Introduction
In the most concrete terms, the *Rui Liangfu bi 芮良夫毖 (The Good Man of Rui’s Admonition; hereafter *Admonition) is a Warring States manuscript text held by Tsinghua University,Footnote 1 consisting of twenty-eight mostly complete bamboo slips that were originally bound together as a foldable sheet.Footnote 2 The text consists of two rhyming admonitions, prefaced by a short narrative that presents them as Rui Liangfu’s criticism of King Li of Zhou 周厲王 (r. 853–842 bce) and his ministers. Whereas the text is previously unattested, the legend of Rui Liangfu is well known from other transmitted sources. The editors have named the manuscript based on its narrative content, although another title was originally written and subsequently scraped off the verso of the first slip.Footnote 3
Beyond these basic details, prior studies of the *Admonition have arrived at quite conflicting conclusions about the nature of the text: those who treat it as poetry (shi 詩 or shige 詩歌) have characterized it variously as a bian-ya 變雅 (an ironic or critical ya-poem);Footnote 4 as a musical poem;Footnote 5 as a chanted or written cifu 辭賦-style non-musical poem;Footnote 6 as a (presumably vocal) non-operatic shi-poem;Footnote 7 as a zhen 箴 (admonishment);Footnote 8 or as paradigmatic of a long-lost bi 毖 genre of shi-poetry encompassing varied forms.Footnote 9 Others, however, have read the *Admonition not as a poem at all, but as a shu 書 (historical) document.Footnote 10 Beyond Chinese scholarship, very little has been said about the *Admonition, perhaps because it is not directly homologous to anything found in the canon. Yet precisely because it is an unknown text about well-known events, it affords a vital perspective on how texts in early manuscript culture may depart from the conventions of canons and genres into which similar material was eventually assimilated.
Most illuminating about the *Admonition are two textual arrays in which it can be situated. On the one hand, the *Admonition, along with Mao no. 257, “Mulberry Tendrils” (Sang rou 桑柔, no. 257), and the Yi Zhou shu’s 逸周書 “Rui Liangfu” 芮良夫 chapter, completes an assemblage of three texts (one canonical ode, one “document,” and one unknown), in which all three texts purport to record Rui Liangfu’s rhyming criticism of King Li.Footnote 11 On the other hand, the *Admonition, as I show below, belongs to a structural class of texts manifest exclusively in manuscript form, save for one example fossilized in the guwen 古文 Documents.
Controversies about the typology of the *Admonition are shaped in part by other known, transmitted sources of the Rui Liangfu legend. That legend, in skeletal form, can be summed up as follows: King Li was wayward and cruel, and refused to hear criticism of his rule. Thereupon, according to the current-script (jinwen 金文) Bamboo Annals, “Liangfu, the Elder of Rui, cautioned the hundred officials at court,”Footnote 12 predicting or facilitating the king’s eventual removal from power, and a period of interregnum that marks the beginning of the end of the Western Zhou.Footnote 13 Compared to the Duke of Zhou, for whom poetics is merely one of many legendary talents, Rui Liangfu is at best a minor sage or worthy of note, whose role hardly extends beyond poetic admonition; he is remembered for little other than speaking out against King Li. Now, the *Admonition can also be compared with those counterpart texts in the Shijing and Yi Zhou shu that purport to record his direct speech. In all three texts, Rui Liangfu presents his remonstrations in verse; a fourth, significant source of the legend is an anecdote in the Guoyu 國語, which differs from those mentioned above in that it narrates a dialogue between minister and king and does not rhyme. Moreover, in the Guoyu anecdote, Rui Liangfu speaks in a Warring States idiom and quotes both the Hymns and Elegantiae by name. This later, post-canonical consciousness is not evident in the three rhyming texts, which use archaic language and cite ancient wisdom but never ancient books.Footnote 14
Genre and Typologies of Criticism
The problem of genre, or of what forms are appropriate to political criticism, is addressed by a different scene in the Guoyu, in which King Li is reprimanded not by Rui Liangfu but by the Duke of Shao 召公, for seeking to suppress criticism of his rule. The Duke of Shao sets forth a meta-remonstrative remonstration, presenting an idealized division of labor in which the entire kingdom provides collective, comprehensive critical feedback:
天子聽政，使公卿至于列士獻詩，瞽獻曲，史獻書，師箴，瞍賦，矇誦，百工諫，庶人傳語，近臣盡規，親戚補察，瞽、史教誨，耆、艾修之，而後王斟酌焉，是以事行而不悖。
When the Son of Heaven holds court, he makes the dukes and high ministers through the upper nobles offer shi-poems; the blind music-directors offer qu-tunes; the scribes offer shu-documents; teachers zhen-exhort; sou and meng [blind] musicians fu-rhapsodize and song-intone; the hundred artisans jian-remonstrate; and the common people spread yu-tales. Personal attendants evaluate him thoroughly; close relatives correct his errors; blind music-directors and scribes teach and instruct; the elders train him; and thereupon the king can deliberate. This is how one undertakes matters without delusion.Footnote 15
According to this comprehensive scheme, if Rui Liangfu ranks among the “high ministers,” then shi-poetry is the appropriate form. But we also have a shu document and the unknown *Admonition attributed to him that appear to serve roughly the same function. Moreover, this vast scheme is itself contested, preserved in no less than ten distinct variants, many of which divide the labor of criticism differently.Footnote 16 If the categories of textual production here may be called genres, then the problem of genre, and the genres appropriate to varied roles, is also both meaningful and contested, as with the classification of the *Admonition. What forms of literature were available to preimperial manuscript users, and how, among these, might the *Admonition have been classed?
