Chinese Classical Literature

Scope: This lecture features three works from Chinas Classical Age: a lyric poem and two prose
works that fall somewhere between philosophy and literatureall of which demonstrate
how different Chinese literature is in its earliest stages from that of Mesopotamia, Israel,
and Greece. After looking briefly at a lyric poem from The Book of Songs, whose voice
is that of an ordinary person in ordinary life, we take a closer look at Confuciuss
Analects and Chuang Chous Chuang Tzu. Confuciuss book is designed to train young
men for government service and argues for manners, benevolence, and a sympathetic
putting of oneself in anothers place to recreate the self, the family, and the state. Chuang
Chous is an early Taoist work which advocates political, intellectual, and emotional
freedom as the basis for going with the flow; several of his stories are analyzed to
demonstrate the values of learning to do this.

Outline
I. While other early civilizations created epic stories, Chinese literature begins with lyric poetry
in which we hear the voices of ordinary people going about everyday events. This can be
illustrated with a poem from the Shih Ching (Classic of Poetry), or The Book of Songs.
A. The collection comes from the Chou Dynasty, and it was compiled between the 10th and
7th centuries B.C.E. It consists of 305 poems, 160 of which are folk songs.
1. Tradition assigned its editing to Confucius.
2. It is probably, however, an independent work of the Chou court, later adopted for
teaching purposes by Confucian scholars.
B. The collection would later become one of the five Confucian classics, used as the basis for
Chinese education for millennia. For over 2000 years every educated person in China
would have known these poems.
C. Poem 26, Boat of Cypress, is typical of certain qualities of the entire collection.
1. It is the voice of an anonymous someone whose concerns are of the mundane, not the
epic, sort.
2. Like many Chinese poems, it starts with a picture that both suggests a situation and
sets a mood.
3. Most critics have decided that the voice is that of a young woman being coerced into
something she does not want to do.
4. The poem then gives a series of negative images for a heart that will not be forced, and
it ends with a wish to fly away.
5. The subject and tone of the poem are in amazing contrast to those of the works we
have looked at from other cultures.
II. The same contrast can be seen in the Analects of Confucius.
A. Confucius (551479 B.C.E.), like Socrates and Jesus, was a teacher who did not write a
book. The Analects are sayings of his which are frequently responses to questions or parts
of larger discussions, and they appear in random order. It is one of the most influential
works in Chinese history.
1. His teachings are this-worldly, focused on human relationships which he sees as
hierarchical, based on the fundamental one between parent and child. They stress
moral propriety and social responsibility.
2. The right is expressed for Confucius in ceremony, ritual, and social forms which A. C.
Graham says we might think of as good manners that should always be observed
unless there is a compelling reason not to.
 3. The right is something like benevolence, and it can be axiomatically stated in what has
been called the Confucian Golden Rule: Do not impose on others what you yourself
do not desire. The key to benevolence is likening to oneself (i.e., putting oneself
in the place of the other).
4. The ultimate goal of Confuciuss teachings is to prepare young men for government
service, and his teachings contain visions of what a government would be like if
every ruler were to observe the right. Like other belief systems, these ideas run the
risk of leading to hypocrisy and authoritarianism.
B. Confucius was looking for a balanced individual in a balanced state, which he believed can
be achieved.
C. Confucius arrived at a place where instinct and duty are identical; thus, he never has to
choose between them again.
D. The combination of virtue, manners, custom and ritual can harmonize all human relations
and can harmonize the individual soul so that instinct and duty are identical. The vision
has had profound influence on Chinese thought throughout history.
III. While Chuang Chou (c. 369286 B.C.E.) created a philosophy in opposition to that of
Confucius (he is considered one of the founders of Taoism), his focus is likewise on the
everyday and the here-and-now.
A. Unlike Confucius, who trained young men for government posts, Chuang Chou did not
found a school or seek out disciples. Instead, he advocated keeping the mind free of
politics, authority, and conventional ways of thinking.
B. The idea of his teaching is to get one into harmony with the order of things: going with
the flow.
1. In order to do this we must free ourselves from all the sectarian and limited ideas,
training, and advice we receive from parents, teachers, and priests.
2. The two fundamental principles of Chuang Chou are that language is not an accurate
reflector of reality and that everything we know is based on categories which are
defined by language and shaped by our own perspective.
3. Since Chuang Tzu is made up of words, Chou turns his skepticism on his own book,
frequently working in paradox and parable.
4. Almost everything he says is illustrated with a story, which makes Chuang Tzu as
much a work of literature as of philosophy.
C. Given the unreliability of language and the relativity of perspective, how does Chuang
Chou suggest we live?
1. He tells a story about hunting a magpie in a park.
2. He asserts that everything in the world is unified and cooperates with everything else.
3. Humans miss the Way by sticking to codes laid down by sages; the true Way is the
entire universe.
4. The heroes of his stories are mostly craftspeople who are not analytical but who can
size up an entire situation and respond to it using both eye and hand in a way that
usually cannot be put into words.
5. The point is to size up a situation based on experience, without imposing definitions
and categories, and then cooperate with the way things are.
D. The Way also teaches us to rise above the distinction between life and death, since all is
process and all is one.
1. He tells a story of how he played music and sang at his wifes funeral, which shocked
people for whom burial rites are of supreme importance.
2. He gives instructions for the disposal of his body after death, suggesting a view of
death that had no precedent in literature before this time.
IV. Chinese literature of the classical period stands in high contrast to the literature of other early
civilizations.
A. In general terms, the literature of most early cultures is heroic and leans toward the tragic.
Heroes try to bend the universe to their will, fight against it, and frequently fail.
B. Early Chinese literature, on the other hand, is not heroic and leans toward a broad sense of
the comic. It allows forces larger than ourselves to carry us along and suggests that we try
to align ourselves with these forces.
Essential Reading:
Confucius, D.C. Lau, trans., the Analects.
Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings.
Stephen Owen, ed. and trans., An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911.
Supplementary Reading:
A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, Chapters 1 and 3.
Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature.