campany robert - the meanings of cuisines of transcendence in late classical and early medieval...

8/19/2019 Campany Robert - The Meanings of Cuisines of Transcendence in Late Classical and Early Medieval China

1/57

the meanings of cuisines of transcendence 1

THE MEANINGS OF CUISINES OF TRANSCENDENCE

IN LATE CLASSICAL AND EARLY MEDIEVAL CHINA

by

ROBERT FORD CAMPANYIndiana University

Practitioners in late classical and early medieval China developeddietary regimens claimed to make them transcendents (xian 仙 )— deathless, superhuman, perhaps posthuman beings.1 The question Iwish to explore, following the leads of Jean Lévi and Kristofer Schip-per, is simple, though the answer is not: it concerns not so muchwhat seekers of transcendence ate (or were represented as eating),though that must of course be considered, as what they did not eat;even more, it concerns what their diet meant.2

A culinary choice—especially when prescribed by a scripture,sanctioned by a tradition, or regularly attributed to a type of holyperson and not simply the circumstantial preference of an individ-ual—may carry multiple meanings and perform multiple functions.

1 This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at Trinity College,Cambridge University, in April 2004, a much condensed version of which will bepublished in a conference volume edited by Roel Sterckx. It is also an offshoot ofa book in progress, tentatively titled The Making of Transcendents in China, 320 B.C.E.-320 C.E.: The Social Production of a Religious Role . One chapter of that book appliesa similar analysis to the entire religio-cultural “repertoire” (a technical term I in-troduce there) of “the transcendent” in its formative centuries; regimes of eatingare one of many elements in that repertoire. By such terms as “dietary regimen”

and “culinary discipline,” which for present purposes are interchangeable, I sim-ply mean a regularized practice involving eating (or non-eating) which is assertedto advance the practitioner toward some important goal (often, as here, a religiousgoal). All translations given in this paper are my own unless otherwise indicated;when quoting Western-language texts I have silently converted all romanizationsof Chinese names and terms into Pinyin. I am grateful to Roel Sterckx, Barendter Haar, Robert Chard, Julianna Lipschutz, Victor Mair, and two anonymous re-

viewers for helpful comments.2

See Jean Lévi, “L’abstinence des céréales chez les taoïstes,” Études chinoises: Bulletin de l’Association française d’études chinoises 1 (1983):3-47, and Kristofer Schip-per, Le corps taoïste (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 216-26.

© Brill, Leiden, 2005 T’oung Pao XCI Also available online – www.brill.nl

http://www.brill.nl/http://www.brill.nl/


2/57

robert ford campany2

Two basic kinds may be distinguished. Those I will call internalist con-cern rationales for dietary regimes that explain and justify them interms of the intrinsic benefits, properties and functions of the food-

stuffs they feature or the preparations they prescribe. Often such ex-planations explicitly link a dietary choice to a larger theory, set ofbeliefs, ideology, cosmology, cosmogony, or myth; but even if the ex-planation is as simple as “We eat X because X makes us live long,”without the addition of “and it does so for reason Y,” we have todeal with an internalist purpose or function of the eating of X. Ex-ternalist meanings or functions pertain when dietary choices have theeffect, whether by intention or not, of associating eaters with cer-tain clusters of values in a culture and dissociating them from oth-ers. Here, culinary regimes are a way of making statements abouta wide range of other matters (and often other groups of eaters),whatever intrinsic benefits might be claimed for them. If food X isimportant in a culture in certain specific ways, and a group makes

a point of shunning X, something is being said by the group to theculture, and that something may have little to do with the intrinsicproperties attributed to X (or even with questions of food and eatingper se); the shunning of X may be, instead (or additionally), a wayof saying something else, perhaps something much larger in scope.Externalist meanings are inherently associative or contrastive, evenif only implicitly so: “We eat X, which is not Y, which those oth-

er people eat” (contrastive or dissociative) or “We eat X, which iswhat beings of class Z, too, eat” (associative). While they are rarelysocially neutral, internalist meanings may or may not claim a hier-archy of eaters; externalist ones almost always do: “We who eat Xare thereby in a position hierarchically superior (in some respect) tothose others who eat Y.”3

3 While my distinction between internalist and externalist meanings or functionsdoes not map onto the distinction in the philosophy of language between “locu-tionary acts” and “perlocutionary force” (and still less “illocutionary acts”), exter-nalist functions, when successfully impactful on audiences, might be viewed as atype of perlocutionary force (see J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words [Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1962] and John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Phi-losophy of Language [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]). Another ana-logue of what I am envisioning in an account of meanings that includes externalist

ones is what Gilbert Ryle meant by “thick description,” a notion famously appro-priated by Clifford Geertz: an account of the context, setting, circumstances, in-tentions, expectations, purposes, and rules—the surprisingly rich array of factorslying around and beyond actions and statements themselves—that give actions and


3/57


My sensitivity to the externalist meanings of culinary choices owesa debt to several sources. One is the so-called new historicism, whichworks to situate texts—even the great works of a culture’s canon—

in relation to their surrounding social, intellectual, religious, andabove all textual worlds rather than viewing them as self-enclosed,spontaneous, contextless products of individual genius.4 Another isthe work of Bruce Lincoln on myths as ideology in narrative form,as well as the work of certain students of narrative who read narra-tives as social transactions among interested parties rather than ascontextless structures.5 Yet from structuralism itself I also draw thefundamental insight that the meanings of signs are not intrinsic tothem but are functions of their places in structures of relations toothers—Claude Lévi-Strauss eloquently demonstrated the fruitful-ness of applying this insight to matters culinary. Foucault’s funda-mental notion of discourse has proved helpful, as have some recentattempts to rethink the model of culture based on the work of Clif-

ford Geertz, among them Ann Swidler’s picture of cultures as mess-ily coexisting repertoires or tool-kits of resources used by individualsand groups as they live their lives, rather than as single, total, all-enveloping, seamless systems of meaning.6

statements their meaning (see Gilbert Ryle, “Thinking and Reflecting” and “TheThinking of Thoughts: What is ‘Le Penseur’ Doing?”, in Collected Papers , vol. 2 of

Collected Essays, 1929-1968 [London: Hutchinson, 1971], 465-96; Clifford Geertz,“Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretationof Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973]; and Catherine Gallagher and StephenGreenblatt, Practicing New Historicism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000],20-31). Yet another is Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse; what I am attemptinghere, to use his terms, is an archeology of certain statements from the “archive”of China in the period ca. 320 B.C.E.-320 C.E. regarding ideas and practices in-

volving food, treating each of them as a “discursive formation” deployed within a

common discourse (see in particular Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Dis-course on Language , tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1972], 116-117,126-131, 138-140).

4 See Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 1-19.5 See Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1999); Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions,Narrative Theories,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 209-239; Natalie Zemon Davis, Fictionin the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 1987).

6 See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2001); Sherry B. Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Jerome Bruner, “The Narra-tive Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991):3-5.


4/57


A source of inspiration that is specific to the study of China is thework of Michael Puett.7 One of Puett’s most powerful methodolog-ical insights is that intellectual choices made in a text take on new

significance when viewed, not in isolation or according to the in-ternal dynamics of one or another tradition or lineage (real or per-ceived), but as alternatives to contemporary competing ideas; theyare not simply assertions made in a vacuum, or reports of assump-tions, but arguments. That the author(s) of a text T asserted posi-tion X is seen differently when it is realized that other texts of thetime were urging an anti-X position Y; X is then revealed to be onegroup’s response to another group in an ongoing argument, ratherthan as a position the authors of T arrived at haphazardly, neutral-ly, or solely as the result of discussions internal to their own positionor tradition. To return to the culinary domain, a group’s favoring offood A, for example, may have more to do with the sheer fact that A is not food B, but is rather an alternative to it, than it does with

any intrinsic benefits claimed for A or any claimed inadequacies ofB (and similarly, claims for A’s intrinsic benefits may be motivatedby the desire to counter others’ preference for B); a woman’s un-conventional food practices may not, at bottom, be about the foodper se so much as they are a way of wresting control of her socialand religious circumstances and of her own body away from others;8 arguments about potatoes versus grains as staple crops in the nine-

teenth century British isles were about much more than the intrinsicmerits of each food type, just as Paul’s warning to the Corinthiansconcerning food practices was enmeshed in a complex set of under-standings, of social and religious oppositions and associations, andwas not a comment on nutrition.9

7

See Michael J. Puett, “Nature and Artifice: Debates in Late Warring StatesChina concerning the Creation of Culture,” HJAS 57 (1997):471-518; “Sages, Min-isters, and Rebels: Narratives from Early China Concerning the Initial Creationof the State,” HJAS 58 (1998):425-479; The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates ConcerningInnovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); andTo Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2002).