Admittedly, the term “genre” is hardly uncontested,Footnote 17 and one might question the term’s commensurability with early Chinese categories. “Genre,” as I use it, refers simply to meaningfully distinct kinds of texts perceived and/or imitated by a community that creates, edits, or collects texts. In particular, I am interested in the community that assembled the *Admonition and other related texts; but given the lack of contemporaneous Warring States-era theoretical exposition on what fundamental concerns or criteria underlay the sort of typology set out in the Guoyu above, my rudimentary working definition can only be a descriptive one, based on identifiable formal and thematic characteristics that might have mattered to users on the ground.Footnote 18
Thus, below I first analyze the *Admonition, starting from those formal and thematic characteristics, and compare them to those of transmitted shu and shi texts.Footnote 19 Although characteristics such as prosody and length are not in themselves sufficient to define a genre, they do help provide a formal vantage point from which to distinguish sources of the Rui Liangfu legend and some conventions of the books that collect them. Second, turning to thematic aspects of the *Admonition, I show that some ideas presented in the text bear a greater resemblance to those in technical, correlative expositions, or to texts known only from early manuscripts, than to what is preserved in transmitted shi or shu canons. Third, I compare the overarching text–paratext structures of the *Admonition with a class of manuscript-bound forms I term “verse albums,” and suggest that rather than viewing the contents of these texts exclusively through the lens of canonical shi and shu, we consider categories that emerge inductively from forms manifest in manuscript sources. A fourth and final section reconsiders the term bi 毖 (admonition), and the problem of genre in preimperial literature.
Prefatory Narrative and Structural Contours of the *Admonition
Due to the length of the text, and so as to sustain my analysis and discussion below, I append a full annotated translation of the *Admonition at the end of this article. Let me begin here by presenting just the narrative section that opens the text and some of the first lines of verse, to give a sense of the text’s laminate structure and content.
The first song continues with a litany of largely formulaic warnings, criticisms, and exhortations (in some cases implicit in the descriptions of ancient models), ending on an exhortative note. The second song is prefaced by the narrative comment, “The second opening says: 二啟曰,” which I interpret as belonging to the same paratextual layer and narrative voice as the prefatory opening. In both songs, most of the individual phrases would not be out of place in the critical poems of the Elegantiae, or the authoritative speeches of the Shang shu, save for a lengthy exposition on the mechanics of government in the second song, discussed in more detail below.
Moreover, in contrast to the prefatory narrative in section 1.0, the two songs themselves are completely devoid of specific reference to known people or places, as is the case in most of the transmitted Odes; the entire work of historically contextualizing the songs is done by the opening “preface.” The same can be said about the function of the prefaces in the Mao-version Odes, in which the prefaces often identify a speaker or “maker” of the ode, and sometimes identify the target of criticism. The entry for Mao no. 257 reads: “in ‘Mulberry Tendrils,’ the Elder of Rui criticizes King Li” (⟨桑柔⟩，芮伯刺厲王也).Footnote 20 Similar contextualizing pronouncements can be found in the corresponding section of the preface to the Yi Zhou shu, and in part of another preface preserved only in the Qunshu zhiyao 群書治要, although shu documents (including “Rui Liangfu”) regularly identify their speakers within the text proper.Footnote 21
Given that the opening of the *Admonition above also rhymes, and considering our lack of knowledge about how its individual songs may have circulated in oral or manuscript contexts, one might question whether there is any fundamental discontinuity between the “preface” and the songs that follow. Were the two composed simultaneously, or did the songs circulate as independent texts, with the rhyming preface added later to match? Should we choose to read preface and songs as separate, the songs are contextualized much as they come in the transmitted Odes. If we are inclined to read the “preface” as an integral part of the *Admonition, then at least with regard to this particular feature, the*Admonition may better resemble a shu document.
Before turning to details of prosody and form in the text, I note one large-scale feature that is neither purely structural nor purely thematic: the final song ends with a transition to a more lyrical mode of expression (section 2.7), highlighting the speaker, in a gesture very similar to “sphragis” expressions that close a number of songs of the Elegantiae.Footnote 22 In this regard, the overall narrative contour of the *Admonition resembles “Mulberry Tendrils,” which can also be divided into two movements on the basis of its verse structure, and contains a similar gesture at the close (perhaps corresponding to the luan 亂 finale).
Prosody, Form, and Formulae in the *Admonition and Texts Attributed to Rui Liangfu
Let me begin a formal analysis of the *Admonition by comparing it with the two other (canonical) texts attributed to Rui Liangfu. The largely similar, formulaic linguistic and narrative content shared by the three texts serves, in a sense, as a controlled variable that can help highlight prosodic conventions of shi and shu canons in which the *Admonition’s counterpart texts are compiled, to show how the *Admonition diverges from those conventions. Of course, “Mulberry Tendrils” and the Yi Zhou shu chapter, “Rui Liangfu,” are not equally representative of the collections in which they are found, so my analysis below must also consider how the works diverge from the prosodic norms of their respective canons.
Does the *Admonition Accord with Known Odes Prosodies and Forms?
Prosody in the *Admonition tends toward a primarily tetrasyllabic or octosyllabic end-rhyme well-known from early verse, in which tetrasyllables rhyme on every second foot, yielding a repeating XBXB pattern.Footnote 23 The *Admonition approaches this regular pattern, although it is only 72 percent tetrasyllabic, and thus considerably less regular than most poems of the Shijing.Footnote 24 In many cases, the rhythm seems to lapse or be carried partly by particles or monorhyme. The 112 phrases of “Mulberry Tendrils,” in contrast, are perfectly representative of Elegantiae prosody in their nearly perfect (99 percent) tetrasyllabic rhyme (Figure 1b), and in their division into two movements on the basis of verse structure.Footnote 25
Verse and rhyme structure in texts attributed to Rui Liangfu. Legend: letters (A, B, C, etc.) represent the rhyming feet; “x” represents non-rhyming feet. Verses 1.0 and 2.0 are paratextual. Underlining indicates rhyme at the penultimate position; [?] is a lacuna; pound sign (#) indicates monorhyme, rendered in superscript (e.g. A#) when integral to the rhyme pattern; lowercase letters indicate significant consonance or assonance (e.g. “a” is consonant with “A”); diacritics distinguish near-rhymes. The text of 1.3 is divided into sections strictly by topic, because the rhyme is not regular enough to perceive any verse structure, and section 1 is found only in the Qunshu zhiyao versions.
