SQ Week 7

 

[22tm]  The class interpreted Yu’s diligence at regulating the floods in terms of his shame that his father, Kun, had not been successful as a hydraulics engineer.  In the text, there is nothing about shame: “Yu was saddened that the work of his deceased father . . . was unsuccessful and that Kun had been punished for this.”  If there is anything we should have learned from reading Sima Qian, it is that filial piety does not allow one to feel “shame” for one’s parents or ancestors.  The man who employed Yu was Shun, the very epitome of filial piety.  Shun’s parents and brother were always trying to kill him, and yet when they needed him, he was always there, surrounding them with filial love [8m, 11-12].  Yao recognized Shun’s worthiness, and Shun in turn recognized Yu’s virtues.  Shun did not hold the father’s incompetence against Yu, and would certainly have recognized lapses of filial piety on Yu’s part.  I see no shame: Yu worked hard for his emperor, and for his father. 

Another classmate brought up King Wu’s very terrible desecration of the corpses of King Zhou and the concubines [61b].  I think the way to think about this is that it represented the ritualistic conclusion of the war against King Zhou.  King Wu shoots three arrows into the dead king’s corpse while in the chariot, then steps down and stabs the king with his personal sword, then decapitates with the yellow axe, and finally hangs the head on his war banner.  My interpretation is that King Wu, wielding Heaven’s authority, shot the three arrows to represent the three standards of Heaven-Earth-Man that the tyrant king had violated [60m, 61t], beheaded him using the yellow axe (both the color and weapon a military as well as ritual symbol of power), and then displayed the head on the white (the royal color of Yin) banner to represent the dead king having violated his ancestors and the Yin Dynasty.  This was a very considered ritual that separated the final, unworthy Yin ruler from a mandate he had the presumption to think was permanent.  

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