8 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance ofFood to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 189-244.

9 On the potato debate, see Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism,110-135; for a study of Paul’s culinary warning to the Corinthians, see Peter D.Gooch, Dangerous Food: 1 Corinthians 8-10 in its Context (Canadian Corporation forStudies in Religion, 1993).


5/57


This view of cultures, societies, and religious traditions sees themas the contestational fields10 upon which agents assert claims andattempt to persuade others to their points of view. Ideas, traditions,

and bundles of practices and disciplines are not imagined as “evolv-ing” or “chang[ing] glacially over time as the result of impersonalprocesses,”11 or solely according to their own internal, neutral logic.Nor are they understood as simply belonging to large bodies of im-personal, collective things like “mythology,” “popular religion,” or“Daoism” (or even “Chinese culture”) that develop, Hegelian style,as if they had some sort of life of their own and essentially invent-ed themselves.12 Instead, they are seen as things made by particu-lar historical agents (even if the identities of those agents are nowlost to us), as claims advanced against alternative positions and withsignificant stakes involved; they are “the sites of pointed and highlyconsequential semantic skirmishes fought between rival regimes oftruth” and of prestige.13 A culinary discipline is, among other things,

a tactical deployment of taxonomies, and the contrast it sets up be-tween higher and lower ways of eating is “not an idle play of cat-egories but a social and political intervention.”14 Furthermore, themaking and exchanging of stories about practitioners of such disci-plines (and much of the surviving material from late classical andearly medieval China about special eating regimens is narrative ma-terial) are likewise undertaken in light of definite sets of interests on

the part of the makers, the tellers, and the audience of the stories;they are acts, social transactions, and not just contextless structures,much less idle entertainments.15

10 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge , 126.11 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth , 18.12

See Robert Ford Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions (in the ModernWest and in Early Medieval China),” History of Religions 42 (2003):287-319.13 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth , 18.14 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth , 118; cf. Julia Twigg, “Food for Thought: Purity and

Vegetarianism,” Religion 9 (1979):17.15 On this point see esp. Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions,” and Lincoln,

Theorizing Myth , 149-150. The scope or scale of the relevant context, and hencethe locating of the competing positions involved, is an open question for historicalresearch; this context should not be assumed to have been merely local, but be-

yond this it is hard to generalize, except to point to “a sense of archival and inter-pretive inexhaustibility” (Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 15).

A statement such as “The meaning of sugar for the Lancashire mill worker is notdetermined in the metropolitan heartland alone. It is embedded in a world econ-

http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ext=a&reqidx=0018-2710(2003)42L.287[aid=6876563]http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ext=a&reqidx=0018-2710(2003)42L.287[aid=6876563]http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ext=a&reqidx=0018-2710(2003)42L.287[aid=6876563]


6/57


Although ideas and techniques such as the ones I will examinehere have usually been identified by modern scholars as “Daoist,” Iavoid this practice, for reasons that can only be sketched here. For

one thing, I am in general averse to reifying religions, to traditionholism, and to lumping together quite disparate things and asserting,almost as an article of faith, that they must somehow be organical-ly, ontologically related to one another, and must share some essen-tial identity, merely by virtue of the common label wielded by themodern scholar.16 Such labelings are in any case acts of interpre-tation and must be defended like any other. I have yet to see anycounterargument to the careful, exacting, chronologically sensitivesorting of views and attitudes toward self-cultivation and macrobiot-ic practice in the late Warring States and Han that Donald Harperhas recently given us.17 In the wake of such an analysis, one cannotmake them all “Daoism” simply by the linguistic (and, as it happens,anachronistic) magic of the “ism” suffix. For another thing, it is un-

clear how lumping disparate practices and attitudes into a singular“Daoism” helps us understand those particular practices and attitudes.The lumping often serves other agendas than this one. I wager thatparticular texts and practices are better explicated on the basis ofthe terms they themselves present as well as in relation to the otherpractices and attitudes to which they constituted alternatives.

In order to understand cuisines of transcendence, then, we must

have some grasp of what they were presented as alternatives to.What they were and what they meant were, in part, functions ofwhat they were not.

omy” (Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology [Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 37) represents a profound insight, butonly when there is a “world economy” for “the meaning of sugar” to be embed-ded in, and not all foods (or other cultural items) are so widely connected; whilecontacts with, and images of, foreign peoples will have their place in what follows,much of what I will be discussing is specific to the Han ecumene. The questionof “entertainment” is one I must address elsewhere; suffice it to say here that wemoderns must strive to imagine and reconstruct purposes in addition to entertain-ment for early practices and ideas that puzzle us.

16 See further Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions,” and Jonathan Z.

Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

17 Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Man-uscripts (London: Kegan Paul, 1998), 112-118.


7/57


PART ONE

The Symbolic and Social Significance of Grains, Meats,

Agriculture, and Sacrifice

I begin with two caveats. First, the following is merely an at-tempt to sketch in some salient parts of a complex picture, certain-ly not an attempt exhaustively to survey the views on the subjectsbroached, which would be impossible here. Each text cited does, ofcourse, crystallize the views of a circle of authors and readers, but Iwill not assume that any of them is the “expression” of some unitarywhole such as a singular “mythological tradition” or an ideological“school” or “ism.” Taken as a whole, however, the set of texts se-lected represent a very wide swath of viewpoints. Second, it shouldbe recalled that each of the passages adduced below was likely al-so circulated as a response to some opposed view; yet it would be

impossible here to do justice to each one in its own argumentativesetting: attempting to do so would open to the door to an extensiveif not infinite regress. I am treating these passages as articulatingsome of the baseline views and practices to which cuisines of tran-scendence were crafted as alternatives, and it is these alternativesthat are my focus; a different focus would naturally produce a dif-ferent selection of texts as well as a better rounded and differently

articulated treatment of these.

1. The consumption of grains and the cooking of food as key marks of civilization

In the “Wangzhi” 王制 (“Royal Regulations”) chapter of the Li- ji 禮記, representing a Former Han (or perhaps somewhat earlier) viewpoint, we find the following discussion:

As for the capacities of people in their various habitats, they could not butconform to the hotness or coldness, dryness or moistness [of each place asdetermined by] heaven and earth. Since [the terrain], whether broad valleysor great rivers, was differently configured, the people born in each area var-ied in their customs. Their [temperaments]—rigid or pliant, light or grave,slow or rapid—were thus differently made uniform; their [tastes in] the fiveflavors were differently harmonized; their implements were differently config-ured; their clothing was differently fitted. In cultivating means of instruction

for [each of] them, their customs were left unchanged; in making their meansof governance uniform, what was locally fitting was left unchanged. Thus the people of the five regions—those of the central kingdoms, theRong, the Yi, [and so on—see below]—each had their several natures, which


8/57


they could not be made to alter. Those of the east were called Yi; they woretheir hair unbound and tattooed their bodies, and some of them ate theirfood without cooking it 有不火食者. [The people of] the south were calledMan; they tattooed their foreheads and had their feet turned in toward eachother, and some among them ate their food without cooking it. [The peopleof] the west were called Rong; they wore their hair unbound and wore skins,and some of them did not eat grain 有不粒食者. [The people of] the northwere called Di; they wore feathers and furs and lived in caves, and some ofthem did not eat grain.

The text moves on to speak of the mutual unintelligibility of thelanguages of these several peoples, and ends in this section (before

moving on to its account of the institution of schools) by noting how,in ancient times, the people were redistributed into walled towns andportioned fields, “so that there was no unoccupied land and therewere no people left wandering (無游民 ).”18

K.C. Chang astutely notes that, in this passage, not cooking andnot eating grains are both markers of barbarism, but are differentmarkers. “One could eat grain but also eat raw meat or one couldeat his meat cooked but eat no grain. Neither was fully Chinese. AChinese by definition ate grain and cooked his meat”19 —and, wemight add in light of the last passage, lived in a settled agriculturalcommunity. According to Chang, in early China a meal—at leastfor the elite class of people whose ritualized eating habits are fore-grounded in such texts—consisted of grain food, meat and vegetable

dishes, and either water or jiu 酒 (probably best rendered as “beer”in this period) or both.20Unlike Chang, however, I read this passage as reflective of the

views of its late Warring States or Han author-redactors rather thanas an intact remnant of Zhou thought. Further, I am inclined to viewit less as a piece of ancient ethnographic description, an “unspon-sored text”21 that just happened to be cast by fate onto the pages

of the Liji , than as a piece of ideology wrapped in the guise of de-scription, its message being that eating grains (the products of or-

18 Liji zhengyi (Shisanjing zhushu ed., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990),section “Wangzhi,” 246-47; I have consulted but sometimes departed from JamesLegge, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, Parts 3 and 4, The Li Ki ,Sacred Books of the East 27 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885), 3:228-30.

