Weaving

Oftentimes interlocked with “plowing” as a pair of foundational material and economic matters,Footnote ⁵⁸ “weaving” gained prominence also as an imagery via multiple ways of rhetorical presentation toward different ends. The imagery is a condensed one, which integrates the embedded weaving practice and the variable material, aesthetic features of the woven artifacts. Altogether, they are distributed among a wide spectrum of topics from social, political, and cosmological ordersFootnote ⁵⁹ to the matter of writing and literary production.Footnote ⁶⁰ In what follows, albeit with references to other aspects of the trope, the present section focuses on the correlation between “weaving” and “writing,” by which I do not refer to the physical gestures of writing something downFootnote ⁶¹ but the process and product of composing a verbal structure toward a textual display—a matter that, during Han times, was progressively foregrounded as a major emblem of intellectual labor and crafts. Therein the “plowing-weaving” correspondence persists. While the “plowing” imagery rhetorically sustains that intellectual labor as a matter of interior accumulation, the “weaving” one characterizes its exterior manifestation.

The correlation between the web of words and the woven nature of fabrics is shown in different languages and cultures.Footnote ⁶² In ancient China, this phenomenon indicates the circumscribed variability of “weaving” as both an evolving technologyFootnote ⁶³ and a socially deployed labor. In addition to its technological maturity and economic prominence, “weaving” became a close reference to writing due to its material involvement in manuscript production by supplying one of the major written media, silk. With these, the correlation between weaving and writing is extensively sedimented in a cluster of lexical items, which referred to specific “weaving” elements in the first place and, by extension, were appropriated in the context of “writing.” Many of these items are graphically embedded with the ideogram 糸,Footnote ⁶⁴ which I regard as a matter of metonymy for it contains a reductive “weaving” imagery—just like “crown” to “monarch” or “fifty sails” to “fifty ships”Footnote ⁶⁵ —while being employed in a different empirical area. The lexical item itself, correspondingly, functions as a weaving metaphor. Before we proceed, it is perhaps a matter of dispute whether a graphic or lexical element such as this should be considered a rhetorical figure or a mere “dead metaphor.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, our evaluation of an utterance as a living or dead metaphor is contingent on its effects on a living audience; and by “effects” we should be mindful of the diversifiable nature of epistemic and aesthetic experience changing over time. A word is possibly the tomb of a dead metaphor insofar as it was the embodiment of a living one—a matter to be better informed through an inquiry into its history.

The whole range of such lexical items includes, first, generic nouns like the interlocked couple of jing 經 and wei 緯, both rooted in the names of basic material elements of weaving.Footnote ⁶⁷ As weaving terms, jing and wei respectively refer to the warp and weft threads, a distinction inherently foundational to the process of most fabric production. Jing and wei were also employed as verbs to metaphorically characterize the overarching capability of putting things in well-organized orders, a function applicable to textual production.Footnote ⁶⁸ Toward writing, the two terms also gained their literary, bibliographical meanings, with jing referring to the core text of a given domain of knowledge—most typically shown in the terms wujing (“Five Classics”)—and, correspondingly, wei referring to the textual traditions situated around a jing (here, limited to the range of wujing). In this sense, the division of jing and wei was a function of hierarchical differentiation, perhaps because jing also integrated the meanings of “constant” and “path” in its actual usage toward a status of authority.

The second cluster of terms are essentially verbs—sometimes used as nouns—that include bian 編 (“to fabricate/connect/compile”), zhui 綴 (“to connect/weave together”), ji 紀 (“to organize (multiple silk threads)/record/memorize”), and so on.Footnote ⁶⁹ A term could emerge as an indication of a rather specific, non-metaphorical material involvement of a weaving element in textual production, while extending its meaning beyond that material sense in later usage. For example, bian, which—according to the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字—first referred to the practice of connecting bamboo/wood slips by threads to make manuscripts, gradually extended its meaning toward the compilation of texts in terms of the contents. In a more general sense, the above weaving terms all gained their literary meanings referring to the practices of integrating minor pieces or units into a larger, coherent textual body. Such cross-media appropriation of lexical items gained currency, particularly during and after the Eastern Han, in coordination with the growing vocabulary and usage of writing terms—including but not limited to those related to “weaving”—that indicate the overall proliferation and diversification of literary productivity and their social impacts.Footnote ⁷⁰

