I’ve been determined to get well, but still the illness lingers.
With no drink-brought flush, my face stays still more pale.
Another day, at rest, I’ll still wonder whom to ask.
As always, Heaven fixes which way we must go.
Along the river the plum blossoms have fallen; so it is with my dreams.
The first returning swallow chances to find a mate.
I’m still riffling through documents, trying not to nap.
Somewhere in my papers a cricket sounds mi-mi.
The changing seasons, lateness in life, slow recovery from illness: These were conventional themes for a culture that took comfort in the slowing down of old age. The great scholar Wang Fuzhi was in his seventieth year when he wrote this poem in 1688. But he still was hard at work. Already having completed more than sixty volumes of some of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic, and difficult scholarship and moral philosophy in the later Confucian tradition, he was working on a set of commentaries on the history of the Song Dynasty, and another, the longest work of his life, commenting on a famous comprehensive history of China written in the Song.
It was altogether appropriate that Wang should be working in the twilight of his life on a study of history. For Wang, as for every follower of the rich tradition we call Confucian, history was the great teacher. Kong Qiu (551–479 B.C.E.), whom the Jesuits and their European readers in 1688 already were calling Confucius, a Latinization of Kongfuzi, “Master Kong,” had claimed to be not a creator but a transmitter of institutions and ceremonies established by the sage kings of remote antiquity and by the founders of the Zhou Dynasty, who had lived about five hundred years before him.
The Confucian gentleman knew his texts had all the answers to the problems of society, morality, and above all government. If only a ruler would employ him, Confucius himself had said, he could set things to rights. But what if the times and the rulers were evil? Then there might be no choice but to withdraw and preserve one’s integrity and the inherited teachings as a recluse. Wang Fuzhi was living out a particular version of this role, that of the minister of a fallen dynasty who refuses to serve the new regime. In 1644 mounted Chinese rebels had occupied Beijing, capital of the Ming Dynasty, driving the last Ming emperor to suicide in the imperial garden. After only ten weeks the rebels themselves fled in the face of a massive invasion by the Manchus, who occupied Beijing and proclaimed their new Qing Dynasty, claiming that they had come to avenge the death of the last Ming emperor and to restore order to the whole empire. This they did in a remarkably short time; Canton (Guangzhou) was permanently in Qing hands as early as 1650, and the last pretender to the Ming succession was driven from the southwest into Burma in 1659. Wang Fuzhi had taken an active part in efforts to organize a Ming Loyalist regime in the south to resist the Qing conquest. The regime in which he was a junior official was a miasma of all the corruptions and conflicts of late Ming politics, supported by armies of former peasant rebels against the Ming and others of former military allies of the Qing.
Withdrawing from this hopeless situation after about a year of active service and four years of interest and intermittent contact, Wang went to live a life of scholarly retirement in his native Hunan Province. There he lived quietly for over forty years, traveling little, seeing a few students and friends. Many men of his generation refused as a matter of principle to take office under the Qing; they thought it disloyal to do so if they had once served or received honors from the Ming. Wang went further, refusing to adopt the changed robes of the Qing scholars and officials or the Manchu-style queue—shaved front of head and long braid down the back—which the Qing had imposed on all Chinese men. This imposition had been deeply resented and occasionally resisted, until the new rulers made it clear that if you kept your hair, you would lose your head. The provincial officials in Hunan almost certainly knew about Wang’s Ming dress and hairstyle, but out of respect for his scholarship and perhaps because he had protectors in the local elite, they chose to look the other way.
Wang Fuzhi was a lifelong student of the Yi Jing (older spelling I Ching), a mysterious and enormously influential work, part divination manual, part guide to the subtle harmonies and interplays of action and passivity, success and failure, light and darkness, an understanding of which is supposed to make possible a life of wholeness and integrity. In 1652, when Wang considered for the last time getting involved in the messy politics of Ming resistance, he had turned to the Yi Jing not as a predictor of the future but as a divinatory source of moral insight. A first divination had suggested that no harm would ensue even if he had to deal with bad men and that he might meet with his prince, but a further step had yielded a configuration that offered no hope of anything good. It had been in the 1650s, not long after his final abandonment of hope for Ming Loyalist resistance and before his fortieth birthday, that Wang wrote his most searching and innovative works of philosophy. The first of them was a commentary on the Yi Jing, in which he made his most radical break with the Confucian faith in the relevance of high antiquity. Many scholars simply believed in the perfection and unchanging relevance of the institutions of early Zhou and the teachings of Confucius. But where had those teachings come from? Wasn’t it possible that changing conditions would call for different teachings and institutions? Wang built on the Yi Jing commentaries to argue that all Ways (dao), including the Way of the Former Kings, had to be understood in relation to concrete situations—that is, their contexts of institutions and practices. The concrete situations were primary; if they were in order, there was no need to worry about the corresponding comprehensive Way. Sages knew this, but most striving scholars did not; common people dealt with it better than intellectuals. There are many potential Ways that have never existed; new ones will be called forth as concrete situations change. Thus, although Wang spent his life studying the Confucian classics, which all other Confucians revered as the unchanging standards of social and political life, his deepest insight called for openness to the emergence of new situations in which traditional ways of life would have to be questioned and altered.