19 K.C. Chang, “Ancient China,” in Food and Chinese Culture: Anthropological and His-torical Perspectives , ed. K.C. Chang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 42.

20 Chang, “Ancient China,” 37.21 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 10.


9/57


ganized agriculture), cooking, and living in settled communities areamong the traits possessed by human beings par excellence. Any-thing less—even if the result of natural, local variations—counts as

less than fully human and needs to be modified, to the extent possi-ble given people’s distinctive “natures,” by the instructive and gov-erning interventions of the fully human people whose norms fill thebook’s pages.

The exclusive association of grain-eating (as well as other culi-nary and economic markers, such as sericulture, the production ofhemp, and salt mining)22 with the civilized center recurs in a passagein the second-century B.C.E. Huainanzi 淮南子 that is not so much asitiogony (see the next paragraph) as a cosmo-sitiology. The text isa list of the treasures of mountains in the nine directions. In all di-rections but the center we find listed relatively exotic goods, manyof them metals and minerals (especially multiple types of jade; al-so mentioned are one plant product and one set of animal ones);

in the center, we find these: “the five grains, mulberry, hemp, fish,and salt.”23 Elsewhere in the same text we find lists of the types ofgrain correlated with the waters of particular rivers and with the fivephases (and hence with everything else the phases correlate with).24 But the main point for our purposes is the correlation between geo-graphic centricity and the resources for agriculture.

Many of the texts relevant to our inquiry take the form of what

Bruce Lincoln has termed sitiogonies—narratives of the nature andorigin of food (from Greek sitos “food, bread, grain”—note that thisGreek term, like the analogous gu 穀 in Chinese, denotes both grainand grain-based staple foods in particular and, synecdochically, foodin general).25

22 For a similar list of associations, see W. Allyn Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Eco-nomic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, vol. 1, rev. ed. (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), 109.

23 Huainan honglie jie , HY 1176, 7.7a3-4 (texts in the Zhengtong daozang will becited by the number assigned to them in the Combined Indices to the Authors and Ti-tles of Books in Two Collections of Taoist Literature , ed. Wang Tu-chien, Harvard-Yen-ching Sinological Index Series no. 25 [Beijing: Yanjing University, 1925]). A trans-lation of the passage in question may be found in John S. Major, Heaven and Earth

in Early Han Thought: Chapters Three, Four, and Five of the Huainanzi (Albany: SUNYPress, 1993), 164.24 See Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought , 182, 185-187.25 On “sitiogonies,” see Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European


10/57


Consider, for example, the poem “Shengmin” 生民 in the “Daya”大雅, or “Greater Elegantiae,” section of the Book of Odes 詩經.26 (Iwill not attempt to do justice to its metric aspects here: attention to

the successive assertions deployed in its narrative will suffice for mypurposes.) The poem opens by asking how Jiang Yuan 姜嫄 gavebirth to “the people”民 —perhaps humanity in general, or more likelythe Zhou people—and, as a whole, it can be read as answering thisquestion. It recounts that, after making an offering and praying fora child (the verbs are yin 禋 and si 祀 ), Jiang Yuan trod on the toe-print of Di

帝 and subsequently gave birth to Hou Ji

后稷, or Lord

Millet; because of her sacrifice, her childbirth was easy and painless.For reasons unexplained, Hou Ji was thrice abandoned, but oxenand sheep, woodcutters, and birds successively rescued him.27 Afterthe birds’ departure he began to wail and crawl, and then, “so asto receive food for his mouth” 以就口食, he planted beans, hemp,

Themes of Creation and Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 65.For specific textual evidence indicating that “abstention from grains” meant theavoidance of what normally passed for food in general, and not simply of the fivespecific grains normally listed as comprised in the group, see Robert Ford Cam-pany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Tradi-tions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 23-24.Here is an additional piece of evidence: when, in Ge Hong’s Traditions of DivineTranscendents (Shenxian zhuan ), the adept Jie Xiang is told by a female transcendenthe meets in the mountains that his “blood-eating qi is not yet fully expunged,” heis directed to “abstain from grains for three years and then come back” (Campa-ny, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth , 190)—advice that would make no sense if“grains” were limited to two kinds of millet, hemp, rice, and beans, or (in a com-mon alternate list) two kinds of millet, rice, wheat, and pulse.

26 On the history of the Odes text overall and its commentaries, see MichaelLoewe, “Shih ching,” in Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berke-ley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 415-423. For a sense of the significanceof the Odes generally, and the Greater and Lesser Elegantiae specifically, see Ste-

ven Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in TraditionalChina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and Haun Saussy, The Problem of aChinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), both superb studies.

27 As the reason for Hou Ji’s abandonment, the Shiji 史記 account—whichshould by no means be treated simply as a “version” of the “same myth” but rath-er has its own agenda and concerns—says that his mother deemed him inauspi-cious (4.111—this and other dynastic histories are cited by chapter and continuouspage number in the modern Zhonghua shuju editions). Sarah Allan (The Shape of theTurtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China [Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1991], 44) points out that, in early myths generally, children conceived byspirits are often abandoned. In Shiji 1.3 it is the Yellow Thearch (Huang Di 黃帝 )who is credited, along with much else, with the first “planting of the five grains,”and no separate mention is made of the originator of cooking.


11/57


wheat, gourds, and millet, and his crops flourished and fattened (pro-cesses the poem fondly lingers over). With this produce he “created(or founded, or commenced) the sacrifices” 肇祀.

Then comes the poem’s second question: “What are they, oursacrifices?” The response describes processes for the preparation ofthe grain and meat foods used—pounding, baling, soaking, boiling,steaming for the grains; gathering or taking (qu 取 ) of firewood andlambs, roasting and broiling for the meat. Next is described the divine response: “As soon as the fragrance rises, Di on high is verypleased”

其香始升上帝居歆. The poem concludes with a statement

linking the textual present via a chain of continual practice to thisaugust past: “Lord Millet founded the sacrifices [ 肇祀 again], andwithout blemish or flaw they have been continued till now” 庶無罪悔以迄于今.28

My reading is as follows:(1) In this vision of things, the very origin and continued existence

of the Zhou people is bound up with the invention of agriculture,and the invention of agriculture is bound up with sacrifice. Agri-culture and sacrifice have the same originator, Lord Millet (namedfor what is both a chief product of agriculture and a chief class ofgrains offered in sacrifice), and although he plants crops to feed him-self, the first thing he does with the produce is “found the sacrific-es.” Agriculture and sacrifice link the Zhou people to Di in multiple

ways—through repeated sacrificial ritual, through continuous sacredhistory, and through divine/human descent (Di is Hou Ji’s divinefather, and Hou Ji is the father of the Zhou people). Further, Hou Ji’s human mother, Jiang Yuan, gains procreative access to his divine father by means of sacrifice.

(2) There is an odd narrative and explanatory loop in the myth:the founder of the sacrifice (si 祀 ) was conceived in response to hismother’s sacrificing (si ) to the high god Di and stepping on Di’s toe-print. It is as if the poem’s makers could not imagine Jiang Yuanmaking a request of Di without accompanying it with an offering,

28 I have relied on, but at points altered, the translation in Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs , rev. ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), 241-243, in ren-

dering the text in Shijing 6:129-131. Another translation may be found in AnneBirrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1993), 56-57. Cf. Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1975), 247.


12/57


even though by the poem’s own assertion the practice of offeringswas not established except as the subsequent outcome of this process.In effect, sacrifice is claimed to generate itself via the mediation of

divine/human intercourse and birth (which are both anomalous— intercourse through the toes, birth painless) as well as the mediationof fecund earth (the medium through which Jiang Yuan accesses theterrestrial trace of Di’s divine power) and its produce. A byproductof this loop is that it is Hou Ji, not Jiang Yuan, who is here creditedwith the invention of sacrifice, even though his mother is mentionedas having performed it first. The mother is cut out of the loop andthe descent of sacrifice, as well as that of the Zhou people, is reck-oned as patrilineal.29

(3) Agriculture and sacrifice are here necessitated by ruptures andfailures in the family—they are created to solve problems in properfamily function. The initial problem that triggers the whole processrelated by the narrative is Jiang Yuan’s failure to produce a child

(no mention is made of a human husband or mate), a failure reme-died by sacrifice and by contact with Di’s terrestrial footprint; andthen, once the divine-human child is born, he is abandoned on theearth (perhaps because of his hybridity?) and must create agricul-ture from the earth to assuage his own hunger, the fruits of his la-bors being used as offerings once again to Di (in the heavens), hisdivine father. Now the ancestral descent-and-sacrifice circle is com-

pleted, and it is this circle that the Zhou people have perpetuat-ed with their ongoing sacrifices in imitation of Hou Ji’s (and JiangYuan’s) initial one(s).

