Drought, Human Sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven in a Lost Text from ISTOR| the "Shang shu" Sarah Allan Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Volume 47, Tssue 3 (1984), 523-539.DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE AND THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN IN A LOST TEXT FROM THE SHANG SHU* By Saran ALLAN In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu fi} #f, the “Ancient documents ’* ‘The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder ‘Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between ‘the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven. Before analysing the meaning of the text, however, we are faced with the problem of identifying and reconstructing a text which is no longer extant. T have appended a table (pp. 535-9) of citations in other early texts which I will discuss below. The language in these is so close that we are clearly dealing with a text and not an oral tradition. Furthermore, two citations accord the text atitle. In the Guo yu, it is called the Tang shi # %.° This is the name of a chapter in the extant ‘ modern script ’ version of the Shang shu in which the Shang founder makes a proclamation to the Xia people urging them to submit to his rule when he is on the verge of attacking Jie. ‘The original Tang shi might have been different from the text we are concerned with, or at. least longer, incorporating more material than the present text. Both the Mengzi and the Mozi include quotations attributed to the Tang shi that are not in the extant version.t However, these quotations are also not a part of our text and there is no obvious relationship between our text, which is concerned with a period of years after Tang had defeated Jie, and the present Tang shi, which is set before the conquest. ‘Another possibility is that our text was the original Tang gao, or a part thereof. The Mozi calls it Tang shuo ® Bt, a Shang shu style of title, but to my knowledge this name does not occur elsewhere as the name of a Shang shu chapter. Shuo could be a scribal error for gao #%. Tang gao is a traditional Shang shu title and that given to one of the ‘ ancient script’ chapters of the Shang shu forged around the third century a.p.5 This chapter draws from our text and I have included the relevant sections in the appended table, but it also + Earlier versions of this paper wore delivered to the Early China Seminar TT (1988), held at SOAS, and to the Workshop on Chinese Divination and Portents (June 1983). held at the University of California at Berkeley. I would like to thank the participants in both seminar and workshop, especially my colleagues, aul Thompson and A.C. Graham, for their asistance and criticism. 2 Thavo used the term Shang shu rather than Shu jing because this text is not in the extant Classic. ‘There are many quotations from the Shu in the early philosophic texts which are not in either the modern script (inden) or ancient script (guben) versions of the text and there may Nave been different collections of these ancient dociments. ‘They were believed to be con temporaneous ancient documents and divided chronologically according to the period from whieh ahey wore believed to have originated ; our text was this a Yin (Le. Shan) shi. 2"The reference to this and other texts which cite versions of this toxt are given in the bibliography following the table (p. 539). Kong Anguo {, “ [J in his commentary to the Mozi follows the Guo yw in taking Tang shi as the correct title. « Mozi 2/10; -Mengzi 14.2 (1/3b). Titles given in the form X/Ya refer to the juan/pago number of the Sibu congkan J 32 Fil editions published in Shanghai in the 1930s, See Zhang Xinzheng HE ity if. Weishu tongtao {B5 $F 38h ¥% (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1954), 126-08, exp. 183-4.52 SARAH ALLAN intersperses our text with unrelated material. Thus, whereas the other quota tions have been recorded continuously as they occur in the original, I have omitted an unrelated part of the Tang gao. The forged ‘ancient script” Tang gao makes no reference to drought or human sacrifice. Its core, however, is an announcement (gao 4) Tang makes to the Lord on High taking the guilt of the people upon himself, which is drawn from our text (sections 8-12 in the table). Since this is the source of its title, it may also have been the title of our text. The Baihutong (HE iii which quotes the Lun yu also states, ‘ This was when Tang smote Jie and made an announcement (gao) to Heaven ...’® thus both naming the short Lun yu quotation as an ‘announcement’ and placing it within the context of the longer text. Besides the Lun yu, Mozi, and Guo yu, the text occurs in a wide variety of other early works—the Xunzi, Lushi chungin, Huainanzi, Shang shu da zhuan, Shuo yuan, Lun heng, and Sou shen ji. Six versions are also included in the Diwang shigi jicun.