In another work of the 1650s Wang had made a generalization about structures and moral practices of Chinese history that drew on the experience of alien conquest in his own time. In so doing he gave a radical rationale for the rejection of Qing legitimacy:
But when the families of things became clearly defined and the lines of demarcation among them were made definite, each was established in its own position and all living things were confined within their own protective barriers. . . . It is not that [Heaven and Earth] made these different types because they favored separation and division, but because under the circumstances it was impossible for all things to cooperate and avoid conflict otherwise. . . . [T]he Chinese in their bone structure, sense organs, gregariousness and exclusiveness, are no different from foreigners, and yet they must be absolutely distinguished from foreigners. . . . If the Chinese do not mark themselves off from foreigners, then the principle of Earth is violated. And since Heaven and Earth regulate mankind by marking men off from each other, if men do not mark themselves off and preserve an absolute distinction between societies, then the principle of man is violated. . . . There might be abdications, successions, and even changes of the Mandate of Heaven, yet never should a foreign dynasty be allowed to interrupt the succession [of Chinese emperors].
Staying sober and worrying a bit about the time he spent napping, Wang Fuzhi in 1688 was still at work on his largest single work, a set of reading notes on the eleventh-century history by Sima Guang, the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government, and another set of notes on the history of the Song dynasty; these were completed in 1691, the year before his death. In the notes on the Mirror, Wang argued that there was still much to learn from the classics and the teachings of Confucius. But “ancient institutions were meant to govern the ancient world and cannot be generally followed today . . . and because what is suitable today can govern the world of today but will not necessarily be suitable for the future, the superior man does not hand it down to posterity as a model.”
Wang’s works were unknown and unpublished until the middle of the nineteenth century. Their circulation at that time owed a great deal to the support of conservative reformers struggling with a world of steamboats and European incursions. Wang could not have imagined these developments, but his principles of modifying institutions to fit changing concrete situations and defending China against foreign invasion seemed deeply relevant. Still later young Hunanese in the early years of this century formed a society to study Wang’s works. One of the members for a time was Mao Zedong.
In the tenth lunar month of the twenty-seventh year of Kangxi (1688), the famous painter Shitao presented to his friend Ding Peng a fine hanging scroll of a mountain landscape, with a small house tucked among trees below great cliffs, a seated figure barely visible in the house. The subject and the feeling expressed in it, that even such a small creature as man could find his place and be at ease among the awesome forces of nature, were at least seven hundred years old when Shitao painted this scroll, and they had inspired many of China’s greatest paintings. Equally long-lasting was the creative tension between observation and portrayal of nature on the one hand and revelation of the character of the artist on the other. In Shitao the urge to self-expression seems to dominate. Chinese painters built their images of rocks, trees, and plants out of a vocabulary of repeated dots, dashes, circles, and leaf outlines that can be clearly seen on close examination but that blend into a convincing representation of a real landscape when one steps back. However, in the painting given to Ding Peng in 1688 and in many others, Shitao’s dots and circles remain dots and circles no matter how one looks at them, and the cliffs are built of strokes that remain virtuoso demonstrations of brush and water-base ink. And the shapes! In the cliff that looms highest an arbitrary diagonal separates one band of upward-thrusting shapes from another that reaches out horizontally. In the foreground a mass of rock seems off-balance, its surfaces and crevices in discord. The viewer of the painting becomes not a gazer of tranquil eye and fixed position but a walker, perhaps a scrambler and stumbler, through an unfamiliar stretch of mountains, shrinking from unexpected dropoffs, wary of unstable cliffs looming above, awed by the powers of earth that care so little for man and move him so deeply. It is as if Shitao’s restless and insistent drawing, his piling up of forms created by the expressive energies of the Chinese brush, have tapped the very energies that built the mountains and thrust the rocks in different directions.
