A Ming Confucian’s World

Front matter

Selections from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden

A Ming Confucian’s World

A Ming Confucian’s World

CHAPTER FIVE Knowledge, Technology, and the Natural World 90 Chinese Character Glossary 113 Notes 121 Bibliography 135 Index 141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ithank those who encouraged and helped me on this project, namely, Cynthia Brokaw, Anne Gerritsen, Zoe Lin, Joseph McDermott, David Robinson, Sarah Schneewind, Rick Todhunter, Richard von Glahn, and Michelle Yeh. Iam also grateful to Beverly Bossler, Paul Smith, and three anonymous readers for their critical readings. In addition, the library of the University of California, Davis, especially Dan Goldstein, Jason Newborn, and Karin Chacon, whose unflagging efforts at procuring materials made an enormous difference. Part of this research was funded by a Small Grant in Aid of Research from the University of California, Davis. Valuable suggestions from Lorri Hagman at the University of Washington Press greatly improved the manuscript. Many thanks go to Jason Alley and Joeth Zucco at the University of Washington Press for their assistance in production and to Ben Pease for supplying, in a pinch, a fine pair of maps. I thank as well Elissa Greisz for proofreading and Devon Thomas for the index. Iam also obliged to the University of California Press for permission to use an excerpt from Ben Cao Gang Mu, Volume 8, Clothes, Utensils, Worms, Insects, Amphibians, Animals with Scales, Animals with Shells by Li Shizhen, translated by Paul U. Unschuld. I am grateful as well to the Nelson-Atkins Museum for permission to use the Shen Zhou painting, Gardeners, for the cover. For all remaining errors, I am solely to blame.

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Some places and periods are special. The names Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, Genroku Japan, and Weimar Berlin, for example, call to mind vital chapters in the history of civilization. Ming China (1368-1644) surely belongs on the list. The world’s largest, most populous empire of its time, the Ming offers a range of superlatives. Its emperors ranked among China’s most ambitious, despotic, and dissolute. Its unmatched economy turned its cities and country markets into thriving commercial centers, sent porcelain and silk around the world, and drew in the lion’s share of the precious metals taken from the mines of the New World. Age-old Confucian mores and hierarchies underwent criticism to a degree that would never again be seen until the twentieth century. Its book industry, based on cheap woodblock printing and offering texts on all manner of subjects, constituted the globe's biggest information sector. The arts thrived, be it painting, vernacular literature, or theater, as social groups rarely discussed before now captured the attentions of polite society. Everyone, even historians, likes excitement, and the Ming was exciting.

Excitement, however, is only part oflife, and the above portrait, save for the ambitious, despotic monarchs, fits mostly the dynasty’s final century or so, starting with the reign of the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522-1566). This epoch, usually called “the late Ming,” has attracted most scholarly attention. Good reasons abound, such as accelerated pace of change, the heady transgression of social and cultural boundaries, and the wealth of historical sources. Put simply, the empire underwent major shifts, leading some historians to label the period as “early modern China.” These changes, though, need qualification. First, these trends affected some regions far more than others. Second, after the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1911) took control, China sobered up in many ways and recovered quickly from its “seventeenth-century crisis. This success derived from political and social structures, economic practices, and cultural attitudes that were present before the late Ming and persisted centuries later.

For a vivid look at basic features of late imperial China, this book turns to Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji) by the official Lu Rong (1436-1494). If Lu did not live in the best of times, neither did he

