A. The Imperial Riddle
King Chao Cheng of Ch'in imposed order on the Warring States and selected his imperial name, Shih Huang Ti (Zhuangdi), First Sovereign Emperor of China. Although his Ch'in Dynasty lasted only fifteen years (221-206 B.C.), "his" imperial style survived him two thousand years, until the 1911 Revolution. Therefore we might believe he was a revolutionary innovator, a great man albeit one infamous for his methods. However, when we examine our august emperor in his circumstantial and historical context, he does not appear to be so unique; we might even stop and wonder if he existed at all. But he did exist, and we cannot entirely discredit him. Nevertheless, the First Sovereign Emperor was not the only first emperor; his revolution revolved to a distant past replete with emperors cloaked by legend and myth. King Cheng might have wanted a novel empire, but his novel was rooted in experience - alas, it is impossible to escape from history and to be civilized for long.
Of course King Cheng was two thousand years closer to his origins than we are. We sift through the old texts and dragon-bone inscriptions, dig up the graves, and so on, with a curiosity nearly morbid but enlivening nevertheless. After we examine the historical remains and archeological evidence, we use our imagination to flesh out the bones in hopes that the past will provide future guidance. In some respects we have a great deal more to work with than King Cheng did in his day (1); yet, when he sought guidance on this same but more proximate subject of ours, he too was confronted with the riddle of the past, with the mystery of the meaning of what had happened two thousand years or more before his own birth. His councillors presented him with old legends and myths, symbolic riddles upon which all pondered and made various proposals until he arrived at an enduring imperial synthesis.
We have previously discussed King Cheng's examination of the 'Three Primordial Emperors.' The historical record expressly states his interest in that obscure triune and how he chose the title of one primordial personage, "Huang Ti", for his imperial name, with its double-meaning of "August" Emperor and "Yellow" Emperor. And in our children's story, 'A Turtle For Tyler', we have related how Yu controlled the devastating flood with the help of his dragon and turtle; having thus solved the problem and proven his abilities, Yu became an emperor in his own right. We also spoke of the Immortals and their herb of immortality. If we are to believe the historical record, we know King Cheng was very interested in Yu; we also hear he was so obsessed with becoming immortal that he went to absurd lengths searching for the most desirable health medicine of all.
Yu was the Water Controller. Whosover controls the water rules China - King Cheng chose Water as his dynasty's element. Those who fail to control the water will fall, just as Yu's father failed and was executed either by a man or a god. Floods and droughts have always been associated with rebellion and revolution in China - all rise and fall in accord with the Heavenly Mandate. A massive undertaking with its attendant perils to control water is underway in China as we speak. We are led to an understatement: the natural order including the social order on Earth has its irregularities upon which order must be imposed if humankind would be civilized.
Once the sovereign order is imposed, it might be convenient to bury the scholars who protest that order and to burn the books they interpret as their authority for dissent - or at least to establish a monoply over textual interpretation. Revolutionaries who succeed often become arch-conservatives just as intellectuals become anti-intellectuals - we recall that Li Ssu, Shih Huang Ti's Grand Councillor, was an eminent scholar who allegedly had so many scholars buried that melons flourished over their grave. Blind faith in the latest imperial order is required, despite its arbitrary character under a sole arbiter, because people tend to forget the terrible causes that made the current legal order necessary in the first place; they are therefore prone to repeat the same old mistakes leading to chaos. The new order, however, is not as new as we might suppose. The linear order of progressive history, the very idea of perpetual innovation, was anathema to China as an agrarian civilization: the continuous change of the Book of Changes is seasonable. For traditional China, progress meant a return to the original Golden Age of the naturally culivated garden where plants, animals and humans once got along so famously. In the traditional Chinese Paradise, not only mutual bliss but bare survival depends on cooperation with the spatial ordering and regular cycling of nature. Thus the large political order will necessarily correspond to the natural order spelled out more clearly by the stars in Heaven than by the complex shifting of sands on Earth. True, the big scheme it may become overbearing in its Heavenly symmetry unless it is in harmony with the Secret Way of the Chinese gardener. (B)
King Cheng wanted to establish an empire as stable and enduring as that supported by Yu's famous turtle, an empire of at least one-thousand years. We know the primordial turtle carried the Growing Soil used by Yu to make the mountains that helped save humankind from the flood. The map of the Nine Regions including the Nine Rivers appeared on the turtle's shell as well as the blueprint for human language by which the future can be known or determined. Basing civilization on the back of a turtle might seem strange to us, but someone must start somewhere with something and ask questions. The deliberate application of heat to the shell of a turtle in order to trick out its internal order, and the conscious presumption behind the question - that there is an answer - was critical to the development of human will and intelligence. The riddles were posed everywhere humans evolved; for instance: in Greece, where the Sophists loved the logical play of riddle games; in India, if the loser did not volunteer to become the disciple of the winner of the riddle contest, he was beheaded.