(4) The origins of animal husbandry are here taken for grant-ed, not explained; although lambs as well as several cereals, grass-es and vegetables are mentioned as sacrificial goods, the productsmade by Hou Ji’s labors are restricted to the latter types, which are

here featured,30 and the two categories of goods (grains and meats)are introduced separately in the poem’s description of the sacrifice. Also not explained here are the origin of the use of fire and thespecific techniques of cooking rather lavishly listed as used in pre-paring the sacrifice.

29 For a provocative study of the cross-cultural prevalence of this sort of ma-neuver, see Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Pa-ternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

30 As noted by Chang, “Ancient China,” 44.


13/57


(5) The poem sets up a hierarchy of eaters and foods: the semi-divine Hou Ji and his human successors eat grains and vegetables(and, implicitly, meats) here below on earth, and he and they eat via

the mouth; the divine Di, above in the heavens, eats but the risingfragrance of the cooked foods (piled up on altars at a height abovethe ground), via the nose (the residual heat from cooking implied tobe the engine that drives the steaming fragrance upward):

Lower position Higher position

Eaters: Hou Ji; people of Zhou Di Station: earth heaven Foods eaten: grains/vegetables and meats fragrances Organ of consumption: mouth nose

We find passages similar in this respect in other texts. In the sea-sonal schedule of activities laid out in the “Wuxing” chapter of theGuanzi (on which more below), for example, we read that during theautumnal and metal phase, “the son of Heaven issues orders com-manding the officer in charge of sacrifices to select suitable animalsand birds from their pens and suitable offerings of early ripeninggrains to present for use in ancestral temples and the five householdsacrifices. Ghosts and spirits will consume their qi , while gentlemeningest their sapors” 鬼神饗其氣焉君子食其味焉.31 Other such pas-

sages will be seen below.In the Huainanzi we find the following sitiogony:

In ancient times people ate vegetation and drank from streams 茹草飲水; theypicked fruit from trees and ate the flesh of shellfish and insects. In those timesthere was much illness and suffering, as well as injury from poisons. There-upon the Divine Farmer (Shennong 神農 ) for the first time taught the peo-ple to sow the five grains and diagnose [literally, physiognomize, xiang 相 ]the quality of soils—which were arid or wet, fertile or barren, highland orlowland. He tasted the flavors of the hundred plants and the sweetness andbrackishness of streams and springs, causing the people to know which were

31 Text as found in Allyn W. Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosoph-ical Essays from Early China , vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),126; my translation differs somewhat. Wang Chong’s discussion of sacrifices inthe Lunheng also attends to the idea that spirits might absorb them through smell

and through the nose: see the passage in the “Siyi pian” 祀義篇, Lunheng jiaoshi ,ed. Huang Hui (Xinbian Zhuzi jicheng, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 4:1047-55, and the rather dated translation in Alfred Forke, Lun-hêng , 2d ed. (New York:Paragon, 1962), 1:509-515.


14/57


to be avoided and which used. In the process he himself would suffer poison-ings seventy times a day.32

Here Shennong leads human society from a gathering stage (no

mention is made of the hunting of mammalian game) to one of agri-culture. The narrative proceeds to tell of how, subsequently, moral-ity was first taught under Yao, how dwellings were first constructedunder Shun so that people no longer had to live in caves, how Yuchanneled the waters, and how Tang instituted regular hours ofsleeping and waking and systems of caring for the dead, the sick, the

widowed, and the orphaned. It emphasizes that each of these fivesages (shengren 聖人 ) cared not about the baseness of his own stationbut about the failure to follow the Dao; none of them worried thathis own allotted lifespan might be shortened but rather worried thatthe people might be impoverished. One implication of the passageis that the agricultural arts instituted by Shennong were a necessarycondition for the flourishing of the other aspects of civilization that,

on this view, arose later; another is that those arts are in accordancewith the Dao, whatever that turns out to mean here. A passage in the “Liyun” 禮運 chapter of the Liji portrays aspects

of the origins of sacrificial rites for ancestors and gods. At first peoplelived in caves and nests; “they knew not yet the transforming powerof fire, but ate the fruits of plants and trees, and the flesh of birdsand beasts, drinking their blood, swallowing also the hair and feath-

ers. They knew not yet the use of flax and silk, but clothed them-selves with feathers and skins.” Then came the use of fire, whichallowed for the making of tools for advanced building arts (enablingthe construction of elaborate and permanent housing) and for specif-ic cooking operations—toasting, grilling, boiling, and roasting—andfor the initial making of liquors. The special burden of the passage

32 HY 1176, 26.1a-b; the same passage in the Zhuzi jicheng edition of thistext may be found at 19.331; for a translation from which I have both benefitedand departed, see Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 49. A similar account of Shennong’sactivities, stressing not only his introduction of agriculture but also his testing ofplants, is found in Lu Jia’s (fl. 200-180 B.C.E.) Xinyu 新語, a passage that was per-haps a source for this Huainanzi text; see Xinyu, Zhuzi jicheng ed. (Beijing: Zhong-hua shuju, 1954), 1.1, and Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 153. For further study

of Shennnong’s ideological uses, see A.C. Graham, Studies of Chinese Philosophy andPhilosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 67-110, and A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), 64-74.


15/57


is to argue that this development, along with the working of tex-tiles, allowed not only for better living but also for better care of thedead in specific ways that are perpetuated in rites performed down

to the present; as the text puts it, “[the people] were thus able tonourish the living and send off the dead [properly], serving ghosts,spirits, and Di on high. In all these things we follow those begin-nings” 以養生送死以事鬼神上帝皆從其朔.33 Thanks to fire, cookingand the fashioning of textiles, the dead may be properly housed inwell-built tombs, clothed in fine garments, and fed with elaborate-ly prepared cooked foods and spirits—precisely what we find in ex-

cavated Han tombs. A passage in the Mencius tells of how Yao lifted humanity from

a chaotic state in which the birds and beasts pressed in upon themand agriculture was not yet practiced. Yao is portrayed as delegatingresponsibility for a series of advances to various ministers: first thedevelopment of fire, then river control, then the cultivation of thefive grains (taught by Hou Ji), and lastly education. Thus by stag-es people were distinguished from other animals and gained cultureand morality. Here again cooking and agriculture—the cultivationof the five grains—are portrayed as necessary stages on the way to-ward the eventual advent of what this text regards as proper rela-tions among humans.34

In the Hanfeizi we find the following sitiogony of cooked food:

In the earliest times … the people lived on fruit, berries, mussels, and clams— things that sometimes became so rank and fetid that they hurt people’s stom-achs, and many became sick. Then a sage appeared who created the boringof wood to produce fire so as to transform the rank and putrid foods. Thepeople were so delighted by this that they made him ruler of the world andcalled him the Fire-Drill Man (Suiren 燧人 ).35

33

Liji zhengyi 21.416, partially borrowing but also emending the tr. in Legge,The Li Ki , 3:369-370.34 Mencius 3A/4; see the translation and discussion in Puett, The Ambivalence of

Creation, 108-9.35 Hanfeizi jijie (Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1974), sec. 49, p. 339. Translations may be

found in Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 77, and John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Trans-lation and Study of the Complete Works , 3 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1988-94), 3:29; my rendition draws on both of these. Early sources indicate that thegraph sui designated any of several devices for producing fire: a mirror that con-

centrated sunlight, a boring mechanism producing heat through friction, or flintsthat threw off sparks when struck (Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai Kanwa jiten, 13 vols. [To-kyo: Taishåkan shoten, 1957-60], 7.546-47); Suiren’s name or title may thus beunderstood in any of these specific senses.