Whereas the two movements of “Mulberry Tendrils” perfectly typify structures found throughout the Elegantiae, verse structure in the *Admonition is often difficult to discern,Footnote 26 especially if one assumes that changes of topic ought to coincide with changes in rhyme (as they tend to do in the Odes). The Odes were presumably set to music, and the preface to the *Admonition clearly indicates that “Rui Liangfu made this admonition (bi) in two codas” (zuo bi zai zhong 作毖再終); since “codas” in all similar contexts refers to bouts of musical performance,Footnote 27 both the *Admonition and Odes narratives imply that Rui Liangfu presented his criticisms in some form of musical verse. The irregularity of the *Admonition’s “verses,” however, seems to mirror that of the text’s rhyme scheme. It drifts in and out of slant-rhyme; its rhymes change mid-topic or cross into new topics no clear thematic shift, and the rhythm is periodically interrupted by a foot that seems extraneous or missing (see Figure 1a). Irregularity of rhyme and verse is a feature found among some odes of the Hymns (discussed below), but in the transmitted Odes, these hymns are poems of praise, set in the ideal age of the Zhou founders and ancestors, centuries before Rui Liangfu. Moreover, these hymns, at least as transmitted, are all much shorter pieces.Footnote 28
As to length as a formal feature, the *Admonition is roughly twice as long as the longest works in the Odes; that is, each song is roughly as long as the longest transmitted Odes, but considerably more irregular in rhythm and rhyme, and in verse structure than any of those long odes.Footnote 29
Formulaic Expressions
Although with regard to rhymes, verses, and overall structure, the *Admonition looks unlike the sort of poem that is attributed to Rui Liangfu in transmitted traditions, and indeed unlike any canonical shi-poem; it does, nevertheless, possess a few features at the level of the line or phrase that are typical of the Odes and atypical of shu documents. These features can be contrasted with a large body of common language and formulae that the *Admonition shares with both shi and shu, (expressions like zi 資, or wuhu 嗚呼, for example), none of which are very useful for discriminating one form from the other. Features that might be of use in discriminating shi from shu include a single reduplicative in line 133, “Overturned, overturned, there is no success” (板板其無成), a rhythmic feature commonly found in the Shijing.Footnote 30 Nonetheless, this feature is remarkably scarce in the *Admonition, considering its great length and the pervasive presence of reduplication in the Shijing. There are, however, some lyrical exclamations of note that would be very unusual in a shu document:
“Oh how troubled is my heart!” (心之憂矣, line 50)Footnote 31
“My heart is [unhappy]” (我心不[快], line 185)Footnote 32
“Worries entangle my inner heart” (吾中心念絓, line 189)
Such formulae of Shijing lyricism are completely absent from transmitted shu documents. Whether those formulae reflect the genre awareness of a text at its time of composition, or reflect its reshaping to fit textual assemblages in manuscript culture is unclear.
In sum, if one approaches the *Admonition from the perspective of the received tradition, it violates the expectations and typology that the “preface” to the Odes, the Zuozhuan, and the Guoyu establish for Rui Liangfu’s literary output. Although it makes gestures toward transmitted shi-poetry, and reflects some of the contours of “Mulberry Tendrils” (criticisms, closing sphragis, two movements, etc.), the *Admonition has few signs of the structures of accompanied musical performance that undergird the Elegantiae. Given its prosodic irregularity, any performance of its songs would have differed significantly from the highly regularized pieces in the Elegantiae, and its rhymes and verses are of more variable length than any ode of comparable theme or length in the Shijing, including the Hymns.
Could the *Admonition be a shu 書 document?
While one may consider shu documents to be primarily prose forms that undergird ancient history and present models of political speech, this impression owes in part to the salience of those chapters presumed to be among the earliest authentic Zhou works of the Shang shu 尚書. Paradigmatic among these are the gao 告 (announcement) chapters, dramatic speeches often regarded as the early core of the work, containing little in the way of verse or rhyme. Some early chapters, however, do contain rhyming verse, although such verse is generally more common in those chapters thought to be post-Han re-creations.Footnote 33
In the peri-canonical Yi Zhou shu, in contrast, a cohesive group of “core” chapters uses rhyme extensively in combination with a set of prosodic and rhetorical features such as anadiplosis (wherein a line’s last word repeats at the start of the next line) and listing/enumeration.Footnote 34 In its dramatic speech,Footnote 35 “Rui Liangfu” resembles the paradigmatically old gao chapters of the Shang shu, and although its loose and disjointed rhymes have generally gone unnoticed,Footnote 36 it does indeed rhyme in places, yet lacks the other prosodic features that characterize the Yi Zhou shu’s “core” chapters.Footnote 37 In its combination of dramatic speech with rhyme, however, it better resembles the *Admonition than any transmitted, pre-Han shu document.Footnote 38
Nonetheless, in other ways, the “Rui Liangfu” chapter does better fit the mold of prose shu literature. At only 60 percent tetrasyllabic overall, it has a less consistent rhythm than the *Admonition, and while there is intermittent rhythm and rhyme, there is little clearly identifiable repeating verse structure (section divisions in Figure 1.3 are based entirely on narrative cues). Moreover, in addition to a relatively loose tendency to rhyme throughout, that drifts into consonance or assonance (e.g. nasal finals), the rhyme in “Rui Liangfu” lapses completely in places, and is held together rhythmically by monorhyme in others.Footnote 39 Unlike the *Admonition, gestures of shi lyricism are totally absent from the Yi Zhou shu chapter, which opens, in contrast with “Rui Bo thusly said: …” (芮伯若曰), a formula found exclusively in shu documents and bronze inscriptions, where, remarkably, it almost always marks the authoritative speech of the king or in some cases the Duke of Zhou.Footnote 40
On a continuum, with regard to prosody and structure, the *Admonition lies somewhere between a typical shi-poem of the sort we might expect and an unusually rhythmic, dramatic shu-history. As a lengthy text that rhymes the entire way through, displaying some of the lyrical gestures of the Odes, its prosodic features are atypical of the finished Odes canon and transmitted shu. Perhaps the overwhelming influence of transmitted literature has led modern readers of the manuscript to focus on concerns that fit more squarely with canonical categories, but the binary approach of reading the *Admonition through the lens of these categories has its limits; showing what the *Admonition is not gets us only part way to understanding what it is, and while the comparison to transmitted literature is a productive foil for examining prosody and form in the *Admonition, the question of the manuscript text’s typology and composition can be further explored below by comparison to other manuscripts.
As suggested above, there are some prosodic features the *Admonition shares with the Zhou Hymns, where the term bi 毖, to which I return in the penultimate section of this article, does appear in the title of one ode. Beyond bi and the canon lie other transmitted verses that help contextualize the *Admonition. Any approach, however, that seeks to contextualize it, must also account for the text’s unique thematic features and intellectual content, to which I now turn.
