Wednesday, November 9

Reading:  "Jixia Naturalistic Thought," "Two Anonymous Naturalist Texts,"
                "Dong Zhongshu and Later Confucian Cosmology"

On Wednesday, we will turning to texts that represent the "Naturalistic" strain of early Chinese thought.  "Naturalism" does not name a "school" of Chinese thought, in the usual sense, but rather a cluster of "daos" that tended to employ a common set of "nature"-related concepts, including the concepts of yin & yang and the Five Forces, to construct portraits of the cosmos that provided people with prescriptive rules that could be read out of the "natural" world.  In some ways, Daoism is simply a variant of Naturalism -- a naturalistic approach that did not particularly highlight these tools.  Naturalisms, however, were adaptable to Daoist uses (an obvious resonance), and turned out also to be fully adaptable to Confucian needs as well.

The origins of the naturalistic "tool kit," particularly the concept of the Five Forces the use of parallels between the worlds of "heaven, earth, and man," and the correlation of different enumerated sets of "natural" facts (the Five Forces, the 28 lunar stations, the 64 basic diagrams of the mantic text known as the Yi jing), seems to have initially derived from groups of practitioners known as fangshi ("gentlemen of [wisdom] formulas").  Fangshi appear at some point in the fourth century B.C., and seem to influence heavily the Jixia masters, who are the source of many naturalistic texts.  A fuller description of the fangshi appears in the box below, which will supplement your reading for Wednesday.  (The Jixia masters - thinkers who gathered at the state-sponsored academy in Qi [see Map 3] - are discussed in your initial online reading for today.)

Your second reading for this class session is devoted to the ideas of a naturalistic Confucian who lived after the era of Classical China, which is the subject of this course.  I have included a discussion of Dong Zhongshu's naturalistic Confucianism in your reading because it is very clear that Dong's ideas are actually the fullest existing expression of the basic tendencies we see in late Classical naturalism, and so are the easiest way to understand the full implications of the naturalistic texts that do date from our era.


The Arts of the "Fangshi"

The term fangshi was applied to a wide variety of men who practiced mantic arts. The word "fang" means "method" or "prescription"; shi is a word we have encountered before, meaning "gentleman." Thus the name fangshi denotes a man with some special method or secret formula. These men attained great influence during the first century of the imperial era (c. 220-120). Although their influence waned by the later Han Dynasty, they continued to be a significant force in the intellectual and religious traditions of China, and remain so to this day.

Origins of the fangshi traditions

The Shiji (a second century B.C. history) traces the rise of the fangshi to the naturalist philosopher Zou Yan, but it is likely that his function was more to give legitimacy to their styles of practice than to invent them. Fangshi made heavy use of the yin-yang five-forces cosmology that became popular during the Qin-Han era, and Zou was one of the first to formulate consistent theories to make that cosmology competitive with the sophisticated ideologies of the persuader tradition.

Geographically, the fangshi movement seems to have originated on the Shandong peninsula, moving north along the coast of Bohai Bay through the influence of Zou Yan, who carried these ideas from Qi to Yen during the third century B.C. It appears to me that the most frequent native origin of individual fangshi is the region of Langye, on the southern coast of the Shandong peninsula. The First Emperor was greatly attracted to this obscure spot, and returned to it several times. It was the point from which he dispatched envoys to the isles of the immortals, and it was also the main destination of his final journey.

There is no record of Langye as a major population center to explain why so many fangshi originated there. But Langye had a puzzling history. During the fifth century B.C., the southern state of Yue, which was located down the coast about 400 miles, established a beachhead in Langye. What is more, they relocated the capital of Yue from south of the Yangtze to Langye, where it remained for about a century. The rationale and logistics of locating the capital of Yue far north in an area generally regarded as a part of Qi are a mystery.The fact that Langye was in some way a meeting ground between the two very different traditions of Qi and Yue may have bearing on the rise of the fangshi traditions.

Varieties of fangshi arts

What sorts of arts did fangshi practice? All accounts indicate they were deeply involved in the cult of immortalism. They developed herbal and mineral formulas to lengthen life (some of these proved lethal) and practiced semi-shamanistic communication with "immortals," conceived as people who had achieved the state of spirits without dying, which gave them special supernatural abilities without loss of corporeal form. In some cases, arts of yoga and dietary or sexual regimens were also part of the fangshi repertoire.

Fangshi were also masters of a wide variety of mantic (soothsaying) arts. Some of these were relatively straightforward, such as divination by means of the sexagenary stem-branch cycle or by the Yi jing. Others were more esoteric, such as divination by dreams, by the stars, by landforms, or by facial characteristics. Still others were simply bizarre: divination by bird calls, wind angles, and bamboo cracks.