The Politics of the Past in Early China

Abstract

While Gu Jiegang uses the example of Yu 禹, Yao 堯, and Shun 舜, he clearly intends this to be a general argument for the early Chinese corpus at large. On the figures Boyi and Shuqi, Gu Jiegang even suspected that they may be fictional altogether, or, if they had actually existed, that the dramatic details of their story such as their suicides must have been fictional inventions from later periods. See Gu Jiegang, "Lun Yao Shun Boyi shu" 論堯舜伯夷書, Gushibian, Volume 1, 43-44. This argument is also reiterated more recently in Poo, "The Formation of the Concept of Antiquity in Early China."

The Politics of the Past in Early China

“…It is an inferential approximation of Heaven through a survey of exemplary and unexemplary figures and their deeds in history. 98 Finally, let me conclude this section with a speculation on the reason behind the relatively limited canon of sage-kings in the Mozi. Only a handful of dynastic founders are noted in the text, namely the sextet Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu, while many other cultural heroes such as Boyi and Shuqi celebrated in the Analects (and elsewhere in the Warring States corpus) are absent.…”

Virtue and Hierarchy in Early Confucian Ethics

“…Mengzi resists “the creeping tyranny of history as an authoritative source towards our moral development and political imagination” and opts to place Heavenly endowed potentials internal to individual constitution as the most salient moral consideration. Rather than absolutizing the utility of the past and thereby setting up an unbridgeable hierarchy between the (past) sage and the rest of humanity, Mencius urges that sages and the rest of humanity belong to the same category (Leung 2019, 93). Xunzi traces the beginning of moral striving back to the incompleteness of creation and nominates the sagely creation of ritual as the inaugural moment that establishes normative patterns.…”