Ix

X TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION live in the worst of times. China during his era caught its breath. Its emperors deserve attention neither for their virtue nor their cupidity or brutality. Natural disasters aside, China’s economy experienced moderate prosperity, recovering from its fourteenth-century calamities. Cotton and silk production expanded, as did textile manufacturing, and opportunities for trade increased, especially in Lu’s home region, the Lower Yangzi or Jiangnan (South of the River). The state began to commute tax and service levies to silver payments, easing the commoners’ burden. Intellectual life remained tethered to official Neo-Confucian doctrine, contemporary verse and prose was undistinguished, and the period’s most lasting contribution to Chinese culture was the “eight-legged” civil service examination essay (baguwen). This complex, rigid rhetorical exercise, which all males seeking to climb the ladder of official success needed to master, became eventually synonymous with late imperial cultural conformity and mediocrity, but it served its purpose for centuries: supplying the bureaucracy with learned, disciplined, pliable officials. Models for women also became more sharply defined, as the cult of widow fidelity (and martyrdom) reached a new intensity, with local officials and prominent men constructing shrines to immortalize the sacrifices of these heroines. Although less exalted groups, such as merchants, courtesans, peasants, bond servants, and clergy, were not especially docile, neither did they cause the sort of unease in literati minds that they would later. Pressed for modern analogies for late fifteenth-century China, one might turn to the 1950s, which appears stable and quiet when juxtaposed with earlier and later eras.' The late fifteenth century set various standards for men and women, which later Chinese challenged and modified but never overturned until the twentieth century.

Why read Bean Garden? First, this book offers a remarkable panorama of late imperial Chinese society. Lu’s anecdotes, taken from incidents he witnessed or heard, encompass a broad range of Chinese characters, including valiant scholar-officials, generous empresses, backbiting literati, runaway brides, corrupt Buddhist monks, gullible commoners, fervent Muslims, savvy farmers, unsavory eunuchs, frontier aborigines, diligent salt workers, and greedy merchants. Second, the entries open a window onto late imperial concepts of power, justice, authority, gender, knowledge, political virtue, the supernatural, the body, sickness and health, and foreigners. Finally, one might read anecdotes from similar works and cover areas untouched by Lu, but, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.’ This view rings true especially here. Lu often did not simply relate the facts; he also frequently voiced his own opinion, expressing a representative yet distinctive Confucian view of the world. Readers would do well to

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION KI adopt a bifocal approach and analyze both the observer and observed. Before taking up the author and his work, however, let us first outline some of the fundamental aspects of Lu Rong’s world.

ORDER AND EMPIRE

Politics and government dominated the lives of Lu Rong, his cohort, and his readers. Empowered by their literacy and command of the Confucian classics, they took their calling as ordering the world, preferably as officials commissioned by the dynasty. Brilliant scholarship or exceptional verse could win one an admirable reputation, but the overwhelming majority of elite, educated men craved to make a lasting name through their effective, moral use of power. Joining the ranks of the bureaucracy meant untold hours spent studying the Confucian canon and then demonstrating one’s learning in the civil service examination system. Competition on these tests was fearsome; gaining the coveted jinshi (advanced scholar) degree meant passing examinations successively at the county, provincial, and then nationwide levels. Only a privileged few succeeded; in Lu Rong’s time, barely one hundred men annually earned a jinshi degree, which placed them in the elite ranks of the bureaucracy, numbering about twenty thousand men and ruling an empire of about 120 million subjects. Small wonder that writers such as Lu often referred to prominent peers by their official titles; they were badges of extraordinary singularity. Once appointed to office, these literati entered a world of innumerable regulations and assessments, as well as ceaseless uncertainty and struggle. On the one hand, the Ming inherited centuries-old, proven Chinese structures of government. Positions were divided into county, prefectural, provincial, and capital levels. Official duties included tax collection, law enforcement and adjudication, water conservancy, and ritual performance at local shrines. Offcials, forbidden to serve in their home regions, rotated generally every three years, with performance reviews determining promotions, demotions, or lateral transfers. At the bureaucracy’s apex were six ministries, dealing with personnel, rites, justice, revenue, war, and public works, but accomplished men usually worked in a variety of specializations over their careers. In addition, many new agencies had appeared over the centuries to enhance the coordination of different functions and levels of government. Staffed often by elite personnel, these organs took up, among other things, the matters of grain transportation, tax collection, frontier defense, and surveillance of bureaucratic performance.” Complicating this transparency and meritocracy, however, were ambition, cupidity, and favoritism. Factionalism, founded on kinship

XII TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION ties, native-place ties, patron-client relations, or policy approaches, was a major part of Chinese political life, and professional competition could turn very bitter and sometimes lethal.