Written on the painting are Shitao’s note sending it to Ding Peng “for criticism” in 1688 and a poem dated 1679:
Like angry lions clawing the rocks,
Thirsty horses dashing to the spring,
Wind and rain gather round,
The clouds take myriad forms.
Beyond the bounds, another realm,
Knowing neither pain nor cheer.
Passions flow into brush and ink.
Beyond the brush and ink, a true tranquillity.
It makes the connoisseur exclaim,
“Nothing like it’s to be seen.”
Landscape by Shitao, given to Ding Peng in 1688
The cataclysm of the Qing conquest, which gave many people opportunities for military adventure, political maneuver, and commercial wealth, had wrenched Shitao from a destiny of idle, closely circumscribed comfort and thrust him into an unsettled life, largely dependent on the patronage of others. He was born in 1641, scion of a line of princes of the Ming imperial house that had been settled for more than two hundred years in the remote southwestern city of Guilin, whose landscapes of water and misty peaks had fascinated Chinese artists for a thousand years. The Ming princes were required to live quietly on their estates and not meddle in politics or military matters. These princes, untrained and out of touch with the country around them, became, simply by the mystique of their imperial descent, the focal points of efforts to rally the forces of resistance to the Qing conquest, with its Manchu core and many Chinese allies. The evanescent resistance effort of which Shitao’s father was the figurehead was, like quite a few others, destroyed not by Qing forces but by a stronger Ming Loyalist force, the one that was supported (and then betrayed) by the first of a succession of Fujian sea lords. Shitao’s father was executed; the son’s life seems to have been in little danger as he grew up quietly in ambivalent and overlapping circles that included both obdurate Ming Loyalists and some of the most prominent Chinese who had gone over to the Qing. Like several other scions of the Ming house and Loyalist intellectuals, he shaved his head and took the vows of a Buddhist monk in order to make it clear that he had no worldly ambitions. In 1679, when he painted the landscape he later gave to Ding Peng, he was living not far from the Huangshan Mountains, where many wonderful scenes like this one can be found. We should not expect ever to be able to match this painting to a particular view; like most Chinese painters, Shitao frequently absorbed many views and later in the studio painted the landscape in his mind’s eye. In 1680 he moved to the Nanjing area, where in 1684 he met the Kangxi emperor, then on his first great southern tour. There followed a series of connections with the court of the conquerors that were to lead Shitao to a long stay in Beijing in the 1690s and access to some of the great collections of paintings assembled by Qing grandees. In 1688 he was living in Yangzhou, a thriving commercial and cultural center.
Shitao was a painter and a writer about painting of immense talent, ambition, and originality. Most Chinese painters either followed and developed the style of an earlier master or elaborated a distinctive personal style that gives most of an individual’s paintings a family resemblance. Shitao sometimes tried to see what he could do in someone else’s style and once confessed that he had not been able even to approach the effects of the austere landscapist Ni Zan. But more often his paintings were like no one else’s and were so different from one another that they seem to be the work of a dozen different painters. This extraordinary variety in style is a central principle in Shitao’s famous Record of Remarks on Painting (Hua Yu Lu). Styles of painting all have their origin, he said, in a primordial, undivided One Stroke. The individual can grasp this One Stroke for himself, and once he has done so, his refusal to be limited to any one style will give rise to many styles, each fully realized in itself, without any special effort. Each painting will represent the external structure and also seize the internal powers and movements of mountains, rivers, people, birds, animals, grass, trees, and buildings. Shitao’s essay drew on over five hundred years of sophisticated critical writing about landscape painting but carried it to a new level of intellectual ambition, echoing basic ideas of Confucianism, Chan Buddhism, and especially Daoism, so that the One Stroke began to sound very much like the undivided primitive Way out of which all particular beings arise.
The One Stroke produced the many styles, and the many styles, always individual and coherent and right, begin to form in the mind of the viewer not One Style but a world of constant surprise and irreducible diversity. Shitao no doubt was aware of the Indian origins of the Buddhist teachings he studied for many years but otherwise left no evidence of any interest in a world outside the world that was China. But in his artistic genius and in his ideas he came as close as anyone to the kind of art needed to encompass the world of 1688. The historian seeking to sketch a world tries not to be confined by any style, any set of questions but to follow hunches, to let one thing lead to another. Like Shitao letting the One Stroke appear in many forms, he hopes to avoid system and to put before his reader many pictures of a world, reflecting the unconfineable variety, splendor, and strangeness of the human condition.