans., Mo Tzu, p. 97.
21 See for examples, Hawkes, p. 4-2 and Burton Watson, The
Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, p. 51•
22 Clae Waltham, Shu Ching, pp. 39-54*
23 Wang I, Ch'u Tz Tu chang chil, p. 48
24 Chu Hsi, Ch’u Tz *u chi chu, vol. II, p. 10.
25 Sun I-jang, Mo_ Tzu chien ku, pp. 123, 153 and Watson,
Mo Tzu, p. 107.
26 Ch'en Meng-chia, P'u-tz'u tsung shu, pp. 594-99.
27 Sun Tso-yiln was the first scholar who attempted to
connect the myth of the Goddess of Wu Shan with shan
kuei. But his arguments are not convincing. See his
"Chiu ko shan kuei k ’ao," Tsinghua Hsileh-pao, XI, 4
(1936), 977-1005.
165
Figure 1. A reconstruction of the Shang chariot in
M 20 (after Shih Chang-ju, Pei tsu mu-tsang, p.28).
m
Figure 2. A reconstruction of a horse wearing a :
frontlet. The frontlet is in the shape of a horned
dragon (after Tseng Yung-i, I li ch1e ma k'ao, p. 150). j
166 |
Figure 3* above Bronze fit
ting used to decorate the j
chariot shaft (after Jessica
Rawson, Ancient China: Art >
and Archaeologyt p. 102).
Figure 4-* left Bronze horse j
frontlet (after Rawson, p. ;
I
102). I
167
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. English Sources
Barnard, Noel. ed. Early Chinese Art and Its Possible In
fluence in the Pacific Basin. New York, 1972.
Cambell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen
Series XVII. New York: Pantheon Books, 194-9.
Chang Kwang-chih. Art, Myth, and Ritual. Harvard Univer
sity Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London,
England, 1983.
_________ . Shang Civilization. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1980.
Chen, Shih-hsiang. "On Structural Analysis of Ch’u Tz'u
Nine Songs," Tamkang Review, II (April, 1971): 3-14-*
Chow, Tse-tsung. "Ancient Chinese Wu Shamanism and Its
Relationship to Sacrifices, History, Dance-Music and
Poetry," Tsing Hwa Journal of Chinese Studies. New
Series XII, 1 & 2 (December, 1979), 1-59.
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175
GLOSSARY
An-yang eg ^
Aoki Masaru W *IE M
Cha-cha-ung ^ 5^ M
chan ;w
Chan-kuo ts'e
Chang river $|r
Changhua, Mound of 1$: lj§
Chao, state of H
chao Pin
Chao hun
j T / f r
Ch'ao-ko
chen liang
Ch1en ^
Ch'en-fu f S j f j
Cheng HP
Cheng wo mao shih ^ $
Cheng-wu Hsien 1$, ^
Ch'eng-p’u, battle of
Chi, king of Hsia
Chi, province |||
chi
±
Chi-chien ^
Chi clan ^
Chi family S|s
Chi Hsien ^ J j i c
Chi-lien 2js §lg
chi pu fS
Chi t'ung
Chi Tzu ^ -J*
Ch'i ^
Chiang Yiian §f
Ch1iang-ch1iang
Chiangnan Q1 Iff
chiao
chien Sf
Chien hsi
Chien Ti
ch ! ien
Chin ff
chin ch1 e rjj iff
chin lu ^ jjg
Chin tj.eng^ jg^
Ch'in, state of fj|
Ch1 in &
Ch * in Tuei ^ ^
Ching, the tribes of
176
ching t mound ^
Ching-ch'u ^|J ^
ching shan [Jj
ch 1 ing t title | | j ]
ch1ing yang ^ p
chiu cheng fgf
Ghiu-i % ^
Chiu-chiang %
Chiu-kang % ^
Chiu ko jh HHk
Chou, king of Shang
Chou dynasty JUJ
Chou li fgl if
chu fig
Chu-fan gj§ m
Chu Hsi ^ ^
chu meng yfe @5
Ch 'u ^
Ch'u-ching
Gh'u-chiu ^
Ch'u ts'i /§:
£:
y f c
ch'u tz'u
ch'u tu
m s .
