Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou Shu PDF
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coNQUer ANd goverN EARLY CHINESE MILITARY TEXTS FROM THE YIZHOU SHU Conquer and Govern Conquer and Govern Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu Robin McNeal University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. © 2012 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McNeal, Robin. Conquer and govern : early Chinese military texts from the Yi Zhou shu / Robin McNeal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3120-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Yi Zhou shu. 2. China—History, Military—To 221 B.C. 3. China—History—Zhou dynasty, 1122–221 B.C. I. Yi Zhou shu. English. Selections. II. Title. DS747.I25M35 2012 355—dc23 2011052152 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Josie Herr Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity and the Civil to Bring Order Chapter 1 Conquer and Govern: Wen and Wu as a Conceptual Pair in Classical Chinese Thought 13 Chapter 2 Righteous Warfare: Laying Siege to an Enemy in Disorder 40 Part II Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu Chapter 3 Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu: Its Transmission and Reception 73 Chapter 4 Translation and Study of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu 97 Chapter 5 Dating and Language of the Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu 136 Appendix 161 Notes 169 Bibliography 231 Index 243 v Acknowledgments Any first book is a testament to the many people who stood behind the author and made the work involved possible—the teachers, the col- leagues, the students, the libraries, and other institutions. The list for this book is long. As early as 1994, as a graduate student at the Uni- versity of Washington in Seattle, I had discussions with my advisor, the late Jack Dull, about my sense that there was a great deal to be learned from studying the Yi Zhou shu. He did not live to see me complete any substantive work on this text, but more than any other single person he taught me how to be a historian. I did not turn serious attention to the Yi Zhou shu until 1996 and 1997, when a fellowship from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China allowed me to spend a year at Peking University. Over the years that followed, I wrote a dissertation that drew on material from the text, albeit without first attending to issues of its authenticity. That dissertation was generously supported by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and vari- ous fellowships and stipends offered by the University of Washington. During those years, in the absence of Jack Dull, many people graciously stepped in to mentor and guide me. Bill Boltz taught me the philologi- cal skills I needed to do the sort of work that is now found in this book, and Kent Guy helped keep me on track as a historian. I spent a year at UCLA, working with Lothar von Falkenhausen, who has for more than a decade been extraordinarily generous and supportive of me. Bob Bagley, too, became a mentor to me and has offered immeasurable insight and encouragement over the years. The year in Beijing, however, was unquestionably the most formative for me. My relationship with Li Ling, who served as my faculty advi- sor there but soon became one of my closest friends, has continued to enrich and influence me to this day. From Li Ling’s example, I have learned what I consider to be the most important lesson of all my years vii viii Acknowledgments of study: a joyful love for the process of inquiry and discovery. I have been fortunate beyond my own expectations to have benefited from the guidance and support of this distinguished list of teachers, and many more whom I have not mentioned. This book is but the beginning of a tribute to their generosity. The institutions mentioned above all left their mark on me and my work as well, but this book did not begin in earnest until my arrival at Cornell in 2000. Soon after, I decided to set my dissertation aside and focus on the Yi Zhou shu itself; this book is the first fruit of that decision. I started over, translating anew those portions of the text I had drawn on during work on the dissertation, and moving substantially beyond that body of materials. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies allowed me to turn a semester’s study leave into an invaluable full year devoted to the research and writing of the manuscript. Both the Department of Asian Studies and the East Asia Program at Cornell University provided additional funding to support first, in 2002, a trip to Hunan, where a cache of tomb manuscripts including material per- tinent to the study of the Yi Zhou shu are housed, and then, in 2007, a small conference held here to study these manuscripts. Several scholars at the Hunan Provincial Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology, in particular Zhang Chunlong, have been extremely helpful, providing access to the still-unpublished cache of manuscript materials and pre- liminary transcriptions of their contents. The conference was made pos- sible by additional support from the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the LT Lam Fund for East Asian Studies. Working carefully through those manuscript materials slowed completion of this book considerably, and waiting for their eventual publication would unneces- sarily slow it even more. To all the people and institutions named above, I owe a debt of gratitude, and seeing this book through to publication is probably the best thanks I can offer for all the friendship, insight, and support I have received over the years. Only one thing remains to be said about the topic of this book. It is an attempt to write an intellectual history based primarily on military texts. No one should make the mistake of imagining that there is any- thing the least bit appealing to me about war. Nothing could be further from the truth. Introduction Your servant respectfully maintains that an enlightened ruler must have substantive accomplishments. And what are the accomplishments of an enlightened ruler? I say: if the state is small, he is able to enlarge it; if it is weak, he is able to strengthen it; he {Ө Ө} yet is capable of making others revere him. These are the substantive accomplishments of an enlightened ruler. Through what achievements is the ruler revered? When battles in the field are won, the ruler is revered. When territory is acquired through siege, the ruler is revered. Now the means of winning battles in the field and acquiring territory through siege lie with devoting one’s energy to siege and battle, and that is enough. For this reason, worthy officers and enlightened rulers know to preserve the tactics of siege and battle.1 The sentiments expressed in this brief passage, which opens a manu- script found in 1973 in a tomb near Changsha, Hunan, in central China, may strike many readers familiar with early Chinese thought as somehow atypical of that time and place.2 This impression could not be more wrong. It grows out of a vision of early Chinese intellectual history that has been overdetermined by late imperial ideology and a particular strain of Confucianism. This vision of early China’s philosophical legacy needs little elaboration here, for in its outline form it is both eminently recognizable and obviously anachronistic. The standard line goes some- thing like this: Early Chinese thought was dominated by Confucianism, which was above all a humanistic and civilian political philosophy that rejected violence and warfare and embraced pacifism and harmony.3 Even a casual familiarity with historical events, written sources, or the material record of the fifth through first centuries BCE—the classi- cal era proper and the focus of this book—will shatter this vision of a 1
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