In name, this apparatus devoted its efforts to the will of the emperor. His family possessed the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) and was charged with undisputable, near-infallible authority. His mere presence on the throne granted him the title of sage, regardless of his performance, and placed him in a line of monarchs extending to high antiquity. Confucian ideology tempered this power, prescribing that the ruling family treat the people with kindness; heed the advice of cultivated, well-intentioned, ethical advisors; and carry out the proper religious rituals in the approved fashion. Failure would lead to revocation of this mandate and dynastic collapse, and the bestowal of the divine charge on new, more deserving leaders. The emperor then played a vital ritual role, linking and ideally harmonizing heaven, earth, and humanity. For literati, the imperial presence was inescapable; they owed their position to his rule and even needed him to tell the time, dating events according to the years elapsed since a given monarch acceded to the throne, such as the “fifteenth year of the Hongwu reign.”

In practice, though, politics meant more than emperor and bureaucracy. Three other groups, whose writings and perspectives unfortunately are lost to history, bear mention. First, beside the civil bureaucracy, tens of thousands of military officials directed an army composed of several million men. Their nominal prestige did not match that of their civilian counterparts, but dynasties relied on their expertise to ward off foreign invasion, domestic rebellions, and palace coups d ‘tat.

Second, emperors had kin. The royal clan encompassed thousands of people, related by blood and marriage, and the funds allocated to the imperial household writ large might consume a colossal part of the total state budget. Close relatives, such as empresses, empress dowagers, consorts, brothers, and uncles exerted on occasion key and even decisive influence in political matters, especially in questions of succession.

Third, staffing the imperial household were eunuchs, castrated men whose mutilation granted them access to the palace and its members. Their job descriptions were ambiguous and their education lacking, at least from a Confucian perspective. Some monarchs, however, found their administrative talents very useful. Their organization gave the emperor a parallel government, answerable only to him and free from the age-old stipulations, restrictions, and norms that bound the formal civil and military bureaucracies. By Lu Rong’s time, eunuchs numbered more than ten thousand men and truly constituted

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION XIII a state within a state, composed of no fewer than twenty-four agencies. Assertive eunuchs could use their proximity to the emperor, whom they might have known since his youth, to gain positions of unsanctioned but fearsome power. In fact, starting in the early fifteenth century, Ming emperors, owing to a freakish turn of fate, usually came to the throne at very young ages, which unquestionably enabled the growth of the eunuchs’ clout.* These men proved adept at manipulating the flow of information, determining what memorials and reports the emperor would or would not see. They helped shape policy deliberation and implementation, in the provinces as well as at the capital, especially over financial and military matters. Their most notorious contribution to Ming history, though, was their secret police, the Eastern Depot (Dongchang), which spied on, jailed, tortured, and sometimes killed their foes among the civilian bureaucracy. Scholar-officials regarded eunuchs as anathema, but the latter never would have achieved such power without the collaboration and incompetence of the literati.

Ming Specifics Three Ming emperors in particular shaped Lu Rong’s world. The first was the Ming dynasty’s founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398), usually known as Ming Taizu or the Hongwu emperor, in reference to his reign (1368-1398). Taizu assumed power after two full decades of bloody civil war that overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1260-1368). Once on the throne, he sought to remake the Chinese polity and society, which he found miserably lawless and corrupt after foreign rule. Taizu strove to restore China to an imagined simpler, homespun utopia of self-sufficient rural communities, which meant ridding the countryside of government clerks and turning over tax collection and adjudication duties to the local people. Villagers were to be organized into units of 110 households, with the ten richest households, rotating each year, conscripted to carry out these tasks. While this structure, known as the lijia system, rid rural China of many sorts of official corruption, it also imposed heavy, uneven burdens on commoners. Furthermore, in previous dynasties, as China had become more commercialized, the state had drawn most of its revenues from commercial taxes and the salt monopoly, but Taizu saw land as the only true source of wealth and taxes. Accordingly, the Hongwu regime carried out the most effective, comprehensive census and land registration survey in Chinese dynastic history. The state also exerted greater control over religious practice, banning the worship of most local gods and severely restricting Buddhism and Daoism’s institutional presences. Finally, the emperor commissioned a new law code and, dissatisfied with the results, revised it personally.

