Bu Zixia and the beauty of Wei

Bu Zixia 卜子夏

Confucius’s disciple Bu Shang 卜商 or Bu Zixia 卜子夏 is referenced in the Analects as having a good grasp of the Odes, such that Confucius found him worthy of discussing them with him. From the Analects:

子夏問曰：「『巧笑倩兮，美目盼兮，素以為絢兮。』何謂也？」子曰：「繪事後素。」曰：「禮後乎？」子曰：「起予者商也！始可與言詩已矣。」

Zi Xia asked, saying, ‘What is the meaning of the passage – “The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colours!”?’ The Master said, ‘The business of laying on the colours follows (the preparation of) the plain ground.’ ‘Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing?’ The Master said, ‘It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the Odes with him.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 4.8

And yet, Bu Zixia is best-known today as the traditional transmitter to posterity of the Gongyang learning 公羊學派 – the school to which belonged Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, He Xiu 何休, Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 魏源 and China’s first modern socialist Kang Youwei 康有為, and of which the Confucian constitutionalist Jiang Qing xiansheng 蔣慶先生 is the most prominent modern exponent. I have often described the Gongyang learning as a ‘revolutionary conservative’ political school of Ru, but its exponents have as often been on the most radical edge of Chinese politics. It is also one whose adherents have imbued the Ru tradition with a ‘religious’ spirit, a spirit of moral revolt, which I have often likened to the Slavophils of Russia.

But the Gongyang hermeneutic of the Classic of History (that is to say, the Spring and Autumn Annals 《春秋》), is best described as a work of historiosophy, not of politics tout court. The concern of the Gongyang commentary is with the inner workings of history: with the moral meaning of human agency down the generations; with the contention of propriety against libido dominandi; with the possibility of salvation within history, even conceived of as a ‘long defeat’. The much commented-upon (thanks to Kang Youwei) historical progression within the Gongyang Commentary actually indicates a kind of ‘fall’ within history, from a state of antique simplicity and high moral standards toward a state of lawless, tyrannical rule by the greedy and violent. The abrupt appearance of the lin 麟 at the end of the History is interpreted as an apocalyptic interruption in history, the coming of the sage-king heralded by the prophetic work of Confucius himself.

Let us take the attribution of the Gongyang commentary to the oral teaching of Bu Zixia as read. So – how did this happen? How did Bu Zixia go from being a profound student of the Odes to an authority on the Classic of History?

I think this question may take a slightly ‘Platonic’ – that is, one informed by the Symposium – interpretive reading of the Analects to answer. Let’s examine Zixia’s reading of the Odes as he commented upon it to his teacher. Zixia’s curiosity is provoked by a particular Ode of Wei, ‘Shuo Ren’ 《衛風•碩人》 which sensually describes the beauty of a young Wei girl with a coy, dimpling smile and big brown eyes. One may say, with some justice, that the young man is aroused by the image.

And yet, Confucius doesn’t at all scold him as lewd for invoking this sensual imagery. Merely having desire does not make one a ‘petty person’. As such, Confucius’s response is instead ambiguous. Like the Socrates of the Phædrus or the Symposium, it’s unclear if he’s being serious or playful with his pupil’s adolescent sexual interest in the subject of the Ode, but it does appear that – as Socrates does with any of the ‘perilous youths’ he tutors – he is subtly nudging Zixia toward philosophical themes, toward something beyond preoccupation with the allures of the Zhongyuan beauty described in the poem. Zixia is led, it seems, to a conclusion that ‘ritual is subsequent’ (「禮後乎？」). This answer meets with Confucius’s unguarded approval.

It is tempting to see in this Analect the raison d’être for Bu Zixia’s historiosophical interest of which the penultimate manifestation is the Gongyang Commentary on the Classic of History. Confucius encourages Zixia’s intellectual and moral exploration of ‘prior’ and ‘subsequent’ in the context of the Odes, the purpose of which is (as we see in Analects 8.8) indeed arousal (xing 興). Bu Zixia draws everything into this intellectual and moral exploration, and establishes the ‘prior’ and the ‘subsequent’ in the sum of human endeavour itself, both the virtuous and the vicious.

The richness and versatility of the Ru tradition is evident here, and we may, perhaps, liken Bu Zixia a bit more fruitfully to the Orthodox Christian sophiologists of later times (Solovyov in particular), at least in the sense that he was able to sublimate his adolescent hormones into a sophisticated and spiritually-profound understanding of human endeavour within history, the potentials for human heroism and the ‘long’ tragœdies of its inner logic. Let us take a moment to recognise the Gongyang Commentary’s singular – and for a classical text, unusual – treatment of the historical personage of Lady Gong of Song, the Eldest Daughter of Duke Cheng, upon whom the Gongyang catechist heaps such hagiographical panegyrics. Was Lady Gong perhaps something of an avatar, for Bu Zixia, of the dimpling brown-eyed beauty of Wei he had worshipped in his youth – a beauty to be reached by imitation of her selfless and self-giving virtue?

This much is speculation, as is my potential position of the Wei beauty of ‘Shuo Ren’ as the philosophical Helen or Diotima who launched the Chinese political left. But the exchange in the Analects is a testament to Bu Zixia’s deep sensitivity, his erotic profundity and the sublimity of his philosophical mind. It must be acknowledged of Zixia, the source of the Gongyang tradition, that he awakened within the broad Ru stream of thought a singular – but persistently-recurring – eschatological hope and apocalyptic consciousness that has historically opened it to Daoist cross-pollenisations and politically-radical ‘popular’ interpretations.

An artistic rendition of the dimpling beauty of Wei in ‘Shuo Ren’