Unique Themes and Concerns of the *Admonition: Virtue, Punishment, and the Mechanics of the Cosmos
Although, as mentioned above, there are many formulaic warnings and exhortations in the *Admonition that would be at home in critical odes or authoritative shu speech, the *Admonition also shares a number of concerns with Warring States technical literature and correlative thought that have gone largely unnoticed.Footnote 41 It could be argued that a correlative understanding of the relation between the natural and human realms underlies even the trope of “stimulus” (xing 興) in canonical poetics, which juxtaposes the two realms. And it would also be mistaken to say that human actions and celestial motions are never juxtaposed within the Odes.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, the warnings and exhortations of the *Admonition reveal a more elaborate, systematic, rule-based, or mechanical view of cosmic correlations, in which the ruler’s action must be closely synchronized with celestial and seasonal events. The mode of discourse in the manuscript, with its tendency towards exposition and a lack of “stimulus,” in many places more resembles that seen in technical literature or correlative philosophy, than in the Odes.
Concerns of the *Admonition include a fear of unraveling, or disrupting the cosmic net-structure (jigang 紀綱), which comes interwoven with concern for the balance between de 德 and xing 刑 (virtue and punishments), a dyad with a wide range of binary correlates known from later technical literature and astro-calendrical divination. The term du 度 (measure, attitude, degree, bearing) directly bridges a correlation between astral bodies and the ruler’s measured disposition or attitude. In the manuscript text, both the motion of planets and the action of the ruler have a proper du that should not be disordered. The text also has an extensive exposition on political order that appears in two conceptually parallel sequences. Therein, mutually reinforcing vertical and horizontal door braces are understood as metaphors of mutual support and regulation in properly ordering the realm and cosmos. These cosmological concerns provide much to digest; here I begin with the relationship between cosmic order and the balance between virtue and punishments.
Balancing Virtue and Punishment
Han Fei’s 韓非 concept of the “two handles” (er bing 二柄), “punishments and virtue,” advocates a pragmatic use of stick and carrot.Footnote 43 Xing 刑, homophonous and perhaps etymologically linked to bodily form (xing 形), is that which is taken away by punishments (e.g. a nose, a foot, or a life), whereas “virtue” (de 德) puns on “obtaining” (de 得) something desired. The problem of balance between de 德 and xing 刑 arises numerous times in the *Admonition (see lines 45, 114, 123, 135, 145, and 154 in the Appendix), but like the dyad “punishment and virtue” 刑德, known from Han Fei and other texts, the reversed de-xing in the *Admonition bears on a number of associations that go well beyond their use in a non-technical context, and certainly beyond associations of terms used to translate them. John Major has suggested that some uses of xing and de be translated as “rescission” and “accretion,” for example, as found in seasonal ordinances, where they cycle through different locations in time, like yin and yang:Footnote 44
德在室則刑在野，德在堂則刑在術，德在庭則刑在巷
When de is in the Room, xing is in the Field. When de is in the Hall, xing is in the Road. When de is in the Court, xing is in the Lane.Footnote 45
One of the earliest transmitted occurrences of the terms in clear opposition, is in the Lü xing 呂刑 chapter of the Shang shu,Footnote 46 thought to date as late as the Warring States period.Footnote 47 The terms do not completely shed their etymological origins as they enter the astro-calendrical realm, but their associative valence is expanded.Footnote 48
Elsewhere in the Tsinghua corpus, the terms virtue and punishment arise in conjunction with the previously obscure concept of “five assistants” (wu xiang 五相), unattested in transmitted Warring States texts, but seen in lines 141 and 157 of the *Admonition. In the *Tang zai chimen 湯在啻門 manuscript, a philosophical text replete with correspondence schemes, the sage king Tang’s 唐 minister, Yi Yin 伊尹 lists these “five assistants” as “virtue, affairs, missions, corrections, and punishments” (德、事、役、正、刑).Footnote 49 Although “five assistants” in the *Admonition was originally read as huxiang 互相 (“mutual,” a sense also unattested before the Han), it should now be clear that it indeed refers to “five assistants,” bookended by “virtue” and “punishment,” which in *Tang zai chimen are enmeshed with or synecdochic for the functions of the five. We see this same five-to-binary correlative enmeshment also in lines 135–41 here, and in 159–71 (discussed below), where virtue and punishments are understood metaphorically as vertical and horizontal door braces, or mutually entwined ropes:
As we will see below, when the pair of braces comes apart or the ropes unravel, the five assistants weaken, and the five celestial entities (sun, moon, stars, planets, and year-star) all become disordered. Some particular themes of the *Admonition can only be fully decoded by recourse to other texts in the Tsinghua corpus, such as *Tang zai chimen, in this case.
