Week 7

 What does Shun expect when he places K’uei in charge of music (15m)? How does music align with his rule? What does it portend? First, it provides a form of education, teaching “the young people to be upright but warm, liberal but stern, firm but not tyrannical, simple but not presumptuous” (15m). Although they are phrased in the same “A but B” pattern, like the nine virtues expounded by Kao-yao to Yü under Emperor Shun, they are not just a subset (33m). Music provides a different way of cultivating virtue. Poetry, which is considered a subset of music, strength ideas; songs improve word use; melody serves to teach one to follow; and tones train that harmony (15m). Specifically, Shun advises K’uei to make sure that the sounds are “capable of being in harmony” and ensure that they “do not…lose the relationship to each other” (15m). While Shun is speaking of sound, we may hear people. The people are “capable of being in harmony” because music’s harmony reminds each person of their relationship to others. One is only oneself in relation to one’s relation with others. Shun is a filial son to the Venerable Blind One. This relationship, between father and son, even as his father seeks “to kill him,” is part of what makes Shun exceptional (12m). Shun is Shun because of his relationship to his father. Music trains that ability to hear individual sounds, but also to recognize their necessary interdependence with the other sounds. Properly trained, “[t]he spirits and the human beings will be harmonized by means of music” (15m). We see this in action when “Kuei played music” and “a phoenix came, all the beasts danced, and all the officials were in harmony” (35m). Shun is then moved to write his own song, using his own words, to explain the relationship between an emperor and his people. “Hands and feet understand each other, / the head be inspired, / and the one-hundred tasks thrive” (35m). There is a unified body, but one such that all the parts can act separately. As Shun expressed earlier, “You vassals be my hands and feet, eyes and ears. I want to assist the people; you assist me!” (34m) Music harmonizes enabling all under heaven to dance.

I have enjoyed reading Sima Qian immensely. I now have the immediate problem of wanting to reread much of what we read and some of what we did not, but without the time to do so. Part of this urge stems from learning how to read Sima Qian. I have not read a work of history like it, but I love the way he intermixes strict, ordinary factuality with personable, charitable biographies of the main actors. At first it was frustrating to seem to reread the same event over, but with variations. Why were these tidbits included in this section and not in that section? For example, why does Xiang Yu have a three-page death scene in his biography (H1 45-47), but only a sentence in Emperor Gaozu’s (H1 74b)? To make sense of these variations requires understanding, or attempting to, Sima Qian’s method—What is he trying to do? What is history to him? While there may seem to be a simple narrative that can account for all the facts behind the age, they are not enough. The biographies supplement the annals. They give life to the work, and Sima Qian’s project is richer for them. These biographies are most interesting because they seek to understand the characters who made the events. Each individual has their own histories and their own reasons for acting, which intersect, often only tangentially, with the events of the annals. These characters fall in and out of the narrative. They may even, like Kuei Tong or Zhao Gao, form the actions of others key figures, but without an eponymous biography. Sima Qian’s structure seems to fuse a collective, more objective history, with personal, more subjective histories. While frustrating to engage with at the beginning, I find the slipperiness of approaching the “truth” of what happened more honest. Sima Qian reports that “Heaven sent down two dragons,” in the annals for the Hsia (N 173b). We have missed his project if we focus on trying to identify what those “two dragons” are or whether or not this really happened. Sima Qian’s history is fundamentally empathetic, because he is trying to account not just for why certain things happened, but how others made sense of those events by acting the way that they did.