Myths evolved from the divination process, and questions were asked of the myths. For instance, the famous poet C'hu Yuan (c. 340-278 B.C.) posed "Heavenly Questions" or "Riddles" about mythology; for instance:
"If Gun was not fit to control the flood, why was he entrusted with this task? They all said, 'Do not fear! Try him and see if he can accomplish it.' ...Lord Yu issued from Gun's belly. How did he metamorphose? Yu inherited his legacy and continued the work of his father. Why was his plan different, even though the work was in progress? How did he dam the flood waters at their deepest? How did he demarcate the Nine Lands of the earth? Over the rivers and seas what did the Responding Dragon achieve, and where did he pass? What plan did Kun devise? What did Yu succeed in doing?" And so on.
Good questions. Perhaps King Cheng pondered on them as well before he selected his imperial name. And C'hu Yuan, in addition to his one hundred and seventy questions, complained about the politics of the Warring States period in which he lived a century before King Cheng appeared on the scene with his final solution to the complaints. C'hu Yuan was a nobleman, an important minister of C'hu, a state south of Ch'in, who raised too many questions and urged embarassingly patriotic answers thereto at court; he was consequently banished. He traveled about, pondered on politics, asked Heaven questions about the mythological pictures on the shrines where he stopped to rest and compose his poetry. Made miserable by the chaos of his times and bemoaning the plight of his home state of C'hu in its conflict with the rising state of Ch'in, he eventually tied a rock to his body, jumped into a river and drowned himself. To this very day the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated in his honor; the boats commemorate the search for his body - it was never found. Rice dumplings are thrown into the water to appease the dragons, or perhaps to feed his spirit. Of course, riddle contests are included for the edification of everyone participating.
Following suit, we gaze upon the grand totemic conglomeration arising from the yellow soil, the Oriental Dragon, the Yellow Sphinx who guards the Great Wall - and we wonder... We are pleased to discover the Oriental Dragon is friendlier and more beneficial than the Occidental Dragon. That is, if we do not fight it. We shall eventually entertain the proposition that Chao Cheng's premature death after becoming Shih Huang Ti was not due to overwork and insanity, but to his spearing of a great sea-dragon - we remember Captain Ahab made a similar fatal mistake with Moby Dick, the Great White Whale of the West. But let us pause here for a moment in eternity to privately reconsider the riddles of existence. Those who answer rightly may don the imperial robe of gold and jade and continue on their way.
-Intermission-
B. The Secret Garden
Arthur O. Lovejoy wrote an excellent essay, The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism, about the China Cult that became so fashionable amongst literate Europeans from the late sixteenth until the late eighteenth century. The European mind was illuminated by the foreign lights of its exotic interests as its agents spread about the globe. Jesuit missionaries and other travelers to China reported back to Europe; everything Chinese was soon in vogue. Intellectuals who examined the Jesuit journals, travelogues and classics of China were convinced that the Chinese system of government was far superior to their own: China is governed by wise philosophers; offices are open to all men of merit; not only are officials punished for misconduct, good conduct is amply rewarded; China is not interested in conquering or exploiting other nations; the object of government is public tranquility. Furthermore, the Chinese ethic is superior to that of Europe: its sole object is the perfection of moral conduct.
The allegations of Chinese superiority without Jesus did not sit well with those who believed Jesus was the one and only Way. That Jesuits were running around China in local robes and allowing tablets dedicated to Shang Ti (highest god) in Catholic churches did not help matters any. The Jesuits were up to their usual tricks: they enticed the Chinese with Western science and once they were hooked on it, out came the Holy Bible - important Chinese Confucians became Catholics. There were arguments over whether or not the alleged Chinese one-god was the same as the Christian one-god. The Confucian rites were controversial; the Jesuits argued they were not religious rites but were simply civil ceremonies showing respect for the dead; the Pope begged to differ; the Emperor of China was angered and issued a decree; the Jesuits were suppressed in Europe; and so on.
We are not surprised Europeans were so enthusiastic about the Chinese political order, given their own record of European disorder. We might imagine that the imperial Chinese order of square Earth in harmony with round Heaven would be quite attractive to Europeans. But that is not quite so, for Europeans were breaking out of their own square-thinking and archaic molds, hence they turned to the popular conception of the Chinese garden as an asymmetric, romantic work of art resembling wild nature, to support their inclinations. The key word was Sharawadgi, or "Chinese want of symmetry" (2). Hence Sinomania was closed linked with the Romantic and Gothic interest.