The third cluster of lexical items now deserve more detailed analyses, insofar as they foreground more nuanced material and aesthetic features of certain kinds of woven artifacts. In early China, the inherent heterogeneity and uneven distribution of weaving labor, material, products, and their aesthetic effects were at once discussed as concrete social matters and open to rhetorical appropriation toward different ends. Consider, for example, the notions of su 素 and qi 綺, which as weaving terms respectively refer to uncolored raw silk (su) and a relatively late-emerging technique of making woven patterns obliquely (qi) rather than vertically in line with jing and horizontally with wei.Footnote ⁷¹ Su was thus appropriated to characterize the uncrafted nature or substance of a person, a manner, a piece of writing, and so on, sometimes implying a sense of genuine purity.Footnote ⁷² The late-emerging qi, by comparison, was metaphorically appropriated as a term in Han and medieval literary criticism, based on its aesthetic commensurability with the delicate patterned beauty of literary—especially poetic—works such as fu 賦 and shi 詩.Footnote ⁷³

Besides the notion of qi, crafted weaving had been long presented as a matter of dispute in early contexts in terms of phrases like fufu 黼黻, jin 錦 (“brocade”), xiu 繡 (“to embroider” or “embroidery”) and so on, which initially bore nothing specially related to writing and literary production. The recurrent use of fufu in Xunzi, Liji, and Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 is normally combined with the more inclusive concept of wenzhang 文章 (to be discussed later) and accompanied with crafted carving and engraving. Collectively, such aesthetic devices are regarded as means to manifest hierarchical orders or cultivate noble manners.Footnote ⁷⁴ This notion can be situated in dialogue with several critical usages of crafted weaving as a topic or rhetorical trope. Some of them led to an overall critique against the corrupted nature of culture as a matter of accumulation and distinction;Footnote ⁷⁵ some more practically regarded it as a matter of excessive, uneven deployment of labor and material that causes poverty;Footnote ⁷⁶ and some considered it an emblem of excessiveness and ornamental exteriority from moral and aesthetic points of view. In such contexts, the crafted beauty of weaving remained a critical trope when it was metaphorically appropriated to characterize intellectual outputs, especially literary production. Consider, for a previously mentioned example, Yang Xiong’s appropriation of the gesture of “embroidering [xiu] girdle and handkerchief” (綉其鞶帨) to characterize the vainly excessive and ornamental works of contemporary official scholars.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such negative use of weaving—again, along with carving and engraving—was also seen in his self-critique and revisionary agenda to rectify the aesthetics of fu, a motif that gained prominence from the late Western Han onward.Footnote ⁷⁸

The problem was further complicated in the “balanced” discourses of Lunheng, where Wang Chong presented various ways of correlating the imagery of crafted weaving with intellectual labor and product (especially writing). The two terms that he preferred in such rhetoric were jin and xiu, either used separately or interlocked as the compound jinxiu 錦繡 (“brocade and embroidery”). In terms of material history, the two crafts represent the most advanced weaving techniques in Han times, embodying the multicolored woven patterns and the delicate presentation of distinguishable pictorial items.Footnote ⁷⁹ These features became increasingly visible from the Western HanFootnote ⁸⁰ and thus sustained the aesthetics and rhetoric of intellectual discourses.

On the writing of fu, Wang Chong’s opinion echoed earlier critical reflections on the genre since the late Western Han, appropriating weaving—in terms of jinxiu—metaphorically referring to the sensational pleasure and beauty of Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 bce) and Yang Xiong’s magnificent fu, in comparison with their lack of truth-making values.Footnote ⁸¹ Nevertheless, elsewhere in Lunheng Wang Chong presented alternative rhetorical presentations of weaving beyond fu toward “learning” and “writing” in general. Since the late Western Han, the two as a pair of input/output practices gained prominence in the intellectual criteria of assessing a scholar. On the literary learning of official classics and their hermeneutic traditions, Wang Chong playfully suggested that such learning to a ru scholar is just like “fabricating brocade and sewing embroidery” 織錦刺繡 to a skilled woman—in both cases, the respective laboring agent is distinguished from the others by his/her crafted production.Footnote ⁸² Also in terms of jinxiu, in Wang Chong’s classification of different types of scholars, the top-tier “Grand Ru” (hongru 鴻儒)—characterized as embodying the finest erudition and literary productivity above others—is distinguished from the ordinary ru scholar, just like a piece of embroidered brocade is distinguished from an ordinary cloth.Footnote ⁸³

Not toward an image as extraordinary as hongru, the motif of self-manifestation with weaving metaphor was made applicable to a wider range of scholars who produced writings:

In this extract, both practices are presented as a process of inputting crafted labor and expertise onto raw material and thus transforming it into a novel, refined status of being. Within such a process of becoming, the “man-of-learning” thereof is at once characterized as the unwoven material, the weaving labor, and the woven product—namely, someone eventually presented via his wenzhang (here indicative of his literary production) as a “patterned manifestation/textual display”Footnote ⁸⁵ of himself as the very embodiment of his intellectual labor, crafts, and possession. Collectively, the preceding rhetorical presentations of crafted weaving in Lunheng marked the emergence of a new fashion of appropriating the imagery. By metaphor and analogy, the totality of individually embodied intellectual labor and its literary production was depicted as an image of becoming, toward a status of self-manifestation that distinguishes the laboring agency itself.