BP
Ch'u yd
chd tsang fg |§
chuan Sp§
Chuan Hsd iif 31
Chuang Tzu®:
ch ' un kuan§ T=f
chdn ^
Chdn Shih ft ^
Chung-shan 4* I_U
Chung-shan Fu LU
Chung Tzu {' j3
Ch'ung 1H
Ch'ung chung ^ fif
Ch'ung-li Jg; ^
Ch'd Xdan JHJ Jg
Ch 'd Wan-li JS ^ M
Duke Chou Ml
Duke Chuang of Lu H
Duke Huan of Ch'i |b
Duke Hsi of Lu %
Duke Xin of Lu %
Duke Wen of Wei |§f ~$C ik
Duke Wen of Sung 5^ 3C &
Emperor Wu of Han||| ^ ^
fang tsiang ^
Fang Shu ^ ^
fei lung ^ fg
&
177
Fu-ch'ai -X ^
Fu-chi i fa
f u-chtln X ^
Fu Ssu-nien (1| ^
Fu t* ien "^f 0
Hai wai hsi ching
Han chiao shih shih chiu ko
m a ie + x *
Han dynasty m
Han river
Ho-ifi m IS
Honan
li 2£ M
Hou Chi J j = j *
hsi ^
hsi ffl
hsi hao
Hsia J|
Hsia-ao 3 ^
hsia
hsia tai-fu ~F A
hsiang (impersonator)
Hsiang (music) ^
Hsiang chu1 1 n | j f | ^
Hsiang fu-.jen $g X X
hsiang lu
Hsiang river $g
Hsiang-t'u -£■
hsiao sun ^ ^
hsiao tgung po /Jx ^ ,f£
Hsieh, ancestor of Shang
Hsieh, sacrifice r 0,
Hsien 0C
hsien ^
Hsien-yiin $H ^
Hsiu-fu
Hsiung-chien |f| ||g
hsti ff
Hsd
Hsii Shen ®
hsiian ming ^ ®
Hsileh-hsiung X III
Hstln Tzu Ifj -f“
Hu fi
Hua-yiian ipf X
Huai, the (barbarians) ^
Huai river ^|£
Huai-nan-tzu
huang liu
Hui-j en
A
Hun
hung
H-p 1 ien Tuei ‘ gfc ,f£
k i Z2i M ^ M #t
[ja-chung ^
■iung ^
Kan-ch' iian -y* J|t
Kao Yang ^ |S§
ke lu S ^
ikeng yin J|? Jl[
King Chuang of Ch’u
King Ch'eng of Chou
King Chao of Chou
I
King Hsttan of Chou
King Huai of Ch’u
King K'ang of Ch’u
jKing Kung of Ch'u
King Ling of Ch'u 3§| f
King Mu of Chou JW 8 3E
King Wen X 3E
King Wu of Chou j l t l Je£ X
^ing Wu-ling of Chao
Iko
iku tz ' u
X
m x
m x
M. X
X
X
Kuan Chung * #
Kuan-ku Hi
Kuan-she Fu ||g
Kuan Shu ^
kuei $ t L
X
p= j
A Kuei-.j en
K'uei §f§
K run-wu
K'un-lun M ^
kung X
kung tzu X X
k'ung-sang H
Kuo ^
Kuo-po Tuei > f £ | |
Kuo shang m £J§
Kuo yil |H
Lee Nung-hwa ^
lei Hf
leiwen ff
Li, clan fpz
Li, river ^
Li chi ®t
X Li Chia-yu ^ || ffc
li M it jg
Li hun sa 5*
153632
^
li-min |j| J s J ;
Li Nil-hsii ^
Li s.ao M Eg
Liao ^
ling. S
1ing-hsiu ||g
1ing-ling ^ ij^
Liu Hsiang g | | J fnj
Lo §|
Lord of the Yellow River ^
Lord Yilan of Sung ^ yu ^
Lu ||.
Lu-chung jg?
M Hsing g
Lil-shih ch’un-eh1 iu B ft ^ ^
luan tao H JJ
lung chou f|
ma
ma-fen K
ma-p1o M
Mao ^
mao shih
Wi
±
mei
Meng-chu, swamps of jg-
Mi, city of m
Mi, clan of Ch'u y
Miao ^
Ming
Ming-i pieh-lu g $lj
Ming-kung Tuei ^ ^
Mo Tzu H J-
mu m
mu lu ^
Mu t1 ien-tzu chuan H
Namhae j§|
nan chin j^g ^
nan tou i|-
nan wu M
Si
Nil Hsil -tc Iff
nil wu i£ M
P’an Tang Jj|
Pao fg
Pao-chil fg |§
pT ei f r f i
Pen-ts1ao Ching Jp
Pen-ts1ao kang-mu
P ’eng §£
P1eng-tsu §£ f|
Pi, battle of $|5
180
pin
(Pin, flute |33
jPo Ch 'in M
!Po Yung ^ flf|
Ip'o
|p 'u chiao p
P'yongyang Zp |g
Samguk yusa (
sang-lin ^ jfo
Sao ssu ming p Wj
sha 3g?
