An introductory yet trenchant exploration of select Chinese classic texts that cover the domains of classical literature, history, philosophy, and fine arts.
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來自 The Chinese University of Hong Kong 的課程
Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings
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與講師見面
Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee 李歐梵Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture
Faculty of Arts
Now let's get into this text a little bit.
Now we are at a certain disadvantage, let me warn you, because
although Professor Wasson's translation is really precise and eloquent and
very readable but somehow certain nuances
in the ancient Chinese words, certain terms, especially verbs.
They're kind of a pithy, terse verbs used in ancient China
are inevitably lost in translations.
For instance, when describes how
tried to begin his studies and he doesn't wanna study actually.
So he gives up his studies of books.
In Ancient Chinese verb there's only one word [FOREIGN] but
there's no way to translate it.
You can not say with his books or gives up his books, or jettison his books.
Someway you can not find the exact verb to give a kind of ancient flavor
was the power and force.
There are many, many verbs and nouns like this, and also adjectives.
So we have to sort of satisfy ourselves on the narrative angle, or on that level.
Not in terms of the kind of etymology of words, but
rather we try to get into the story so to speak.
And that story is really fascinating.
Although the other difficulty of this text is there are too many names.
So don't worry.
Remember just one or two names.
One is Shun Yu.
The other is Liu Bang, the founding emperor of Han dynasty.
[FOREIGN] is known by several names in the English translation.
One is the Duke of Pay.
The other I think is Leobun or
Deleo, Lord of the Han House, etc., etc.
But [FOREIGN] appears only by this one name.
Although in a Chinese version he also is known by.
So let us sort of leave aside the name for
the time being and get into the story here.
How does this biography organize?
How is this organized?
It is very long biography.
It is filled with descriptions of battles of intrigues.
They are, I once counted, more than 30 figures,
30 people, moving around in a textural universe.
And yet, very interestingly, they are like workers
revolving around one sun or stars revolving around one sun.
And that sun, that central figure, is showing you himself.
So, interestingly, his nemesis, his enemy,
Liobang takes a second seat.
Is really on the sideline.
Now, imagine a historian writing for the overlord of his own dynasty by putting his
ancestral emperor on the side as it were as a kind of a backdrop to his main hero.
Of course, by design, supplements
his famous biography I've shown you by another biography, the biography of.
That is about.
If you compare these two biographies, you'll find that they are written
in very different ways and styles.
The Xiang Yu biography is really focused, full of dynamism and
energy, whereas the Liu Bang biography is somewhat diverse.
Are filled with various data, various legends about the emperor.
But somehow it lacks a central focus about [FOREIGN] 's character.
Since in the [FOREIGN] biography, the central hero is sort of a foregrounded,
his character is revealed in full.
It is a character full of contradictions.
Like the ancient Greek heroes, [INAUDIBLE] heroes,
the hero's interior side is not described.
So everything is described in terms of external action.
Let's just say, what Shun Yu does as a warrior.
And also his personality and
character is also reflected by other people's commentaries.
What other people, his friends, his enemies, his followers.
How they see him.
And then of course their views also change.
So here what you have is a kind of mosaic of showing of character,
which leaves the hero so to speak also in the dark.
So he's both foregrounded and backgrounded and somehow you need a sort of shifting
focus to understand the development of that heroic character.
Now, to make things a little bit even more complicated, almost half of the biography,
albeit using Sheng Yu as the central hero, describes battles, lots of battles.
And before each battle there were intrigues,
all kinds of plotting and counter plotting.
And then all these minor episodes sort of pile up which culminate in a big battle.
Always wins at battle.
And then, you get into another set of plots and
counter plots, intrigues, and people talking among self.
You know, going back and forth.
And then you have another battle.
Yeah.
And you have the final battle, when [INAUDIBLE] defeated.
So in a way, the narrative sort of moves to a climax, somewhere in the middle.
And then there follows a kind of a.
A few pages of competing figurations
of military forces with no clear winner yet
and then you get into the final ending which are defeated.
And where do you find the central, sort of pupil to point.
Showing his rise and showing his failure and
that pivotal point is the famous banquet.
If there are two episodes that I must go out for special analysis.
As everybody agrees, it will be the Hunan banquet in the middle and
[FOREIGN] defeat, his tragic end in the end.
The rest you can skip if you like, or
you can just read through to see the richness of all the descriptions.
In contrast to these two major dramatic scenes, the rise of
shall we say, in making of a hero receives very brief descriptions.
Only a paragraph, less than a paragraph in fact.
Very, very precise and terse.
In contrast with some of the other west,
in which the sort of a were more of a hero.
The growing up, the making of a hero,
or the forging of a heroic type, takes pages and pages and chapters.
So, to give a kind of external
epitaph of a classic Chinese military hero, he must be very strongly built.
He must be very tall.
Shun Yu's over six feet tall.
He is so strong that he could lift a cauldron, a heavy cauldron, in one arm.
And of course, he's fearless.
He fights all the battles and kills countless people here.
But when you look further into the external exterior or
the external facade of a military hero you're
getting to the kind of code of action.
I should say by what code does he do this and does he do this and do that?
And that becomes sort of complicated.
In Ancient Greece, if you read the Iliad for instance,
every scholar agrees that the heroes in the Iliad live by two codes.
One would be military valor.
Let's call it valor.
You have to fight.
So in ancient Greece in fact the hero is basically identified as a warrior.
There's no such thing as a philosopher hero.
That's something else.
One is valor, the other of course is honor.
Honor is the thing that is most valued in the Western tradition.
And honor is also the thing that lurks behind
the Shun Yu character in my argument.