The virtue and punishments of the *Admonition operate closely in unison with the workings of the cosmos and calendar: when imbalanced, they lead to disorder in the five celestial bodies seen above; when balanced, the seasons come at the right times (lines 145–59). Moreover the idea that “sanctions” in the human realm should be issued at a proper time (line 153) and that “virtue and punishments be proper and advantageous” (line 154), were not just matters of theory in early China; punishing at certain times was a matter of practice.Footnote 50
The emphasis on balancing the astro-calendrical variables of virtue and punishment is just one manifestation of a relatively impersonal, mechanistic or rule-based view of the cosmos that underlies the model of rulership set forth in the *Admonition, nowhere better exemplified than in the metaphor of “Heaven’s trigger mechanism” (tian zhi faji 天之發機), (Appendix, line 173), which Rui Liangfu fears will be set off by the failure to instate timely, measured, cosmically aligned governance.Footnote 51
Du 度 and Celestial Alignment
Another crucial concept that aligns the ruler with the heavens in the *Admonition is du 度, which usually refers to a measured quality of being or doing, and which I have translated imperfectly as “bearing.”Footnote 52 By not “being ashamed to inquire about the proper course” (毋擾聞繇), one’s “du (bearing) will be without misfortune” (度毋有咎, lines 19–20); conversely, not adhering to pure virtue can cause a loss of du (lines 107–8). Du is also a central concern of some transmitted shu documents and texts known only from the Tsinghua corpus: for example, its perfection is emphasized repeatedly as a goal of the “Ming xun” 命訓 (also found in the Yi zhou shu);Footnote 53 the Tsinghua *Zhi zheng zhi dao 治政之道 and *Zhi bang zhi dao 治邦之道 compare improper du measurement or calibration in the selection of worthy ministers with the desynchronization of the year-star (sui 歲), miscalibration of drought/flooding, and ultimately the destruction of crops.Footnote 54 The Tsinghua Zhou Gong zhi qinwu 周公之琴舞 (Duke of Zhou’s Zither Dance) also uses the term du to refer to the implicit alignment between ruler, sun, and moon.Footnote 55
Likewise, in the *Admonition, the du of the ruler is very closely associated with the du of planetary bodies, and comes intertwined with the notion of balancing virtue and punishment. Sima Qian, in addressing prior practices of astral divination that he viewed as misguided, reveals some clues to how virtue and punishment were correlated with celestial movements of the “five stars,” or “five helpers” (wu zuo 五佐; cf. “five assistants”) of Heaven in some schemes:
水、火、金、木、填星，此五星者，天之五佐，為（經）緯，見伏有時，所過行贏縮有度。日變脩德，月變省刑，星變結和。凡天變，過度乃占。
[Mercury], [Mars], [Venus], [Jupiter], and [Saturn]—these five stars are the five assistants of Heaven. As for their actions in warp and weft (i.e., declination and right ascension), and their appearance and hiding, [everything] has its time, and the gain and retreat by which they exceed their [expected] travels have their measure {du 度}. When the sun changes, work on your virtue; when the moon changes, reconsider your punishments; when the stars (planets) change, join [people?] in harmony: With celestial incidents, one only performs omen interpretation when they have exceeded their measure/expected du positionFootnote 56
Here, Sima Qian is writing to criticize practices from before his time. His claim is that astral divination was practiced more regularly than needed, perhaps as a regular part of the craft of seasonal regulation. We do not know what role astral divination had in the context of the *Admonition, but cycles emphasizing virtue and punishments are interwoven with the movement of celestial bodies, and the du of planets must be closely regulated by the ruler. It seems likely that to “inquire about the [proper] course [yao[” (聞繇, line 19) involved consulting technical specialists as well as those versed in more mundane political matters. The term yao 䌛, translated as “course” here, can also be interpreted as “mantic pronouncement” or “prognostic song.” The interpretive possibilities point to a cluster of etymologically related terms, including “portent” (yao 妖), which appears below, or a prophetic yu-song (飫歌) in the Guoyu that shares a line with the *Admonition.Footnote 57 All these possible readings assume a fundamental relationship between the mantic arts and charting a course of action.
Parallel Structure Within the *Admonition and Parallel Concerns Beyond
The description of a harmonious cosmos (lines 137–50) is the result of proper government, which according to the *Admonition is also a task of careful alignment or measuring, well within the valence of the term du 度. The metaphors employed to describe the precise and symmetrical craft of good government (paired rope ties, vertical and horizontal door-braces, “five assistants” aligned, etc.) share imagery in common with the warp and weft of the cosmic structure, which extends lines of regulation across vertical and horizontal space. Note, again, the exposition on proper alignment (lines 137–54 above), and the parallel section that follows it, detailing precisely the opposite, negative consequences of misalignment, in which political breakdown leads the cosmos to correspondingly fall apart (lines 155–66):
Neither this language nor any part of the correlative expositions are shared with the other Rui Liangfu texts. As it turns out, the texts which bear the most resemblance are seasonal ordinance texts such as the rhyming *Sui 歲 text of the Zidanku Chu boshu 子彈庫楚帛書 (Zidanku Silk Manuscript #1):Footnote 59
Calamities include the collapse of mountains, geysers erratically gushing forth, wars, and other negative consequences for the king,Footnote 61 precisely the “many disasters” (庶難) Rui Liangfu repeatedly warns of in the *Admonition (lines 6, 39, 81, 106, 148, and 184), if the authorities do not heed the yao (for which “portent,” here is a plausible loan). Li Ling points out that this section of the Zidanku manuscript is concerned primarily with “disorder and the imperative to reestablish order,”Footnote 62 and that issues of seasonality and the imperative to order time properly were not relegated to the realm of the ritual specialist, but rather were pervasive concerns.Footnote 63 They are not found in the shi or shu arrays, but they are common in other early texts and surface clearly in the *Admonition.
Moreover, these concerns are addressed by rhyming verse forms—exemplified by the Zidanku Sui text—that circulated in the Warring States, presumably within the same milieu as texts like the *Admonition. In addition to rhyming philosophical texts that we know from both transmitted compendia and unearthed manuscripts, we also know a number of correlative texts developed in the Warring States through Han, some of which share formal and prosodic features with canonical shi poetry. We also see this clearly reflected in texts of the Tsinghua corpus, like the Tang zai chimen, Wu ji 五紀, and San bu wei 參不韋, that weave like concerns into a philosophical system, often with the use of rhyme. None of the foregoing aims to deny the large part of the *Admonition for which comparisons to shu or shi are perfectly straightforward, but given the similarities of both (rhyming) form and content that exist between the *Admonition and the Sui text, we must consider a body of rhyming literature distinct from canonized shi or shu to fully understand the typology or composition of the *Admonition. Or, perhaps, we need also consider the practices of reading, editing, selection, and use that underlie the separation of this body of what might be called technical literature from canons that have come to define the typology of shi and shu.
Structure and Paratext in Verse Albums
The foregoing has shown ways in which the *Admonition is not paradigmatic of transmitted forms, as well as some concrete examples of what is thematically distinct about the text, and what sorts of texts those distinct parts resemble. Let me continue to identify other texts that, likewise, do more resemble the *Admonition, while shifting the focus to broader text–paratext structural features.