16/57


The Guanzi and Xunzi mention Suiren in passing as a recognizablemarker of an extremely early phase in the history of human culture,that at which it begins to use fire to cook its food.36

In the “Menders of Nature” 繕性 chapter of the Zhuangzi (chap-ter 16 in the received ordering), perhaps datable to the third centuryB.C.E., Suiren is the first ruler mentioned in a series of what wereusually taken to be civilizational advances but which are portrayedhere as leading to the decline of Power and the ever-farther depar-ture from the natural Dao into systems of social constraint and whatpasses for culture.37 Similar in spirit to this passage is one found in

the fourth century C.E. Uncollected Records (Shiyi ji 拾遺記 ), which al-so features Suiren in this key role and also sees the use of fire as thebeginning of human descent into the balefulness of what passes forcivilization.38 Such counter-narratives—and others might of coursebe cited—agree with the ones cited above that cooking and agricul-ture are key elements of the known social order and of ritual, andthat is why they attack at those points.

Not all sitiogonic passages are thus socio-mythic in character; afew are situated within five-phases, qi -based systematic cosmologiesand cosmogonies, and here it is the exalted qi pedigree of grains,rather than their descent from the ministrations of an ancient cul-ture hero or sage, that is emphasized. Consider the opening passageof the “Neiye” 內業 (“Inner Training”) chapter of the Guanzi 管子 (a

text assembled by Liu Xiang around 26 B.C.E. from earlier materi-als, some perhaps as early as the fifth century B.C.E.),39 structured

36 For the Guanzi passage (in the Kuidu sec.), see Rickett, Guanzi , 2:430-31; forthe Xunzi passage, see Knoblock, Xunzi , 3:43.

37 See A.C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: George Allen &Unwin, 1981), 171; in the Harvard-Yenching concordance ed. the passage appearson p. 41. Suiren is mentioned again in Zhuangzi 18 (see Graham, The Inner Chap-

ters , 189), where he is paired with Shennong, just after mention of Yao, Shun, andthe Yellow Thearch.38 See Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval

China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 64-67, 314-15; Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 43-44.One wonders whether the Cold Food Festival, in which for five days in winter peo-ple abstained from using fire to cook, was connected with these earlier narrativesof the advent of the use of fire. The festival was linked with the transcendent JieZitui, who first appears in Zuo zhuan and has a hagiography in Liexian zhuan. SeeDonald Holzman, Immortals, Festivals and Poetry in Medieval China (Aldershot: Ash-gate, 1998), 51-79. The festival is first mentioned in extant texts in Huan Tan’s(ca. 43 B.C.E.-28 C.E.) Xin lun.

39 W. Allyn Rickett, “Kuan tzu,” in Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts , 244, butsee note 76 below.


17/57


in parallel four-character lines with rhyming final syllables:

凡物之精此則為生下生五榖上為列星流天地間謂之鬼神藏於胸中為之聖人

In all cases the essence of things is what gives them life.Below (or descending) it gives life to the five grains;

Above (or ascending) it creates the arrayed stars.When it floats between the sky and earth, we call them ghosts or spirits;When it is stored in the breast, we call them sagely persons.40

Beginning with the first-mentioned item, and then arranging therest by degree of spatial elevation (with indentation marking the twosub-pairings, grains/stars and sages/spirits), we get the following hi-

erarchical taxonomy:In this station: Jing manifests as:

Below (rooted in the earth) Grains In people’s chests [stored state] Sages Between sky and earth [flowing state] Ghosts and spirits

Above (hung in the sky) Stars

By pairing grains with the stars, the text sets up an analogy: grainsare to the earth as the stars are to the heavens; grains are terrestri-al stars, stars are celestial grains, each holding an analogous placein its own proper realm. Furthermore, the root significance of thegrouping together of all four classes of phenomena is bound up withthe fact that the term jing 精 “essence” implies an achievement, the

result of a refining or concentrating of qi . Each of these phenome-na, then, is not simply another baseline configuration of qi amongthe myriad things but represents qi concentrated in superior form insome characteristic station of a layered cosmos. Grains are to ordi-nary plants (or perhaps to other lowly terrestrial life forms) as sagesare to ordinary people: just as the latter have trained and cultivat-

40 In translating I have benefited from Rickett, Guanzi , 2:39, and Harold D.Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1999), 46, while slightly departing from both.


18/57


ed themselves, carrying jing within their chests, so grains representa form of (plant) life that has been cultivated by human labor andthus harbors superior nourishment.

I know of no text that exalts grains more highly or insists on theirimportance more strongly than the Guanzi . More than once we findit said that “The five grains and the eating of rice are the people’sDirector of Allotted Lifespans” 五榖食米民之司命也,41 an extraor-dinary metaphor likening grains to the forbidding deity, Siming 司命, who already by the fourth and third centuries B.C.E. was heldto enforce predetermined limits on people’s lifespans.42 Or again,in the same chapter: “In all cases the five grains are the controllersof all things” 凡五榖者萬物之主也,43 meaning, as we can see fromthe context, that the price of grains determines the economic valueof all else in society. Or again, in explaining why it is that “the sheji 社稷 [on which see below] are more to be valued than parents”— a truly astounding statement—the text offers: “When city and sub-

urban walls have been destroyed and the altars to Land and Grainno longer receive blood and food sacrifices, there will no longer beany live ministers. However, after the death of their parents, thechildren do not die. This is the reason the sheji are more to be val-ued than parents.”44

Some of the human or quasi-divine progenitors of agriculture,cooking, and sacrifice were not simply worked into mythic narra-

tives or cosmological schemes but also honored with sacrifices. TheLiji passage on the twelfth-month zha 蜡 festival, cursory though it is,suggests year-end harvest thank-offerings to the First Husbandman(xianse 先嗇, identified with Shennong by the commentator ZhengXuan, 127-200 C.E.), the (divine or former human?) overseers ofhusbandry (sise 司嗇 ), and the (discoverer of? god of?) the hundredgrains, as well as to the (gods of?) the fields and apparently both do-

41 For text and translation (my own translation departs slightly), see Rickett,Guanzi , 2:377, n. 6, giving a list of other loci where the same statement appears.

42 See Robert Ford Campany, “Living Off the Books: Fifty Ways to Dodge Ming in Early Medieval China,” in C. Lupke, ed., The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allot-ment, and Fate in Chinese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005) 129-150; Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth , 47-52; and Robert L. Chard,“The Stove God and the Overseer of Fate,” in Proceedings of the International Confer-

ence on Popular Beliefs and Chinese Culture , Center for Chinese Studies Research Se-ries no. 4 (Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies, 1994), 2:655-82.

43 Rickett, Guanzi , 2:382.44 Tr. modified from Rickett, Guanzi , 2:438.


19/57


mestic and wild animals; to judge by this and another brief mention,it was a calendrical moment for the recognition of and return to the very foundations of human society, a festival in which great license

was granted (一國之人皆若狂, “the entire realm as if deranged,” ishow Zigong is made to describe it to Confucius—feeding the vivid ifsomewhat speculative portrayal by Marcel Granet) and in which duerequital (bao 報 ) was paid—in sacrificial food—to the myriad thingsfor their feeding and support of humanity.45 Furthermore, from theHan onward the spring ceremony known simply as Plowing ( geng 耕 )formed part of the imperial ritual system; it opened with an offer-ing to Shennong (and, according to a more detailed account, to theFiery Thearch [Yandi 炎帝 ] as well, perhaps implying that he wascredited with the discovery of fire for cooking), and was followed bythe emperor and officials ritually breaking the ground in a sacredfield used to grow the grains used in court sacrifices.46 The found-ing Han emperor, when told that the Zhou had instituted sacrific-

es to its ancestor Hou Ji upon founding its capital city,47

respondedby ordering every commandery, kingdom, and district in his impe-rial administration to initiate sacrifices to Hou Ji as well, and he de-creed that the shrines for this purpose be called Numen-Star Shrines(lingxing ci 靈星祠 ) because (at least according to commentators) thatstar stood in the left corner of the Celestial Field (tiantian 天田 ) as-terism and thus was auspicious for agriculture. Sacrifices of oxen,

sheep, and pigs were made there several times a year.48

45 See Liji zhengyi , “Jiaotesheng” chapter, 26.499; Legge, The Li Ki , 3:431; Bodde,

Festivals in Classical China , 68-74; the other brief mention is to be found at Liji zhengyi , “Zaji xia,” 34.749a; Legge, The Li Ki, 4:167. For Granet’s lyrical evocation ofthe agricultural festivals of spring and fall, imbued with Émile Durkheim’s emphasison social moments of “collective effervescence” as formative of a society’s sense ofthe sacred, see Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People , tr. Maurice Freed-man (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 40-46, and Fêtes et chansons anciennes de laChine (rept. Paris: Albin Michel, 1982), 179-85.

46 Hou Han shu, “Liyi shang,” 3106; see also Bodde, Festivals in Classical Chi-na , 223-241.

47 On this see further Marianne Bujard, Le Sacrifice au ciel dans la Chine ancienne:Théorie et pratique sous les Han occidentaux (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient,2000), 51.