* All the textual versions and the relevant sections of the Tang gao can be compared by reference to the appended table.* ‘The six versions assembled in the reconstructed Diwang shiji are, in spite of omissions and occasional abbreviations, extremely close to one another and clearly derive from a single Diwang shiji original which was very close to version A. The texts are arranged in the table below in a pattern which would indicate filiation rather than according to the chronological order of the texts, but except for the Guo yw and Lun yu quotations which are extremely short, all the other versions interlock with one another in such a manner that they could not derive from one another. Alll the versions except the Mozi, Guo yu, and Lun heng (which quotes the ‘ records and documents’), tell the story without reference to its source, but their language is so similar they must all derive ultimately from a single source, i.e. one of the Yin documents of the Shang shu and most likely the Tang gao. ‘The earliest works which quote this text are the Lun yu and the Mozi (ian ai, xia), so the original document predates the third century and probably the fourth century v.c. The Mozi and the Diwang shiji A versions are the longest and most complete and their content is very close, but the Dinang shiji begins with Tang’s overthrow of Jie and proceeds chronologically, whereas the ‘Mozi begings with Tang’s announcement (8). Asa consequence, the philosopher reverses the order of some parts of the text. He also sums up and abbreviates sections of the text as it appears in the Diwang shiji A and inserts comments which are unique to the Mozi. One section (11) of the Mozi which is not in the Dinang shiji does occur in other versions and probably derives from the original text. Thus the two texts appear to derive from the same original, but not from one another. ‘hin cur in two contexte: see 4/2b- Ba, 7/04, , ™ 1 These references follow the table (pp. 585-9). The Diwang shijt is no longer extant. Thus, these six versions are quotations of the, Diwang shiji culled from ater sources. Other texts which include references to the story of the drought in language that does not derive directly from the text I'am considering inelade the Zhuangsi 6/26n (dian 17), Guanst 22/%b (ian 75), the Shisi F4 = (Jun shi), Commercial Press, Shanghai, 1926, 16a, and the Zhushu jinian th EB 4 1/22. phe text used for the Tang gao is that of B. Karlgren in The Book of Documents (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, X¥tt, 1950). ® These numbers are the section numbers in the translation which follows as well as those in the appended table. See also notes 20 and 21 for more detailed comparison of the two texts. 1" (2}-(@) may be a conflation, see p. 528 below and note 13.DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 525 ‘The Diwang shiji was compiled in the third century a.v. With the exception of the Sou shen ji compiled in the fourth century, it is the latest of the texts which I have included in the table. However, since Diwang shiji A can provide a source for the material in all the other quotations with the exceptions noted above, I assume it is structurally closest to the original and use it as the basis of the following translation, adding (11) from the Moai. I do not mean to imply by this that the Diwang shiji version is the original document. The Diwang shiji normally modernizes the language of the earlier documents from which it draws (just as the Shi ji & #2 does) ; thus, T assume it is a third-century recension of an earlier text." Although there was clearly a single document from which all these many versions derive, it is difficult to date it. ‘There are three means of dating a text: its history as known from references in other works, its style, and its content. The first two means provide little evidence for a text of this type Historically, we know that it was extant by the fourth or, at latest, the third century B.c.; that it was widely known up to the time of Wang Chong’s Lun heng (first century a.p.) and, since it was drawn upon by the Tang gao forger and the writer of the Diwang shiji, that it was extant but no longer current in the third century .p. T have not found any reference to the story in the Shi ji. Sinee it was so widely known, this omission was probably deliberate and it’ may be attributed to the theme of human sacrifice in association with Tang, the virtuous founder of the Shang Dynasty, which would not have been acceptable in the Confucian tradition, Mencius quoted Confucius’s condemnation of the use of effigies in burial, apparently fearing that they would lead to the practice of human sacrifice which still occurred sporadically in the fifth to third centuries n.c.! In Shang times, human sacrifice was practised on a grand seale. This is now well known from archaeological evidence, but could never have been known on the basis of the Shi ji. The Lun yu and Xunzi versions