Verse Albums as a Structural Class of Texts
Within the Tsinghua corpus, two other manuscripts are structured much like the *Admonition: the Qiye 耆夜 (Toast [celebrating the defeat] of Qi) and Zhou Gong zhi qinwu. These two manuscripts are collections of verse in which prefatory narrative and punctuation of individual songs frames the interpretation and parsing of the song texts, much as seen in the *Admonition.Footnote 64 The five song texts of the Qiye consist of four previously unattested songs capped by a variant of the poem “Xi shuai” 蟋蟀 (The Cricket) transmitted in the Odes (Mao no. 114). Likewise, the Zhou Gong zhi qinwu, combines the previously unknown song texts with a rendition of one Shijing poem we know, “Jing zhi” 敬之 (Be Warned of it; Mao no. 288). The editors note that the codicological features and handwriting of the Zhou gong zhi qinwu and *Admonition manuscripts are similar, and that the two texts were likely produced at the same time.Footnote 65 What we know more certainly about the Qiye and Zhou Gong zhi qinwu, is that at least the canonical part of their contents circulated—in some form, as texts—beyond the manuscripts. For this reason, the sort of historical contextualization performed by these narrative portions is best understood as the work of encapsulating paratexts—“thresholds” that constrain the identity and/or interpretation of the text proper, from a position on the same codex.Footnote 66
The Qiye manuscript commemorates a drinking party that celebrated King Wu’s conquest over the state of Qi 耆.Footnote 67 The text opens with a prefatory, paratextual narrative that historically contextualizes the songs. It reads:
武王八年征伐耆，大戡之。還，乃飲至於文太室。畢公高為客，召公保奭為介，周公叔旦為主，辛公泉甲為位，作策逸為東堂之客，呂尚父命為司正，監飲酒。
王舉酬畢公，作歌一終曰⟪樂樂旨酒⟫: …
King Wu campaigned against Qi in his eighth year, and greatly conquered it. On his return, he drank to his arrival in the Great Hall of King Wen. Gao, the Duke of Bi was the guest; Protector Shi, the Duke of Shao was the helper; Shu Dan, the Duke of Zhou was the host; Quanjia, the Duke of Xin was the attendant; Zuoce Yi was the guest of the Eastern Room; Lü Shangfu was ordered to serve as master of ceremony, overseeing the drinking.
The King offered up his chalice, toasting the Duke of Bi, and made a song in one zhong 終 (coda), called “Joyful, joyful, the tasty brew”:Footnote 68
[Song text … ]
Much like the opening in the *Admonition, which describes the circumstances under which Rui Liangfu presented his song in two codas, the prefatory section here guides the reader to interpret the poem as having a specific historical significance, performing a similar function to the prefaces found in the Mao-version Shijing, albeit differing in the specific details of its historical context. What follows is a series of songs, offered by King Wu and the Duke of Zhou, in the course of toasting members of the drinking party. Each song is prefaced and punctuated by paratextual narrative that indicates “[so-and-so] made a song in one coda, which is called [such-and-such]” (作歌一終曰). A rendition of “Xi shuai” is the last of the poems, and its prefatory narrative indicates that the Duke of Zhou extemporized (or composed) it in response to an interloping cricket that happened upon his mat.
While the Qiye climaxes with a known song of the Odes, the Zhou Gong zhi qinwu opens with one: after a brief introduction and entrance by the Duke of Zhou, the song sung by King Cheng 成王 in the first section is a version of “Jing zhi.” In this case, the opening narrative is more rudimentary: preceding the first song it says that “The Duke of Zhou made [for] the many nobles warnings and cautions, [accompanied by] zither and dancing in nine sui [refrains/units of performance]” (周公作多士儆毖，琴舞九遂).Footnote 69 A similar phrase prefaces King Cheng’s first verses, and paratext functions also to punctuate the nine sui, each of which is divided into an opening (qi 啟) and a finale (luan 亂).Footnote 70
Comparing these two manuscripts with the *Admonition, the resemblance in overall textual form is quite apparent: all are collections of rhyming verse that could perhaps be termed “historically contextualized micro-collections,” or “historically conscious song-books” (at least in that the paratextual narrative suggests a context of musical performance). The term I have settled on, “verse album,” implies an agnosticism about the genre identity of their contents, or whether the texts were ever performed as they are portrayed in the manuscripts. In addition to the historicizing function of the paratext, all the texts seem concerned with presenting ritual models for rulership, in which proper du 度 alignment is key.Footnote 71 The Tsinghua corpus offers a total of three examples of texts with this form and function, but there is at least one more example now fossilized in the Shang shu.
Considering that the songs of the guwen 古文 (old text) Wu zi zhi ge 五子之歌 (Songs of the Five Princes),Footnote 72 are all remonstrations against a corrupt ruler, the content of the chapter resembles the *Admonition even more closely than do the other verse album manuscripts in the Tsinghua corpus. The text, set in the declining Xia 夏 dynasty, and found in the Xia shu 夏書 section of the Documents, recounts the tale of Tai Kang 太康, whose negligence and mismanagement ultimately led to the revolt of the people (note the morphologic resemblance to the Rui Liangfu story). Tai Kang’s brothers present songs of criticism against him. The prefatory paratext reads:
太康尸位，以逸豫滅厥德，黎民咸貳，乃盤遊無度，畋于有洛之表，十旬弗反。有窮后羿因民弗忍，距于河，厥弟五人御其母以從，徯于洛之汭。五子咸怨，述大禹之戒以作歌。
Tai Kang occupied the throne like a personator of the dead. By idleness and dissipation he extinguished his virtue, till the black-haired people all wavered in their allegiance. He, however, pursued his pleasure and wanderings without any self-restraint (du 度; “measure,” “bearing”). He went out to hunt beyond the Luo, and a hundred days elapsed without his returning. (On this) Yi, the prince of Qiong, taking advantage of the discontent of the people, resisted (his return) on (the south of) the He. The (king’s) five brothers had attended their mother in following him, and were waiting for him on the north of the Luo; and (when they heard of Yi’s movement), all full of dissatisfaction, they related the Cautions of the Great Yu in the form of songs.Footnote 73
The songs of complaint and criticism that follow this prefatory section are all very short, ranging from five to sixteen mostly tetrasyllabic lines, with each song set apart by paratextual markers, “The first one said” (其一曰):, “The second one said” (其二曰), and so on. On the basis of both text–paratext structure and content, the Wu zi zhi ge’s resemblance both to the *Admonition and to the other verse album manuscripts is strikingly clear.