48 Shiji 28.1380; Han shu 30.1211.


20/57


2. The centrality of agricultural control and of sacrifice to the state

It is clear that, for many authors in late Warring States, Qin, and

Han China, a primary function and prerogative of the state was todo everything possible to assure a good agricultural harvest and thento carefully record, store, and mete out that harvest. Legal docu-ments found in a tomb at Shuihudi dating to 217 B.C.E., for exam-ple, reveal the care taken by the Qin state to manage grain stores,even down to the local level; salaries were reckoned in grain.49 Thesame documents provide insight into the way in which foods of the

sacrificial system—here, alcohol and meat—bonded participantsin social rituals together. Alcohol and meat consumed before thegods sealed legal bonds between parties: “If a husband stole prop-erty, his wife was not legally liable for his act unless she consumedwine and meat with him.”50 The “Royal Regulations” chapter ofthe Liji portrays the careful notation of annual grain harvests andthe management of grain seed for the coming year’s plantings as key

functions of the state.51 Conversely, throughout the “Monthly Or-dinances” (“Yueling” 月令 ) chapter of the same text, one frequentlymentioned effect of the ruler’s acting out of season is that the fivegrains do not germinate or mature properly. “Minister of fields” wasa key high office in the standard accounts of governmental structureof the era.52 Political authority and agricultural production were in-extricably interwoven.

Thomas Wilson has recently summarized the state system of sac-rifice, why and how it was centrally important in Chinese society,and how it was co-implicated with the system of agricultural produc-tion—and this is not even to speak of familial sacrifices to ancestors(other than the royal/imperial ancestors, who were the recipientsof state sacrifices):

A principal duty of the Chinese court was to provide ritual feasts for the godsand spirits at imperial altars and temples. From ancient times…, the emper-or regularly offered a ritual feast—or sacrifice ( ji )—to Heaven and Earth, theroyal ancestors, the gods of grains and soils, sun and moon, stars, and other

49 Robin D.S. Yates, “State Control of Bureaucrats under the Qin: Techniquesand Procedures,” Early China 20 (1995):352-57, 359-60, 361.

50 Yates, “State Control of Bureaucrats under the Qin,” 357. The beverage inquestion was most likely more similar to our beer than to our wine.

51 Legge, The Li Ki , 3:221, 293, 308.52 See, for instance, Rickett, Guanzi , 1:108-9.


21/57


22/57


23/57


but that the living were obliged to feed the dead was assumed by allparties, even those (such as the first century C.E. Wang Chong) whoargued that the dead lacked consciousness and could not therefore

receive, require, or be grateful for food offerings. Numerous storiesare preserved in late Warring States, Han, and early medieval textsin which unfed ghosts complain about their lot or thank those non-kin who, out of compassion, offer to feed or rebury them.66 In somecases the dead are represented as actively making very specific re-quests and having particular preferences regarding their food andclothing.67 The unquiet, resentful dead who went without food of-ferings through the normal channels were a special object of con-cern and received special ritual attentions and feedings.68

Feeding the dead was an emotionally charged event in whichsensory and verbal as well as commensal contact between the liv-ing and the dead was briefly but powerfully reopened. (This is anaspect of ancestral rites that deserves more study, and perhaps if we

had a better appreciation of it the question as to whether what isnormally reified as “Confucianism” is “a religion”—a question asbadly formed as it is persistent—would subside.) At the banquet ta-ble, a living descendant acted as ritual impersonator (shi 尸 ) of thehonored ancestor. Offerings were preceded, on the part of livingparticipants, by a period of seclusion, purification, and fasting mostcommonly summarized with the term zhai齋 or齊. The Liji poignant-

ly insists at several points that after completing this fasting for thefull period of three days—and only after having done so—will thesacrificer be able to see and hear the beings he is feeding,69 passages

Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),227-233; Jeffrey Riegel, “Do Not Serve the Dead as You Serve the Living: TheLüshi chunqiu Treatises on Moderation in Burial,” Early China 20 (1995):301-330;

Forke, Lun-hêng , 2:369-375.66 See Robert Ford Campany, “Ghosts Matter: The Culture of Ghosts in SixDynasties Zhiguai,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991):15-34.

67 As for example in Forke, Lun-hêng , 1:512; Donald Harper, “Resurrection inWarring States Popular Religion,” Taoist Resources 5.2 (1994):13-29; Terry Kleeman,“Licentious Cults and Bloody Victuals: Sacrifice, Reciprocity, and Violence in Tra-ditional China,” Asia Major Third Series 7 (1994):185-211.

68 See Kleeman, “Licentious Cults and Bloody Victuals,” 195; Robert L. Chard,“The Imperial Household Cults,” in McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in Chi-

na , 241-242.69 E.g. Liji zhengyi 27.507, 49.830, and, for the most explicit example, 47.805ff.

(cf. Legge, The Li Ki , 4:210-15), where we find this poignant statement: “Duringthe days of vigil and purification, [the mourner] thinks on the place where [the de-


24/57


undoubtedly reflective of the often repeated yet misconstrued Con-fucian remark that one is to “sacrifice to the spirits as if the spiritsare present.” Note that here one temporarily abstained from food

in order to purify oneself to see the spirits of the dead when pre-senting food to them and eating with them.

The chronological, ideological, and generic variety of the texts Ihave juxtaposed, while it would be a liability in an attempt to do justice to any one of those texts taken severally, at least has one ad- vantage for my purposes. It indicates the depth and breadth of cul-tural assumptions about the priority of grains, cooking, sacrifice (ofmeats and grains), agriculture and its products, and the extent towhich these were central to political authority, social function, andcultural identity. With rare exceptions, the spirits of nature as wellas the human dead were thought of as needing to eat. With no ex-ceptions, it was thought that the job of the living human communi-ty was to feed them. What they were fed was “grains”—synecdochic

for the products of agriculture—and meats. Grain was, in short, asymbol and summation of culture itself, or rather of nature accul-turated, as well as of the fully human community. A natural locusof nutritive “essence” ( jing ), grain nevertheless required cooperative,communal,70 differentiated stages of production—planting, tend-ing, harvesting, storing, thrashing, milling, mixing, and cooking— to be transformed into food. Thus transformed, it was perhaps the

most culturally celebrated food of humans (both living and dead)and of gods.

parted] sat, thinks on how they smiled and spoke, thinks on their aims and views,thinks on what they delighted in, thinks on what they enjoyed. On the third dayof such vigil and purification he will see those for whom he has been keeping vig-il and purifying himself” 齊之日思其居處思其笑語思其志意思其所樂思其所嗜,齊三日乃見其所為齊者. For further discussion, see Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People ,83-86, and Jordan Paper, The Spirits are Drunk: Comparative Approaches to Chinese Reli-

gion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 112-15.70 A sitiogonic passage in Mozi unmistakably links the advent of agriculture

with that of living in communities; when people gathered food from the wild, theylived in distinct locations 素食而分處 ( Mozi jijie 1.38).


25/57


Interlude:Strategies of Disciplined Eating within the Mainstream

Cuisine

In some late Warring States texts we find a concern for disci-

pline in eating—that is, attempts to transform eating from a simple

satiation of hunger or social activity into a self-cultivational prac-

tice. As Donald Harper has noted, such regimens, with their warn-

ings against excessive consumption and against overly rich foods,

clearly presume as their target audience a noble class of people.71

How one eats is assumed in these texts to be part of a larger ma-

trix of self-cultivational discipline of some kind, and the sheer pur-

suit of gustatory pleasure is subordinated to a higher goal—a very

basic and, to this point, moderate kind of asceticism (in the sense

of the Greek verb askekein, “to exercise”).72 But there is no sense in

these texts that the mainstream cuisine can or should be replaced

with an alternate diet.In the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (compiled ca. 239 B.C.E.) chapter“Fulfill the Number” 盡數 , for example, we are told that when es-sence ( jing 精 ) and spirit ( shen神 ) are secured within the human frame,life span is extended; the text hastens to add, however, that this does

not mean lengthening an otherwise short life—that is, changing

one’s preallotted span of life, or ming 命 —but merely being assuredof fulfilling the span one otherwise would have, or bi qi shu 畢其數 . According to the text, the way to do this is to avoid extremes of all

sorts: in flavors (excessive sweetness, sourness, bitterness, acridness,

or saltiness, the “five sapors” wu wei 五味, are to be shunned), emo-tions, temperature, humidity, and quantity of food eaten. Rules of

71 Donald Harper, “The Bellows Analogy in Laozi 5 and Warring States Mac-robiotic Hygiene,” Early China 20 (1995):391; Harper, Early Chinese Medical Liter-ature , 111.