Shaman Hsien 7g ^
Shaman P'eng ZE j|£
Shaman Yang /Ja |^§
Shan hai ching [X| \
Shan kuei | J L |
Shang dynasty
Shang shu fnj ft
shang tai-fu _h ^
Shao-hao p
s M W l
shen ^
shen ma
Shen-nung H
shen pao j j j $ ^
shen shih ^ Jb
sheng, birth P
sheng, chariot III
sheng lei f j |
Sheng min p Jj^
sheng po ytlan hsi tsung wen
shih, impersonator P
shih, market place iff
shih, sacrifice
shih, scholar
Shih ching fff |g
Shou-meng ^
shou ssu ®
Shu In
Shuo-wen chieh-tzu f fi
Shuo ytlan %
Ssu-fei f | D J 0| =
H M i i
sun H
ssu-ma Wl M,
ssu wu W] 3Z
Sung, state of
Sung, of the Shih ching
ta lu fan yin i_ chiudbffg
181
Ta ssu ming ^ W] -pp
ta tsung £o ^ ^
Ta ¥u ^
V.ai 2 M >fc UJ
T'ai-i ^ —
T’ai Ssu
T'ai Wang^ 3£
Tan up.
T'ang, founder of Shang ^
T'ang dynasty j||
t'ang, adjective |j|
t'ang, roofed altar
Tangun ^
tao SM
t1ao-t1ieh
li *
Ti, barbarian tribes
m
ti tu ffll ^
ti tzu -J*
t'ieh m
t1 ien-fu ^
t1 ien kuei ^ jf
t1 ien shih |gj gj|
T1ien-tsu gg ^
J E 2 >
F = r
T'ien-tsdn JU §£?
T * ien tsfln chi hsi |33 ^
T1 ien wen ^ fH]
• b . ing
Ting, surname t f j j .
Ting, star Jg
Ting chi fang chung ^ ;£ 4j
tsa, sacrifice g
Tsai-lu Deeps ^ {ig $jf
Ts'ai, state of M.
• ✓ j >
Tsan-hu gg:
Tsao |f|
Tsao-hsing H - ^
Ts'en-yang p£ ^
tseng sun ^
Tseng Tzu f j | - gp
Tso chuan
tsou chia 3|f
tsu fg.
tsun |ft
tsung^
Isuag, ^
Tung chdn j|f ^
Tung huang tai 1 jf[ H -%Z —
Tung-t1 ing flg) |g
182!
Tzu Chung ^ ^
Tzu Yii zp
Tzu Yiian J- 35
Tz 'u Hai m 'M
wan
Wang Chi gr ^
Wang chu chiao HA
Wang I T
Wei, state of Hf
Wei, King Ling’s name
Wen Wang 3E
l£ tsiang
wu, dance JS|
Wu, shaman /g
Wu, state of
Wu, surname ^
Wu-chil f f i L J§l
Wu-hui J?| [gj
Wu Shan /g [Jj
Wu-ting, King of Yin j
Yan Province ' J f j
yang | J | §
Yao, Emperor gfe
yeh |jg
yen. sacrifice ^
£ T
Yen, province
yin
Yin, dynasty
Ying, capital of Ch’u
yu y£]
In chieh yu ch’i #; ^ it
Yu-jung M
Yii m
i a m
yii chin fg| ^
Yii Chii ^ R
yft-.l en H A
Yil-mei ft
Yiian dynasty 70
yilan che
Yiian Mei M
Yiian yu j||
Yiieh M
yiieh chang |§ ^
Yiieh-.j en ko j A t
Yiieh ling ^ ^
yiieh tsu tai jsap. $$ jg
Yiln chung chiin §!g c ja
Yiln-meng Igg
Yung
183

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Creator Chen, David Tze-yun (author)

Core Title The Nine Songs: A reexamination of shamanism in ancient China

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