What is not clear, however, is how a text structured like the Wu zi zhi ge came to be found in the Shang shu. The guwen chapters of the Shang shu are generally suspected of being recreations, or “forgeries,” composed after the Western Han. The questions of how and why texts structured much like the Wu zi zhi ge circulated in the Warring States are difficult to answer without some speculation, although reconstructions, or “forgeries,” often reflect the forms and interpretive practices of texts that were used and circulated contemporary to their fabrication.Footnote 74 While it is definite that verse albums circulated in the time of the Tsinghua manuscripts, it is certainly possible that they circulated long afterwards. The only other traces we have are those now found in manuscripts.
Bi 毖 (Admonition) and the Problem of Genre
Having examined what the *Admonition is not (canonical shu or shi), what is unique about it (technical/correlative exposition), and what its overall structure resembles (other verse albums), let me return to the category of bi 毖, and consider its value for reconstructing the genre-awareness of preimperial manuscript users. The *Admonition makes it clear that Rui Liangfu “made a bi 毖 in two codas”; the Zhou Gong zhi qinwu prefaces its version of the Shijing poem “Jing zhi” with “the king made warnings and bis” (王作儆毖). Does the term bi refer to an “admonition” of any sort, or to a bounded literary genre? The Tsinghua editors have certainly implied that such a genre typology holds.Footnote 75
Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 has attempted to trace the etymology of the term bi 毖 from Shang oracle bones.Footnote 76 He argues that the term is a warning delivered at a distance, which would have entailed a significant campaign.Footnote 77 Such a warning (or threat) is reminiscent of the use of bi in early shu documents literature.Footnote 78 Bi in the Shang shu has both nominal and verbal uses: “admonish,” and “admonition”; and in the Jiu gao 酒告 (Proclamation on Wine), for example, it gets used both ways.Footnote 79 Zhao Ping’an argues that since shu documents can contain songs, bi may be a long-lost subgenre of the shu documents, like shi 誓 (oaths), gao 告 (proclamations), xun 訓 (instructions), ming 命 (commands), etc. Certainly, the similarity of the “Rui Liangfu” chapter of the Yi Zhou shu suggests that transmitted shu forms could encompass—with some editing—the material found in the *Admonition. Nonetheless, the manuscript texts use the term bi to refer to the song-texts proper, not to their larger, paratextually encapsulated narrative forms.
The idea that subgeneric conventions are perceptible in shu literature, however, reminds us that canons—and subsections of those canons—contain heterogenous materials. Such is also true of the Zhou Hymns section of the Odes, in which the odes “Min yu xiao zi” 閔予小子, “Fang luo” 訪落, “Jing zhi” 敬之, and “Xiao bi” 小毖 (Mao nos. 286–89), form a self-admonitory suite.Footnote 80 The suite, together with the corresponding Mao prefaces, echoes the tone of self-admonition in the Zhou Gong zhi qin wu manuscript, although self-admonition, in both suite and manuscript, functions largely to present King Cheng as a model of ritual devotion (xiao 孝). In addition to the bi in the title of “Xiao bi” (Little Admonition), the Zhou Gong zhi qinwu text uses the term bi to refer to its version of “Jing zhi”; its exhortations to “be warned of it,” in turn, are echoed also by the *Admonition. As a rule, none of the Zhou Hymns are satirical, and as criticisms they do not exceed a form of ritual self-deprecation that the king performs while facing the ancestors. Nonetheless, must the rules of the canon constrain the manuscript culture that produced the Tsinghua manuscripts? Although the *Admonition’s songs are unequivocally critical and far longer than any in the Zhou Hymns suite, the irregularity of their rhyme and verse patterns is more reminiscent of the admonitory Zhou Hymns than texts such as “Mulberry Tendrils” and its operatic ilk. For this reason, and because of the material and codicological similarity between the *Admonition and Zhou Gong zhi qinwu manuscripts, one might be inclined to group the *Admonition with the self-admonitions of the Zhou Hymns suite, despite the differences of length and theme.
More broadly speaking, direct criticisms against the king in transmitted shu documents are set almost exclusively in pre-Zhou or prehistoric times; the only clear exception to this is “Rui Liangfu,” which perhaps for this very reason was shunted to the Yi Zhou shu;Footnote 81 in the Odes, identification of wayward kings never happens explicitly, but is a function of the preface, such that neither the Documents nor the Odes ever directly criticize a Zhou king. The Hymns (song 頌) are generally thought to take their name from rong 容 (countenance), or proper ritual demeanor towards the king and ancestors, such that they almost by definition would exclude any sort of direct criticism.Footnote 82
Evidence of a bi genre from the Duke of Shao’s systematic taxonomy of remonstration in the Guoyu and parallel sources is lacking,Footnote 83 and the evidence from other transmitted sources is murky. Suppose, however, that there is class of critical bi verses that encompasses all manner of warnings—both kingly self-admonishment and ministerial critique—and functions either as a class of composition or nomenclature of compilation during the Warring States: if there were such a bi category, of which only some “eulogize” (song 頌), it seems almost certain that its thematic range could never be reflected in the canon as we know it,Footnote 84 due to the unspoken conventions of redaction that have scrubbed away all direct criticism of Western Zhou kings. If the Guoyu taxonomy provides a hierarchical yet contested blueprint for collective labor, it must also have hierarchical notions of who is authorized to say what to whom.
If we do wish to further pursue the question of typology, there are other instructive genre candidates in taxonomies beyond the Guoyu, including zhen 箴 admonishments, of which an example, Yu ren zhi zhen 虞人之箴 (The Warden’s Admonishment), is preserved in the Zuozhuan. Footnote 85 In that the Yu ren zhi zhen is tetrasyllabic and lacks a clear cyclical verse structure, thematically and prosodically it resembles the *Admonition. Other verse forms, like the Gui shi 佹詩 in the Fu 賦 section of the Xunzi, are instructive, if not decisive, in contemplating the problem of genre. The Gui shi is a poem rather than a dramatic speech, and its classical language would never be mistaken for the archaic diction of shu documents, but in other ways it resembles the *Admonition: in its irregular tetrasyllabic meter; in its themes of complaint (for example, against the neglect of good men in government); and—more generally—in what David Knechtges calls the “topos of the world upside-down.”Footnote 86 Its structure includes an auto-commentarial opening akin to the paratextual section of the *Admonition, and claims to musicality in a final xiaoge 小哥 (little song) section. In its universal poetics of complaint, the Gui shi may represent a development, whereby specific instances of dramatic, historical, and exemplary speech give rise—by induction—to poems that present an ahistorical, philosophical, general case.Footnote 87 Nonetheless, as a shi-poem lodged in a chapter of what are presumably fu-poems, the Gui shi’s placement among the Fu chapter’s expository riddles echoes the complexities of placing the *Admonition within canonically shaped shi and shu genres.