72 The advice given in the Pulling Book 引書 found in 1983 at a tomb in Zhang- jiashan (burial dating to mid-second century B.C.E.)—“with drink and food, lethunger or satiation be whatever the body desires” (Harper, Early Chinese MedicalLiterature , 111)—might appear to be an exception, but even this is seasonal advicespecific to autumn in an overall macrobiotic regimen attributed to Ancestor Peng.

Another example of moderation in the consumption of a mainstream diet (here,

specifically, the importance of keeping trim) as a part of a larger program of cul-tivation can be seen in an early treatise on the circulation of qi : see Vivienne Lo,“Tracking the Pain: Jue and the Formation of a Theory of Circulating Qi throughthe Channels,” Sudhoffs Archiv 84 (2000):208.


26/57


eating are offered: no rich or fatty foods, no heavily spiced foods,no strong alcoholic beverages; eat at regular intervals, neither go-ing hungry nor engaging in gluttony.73 Similar advice of modera-

tion is given elsewhere in this book regarding life in general, and theapplication of extreme measures—such as an absurd case of a manwho claimed to be able to raise the dead by doubling the dosage ofa medicine for paralysis—is criticized.74 The fact that this text goesout of its way more than once to argue against extreme practicesfor the lengthening of life suggests that its authors knew of practi-tioners of such arts and opposed them on the grounds that, though

life is precious and should be carefully guarded and maintained, toattempt to lengthen it artificially will in fact have the opposite ef-fect: what shortens life is to go against what is natural.75 Clearly themainstream cuisine was thought of here as “natural” to humans.

Similarly, the “Inner Training” section of the Guanzi , perhaps aslightly older text,76 contains a section on “the dao of eating” thatopens with a warning against both over- and underconsumptionand posits as ideal a balance between overfilling and overrestricting,with specific physiological harms associated with each extreme. Wesaw above the exalted cosmological station accorded by this text tothe five grains. Overall, it lays out a program of cultivation featur-ing meditation and, most especially, the regulated intake and refine-ment of qi through breathing exercises in which longevity is merely

one goal (though it is not as minimal as Roth insists due to his priv-ileging of the text’s “apophatic” strands).77 Roth himself notes sim-

73 Knoblock and Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei , 99-101.74 For the similar advice, ibid., 64ff.; for the criticism of extremes, ibid., 628.75 Ibid., 67-70, 518-20; “attaining the one” [ de yi 得一 ] is mentioned as having

many benefits, but longevity is not among them; ibid., 107.76 Harold Roth’s arguments for a fourth century B.C.E. date for this section

(Original Tao, 23-30), however, are suspect in that they are based, in part, on hisspeculative and wishful assumption that political considerations were added onlylater to an “original Dao” that started as a “pure” program of personal cultivationinnocent of politics—an assumption belied by the actual content of the text (seethe portions designated by Roth as chs. 9, 10, 18, and 22, only the last of which isadmitted by him to harbor “political” content). I furthermore reject Roth’s argu-ment that this text represents an “original” teaching that was passed down contin-uously and developed organically as a holistic, single “Taoist mysticism” (to quotehis subtitle; see also ibid., 2-3, 8-9), as well as his view that it was “the first text

of Taoism to be written down” (ibid., 9). For a critique of the model of religionsseemingly implicit here, see Smith, Drudgery Divine , 1-35.

77 See esp. Roth, Original Tao, 86-87, 82-83; for Roth’s privileging of the text’s“apophatic” (his term) or “mystical” aspects, see ibid., 169.


27/57


ilarities between this text and a dialogue found within the “TenQuestions” manuscript found at Mawangdui; but that text must bediscussed below since, unlike the Guanzi generally, it certainly does

not exalt the mainstream cuisine and seems, as I will argue, to havesomething quite different in mind.

PART TWO

Alternative Cuisines for Superior Eaters

Many late Warring States, Qin, Han, and early medieval textualand visual representations depict or prescribe an array of culinarypossibilities other than the mainstream (elite) diet. It will becomeobvious that they do not offer these possibilities neutrally, as a sim-ple expansion of the choices available to consumers of food and of

texts, but rather that they recommend them as superior and implyor state that those who practice them are superior.

1. Eating qi is better than eating grains

I begin with the following well-known passage from the oldestportion (the “inner chapters”) of the Zhuangzi 莊子, dating to around320 B.C.E:

Jian Wu put a question to Lian Shu: “I heard Jie Yu say something. His wordswere expansive yet touched nothing, went far but never returned. I was amazedand frightened by his words, which like the Milky Way were without any lim-it and various, coming nowhere near people as they really are.” “What did he say?” “He said that on the distant mountain of Guyi a divine man 神人 dwells.His skin and flesh are like ice and snow. He is gentle as a virgin. He does not

eat the five grains, but rather sucks wind and drinks dew 不食五榖吸風飲露.He rides the qi of clouds and mounts dragons, roaming beyond the four seas乘雲氣御飛龍而遊乎四海之外. When the spirits in him congeal 凝 , this causescreatures to be free from plagues and the year’s grain crops to ripen 年榖熟.

—I thought him crazy and did not believe him.” Lian Shu replied: “Yes, the blind cannot partake of the spectacle of or-naments and emblems [of writing], nor the deaf in the sound of drums andbells. But is it only in flesh and bone that there are blindness and deafness?No, understanding has them too.”78

78 Zhuangzi ch. 1, lines 26-31 in the Harvard-Yenching ed., relying greatly onGraham, Chuang Tzu, 46, but adding slight emendations; cf. Victor H. Mair, Wan-


28/57


It would be a mistake to lump this strange figure into the ranksof those soon to be known as “transcendents” (xian 仙 ), at least notwithout careful consideration.79 For one thing, his rhetorical func-

tion here is to serve as one of a series of wonders, things beyond theken of ordinary folk, and not as representative of a class of deathlessbeings. The point is simply that the world is big and full of strangethings, and one of them is this divine man. The passage does notsuggest that readers should or can emulate him (although he is clear-ly presented as admirable rather than despicable or negligible—any-thing in this chapter that “roams” is so, since the chapter criticizesfixed, narrow views). And, quite conspicuously, for all the divineman’s remarkable properties there is no mention of a long life spanor immortality. But, on the other hand, each of the properties thatdo mark him as different from ordinary humans will have becomepart of the repertoire of transcendents within the next two centu-ries: (1) Taxonomically he is neither a spirit nor a man, but some-

thing in between, a “divine man,” perhaps a sort of hybrid or elseone of a distinct class of beings. (2) As to his diet, he does not eat the“five grains” but subsists on wind and dew instead. We might infer(though it is not explicitly stated) that it is this diet that accounts forhis wondrously refined body; we might also infer, since he is a divineman, that this strange diet is being claimed superior to one basedon grains. (3) He dwells at a distant place, not in the central king-

dom, and on a mountain, not on agricultural plains; he also roamsbeyond the known limits of the settled world. (4) He travels by rid-ing qi and dragons, implying flight and ascension into the heavens.

dering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (New York: Bantam,1994), 6-7. A similar and clearly derivative passage occurs in the “Yellow Thearch”

chapter of the much later Liezi , and the same language is used to describe the divineman’s avoidance of grains and subsistence on wind and dew. But there are differ-ences: (1) The description of the man is not surrounded, as in the Zhuangzi , by anyconversational context. (2) The geography of the mountain is specified: it here be-comes (by virtue of an intertextual linkage with passages in the Shanhai jing ) an off-shore island visible from the point where the Yellow River meets the sea, thus akinto the fabled eastern isles of Penglai and Yingzhou. (3) Most significantly, the listof benefits conveyed by the divine man’s activities expands to cosmic proportions;even the sun and moon, yin and yang, and the four seasons respond to him with

timely movements, transcendents and sages serve him as ministers, and ghosts qui-et down. See Graham, Lieh-tzu, 35, and Liezi jishi , ed. Yang Bojun (Beijing: Zhong-hua shuju, 1979), 2.44-46.