XIV TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Taizu frequently found himself dissatisfied, and the Chinese people paid a terrifying price. Powerful ministers became a target of suspicion, supposed malfeasance and conspiracies were revealed, and the guilty parties were tried, convicted, and executed. Over the 1380s and 1390s, the circle of alleged accomplices and incompetent officials widened, and Taizu abolished several offices and became his own prime minister. Most of the guilty parties came from the Lower Yangzi, which by the twelfth century had become the most urbanized, richest, and best-educated part of the country. In the early Ming, its wealthy families bore the brunt of the state’s new emphasis on land taxes. Scores of families, due to political or economic missteps, saw their property confiscated and were deported. Historians estimate the victims of Taizu’s remarkable energy and paranoia to number over forty thousand people, with countless more dispossessed.’ This reign of terror set back China’s economy and left its literati elite traumatized for decades. That said, Taizu had created the Ming world, and later writers referred to him as “the Lofty (or Loftiest) Emperor” or “the August Patriarch.’

Upon Taizu’s passing, scholar-officials hoped for a measure of calm and a return to the ritual order governing the relations of sovereign and official. It was not to be. Taizu’s grandson and successor, the Jianwen emperor (r. 1399- 1402), soon fell prey to his uncle, the Prince of Yan, usually known as the Yongle emperor (r. 1403-1424), who usurped the throne after another civil war. Yongle demanded the support of prominent scholar-officials, but many defied him, leading to their own deaths and that of hundreds of their relatives. Their slaughter completed the intimidation of the educated strata. The new emperor proved as ambitious as his father, conducting personally five costly military campaigns north of the Great Wall against the Mongols. They scored some successes but failed to secure long-term security, as did a prolonged quest to bring Vietnam into the Ming empire. Other notable projects included the sponsorship of naval fleets of unprecedented size on expeditions to South and Southeast Asia. These armadas, under the eunuch Zheng He (1371-ca. 1435), did not aim to explore new lands or expand trade but to demonstrate Ming glory. For the cowed literati, Yongle underwrote massive bibliographic projects, revived the civil service examination system, and promoted the Confucian orthodoxy of the philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Finally, he moved the dynasty’s main capital from the Yangzi metropolis Nanjing to the Mongol capital, Dadu, or present-day Beijing. This colossal enterprise took fifteen years and enlisted the labor of hundreds of thousands. Supplying the new metropolis required another extraordinary public work, the extension of the Grand Canal

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION XV from south China. Despite these ordeals, later generations commonly referred to this monarch as “Grand Ancestor” or Taizong.

A final key emperor, Yingzong (1. 1436-1449, 1457-1464), cut a very different figure from these two autocratic, immensely able, relentless, even Stalinesque predecessors. Unlike Hongwu and Yongle, this sovereign came to the throne as a child, only eight years old, and was dominated by his female relatives and later court eunuchs, especially Wang Zhen (?-1449). The latter’s influence proved disastrous. When the Oirat Mongol confederation again threatened the northern frontier in 1449, Wang persuaded Yingzong to emulate Yongle and take his place among the troops defending the realm. Botched planning and crack Mongol cavalry led to a crushing defeat at Tumu, perilously close to Beijing. Wang was killed, and Yingzong was taken prisoner. Ming officialdom, however, led by Yu Qian (1398-1457), mobilized the capital’s defenses and made Yingzong’s half-brother Jingtai the new emperor (r. 1450- 1456). Eventually, the Mongols chose not to press the issue and in fact returned Yingzong in 1450.