Most of the above-analyzed lexical items and rhetorical instantiations involve a process of meaning transportation from “weaving” to “writing.” Moreover, since weaving was conventionally conducted by female labor, the “weaving” imagery sedimented in the male-dominated domain of writing and scholarly practices strengthens the point that the verbal presentation of embodied experience—especially labor—is not based on an equal foundation of physical experience but largely drawn from socially acquired knowledge and imagination. On the other hand, the increasing female involvement in literacy-based scholarly practices—especially during and after Eastern Han—could indeed enhance the significance and aesthetic effects of “weaving” as an available reference. As in the case of “plowing” too, the expansion of literacy and literary culture among larger and more diverse communities in Han times underscored the interpenetration between intellectual practices and other forms of labor, making them more actively intertwined in the repository of intellectual rhetoric.

Beyond the evidence analyzed above, there is another kind of lexical item that resides in both “weaving” and “writing” yet pertains to a more inclusive conceptual structure. Every instance of such items is thus better considered a synecdoche (of the inclusive one), rather than a metaphor or metonymy of “weaving” in particular. The concept central to this line of inquiry is wen 文. As is widely acknowledged, wen semantically falls into a broad spectrum of abstract and concrete meanings such as “pattern,” “ornament,” “refinement,” “culture,” “text,” “writing,” and so on.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such semantic inclusiveness also extended to its lexical derivations such as wenzhang (“patterned display/manifestation”).Footnote ⁸⁷ Both wen and wenzhang were used in “weaving” contexts—along with other ritual, political, and material meanings—before they gained currency as terms referring to text and writing. However, rather than being oriented in a fashion of meaning transportation from one empirical area to another, a term like wen or wenzhang is better considered the vessel for a more inclusive idea distributed—albeit not simultaneously—among much wider media and material contexts.

While every material-related meaning of wen occurred at a specific historical stage, the inclusive one is not supposed to be the oldest among all. Instead, it was progressively accumulated and synthesized from ever-renewing appropriation and proliferation. For reference, according to the Shuowen jiezi, wen—as a written sign—denotes “intersecting strokes” (cuo hua 錯畫) and “emblematizes the crisscrossing patterns” (象交文).Footnote ⁸⁸ This Eastern Han explication does not contradict the oldest evidence from China’s Bronze Age of wen as a character, presented as a (human?) body with a crisscrossing tattoo. Either as a single term or as a lexical component, the actual usages and appropriations of wen constituted an ever-growing and transforming body beyond semantic specificity. Collectively, the inclusive, cross-media idea of wen refers to the patterned, perceivable exteriority in which a presumably existing substance presents itself. This is made clear in a recurrent verbal structure that correlates two realms of wen as, respectively, the patterned manifestation of the cosmos (oftentimes in terms of tian 天 [“Heaven”]) and that of the human or human society (oftentimes in terms of ren 人).Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus, the imagined substance of the cosmos was made commensurable with an imagined human interiority, insofar as they are both displayed and perceived through the patterned exteriority of wen. On the same conceptual foundation, wen was thus coupled with the concepts of zhi 質 (“[interior] substance”) and qing 情 (“[interior] state of affair/condition/situation”) in the contexts of human nature and behavior.Footnote ⁹⁰

With this, the inclusive, cross-media nature of wen is distributed among a wide spectrum of meanings: the patterns of celestial bodies; the stripes on animal skins; the emblems for cultural orders; as well as the individually embodied presentations mediated in various forms—a fabricated cloth, a cultivated manner, a refined speech, a piece of writing, and beyond. Every phenomenal manifestation of wen is thus a minor realization, or a synecdoche, of the patterned exteriority in which the overall reality presents itself. In the present context, this notion works well with wen in the senses of “weaving” and “writing.” See, for example, the late Eastern Han dictionary Shiming 釋名 by Liu Xi 劉熙 (fl. ca. 200 ce), where we read his explication of wen as a lexical item:

Central to this utterance is the figuration of wen as a matter embedded in both “weaving” and “writing.” By correlating “weaving” and “writing” as two domains of experience, the passage nevertheless does not indicate a shift “from wen as a fabric to wen as a text.”Footnote ⁹² Instead, “weaving” and “writing” are positioned as a pair of synecdoche for an inclusive way of becoming, a mechanism beyond the specificity of any material medium. Within this conceptual frame, a patterned brocade and a verbalized passage become commensurable with each other, insofar as they are both integrated toward a status of patterned exteriority in terms of wen. This works in coordination with terms like zhuwen 屬文 and zhuiwen 綴文—literally, “to make connections between/weave together wen”—during and after the Han, both of which characterize literary production as a weaving-like practice toward an instantiation of wen. Comparatively, the term zhuwen was much more current during and after Han times and more specifically referred to literary writing.Footnote ⁹³ The much rarer use of zhuiwen, nevertheless, undertook no lesser significance. As is seen in a statement made by Ban Gu in Hanshu—