79 As noted by Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature , 113.


29/57


(5) Despite his extreme spatial distance, by some unexplained mech-

anism his “spirit-congealing” activities bring benefits to the people

of the central kingdom, warding off illnesses among them and ripen-

ing the fruits of their agricultural labors. (In many cases of transcen-dents, we will be told at least that certain particular “arts” [ shu 術 ]are responsible for such effects, even if those arts are not explained

to us in detail.) This being who does not consume grains somehow

helps them grow by his self-cultivational disciplines.80

The song “Yuanyou” 遠遊 , or “Far Roaming”, in the anthologyof Chu lyrics known as Chuci

楚辭 maps out a cosmic journey and

a path of self-cultivation toward a specific sort of transcendence.81

The soteric, progressive structure of the song deserves closer scru-

tiny elsewhere; for our purposes it suffices to focus on two clusters

of lines. The first reads:82

I shall follow, then, Wang Qiao 王喬 for my pleasure and amusementSup on the six qi and drink Drifting Flow 餐六氣而飲沆瀣兮

Rinse my mouth with True Yang and swallow Dawn Aurora 漱正陽而含其霞Conserve the limpid clarity of spirit illumination 保神明之清澄兮 As essence and qi enter in, pollution and filth are expelled 精氣入而麤穢除

Here, the poet, following the example of the noted transcendent

Wang Qiao, begins a culinary regime based on qi and—at least by

implication—no longer on grain food. By the final verse, the pu-

rifying effects of this regime on his biospiritual person begin to be

noted. As Harper explains, the three types of qi mentioned in thesecond and third lines—Drifting Flow, True Yang, and Dawn Au-

rora—are the names of the beneficial qi of midnight, midday, and

dawn respectively. The six types of qi , also mentioned here as a class,

are all beneficial and correspond spatially to the four quarters, heav-

en above, and earth below, and temporally to the seasons, and lat-

er texts specify seasonal schedules by which to ingest them; there

80 This aspect of what would soon become the discourse of transcendence hasbeen overlooked by scholars and will be highlighted in my forthcoming book.

81 This composition may date to the late fourth century at the earliest, or tothe early Han at the latest. The vexed question of its more precise dating is of norelevance to my purpose here.

82 Chuci jizhu (Saoye shanfang woodblock print ed., n.d.), 5.2b-3b. My trans-

lation is based on the ones found in Paul W. Kroll, “An Early Poem of Mysti-cal Excursion,” in Religions of China in Practice , ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1996), 159-160, and in Donald Harper, Early Chinese

Medical Literature , 307 n. 1.


30/57


are also five types of qi to be avoided, already mentioned in someof the Mawangdui manuscripts.83

The poem moves on. After receiving instruction from Wang Qiao,

the poet continues via flight on “to the Feathered Persons [these are,of course, transcendents] at the Cinnabar Mound, loitering in thelong-standing land where death is not” 行仍羽人丹丘兮留不死之舊鄉, and proceeds to bathe at other mythic destinations in the cardi-nal directions (a sort of ritual purification) till he “sucks in the darkliquor of the Flying Springs” 吸飛泉之微液兮 (a site located at thewestern Mt. Kunlun) and “clutches to (his) breast the floriate bloomsof gorgeous gemstones” 懷琬琰之華英. He then narrates:

My essence, becoming whole and unmixed, now took on strength 精醇粹而始壯 As my body, weakening and wasting, turned tender and listless質銷鑠以汋約兮 And my spirit, growing fine and subtle, was released, unrestrained 神要眇以淫放

The very processes that transform qi into sustenance sufficient

to support life are described with metaphors grounded in the pro-cessing and cooking of agricultural products and in the smelting ofmetallic ores. In the first line we have three terms drawn from thedomain of the production of liquor from grains; the term jing (“es-sence”) itself, containing the rice radical, partakes of this metaphor.In the second line we have two terms suggesting smelting, drawnfrom the domain of metallurgy,84 and the poet’s body is denominat-

ed as if it were the “raw material” (zhi 質 ) of a smelting process inwhich the essence is purified and strengthened, the bodily form ismelted away, and the spirit is released. This conception of what itmeans to transcend—that one’s “essence” and “spirit” are releasedfrom the dross of the “bodily form”—is merely one conception, byno means the only or even the predominant one, and is sharply atodds, as will be noted below, with others that prioritize the preser- vation and strengthening of the body. It is congruent, on the otherhand, with passages in other texts that hierarchize the relation be-tween “spirit” and body.

83 Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 307-8.84 A commentator glosses this compound as 形解銷化. The rhyming binomial

expression yaoyao that closes this line recalls the line from the Zhuangzi ’s descriptionof the divine man, “He is gentle as a virgin” (in some versions 綽約, in others 汋約,若處子 ).


31/57


Among the silk manuscripts found at Mawangdui is one titled

“Eliminating Grain and Eating Qi ” ( Quegu shiqi 卻榖食氣 ).85 The textoutlines a method for avoiding the eating of “grains” (presumably

here as often synecdochic for the products of agriculture) by ingest-ing qi according to scheduled procedures and by consuming the herbshiwei 石韋, or pyrrosia, apparently here used as a drug to treat theurine retention that comes from eliminating grain rather than as a

substitute food. Specific modes of exhalation are prescribed, and sea-

sonal and age-based guidelines for the practitioner’s ingestion of the

various types of beneficial qi are laid out along with a taxonomy ofthe five types of harmful qi to be avoided. The brief text twice positsa hierarchy of eaters, those who eat grain versus those who eat qi ; inthe first passage the basis for this hierarchy is not made clear, but in

the second we read: “Those who eat grain eat what is square; those

who eat qi eat what is round. Round is heaven; square is earth.”No specific benefits of this regimen are promised—perhaps details

on them are lost in the several lacunae—but the hierarchy is clear:eating grains is to eating qi as earth is to heaven.Similarly, the Heshanggong 河上公 commentary to the second

line of chapter 6 (in the received ordering of chapters) of the Daode- jing 道德經, which reads “This is called the mysterious female” 是謂玄牝, informs us:

“Mysterious” refers to heaven; in people it is the nose. “Female” refers to

earth; in people it is the mouth. Heaven feeds people with the five types ofqi , which enter through the nose and are deposited in the heart. The five qi are pure and subtle and they constitute [in people] the essence, spirit, intel-ligence, voice, hearing, and the five natures. Their ghosts ( gui 鬼 ) are termedcloudsouls ( hun 魂 ). The cloudsouls are male and come and go through thenose; they course through ( tong 通 ) the way of heaven; this is why the nose isthe Mysterious. Earth feeds people with the five sapors ( wuwei 五味 ), whichenter through the mouth and are deposited in the stomach. The five sapors

are impure and turbid and they constitute the form, skeleton, bones, blood, vessels, and the six emotions. Their ghosts are termed whitesouls ( po 魄 ).The whitesouls are female and come and go through the mouth; they coursethrough earth; this is why the mouth is the Female.86

85 I rely on the annotated translation in Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature ,305-9. Unfortunately at this writing I have not yet seen a copy of the Chinese facsim-

ile and transcription published in 1985 as volume 4 of Mawangdui Hanmu boshu.86 Daode zhenjing zhu (HY 682) 1.5a-b. The figure of Heshanggong was assim-

ilated by some into the ranks of transcendents; see Campany, To Live as Long asHeaven and Earth , 305-7.


32/57


Here a hierarchy of foods— qi versus mere sapors—is correlatedwith a hierarchy among several other phenomena:

In this domain: the higher position is: and the lower is:

Cosmos heaven earthHuman facial apertures nose mouthFoods the five types of qi the five saporsComponents of the self spirit, essence, etc. body, bones, etc.“Ghosts” cloudsouls whitesoulsGender male female

The manuscript known as “Ten Questions” (Shiwen 十問 ) foundon bamboo strips at Mawangdui, thought to have been copied be-tween 180 and 168 B.C.E.,87 like some other texts of the period(including another Mawangdui medical manuscript and the Tai- ping jing or Scripture of Great Peace , on which more below) presents itsteachings in the form of dialogues between august figures of anti-quity who are cast in the roles of master and disciple. The diversetechniques revealed in this text are methods for the intake, circula-tion, and cultivation of qi (or sometimes, as at the close of the firstdialogue, “eating spirit qi ” 食神氣 ) that utilize breathing, stretching,and sexual intercourse. Here there is no mention of a need to avoidgrains, and one passage implies that the method outlined for “eat-ing Yin” 食陰 prepares the body for the maximally advantageous

intake of “drink and food”—although that food may be the other-wise unspecified “diet of elemental stuff” ( pu shi 樸食 ) mentionedearlier in the text and perhaps synonymous with the expression sushi 素食, used in the Mozi , at least, and perhaps in a few other ear-ly texts to indicate a diet of uncultivated plants gathered from thewild.88 But a dialogue between the Yellow Thearch and Rong Cheng容成89 embedded in this text sets up a hierarch

campany robert - the meanings of cuisines of transcendence in late classical and early medieval...

Documents