The Tumu catastrophe hardened antiforeign sentiment among the elite, and its effects would be felt for centuries. In the short term, though, the next six unusual, uneasy years saw Beijing with two Sons of Heaven. In 1456, Yingzong’s supporters staged a coup d’état against the ill Jingtai emperor and restored Yingzong to power. There followed a wholesale purge of officials who had served in Jingtai’s administration, involving demotions, punishments in exile, imprisonments, and executions. Eventually, even the coup masterminds overstepped and meta similar grim fate. Yingzong’s reigns began a pattern that lasted throughout the dynasty, which saw weak, capricious emperors, only occasionally interested in government, and the levers of state falling into the hands of powerful eunuchs and domineering scholar-officials. A life in office promised professional and perhaps financial rewards but also instability and risk.

CLASSICS AND HISTORY

Lu Rong and his readers grounded their worldview in the Confucian classics. This canon, first called the Five Classics, comprised The Book of Changes (Yijing or Zhouyi), The Book of Songs (Shijing), The Book of Rites (Liji), The Book of Documents (Shangshu), and The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu). Their contents and commentaries dealt with cosmology, divination, poetry, ritual theory and practice, and ancient history. Composed over centuries, they portrayed China's golden age, which meant primarily the Western Zhou

XVI TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION dynasty (c. 1045-771 BCE), and had received the Han state’s imprimatur in 121 BCE. Over time, literati wrote countless commentaries, seeking the true meaning of the classics. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the canon’s importance grew, as the Song dynasty (960-1279) made classical learning and examination success necessary for official appointment. Scholars probed and elaborated its texts with unprecedented intensity.

By 1200, a forceful, highly articulate, and self-conscious school of Confucian thought, eventually called the Learning of Principle (lixue, also known today as neo-Confucianism), had emerged, spearheaded by Zhu Xi. Zhu reconfigured the Confucian curriculum, assigning the Five Classics a secondary role and focusing on four shorter texts. This quartet, known as the Four Books (Sishu), included The Analects (attributed to Confucius), Mengzi (attributed to his famous disciple, Mencius), and two short chapters from The Book of Rites, Great Learning (Daxue) and The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong). In later centuries, the Four Books and Zhu’s commentaries on them became state orthodoxy, to be mastered by all seeking an official career. These works defined, explicated, and displayed what was correct and what was perverse, how the cosmos worked, how governments ought to wield power, and how men and women ought to behave. This explicitly moral, didactic approach extolled the virtues of benevolence (ren), right conduct (yi), ritual propriety (li), sincerity (cheng), and unconditional devotion to one’s parents and ancestors, usually labeled filial piety (xiao). The canon lay at the core of Confucian literati identity and provided the framework by which educated men would carry out the central task of transforming the world through education (jiaohua).

Much of the canon concerned history, which exercised an abiding hold on the educated imagination. Writing history was part of the state’s functions as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). Unofficial historians abounded; the past offered countless admirable exempla and deplorable incidents and people. Writers such as Lu Rong sought to clarify these affairs, as substantial disagreements about their significance and fine points sometimes persisted for centuries. In relating the past to the present, literati generally proposed two trajectories. The first one proposed progress, finding the present dynasty to have surpassed earlier eras (with the exception of the Western Zhou), often because of its line of sage, benevolent monarchs. The second one, found in many genres, took history as a tale of tragic decline, as the sage-kings grew ever more distant in time. This deterioration at times looked unceasing, as even worthy cases from the recent Song dynasty could put fifteenth-century contemporaries to shame. Most of Lu" historical notes, though, took up Ming

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION XVII matters and sought to record events that official annals might overlook but that posterity, in Lu’s view, needed to know and would enjoy reading about.