This may beg some further discussion.
If we would like to find a heroic counterpart
in the Western tradition Saying.
Of course, that hero must be Achilles.
In many ways, Achilles and make a good pair.
They have many things in common.
They're both warriors.
They both excel in their military strengths, their physical strengths.
They are both very arrogant people.
They are even very angry.
They often succumb to anger.
Yet, there are subtle differences.
In some ways you could argue that Achilles listing around
between gods and men, he is a semi-god.
There's a Greet term called Arete, which means excellence in life.
It basically refers to the heroic ideal
of someone like Achilles, who has to exemplify life.
How to live as a hero.
He knows that he's gonna die very early but for
this notion of excellence a full life is a life.
He willingly and gladly goes to his death.
Not however without a series of battles in which
he shows his military and physical strength.
So in a way he is tragic precisely because he is cast in this hero mold.
And tragedy in the great tradition carries
a relationship between the human realm and the God for realm.
It's a very complicated matter.
In a Chinese case you can say that in some ways Chinese stands alone.
He does not have the blessings of God.
In fact, it's who has the blessings of Chinese heaven.
The other factor, of course, is history.
Stands against historical tide.
He wants to go back to a earlier era.
He wants to fight his surroundings almost single handedly.
He abides by a code which might be called E.
And not many people really understand what he means by that.
So for this and many other reasons, one could argue that the portrait of
is even more tragic, more lonely so that his doom or
his tragedy seems to be more glorious this of course is my personal point of view
so let's try to go into some of the scenes you know in order to see how such things
reveal showing his character, let's take the central scene of the whole.
[FOREIGN] Well the background to this is that, basically,
undefeated army come to threaten the stronghold in the west.
So the has to beg for peace.
Has taken over the Chin capital.
And furious.
So being weak warns to plead to.
That in fact is the overlord.
He is the one who acts by his orders.
So, he sends a messenger and then of course, [INAUDIBLE] replied.
He invites [INAUDIBLE] and his entourage for dinner,
at this place called [INAUDIBLE].
In ancient China, of course, they drank a lot.
So, basically it's a drinking party, as it were.
This is the most celebrated dinner, perhaps, in all Chinese history, or
in Chinese literature.
Yeah.
Now, if you look closely at description,
the seating of the banquet is carefully arranged.
Instead of putting Liu Bong in the seat of the guest, the most important or
the principal seat, Zhou Yu himself sits in that seat, facing the east.
That is to say, he shows us by this seating plan, he is already the master.
Then you have other people sitting on other sides.
[INAUDIBLE] was placed in the second worst seat
of a square table, or the square yard, if you like.
So agrees to it.
Of course, the seating plan was already preplanned.
So agrees to it.
And then, of course, Sheong Yu is a lieutenant.
He's a military strategist and designs a plot.
Basically, the [INAUDIBLE] must be assassinated.
So he got [INAUDIBLE] cousin, to do a sword dance.
So in a [INAUDIBLE] moment, a signal, everyone will be killed.
And they knew it, [INAUDIBLE] knew about this.
So [INAUDIBLE] was scared stiff.
So how do you cope with this situation?
The designed another figure,
namely another sort of a look alike of.
A lieutenant of army, who stormed into the banquet and
talks about how heroic his own master is.
And the Han should shall you disobey the honor code of the warriors.
Since has already played his part subservient
to there's no reason to kill.
So stop.
There by losing a golden opportunity.
It was said that later on argued that showing really should have killed.
That was the major mistake has ever made.
Yeah, but that own view.
Yeah.
Other scholars will argue that this is the sign of a true warrior,
because he stands by his code.
And that code is kind of a promise, an honor, a hierarchy.
Because in [INAUDIBLE] view, the kind of hierarchy of the world,
is really not a unified empire, but rather a set of kingdoms.
Was he himself on the southern eastern side as the overlord.
They will be bound together by contracts by hierarchical seating and
by all sort of rituals so that everybody will live in peace.
Of course, the truth of the matter was just opposite.
So one could argue that lived as a kind of anachronism.
He wanted to go back to the older period of the spring and autumn and
the war stage period rather than to serve as the new emperor.
On the other hand Liu Bang the founding Han was sort of destined
to play that role, no matter how weak, how imperfect he is.
But somehow, always in the nick of moment, heaven came to the rescue.
With thunder, with rain, with storm, etc., etc.
So in a way, it's a very interesting portrait.
In a sense that Sheong Yu is given every possibility,
every narrative advantage to showcase his prowess,
his looks, his valor, and eventually, of course, his tragic ending.
A hero according to some scholar it has to be tragic,
otherwise a comic hero is something not really lot of satisfying.
Of course there is such a thing as a comic hero like in Shakespeare for instance.
But in ancient tradition, a hero somehow has to be tragic.
Now hero of course would get into another thorny problems in great tragedy.
There's also a relationship with heaven,
although that's something called great hubris, a kind of elegance and pride
to defy the orders from Zeus or all the deities in heaven.
In China it's not.
In China especially in texts it's both heaven and history as it were,
as if a hero is destined to play certain roles in a certain period.
If you do not live in the right period, you may be a defeated one.
You cannot really succeed.
So the hero and his age become a kind of dialectic problem.
Does the hero create his age or the age create the hero?
I think it's the latter.
I think if Christians so much as view a hero has to be in the right
period in the right contract to make his prowess shown.
Unfortunately, [INAUDIBLE] so to speak, was put in the wrong age.
He lived in the age of unification, or the process of unification, whereas he
wants to, his vision, is to halt back to a kind of a period of disorder.
A kind of a carefully arranged disorder, if you like.
