Week 5

 What does Kuai Tong attempt to teach Han Xin in his last lecture (179m-b)? There are two parts to his lesson. The first is to listen and plan (179m). The second is to resolutely act upon those ideas (179b). Listening requires “a sense of logic” to see through “mere words” (179m). Perhaps this is even to include Kuai Tong’s words as a rhetorician. But this listening is not just a mental filtration that identifies what to do or not, but it is “listening to advice” (179m). Advice suggests future actions or schemes, dependent on who is advising and who is being advised. The question is how to filter through advice to identify when to listen and when to disagree. This “sense of logic” must find the truth? reason? reality? behind the suggestions. What is heeded from the council must be then included in the plan. Planning must be able to filter with “a sense of relative importance” (179m). There will not be enough resources to act everywhere, at all times. Planning determines what to do, but it does not ensure that one will act; it helps create the opportunity. With the dual senses of “logic” and “relative importance” someone, following Kuai Tong’s advice on advice, has the potential to gain power. But to achieve such power demands resolution to act. Interestingly, this sets what it means “to be wise” as being “resolute in decision” (179b). Once the sound ground has been found through the logic couched in the advice and then adjusted in the plan according to its relative importance, it must then be converted into real power, action. Without this, one is “to meet disaster in every undertaking” (179b). The proverb that Kuai Tong uses indicates that even despite size (“wasp”), age (“old nag”), and poverty (“common man”) determined action will prevail over the hesitating better (“tiger”, “thoroughbred,” and “bravest hero”) (179b). There is value in action itself. Only when propensity to action is coupled with sound advice, parsed by logic, and planning, guided by importance, can “merit” arise (179b). Mostly this advice relies on “The time, my lord, the time!” (179b). We found such council at the “dawn” of Zhang Liang’s power and he heeded it (100).

How are we to understand Tian Heng’s and his followers’ deaths (201b-202m)? Tian Heng is captured and taken to the King of Han. To avoid confronting his “shame” Tian Heng has his head cut off, after he cuts his own throat, to ensure that his “features will not have decayed” by the time the emperor can look upon him (201b-202t). The emperor is overwhelmed. Not only does he weep for him, but he sees three things in his countenance. First, he sees that it was “no accident that this man rose from the rank of commoner” to become king (202t). Second, he sees that this extends to his brothers, who also became kings. Lastly, he rhetorically asks “[w]as he not a worthy man?” (202t). At this moment, the emperor seems genuine in his grieving response, honoring “two followers” of Tian Heng. But these two then “cut their throats” with the intention to be buried next to Tian Heng in his royal grave. The emperor is “astonished” and then “concluded that all of Tian Heng’s followers must be worthy men as well” (202t). Does he hope for a similar outcome? I hear the subtext that the emperor concluded all of Tian Heng’s follows must be willing to commit suicide as well. The emperor then sends envoys to the island refuge where Tian Heng had been holed up and where “500 men” remain. As, I believe, the emperor expected, “they all committed suicide” upon learning that Tian Heng was dead. The emperor has eradicated another source of disaffection. But how to incorporate Sima Qian’s observations? He reports “[f]rom this one may see what fine men Tian Heng and his brothers were able to attract” (202m). This suggests that the emperor (and Sima Qian) are earnest in their belief in the “worth” of these men, even the 500. In his conclusion, I find a similar teetering between earnestness and irony. Sima Qian notes that Tian Heng “was a man of such high honour that his retainers, moved by his integrity, followed him in death” (202b). They were “men of the highest worth” and, as such, worth remembering. And yet, Sima Qian’s last line may also apply to their folly. How could they have failed to find another solution to their problems than suicide-as-self-sacrifice?