WORK AND FAMILY

Only a fraction of Lu Rong’s contemporaries, however, could read. The lives of most Ming people were taken up not with political life and classical study but with making a living and maintaining a household. The overwhelming majority of fifteenth-century Chinese were farmers, preoccupied with cultivating the land, marketing its produce, and paying rents, debts, and taxes. While tenure conditions differed widely across the empire, most farmers were not bound to the land. Since the eleventh century, the economy had become much more specialized and commercialized, leading to nationwide markets in many commodities and sophisticated financial tools, such as the world’s first paper currency. Nowhere were these changes felt more deeply than in the Lower Yangzi region, blessed with fertile soil, a mild climate, and well-developed irrigation and canal transportation networks. In the fourteenth century, civil war, major population losses, and restrictive state policies stifled this dynamism. By the late fifteenth century, though, the tight control of the Hongwu and Yongle eras had slackened considerably. Landlords and peasants found ways to escape government tax rolls, local officials devised ad hoc arrangements, and the economy revived. By Lu’s time, his home region, near contemporary Suzhou, concentrated on cotton and silk production, and imported its grain from provinces hundreds of miles away.

Great numbers of men, however, engaged in other occupations. Millions served in the Ming military, bound originally to the soldier’s life by the state household registration system. The cities and market towns abounded with artisans. The largest enterprises supplied the court and government, producing its paper, porcelain, silk, and even musical entertainment. Salt, an essential commodity, was a state monopoly. These occupations were not mutually exclusive; individuals might take up several lines of work. A farmer’s household during the slack season might make hemp, wood, or bamboo products, or the males might even leave home to fish or mine. At the bottom of social scale, nominally, were merchants, condemned in Confucian dogma as parasites. This category spanned an enormous social range. On the one hand, they included petty shopkeepers, small pawnbrokers, and struggling peddlers who sold to local farmers. On the other, they comprised large, sophisticated magnates, shipping basic necessities and luxury goods throughout the empire. The state, in fact, found their logistical skills indispensable and commissioned merchants

XVIII TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION to provision its frontier garrisons, in exchange for monopoly rights to sell salt. The merchants’ heyday would arrive in the late Ming, and mercantile wealth and influence would arouse literati admiration, envy, and unease.

The main social unit for most Ming subjects was the household. A hierarchical system governed all classes, wherein elders dominated their juniors, and women were subject to men. Females, ideally, stayed in the home, leaving only to marry and join their husband’s family. As one ascended the social ladder, gender segregation took on increasing importance, as Confucian strictures governed women’s conduct and relationships. A household's ability to enforce strict standards of conduct enhanced the family’s reputation as community paragons. Among males, partible inheritance among sons at once promised them a basic minimum but also sowed the seeds of suspicion and competition. At the top of any family’s hierarchy were its dead ancestors, whose souls looked down on the living and required periodic prayers and offerings, at home and at the gravesites. To neglect these ceremonial duties was nearly unthinkable. In the eleventh century, scholar-officials had begun exploring and creating means to give the expression of filial piety and family solidarity greater institutional permanence. By Lu Rong’s time, elite kin groups often compiled genealogies, conducted large-scale rituals, and buried their dead in family gravesites. In some notable cases, they created lineages with corporate property, ancestral halls, and lineage-run schools and businesses.

SPIRITS, DEITIES, AND CLERGY

For most Chinese, their ancestors constituted the most important residents of the unseen world, but the family dead had plenty of company. The supernatural realm was a crowded, complicated place. One may say that Ming China had five overlapping religions. The most basic one was the ancestor cult, practiced by virtually all people of any means. The next, and the most rarified, was the state cult, a sophisticated panoply of sacrifices, conducted by the emperor, his family, and his officials. Those worshipped in this state-sponsored devotion included the imperial ancestors, as well as the gods of heaven and earth, the spirits of China’s important mountains and rivers, and, finally, Confucius (551-479 BCE). Regular, correct offerings and communication with these celestial beings certified the dynasty’s authority.