Many of the thinkers who expounded most eloquently on the Chinese Garden had never seen a Chinese garden in China and were speculating on second-hand reports. Sir William Chambers had visited China in his youth; he admitted that his aesthetic principles - which were opposed to those of others who reasoned on what is really beautiful - were based on a fictitious or ideal Chinese Garden. His descriptions are definitely Gothic: sublime combinations of the natural and supernatural in large-scale parks replete with ruins evoking feelings of horror, terror, melancholy. The Gothic Chinese gardener is a painter and poet who does not imitate nature - its limited materials and disposition is relatively boring - but assists nature by making certain artistic variations emphasize or de-emphasize this and exaggerate that, and so forth. Therefore Chambers contradicted the popular notion of nature as "wild", and presented the artist as a creator in his own right. Man, then, is the wild one juxtaposed to physical nature; his wildness is contrived. Thus the artist returns, like Rousseau, to an ideal, lost Nature, to an illusion of his own making, where he retreats from the discontents of civilization but is not killed and eaten by a wild animal.
But what in China was a Chinese Garden really like in ancient times? No doubt it resembled nature including human nature. Regular nature has it irregularities which can be uncertainly predicted with theories of probablity, at least where big numbers are involved. Individuals do not "obey the law of averages", notwithstanding the fool who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on New Year's Eve because the law of averages was one shy of the thirty-nine jumpers per annum over the last twenty years.There is a degree of freedom within every order including human order which takes its cues from the rest of nature. The large-scale public projects of the imperial regime in China inclined to regularity, symmetry, predictability. But its gardens and palaces did not lack variety. We should recall here the inluence of the wizards and Taoists, who had their origins in the forests and wilds, on the "superstitious" emperors. Once at court the wise men may have become squares and taken up geometry in order to succeed; never mind, the Tao cannot be contained.
As for the individual who was sick and tired of feudal and imperial society, he had his retreat into the Classical Private Chinese Garden, a virtual Utopia, "another Heaven and Earth within a small pot." His fool's garden was itself a poem and painting. And within this garden we find vegetation, paintings and poetry throughout; perhaps a poem about a lotus flower in mud, a metaphor for the virtuous gardener in dirty society.
The Son of Heaven would have one Heaven on Earth, but earthlings want their own heavens too. The Chinese are only human. We all have much to learn from one another - and from the Dragon.
Notes:
(1) While discussing the discovery of binary arithmatic by Fu-Hsi (a primeval emperor whom we shall discuss elsewhere) Liebniz said, "It is indeed apparent that if we Europeans were well enough informed of Chinese literature, then, with the aid of logic, critical thinking, mathematics and our manner of expressing thought - more exacting than theirs - we could uncover in the Chinese writings of the remotest antiquity many things unknown to modern Chinese and even to other commentators thought to be classical." (Ching) Leibniz believed Europeans to be superior to the Chinese in the abstract sciences, while, on the other hand, the Chinese excelled in the practical philosophy of civil life: "Be it said with almost shame - we are beaten by them... in the principles of Ethics and Politics. For it is impossible to describe how beautifully everything in the laws of the Chinese, more than in those of other peoples, is directed to the achievement of public tranquility...." (Lovelace) In any case, modern Europeans could educate both modern and ancient Chinese commentators on the true nature of their sources.
(2) "A turning-point in the history of modern taste was reached when the ideals of regularity, simplicity, uniformity, and easy logical intelligibility, were first openly impugned, when the assumption that true beauty is 'geometrical' ceased to be one to which 'all consented, as to a Law of Nature.' And in England, at all events, the rejection of this assumption seems, throughout most of the eighteenth century, to have been commonly recognized as initially due to the influence and the example of Chinese art." (Lovejoy)
(3) The term Sharawadgi, or "Chinese want of symmetry," is employed today in postmodern music, in "acousmatic music" and "acoustic ecology." The garden is a soundscape. Composer Claude Schryer strives for the Sharawadgi Effect in everyday sounds, which he presents in a deliberately contrived, confounding manner. The superficial chaos, for instance, of the voice of a city, eventually resolves when heard, by virtue of a discordant estrangement from auditory context, into a sumlime beauty which is no doubt beyond representation or normal sensory experience. The CD Autour ($15) includes a composition played by six boats frozen in Montreal Harbor, two trains in motion, cathedral bells, three wind instruments, blowing wind and crickets.
Quoted Sources:
Lovejoy, Arthur O., Essay in the History of Ideas, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1948
Ching, Julia, and Oxtoby, Willard, Moral Enlightenment - Leibniz and Wolff on China, Institut Monumenta Serica XXVI, Sankt Augustin, Steyler Verlag, Nettetal, 1992
Anthology of Chinese Literature, Ed. Cyril Birch, New York: Grove, 1965