The clustered remembrance of an array of masters from Kongzi to the two late Western Han idols—Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 bce) and Yang Xiong—highlights their intellectual qualities in terms of being “broadly learned about things and richly informed” and “thoroughly comprehending the past and the present”—each phrase thereof gained value during and after Ban Gu’s time. These intellectual qualities are presented as foundational to their “words” (yan 言), which, from an Eastern Han viewpoint, crystalize their intellectual labor in terms of zhuiwen, of which wen inclusively denotes both their overall cultural legacies and the textual productions that they “wove together.”

The term wenzhang, almost as widely appropriated as wen, denotes the “patterned display/manifestation” of a variety of figures and things. Semantically, the term is a condensation of wen and zhang 章, whose meaning conjoined with wen is better considered “to display,” “to manifest,” or “that which is actualized via wen.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The meanings of wenzhang fall into a spectrum covering ritual and cultural orders, ornamental patterns (including but certainly not limited to those on fabric artifacts), and writings or literary productions. The relatively late use of wenzhang as “text,” “writing,” or “literary production” occurred in the first century bce and gained currency especially during the Eastern Han,Footnote ⁹⁶ clearly after the term had already come into wide use in ritual, material, and sometimes rather particular “weaving”Footnote ⁹⁷ contexts.

In general, the growing prominence of wenzhang as a writing term indicates a cultural transition, by which literary text “rose to its status as the main emblem of culture.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Again, this lexical change does not represent a one-way appropriation from one specific empirical area—such as “weaving”—to another, insofar as each media-based meaning of wenzhang is a minor realization of a more inclusive idea of “patterned” (wen) “manifestation” (zhang). Among a multitude of instances, see the following three examples, which indicate the usages of wenzhang as respectively ritual/cultural orders, ornamental patterns (not limited to a weaving use), and textual display via writing/literary production—

Nothing essential will be missing or distorted if we take wenzhang in all three contexts inclusively as the “patterned display/manifestation,” without downplaying the specificity of each instance as a media-based realization. The late-emerging usage did not replace the older ones, for they all functioned as the synecdoche for an inclusive one above yet among all at once. The comparatively new meaning of wenzhang as the “textual display” worked in concert with an arising Han notion, which regarded literary production as a manifestation of individually embodied erudition (as showcased, for instance, in the previously discussed weaving metaphor by Wang Chong, as well as the above-quoted appraisal of Yang Xiong by Ban Gu). Such ideas, practically based on the extended foundation of individual possession and embodiment of texts, knowledge, and scholarly experience, add further to a scholarly ideology in praise of the self-oriented accumulation and manifestation of intellectual labor, value, and productivity—with which the imagery of “plowing” was associated as well.

Fishing and Hunting

The present section combines the imagery of “fishing” and that of “hunting” as a pair of tropes with strong material and symbolic connections. While “plowing” and “weaving” were often discussed as concrete social, economic matters, for they were indeed the two gestures foundational to the material production of the state in a society like ancient China, references to “fishing” and “hunting” present stronger affinity to the metaphorical and allegorical appropriation of a specific nature of these two forms of labor.

Labor in the forms of “plowing” and “weaving” can be considered a matter of producing something new by integrating and transforming the otherwise sporadically distributed material elements. By comparison, both “fishing” and “hunting” indicate the interaction with a self-contained living body—fish, beast, bird, etc.—whose ontological status is already “out there” prior to the intervention of human agency. In rarer cases, such a premise sustains lessons in praise of specific embodied virtue or mental state. As seen in an episode in which Kongzi appears in Zhuangzi, the condition is inherently embedded in the exaggerated description of the “bravery/courage” (yong 勇) of fishermen and hunters who risk confronting extremely dangerous animals. Their yong is thus made commensurable with that of heroic and sagely models who confront external troubles.Footnote ¹⁰² In a different way, the status of someone like a fisherman was mapped onto the mind of a ruler. As seen in Xun Yue’s 荀悅 (148–209 ce) Shenjian 申鑒, the art of upside-down governing is compared with a fisherman’s skill of handling the rod and hook.Footnote ¹⁰³

Also grounded in the interaction with self-contained objects, richer evidence appropriates “fishing” and “hunting” to characterize practices and situations that require more complicated intellectual engagement. This usage is based on the two activities’ technical involvement with tools, methods, or devices made to “catch” the living things. In this way, the connection between fishing and hunting becomes strong due to the similarity and sometimes interchangeability between devices they employ,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ as well as the experience of and techniques for using them. A fishing/hunting metaphor or allegory thus works well in discourses reflecting on the dialectical relationship between method-and-goal or tool-and-truth in varying senses. For example, see perhaps the most famous instance of coupling the two tropes in Zhuangzi—