Next were the Daoist and Buddhist churches. The former, China’s higher religion, had for centuries assisted the court in supernatural affairs and aided elites and commoners with its prophylactic and exorcistic rituals, for the living and the dead. Outnumbering the Daoists were the Buddhists, whose temples

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION KIK dotted the Chinese landscape and whose concepts of good works, karmic retribution, and salvation had become basic parts ofthe Chinese worldview. Finally, the most ubiquitous “religion” was the innumerable local cults, which often lacked formal patrons, fixed dogmas, or set practices. Their shrines were devoted to rivers, mountains, cities, neighborhoods, upright officials, filial children, trees, foxes, tortoises, or any other source of perceived spiritual efficacy. Daoists, Buddhists, and government officials at times looked askance at some of these cults, labeling them as “licentious cults” (yinci) and suspecting them as seedbeds of wasteful, immoral, and violent behavior. At times, they took forceful measures and destroyed them. On other occasions, however, state and religious authorities chose to regulate local cult practice and assign the questionable deities a fixed, if inferior, position in their own systems. Between these five general categories, in fact, we see much more borrowing than fighting, as their relationships evolved over the centuries. For example, the court at times commissioned Daoist priests to conduct state rites at important mountains and rivers. Confucian scholar-officials might chant Buddhist scriptures on behalf of their parents, and Buddhist temples might house shrines to local gods.

The religious scene of Lu Rong’s time had its distinctive features. In particular, literati attitudes toward the Buddhist church, when compared with those expressed in the Song and Yuan dynasties, had undergone a sea change. Despite neo-Confucianism’s growing strength during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most scholar-officials did not adopt Zhu Xi’s uncompromising anti-Buddhism. By the late fifteenth century, though, Zhu’s views had become much more widespread, and the Buddhists had lost considerable favor among literati. Similarly, cult worship and accounts of the uncanny came under greater suspicion. To explain this shift, one could point to repressive state policies and intensified intellectual dogmatism, as well as to the new salience of kin-centered religious practice and ideology.* These changes did not mean that educated Chinese men had become atheistic, let alone “scientific”; they “knew” that spirits existed, that the natural world and humanity responded to each other, and that occasionally inexplicable, wondrous turns of events took place.

THE GENRE

Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden belongs to a particular traditional literary genre, called biji, or “brushed records,’ among other things.” Generic conventions meant a great deal in Chinese writing, prescribing what authors

XX TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION must say, what they must not say, and what they might hint about. Most genres of writing, composed “on duty” while serving in the government or mourning the dead, offered clear, time-honored guidelines about what ought to go down on paper. Other literary forms, such as personal letters (which often were copied and won a wide distribution), prefaces for books or to send off traveling acquaintances, or commemorations for rebuilt schools and temples, allowed writers more freedom, but most abided by clear norms. They concentrated on the subject at hand and praised the individual or subject under consideration. If the discussion shifted to larger issues, readers still could find the threads of thought leading from the specific to the general.

Biji were different. To begin with, this genre went by several names, such as “miscellaneous histories” (zashi), “miscellaneous learning” (zaxue), “miscellaneous affairs” (zashi), or “small talk” (xiaoshuo). Put simply, biji were anthologies of stories and observations about all sorts of subjects. They appeared in the first century, grew in the ninth century, and then proliferated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, abetted by the expansion of the literati and woodblock printing. Most entries were short but detailed, presented one after the other, lacking any systematic order. Unlike other genres, they had an informal air, without any particular audience or didactic purpose. Topics included the supernatural, the court and famous officials, local customs and products, medical miracles, crimes, and social trends; they also included commentary on noteworthy poems. Prefaces occasionally reported that the compiler had seen and heard much during his life and wished to record these matters, lest they be lost to posterity. Biji writers necessarily were literati, but they often were lesser-known men, having never served in high office or won a reputation for their classical scholarship or poetry. Some scholars suggest that these men compiled such works partly to gain a name for erudition and judgment; anthologists announced their fidelity to the truth and listed their sources. Writing history in dynastic China, however, meant more than reporting the facts and explaining why and how past events took one course and not another. The historian’s responsibilities included moral assessments of individuals and events, illustrating how they did or did not embody Confucian virtues. That being said, biji were also part of what educated men wrote and read for fun.