The Power of an Alleged Tradition - CHINA Buchservice

Doubts have been raised as to whether this text really is what it pretends to
be, namely a eulogy praising Emperor Wu. The opinion that it should be regarded
as a masterpiece of subtle irony has been expressed, e.g. by Wu Rulun ���
(1840–1903). He maintained that the central intention of the “Fengshan wen” was
to remonstrate with the ruler and that this sole legacy of Sima Xiangru as the last
document available to the imperial envoy in his home at Maoling had the character
of a shijian��� (a rebuke by means of one’s corpse), meaning to remonstrate with
one’s ruler in one way or the other with one’s own death. 153 Ruan Zhisheng in a
recent study came to the same conclusion, arguing that Sima Xiangru by writing his
“Fengshan wen” intended to posthumously criticize Emperor Wu. 154 – In fact, irony
is something which is too subtle to be proven with certainty, but if one considers
that prose-poetry has a long tradition of expressing criticism in a subtle way, it is
certainly not too far-fetched to suggest that Sima Xiangru, though outwardly fl attering
Emperor Wu by his writings, might have had cherished the hope that he would
be able by indirect criticism to dissuade Emperor Wu from an ever more exaggerated
cult of his own person. 155
For our purposes, however, it is not necessarily relevant whether Sima Xiangru
originally meant to express criticism against the emperor in his “Fengshan wen” or
not. Emperor Wu obviously did not have the slightest doubt that Sima Xiangru’s last
will came from his heart. Thus the only relevant matter is the impact that this text
had on the emperor who obviously regarded the text as a sincere eulogy. To sum
up: although Sima Xiangru died several years earlier than Sima Tan, he was in a very
particular way involved in what came to be called the matter of the Feng and Shan
sacrifi ces at the time of Emperor Wu. Although he had already died several years
before Emperor Wu fi nally proceeded to perform the sacrifi ces on Mount Tai for the
fi rst time, it seems that it was Sima Xiangru who originally inspired the emperor
to put the ceremonial reform into practice and embellish his rule over the empire
with a ceremony grandiose enough even for a god, and who thus seems to have some
“Cette richesse de vocabulaire, surtout dans les descriptions interminables, est bien la charactéristique essentielle
du style de Sseu-ma Siang-jou. Il est dans la lignée du Tch’ou ts’eu, du ‘Li-sao’���, des ‘Kieou tchang’ ��, etc.”
The strong infl uence of Chu culture and especially of the Chuci on the secular poetry as well as the sacrifi cial
hymns composed at the court of Emperor Wu has also been emphasized by Gopal Sukhu who remarks that even
the mode in which the hymns were composed was that of Chu. See his “Monkey, Shamans, Emperors, and Poets:
The Chuci and Images of Chu during the Han dynasty,” in Defi ning Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, ed.,
Constance A. Cook and John S. Major (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1999), 156–57.
153 Lidai mingjia ping Shiji ���������edited by Yang Yanqi ��� [et al.] (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue,
1986), 692.
154 Cf. Ruan Zhisheng, “San Sima yu Han Wudi fengshan,” 307–340, esp. 334.
155 As described in Sima Xiangru’s biography, the “Daren fu”���� (Prose-poem on the Great Man) in which an
immortal roaming through the Skies is described in a language full of cosmological symbolism was already in the
process of being written when the emperor heard of it, and that Sima Xiangru promised to submit it to him. The
account goes on to say that Xiangru saw that the emperor was much inclined toward the way of immortals �
������” and that he “was of the opinion that those who according to tradition are reckoned among the
immortal beings live in forests and close to swamps and who from their very conduct make one stand in awe of
them, which would be completely different from how emperors or kings think of immortals ��������
����������������.” (Shiji 117/3056; cf. Y. Hervouet, Le Chapitre 117 du Che-ki, 185). It thus
seems as if – at least in the eyes of the biographer – Sima Xiangru was not intentionally deceiving the emperor
but rather seems to have fallen victim of the emperor’s unwillingness to understand the underlying message.
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DOROTHEE SCHAAB-HANKE
BMFEA 74 · 2002