Known as the “Fishnet-Rabbit Snare Allegory,” the passage presents a philosophical reasoning on the relationship between yan (“speech/words”) and yi 意 (“idea/meaning”). Though previous studies interpreted the allegory in terms of a crisis of “language” (in denoting meaning or reality) mapped onto early Chinese philosophy, alternative readings suggest a more pragmatic way of understanding. According to Wim De Reu, the passage does not deal with “the dynamics of the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘meaning,’” but makes a distinction between “two very different modes of linguistic engagement,” and suggests a flexible manner of speaking beyond patterned fixations.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Focusing on the notion of yan, Jane M. Geaney regards it as indicative not of “language” but of “speaking” as a bodily practice, which has its limits in conveying the self-contained yi. The yi, like a fish and a rabbit, is elusive and thus demands a more dynamic understanding other than being trapped and fixed by speech (like a fish trap and a snare).Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Sharing with both scholars a pragmatic ground that avoids reading the passage as an instance of linguistic crisis, I would emphasize how the yan-yi complex is interconnected with the verbally presented imagery of fishing and hunting, which at once involve the matters of tools (fish trap and rabbit snare), goals (fish and rabbit), and the embodied experience of laboring. Broadly speaking, the passage can be situated within a set of recurrent topoi in early Chinese thought—collectively, the critical reflections on the coherence, authenticity, and fidelity of the culturally coded system of signification (speech, writing, emblematic symbols, etc.) in comparison with the realm of idea, meaning, truth, reality, and so on.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The passage does not present an overall devaluation of words; rather, it rejects a particular—perhaps the common—way of communication entrenched in “words” (the tool) while neglecting/mistaking “ideas” (the goal). By comparison, good communication happens among those who properly “forget” (wang 忘) or let go of the “words,” while grasping the essential ideas embedded in the very activity of saying and hearing them. Not without irony, such a lesson itself is conveyed through a coded system of socially inscribed traditions of speaking and understanding. However, the text also makes the lesson more sensible by imagery—one could hopefully understand it, by situating oneself in the (imagined) embodied experience of a fisherman and a rabbit hunter who evidently obtain what they want. Modeled on them, yi becomes attainable through embodied experience, which is neither erased nor imprisoned in the process of acting or speaking. By extension, this approach of highlighting the embodied experience of labor—as an area beyond (spoken or written) words but connected to essential reality—is also well-employed elsewhere in Zhuangzi.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

By comparison, the following Huainanzi passage addresses another topic in a different tone:

Contextually, the passage is positioned among a cluster of proverbial utterances that weave together varying natural phenomena and human activities, with a gesture to inquire into the multiple intangible causes behind them in terms of “that which makes things so” (然之者).Footnote ¹¹¹ Within this context, the passage foregrounds the importance of instrumental devices, tools, and methods—nets, bait, and the political art of using ritual propriety—underlying the process of “catching” birds, fish, and worthy men. Rather than “forgetting/letting go of” (wang) such devices as in the fishnet-rabbit snare allegory in Zhuangzi, the Huainanzi passage emphasizes that it is essential to “have” them in proper order and fully equipped.

The negative imagery of “a net with only one grid” 一目之羅 strengthens the point of refining one’s tools and methods toward better results. Characterized by the number and size of its “grids” as proportionally related to its overall function, the imagery of the “net” as an instrumental device is flexibly situated in varying intellectual and political contexts. For a mid-Western Han instance, the Yantie lun 鹽鐵論 employs the fishnet in its justification of a legal system substantialized by multiple codes and rules—

The imagery of the “net” recurs as a tool not to trap the bird as in Huainanzi but, reasonably too, to catch the fish, adding further to the interlocking affinity between “fishing” and “hunting.” Moreover, both passages begin with a net with insufficient grids, a negative example sustaining multiplicity as a value. Also noticeably, the three above-quoted passages are all presented within a threefold, progressively articulated parallel structure of argumentation.Footnote ¹¹³ This structure inherently orients the juxtaposition of two comparable tropes like “fishing” and “hunting”—in flexible sequence—to constitute a pair of subordinate statements proceeding to the major one. In all three cases, the labor of fishing and hunting are allegorically correlated to the arts of using a ruling function (upon speech, people, or the state).