Closing Thoughts
The trouble of identifying genres such as shi, shu, or fu in preimperial texts, and of answering—from the perspective of early manuscript culture—the question of “what is the *Admonition,” may be precisely the trouble of determining how preimperial texts were composed, compiled, and redacted. Were they composed with an awareness of genre? Was there any systematicity to those genres, such that membership in one category might preclude that in another? Were texts edited to fit genres that arose subsequent to their earliest instantiation? The collection of texts into preimperial verse albums provide new clues to those processes, or at least hints about what constituted “like” materials in a preimperial context, and so I close with some reflections, speculations, and questions based on those clues.
First, etymology and early use of the term bi is shared by texts that came to be compiled in canons of shu and shi (e.g., the “Jiu gao” chapter in the Shang shu versus the “Xiao bi” or “Jing zhi” of the Shijing). Although it is not entirely clear whether, when, or where in early China bi may have functioned as a generic term, there is also little evidence that mutually exclusive categories of shi and shu literature should predate the earliest works that later found their way into the canon; the term shi 詩 is found in the closing, autographic or “sphragis” verses of the Elegantie but nowhere in the Zhou Hymns. If we want to know whether bi is a genre of texts, we need not count on the attestation of such a genre in transmitted literature, especially when considering regional manuscript cultures.
Second, it is worth noting that the *Admonition’s correlative exposition and many of its technical concerns seem to concentrate in the second song text.Footnote 88 This may be purely coincidental, although it may be meaningful for understanding how verse albums were compiled. If the first song-text was understood as a model, the second song text could be a later composition that in seeking to elaborate on its admonitory theme, reveals, in turn, intellectual concerns particular to its own time and place. Considering that “Jing Zhi” is the first song by King Cheng in the Zhou Gong zhi qinwu, and that “Xishuai” 蟋蟀 is the clear climactic focus of the Qiye, these poems we know from the Odes probably enjoyed a special status in the community that produced the manuscripts. The directionality of their relationship to the transmitted Odes is hard to know. Were odes with a prominent role in verse albums more easily inscribed in memory and thus ultimately better preserved in the Mao Odes? Or does the placement of known odes within verse albums merely reflect their prominence as members of a fixed Odes collection? Whatever the directionality, material in the first song of the *Admonition might also have enjoyed a special status—or, perhaps, it existed previously as an anonymous collection of complaints that could apply to any bad ruler,Footnote 89 and was only given a historical context, identity, author-figure, and the two-movement structure known in “Mulberry tendrils” by later editors.
Finally, while it is undoubtedly the case that many of the texts we know from the canon must have been especially revered in the Warring States, the relative fixity and significance of those texts within certain communities may still have been a matter of contention that paratextual embedment sought to resolve, perhaps in tandem with the elaboration and compilation of like materials. The degree of organization in verse albums is different from what we see in the closed canons of the Han, but the impulse may be largely the same. The preface of the *Admonition would thus have sought both to contextualize its attached song-texts and emphasize their significance by attributing their creation to an authoritative figure. I see no reason to doubt that these collections of verse convincingly resembled collections of like material. However, if, for example, all of the unknown verses in the Qi ye were composed primarily to provide a context for the making/performance of “Xi shuai,” then the term “paratext,” strictly speaking, still applies, but is perhaps a blunt instrument for treating the complex, multilaminate structures that accrete in manuscript culture over generations of transmission.
Considering that selective forces of transmission eventually cast the *Admonition aside, its preservation in the Tsinghua corpus affords us an opportunity to learn from its transmissive failure. Perhaps it overstepped the bounds deemed appropriate in imperial times, or, with so many texts in early China contending to transmit Rui Liangfu’s authentic words, perhaps it lost out to texts that better fit the forms and conventions that made canonical literature as we know it.
(適). A similar structure and meaning is found in the Shijing poem “Bo xi” 伯兮 (Mao no. 62): “It is not that I could not anoint and wash it; But for whom should I adorn myself?” (豈無膏沐、誰適為容); Shisanjing Zhushu Bianweihui, Mao shi zhengyi, 3.286; tr. Legge, She king), 105. Zheng Xuan herein glosses this character as zhu 主 (to be the master or ruler).
. A number of alternatives for this line are plausible, including: “Having tasted despair they hope for death” (嘗憂思殪); “Alas, they still think troubled thoughts” (尚憂思噫); and “Often they are troubled, thinking of this” (常憂思繄).
as zhuang 狀 (countenance) here and as zang 臧 (good) in slip six. The translation follows the latter reading in both places.
as wei 違 (disobey; violate). The terms “taboo” or “concealment” (hui 諱) better suit the mouth signific and the context of the preceding line.
人, may be a loan for “sprinkled/rinsed man” (chong ren 沖), or for “sincere man” (chen ren 訦人). This and the similar “submerged/sincere son” (chen zi 沈子) occur throughout transmitted shu documents literature, bronzes, and the Tsinghua She ming 攝命, Zhou wu wang you ji 周武王有疾 (“Jin teng” 金騰), and Zhou gong zhi qinwu 周公之琴舞 texts, where in most cases it is self-referential for the king and possibly the Duke of Zhou. This raises questions about the level of royal authority Rui Liangfu here implicitly claims.
, glossed as zhi 治 (to order; control) in the Shuowen: “The Zhou documents says, ‘I cannot [control] it’” (周書曰：我之不
). A variant of the phrase 我之弗辟 is found in the transmitted text. Unfortunately, the few graphs after wo zhi 我之 are missing in the Tsinghua version of “Jin teng” due to slip damage. Given what can be seen of the graph, 
seems possible here. A possible loan word, jing 靖 (OCM dzeŋɁ), also glossed as zhi 治 in the Mao commentary, is found in the Xiaoya poem “Yu liu” 菀柳 (Shijing no. 224): “If I were to [try and] order his affairs, his demands afterwards would be extreme” (俾予靖之、後予極焉) (tr. Legge, She King, 407–8).
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