For a late Eastern Han appropriation, Xun Yue, in his Shenjian, rhetorically employed the imagery of hunting with a net—in this case, to catch a bird—to sustain his argument on the values and methods integral to scholarly learning—

Central to the passage are the interlocking values of bo (“broadness”) and yue 約 (“to bind,” “to tie together,” and by extension “constrain,” “concise,” “integrate,” etc.). As can be traced back to the notion that one should ideally be “broadly learned about cultural patterns (wen) and making them tied together/concise (yue) by ritual propriety” (博學於文，約之以禮)Footnote ¹¹⁵ attributed to Kongzi, the two values underwent a variety of revisionary appropriation during Han times. Specifically, they were mapped onto the new circumstances of literary culture in discourses toward different ends: to justify the methods and ethics of broad learning within and beyond the canonical corpus; to problematize the proliferation of texts and knowledge; to solidify the official system of canonization against the surplus of non-canonical texts; or, to express an intellectual aspiration for the ideal state of (re)integration of the two values as a coherent one.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Within such contexts, as an echo of Yang XiongFootnote ¹¹⁷ and others, the present passage carries forward the task to integrate the “broadness” of intellectual interest and the presumably “concise” nature of truth.

The task was done by a cluster of imagery. The imagery of a “net” with enough “grids” (as in Huainanzi and Yantie lun), along with the term fang 方 as a pun referring to “method” and “scope” (both related to its basic meaning as “square”Footnote ¹¹⁸ and mapped to the picture of net-with-grids in the present context), constitute Xun Yue’s figurative characterization of bo as a practical manner of broadening one’s mastery of various sources. At this stage, broad learning is thus described as an indispensable means to grasp the presumably “essential,” “concise” (in terms of yue and yao 要) truth, a “bird” that is otherwise uncatchable. Also presented in this scenario are the almost dead metaphor of dao, which at once refers to “way/path” and “principle/truth”; and, correspondingly, the spatial-orientational concept of tong, with its dual meaning as “passing/penetrating” and “comprehending.” With all these, Xun Yue’s allegory offers a set of objective correlatives that sustain an Eastern Han intellectual scenario of scholarly learning, a matter of working with an ever-growing body of texts and knowledge. Essential to this scenario is an inheritable model of the accumulation of intellectual labor, which, on the individual basis, enriches the personal possession of scholarly resources and experience. With these, the passage presents its own version of a Han motif to resolves the bo-yue complex and approve bo as a positive intellectual value.

Collectively, the passages of Huainanzi, Yantie lun, and Shenjian present the imagery of “net” and “grid” together as fishing/hunting tools in praise of a specific art—namely, that which enlarges and multiplies certain functions toward greater accumulation. In its most visible form, this motif was presented as the gesture of collecting and thus enhancing a subject’s possession of resources. The final instance in Shenjian sustained an arising Han scholarly ideology, in which self-oriented and broadly engaged intellectual labor supposedly finds its way toward the objective truth. In addition, “fishing” and “hunting” imagery were also sedimented in specific lexical items that gained prominence during and after Han times. The term wangluo 罔羅 (“to collect/enlist by net”), for example, indicates a centripetal gesture of collecting and enlisting various resources—talented people, knowledge, texts, and so on—from a condition of dispersal into institutional or intellectual management.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The term shelie 涉獵 (“to pass through and hunt”), oriented differently, pictures an equally active intellectual labor that extends one’s scheme of learning and mastery of a diverse range of texts and knowledge.Footnote ¹²⁰

As is informed by previous sections, the motif of broadening one’s learning was also presented in the rhetorical appropriations of “plowing” and less explicitly “weaving.” Backwardly, and for a closure of the present section, see the last example in Fayan, a passage that analogically juxtaposes “hunting” and “plowing” to sustain the ideal model of broad learning, which also bears Yang Xiong’s criticism against sectarianism and institutionalization—

In this imagined, back-and-forth conversation, the master voice (of Yang Xiong) confirms, first, that the true value of a text does not depend on its status as a privileged “canon/classic” (jing)—the “weaving” metonymy, again, being embedded—or not. Second, any unknown text alternative to the already-canonized corpus could potentially have the same quality as a jing. The passage thus implies an open-minded principle, that one ought to embrace a broader range of literary sources only depending on their intrinsic values rather than the degree to which they are institutionally empowered. This stance is further shown in the master’s response to the interlocutor’s claim that a hypothetically valuable yet non-canonical text cannot be properly studied, unless it is situated within the institutional system of division and examination (in terms of fa ce jue ke 發策決科). Here, the term ke 科 works in concert with that in Fayan 7.8, where the master advises to “dissolve/unfurl” (jie 解) it.Footnote ¹²² In response, the master demonstrates that “a great man learns for the sake of dao, and a petty man learns for the sake of profits” (大人之學也爲道，小人之學也爲利), an utterance in coordination with the notion of gu zhi xue zhe in Lunyu, Xunzi, and by extension in Fayan and “Yiwen zhi.”Footnote ¹²³ Right after this, the conversation shifts towards the analogization of scholars with farmers and hunters, wherein the trope of geng (“plowing/cultivation”)—here accompanied with that of lie 獵 (“hunting”)—bears clear similarity, again, to that in Fayan 7.8, as a metaphor for a self-oriented and broadly engaged scholarly labor, which is detached from institutional regulations yet working on the ground of a greater truth. Therein the one-above-all model of labor persists and proliferates, in its one-among-all image of becoming.

Coherence and Ruptures

As a condensation of embodied experience and social imagination, the imagery of labor constitutes an emblem of the overall distribution of the sensible and its embedded aesthetics and ideologies. As can be traced back to pre-imperial China, the four types of imagery of plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting constituted an ever-renewing repository of rhetorical language sustaining a variety of political, moral, and intellectual discourses. Accordingly, the four tropes were associated with each other in varying contexts, sometimes compared with other socially defined labor and expertise. Among these we identify a one-above-all model distinguished by its embodied ruling function of sensation, cognition, and coordination, sometimes depicted and positioned in a one-among-all image commensurable to other empirical areas. On this ground, and especially during Han times, the four tropes of labor under focus were made useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production, in coordination with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture.

Based on preceding analyses, this rhetorical phenomenon now becomes increasingly clear as a product of scholarly aesthetics and ideology, which internalized the one-above/among-all model sedimented in previous traditions, and, especially since the first century bce, worked in concert with a particular way of becoming—namely, a manner of self-oriented accumulation of intellectual labor and resources toward individually embodied erudition and its variable manifestations. Within such context, the four tropes of labor under review were appropriated and encoded with a constellation of values and methods, collectively emblematizing several modes of intellectual engagement with the self and the world. From a Han scholarly viewpoint, such a world is presented as a set of objective correlatives commensurable to the ever-growing bodies of texts, knowledge, and literary outputs, all of which are accumulated, embodied, recycled, and transformed via individual practitioner as a vessel-like occupant and an active agent working with intellectuality. Over the process, the accumulated labor transformed itself into both embodied and objectified states of cultural capital,Footnote ¹²⁴ a matter potentially open to proliferation and reproduction on both individual and social levels.

Yet in a dividable sense, the intellectual values associated with the four types of imagery were distributed unevenly and correlated with circumscribed variability. To summarize, the “plowing,” “fishing,” and “hunting” imagery were primarily employed to characterize specific values and methods sustaining one’s scholarly learning of texts and knowledge, while the “weaving” imagery were made particularly useful to characterize “writing” as a matter of textual display of the laboring agency and its possession of intellectual arts and resources. The virtues like devotion, consistency, and fortitude were made particularly strong in the imagery of “plowing” (as in its older usages) and to a lesser extent “hunting,” while gaining new implications against the institutional regulation of scholarship in the context of Han intellectual culture. The motif of self-manifestation was foregrounded, either in the image of a farmer-like scholar who learns and produces more than the ordinary ones, or in the imagined aura of wenzhang that distinguishes oneself, as the patterned woven beauty does to raw material. The values of integration, multiplicity, and inclusiveness were distributed among all but differently, either in a sense of broadening one’s scheme of literary learning or in terms of weaving together multiple materials into a new product. The reflection on the values of tool and method was particularly strong in the cases of “fishing” and “hunting,” which themselves were tightly correlated with each other in terms of their commensurable technicity. In the end, every category of labor thereof had and would continue to have its own history and inherent heterogeneity, which exerted material influences on the repository of intellectual discourses. Within such a dual-oriented complex, the four types of imagery under review productively sustained the rhetoric of intellectual practice as an evolving form of embodied labor, a matter intertwined with the ideologies and aesthetics of early Chinese intellectual and literary culture.

As the preceding analyses reveals, instead of assuming a mental–physical division in the first place, classical Chinese sources since pre-imperial times characterized a distinguished, one-above-all function—along with its moral and intellectual agency—as an embodied, laboring one. None of the four types of labor imagery under review is required to “prove” the embodied nature of intellectual labor, whose physical involvement was both embedded in reality and recognized in the history of ideas. Nevertheless, the growing body of textual evidence precisely manifests and substantializes the proliferating images of the distinguished one, which was positioned “above” yet “among” all at once, only via its ever-renewing instantiations and circumscribed variability contingent on the changing contexts. Within this rhetorical phenomenon we might name a notion of commensurability, which sustains the imagined condensation of overall experience across the boundary between socially and physically divided empirical areas.

Such coherence is inherently filled with ruptures, insofar as the correlations thereof are dominated by a one-way orientation of meaning-production. Whether or not a farmer or a fisherman would consider their arts commensurable with scholarly labor, they rarely had their voices documented and transmitted. This non-reciprocal sociology of meaning-production can be related to another rhetorical phenomenon in early China, one that deserves another essay with equally intense investigation. There, the personae masked as less civilized commoners or physical practitioners do “speak,” yet as imagined interlocutors, with a master voice performed through their mouths and foregrounded in scenarios opposed to specific civilized elites. One of the most challenging voices is that performed in Zhuangzi, a wheel-maker’s questioning of the fidelity of the sages’ “words” presumably transmitted by texts, and furthermore his demonstration of embodied experience as the closer locus of truth than speech and writing.Footnote ¹²⁵ Consider too, the farmer-like old man presented in Lunyu who regards Kongzi as physically useless and epistemically having no sense of making a meaningful life,Footnote ¹²⁶ as well as the persona of “Fisherman” (yufu 漁父) figure distributed among Shiji 史記, Chuci 楚辭, and beyond in dialogue with a noble hero recognized as Qu Yuan 屈原 (trad. ca. 340–278 bce).Footnote ¹²⁷ Taken collectively, this phenomenon presents a manner of self-reflexive criticism and intellectual gaming with other domains of experience, a motif interrelated with the rhetoric of intellectual practice as embodied labor, as investigated in the main body of the present essay. Albeit toward different ends, both phenomena internalize a motif comparable to the Western imaginaire of “Wild Men” and the “Noble Savage,” which, to adopt Hayden White’s interpretation, undertakes a complex of repression and desire within a cycle of mythification, de-mythification, and re-mythification of humanity between wildness and civilization.Footnote ¹²⁸

During Han times, there also emerged another intellectual discourse that deserves a comparative investigation. This discourse positions intellectual labor—especially that devoted to text-based literary learning and writing—as even less reciprocally distinguished from other practices and expertise. Such a stance is made particularly clear in a set of Han discourses from Yang Xiong to Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133–192 ce)Footnote ¹²⁹ later categorized as shelun 設論 (“Hypothetical/Staged Discourse”)Footnote ¹³⁰ or similar sub-genres in early medieval China, which share the structure of hypothetical debate between a self-reflexive master voice and an imagined, learned interlocutor. Leaving aside a text traditionally attributed to Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 (ca. 154–93 bce) and acknowledged as the “first” shelun,Footnote ¹³¹ the five starting from Yang Xiong constituted a more condensed body of utterances with thematic, formalistic consistency and circumscribed variability. The five works collectively present a motif of criticism against institutional regulation, in praise of the masters’ scholarly engagement in learning and writing detached from higher official power and rank. Simultaneously, all the five texts distinguish the masters’ intellectual labor from other achievements, talents, and expertise (political or military success, fishing, hunting, performing, gaming, musical performance, physical strength, etc.), mostly in a sarcastic toneFootnote ¹³² considering them dependent on external patrons or conducted for utilitarian purposes. This condensed body of utterances—with nuanced variability—is positioned near the end of these texts: a clustered presentation of around a dozen previous models who excelled in their own ways, and then a self-assessment of the master claiming that he would not become one among those figures but rather stay with his own business as a literary scholar.Footnote ¹³³ Thereafter the debate is concluded in its master’s winning voice.

It appears that all these rhetorical phenomena were interrelated, especially during Han times, when an expanding literary culture fostered more than one way of rhetorical presentation of the agency of intellectual labor thereof. Such discourses were as variable as the different ways of revisionary appropriation of imagery and tropes grounded in old traditions, among which “labor” as a rhetorical source gained new significance as a social inscription of aesthetics and ideology. In a critical manner, by integrating the imagined upper and lower, the one-above-all model was depicted as a one-among-all image of becoming, characterized by a constellation of values identified in different forms of physical labor. Meanwhile, such an intellectual labor also entailed a motif to distinguish itself, either from the institutional regulation imposed upside-down or the various talents and skills in general.

The rhetoric of intellectual practice as embodied labor hence resided in the middle of a picture of coherence and ruptures at once. With ruptures, the rhetorical body of the four types of labor imagery under review was an output of the everlasting complex of intellectual motifs and desires. Collectively, they instantiate a re-mythification of the imagined condensation of overall experience, a picture presumably recovered from the socially inscribed division and merged back into an undivided world as a primitive myth. Simultaneously, they carry forward a self-mythification of the intellectuals, without whom the imagined coherence is incomprehensible and left in oblivion. Such processes can be narrated in an alternative way: the ancient one-above-all model as the primitive mythification of a ruling function of labor coordinating and penetrating all areas of experience; the notion of commensurability across boundaries as a de-mythification of that primitive one imprisoned by social fixation; and finally, a re-mythification of that model, whose one-above/among-all flexibility makes it, still, the single most active agency mediating between the world and the self. It is constantly an intellectual desire that embraces, yet sometimes lets go of, the image of the working ones being united.