also do not include this aspect of the story." This Confucian refusal to recognize the existence of human sacrifice might also explain how the text could be recast into the third-eentury forgery called the Tang gao when it was so well known—the new text fitted the famous lines of the text into an acceptable historical framework. Historically, then, although the text ean be traced back to the time of the Lun yw and the Mozi, there is no evidence upon which to determine how much earlier it was written. Indeed, there are very few earlier texts than these extant. and those that there are do not normally make reference to other texts. Nor can stylistic criteria be used to determine the original date of the text because we are dealing with a recension rather than an original text and as we can see, even in the pattern of changes in these versions of the text, words and grammatical particles are easily changed in transmis 4-The Diwang shiji draws from many of the same sources as the author of the Guben Shang ‘shu; thus its author Huangfu Mi was considered one of the possible forgers of the Cuben Shang shu. See Zhang Xinzheng, p. 169. = Mengai 1A (1/8). 38 The Nunzi and the Shuo Yuan include (2)-(3), an invocation questioning the rectitude of ‘Tang’s government, but not the story of the self-sacrifice. This may be a Confucian transforma: tion of the drought story which appears in the Diveang shi as a conflation. See below, p. 528 4'See for example (8): the pre-classical particle wei appears in two forms and is omitted in the Lun yu: yu' I" (which Qu Wanli uses to evaluate the date of the Jin feng, see p. 531 below) occurs int two forms; gan zhao occurs in some texts but not others; and, most important, the lature for the gods to whom the announcement is addressed is different in every text and two further forms in the Baihutong quotations of the Lun yu.526 SARAW ALLAN The Shang shu includes a number of ‘ Yin sfiw’, documents attributed to the Shang kings. The Shang must have had documents and some of these must have been preserved after the fall of the dynasty because the outline of Shang history in the Shi ji has been proved to be generally accurate by archaeological excavation “and contemporaneous oracle bone inscriptions. However, none of the extant Yin si are in the style of oracle bone inscription language; so if any of them were originally Shang documents, they must have been revised from poorly understood originals sometime in the Zhou Dynasty. But if the style has changed, we must also recognize that the content will have undergone some change as well. In the case of our text, we do not even have the original, but only later versions indirectly transmitted, so the style can give very little evidence of the original date. I will argue below that the content reflects a knowledge of, or continuation of, Shang tradition, but as a text it is probably Western Zhou in origin. In the following, I will analyse our text first with relation to the role of the king in Shang divination inscriptions, then in comparison with the Jin teng & Ii chapter of the Shang shu, and finally in the context of late Zhou legend about the beginning of the Shang Dynasty. In Shang times, the king was a medium between the spirits above and the earth below, portents were the signs of a spirit’s curse and the king divined to determine the appropriate ritual to appease him. In the legend of the late Zhou and Warring States period, the founders of the Shang and Zhou Dynasty were kings mandated by Heaven to rule because of their superior virtue. Heaven reflected moral disorder in the world below by ominous signs, but it had become an abstract force. Our text is transitional. The story is a myth of the king’s assumption of the role of medium between the High Lord and the people, but it is set within the context of the changing mandate of Heaven. Before turning to my analysis, I will translate the text. ‘The following translation is based on Diwang shiji A except where otherwise noted : (1) After Tang smote Jie, there was a great drought for seven years and the Luo River dried up. (2) He ordered someone to take a three-legged ding vessel and make an invocation to the mountains and rivers. (3) It said, ‘Is it that the government is not frugal, that we are causing the people to be harried ¢*° That food bribes are common? That slanderers flourish ? That palaces are being built? That women’s advice is followed 2° Why has the lack of rain reached such an extreme ?’ (4) The Yin scribe divined by crack- making and said, ‘ Prayer should be made with human (offering) ’. (5) Tang said, ‘Those for whom I am asking for rain are the people. If it is necessary to make a prayer using human offering, I ask that I should be it myself’. (6) Thereupon, he fasted and abstained, cut his hair and pared his nails, and regarding himself as a sacrificial victim, prayed at the altar of the Mulberry Grove.” (8) He said, ‘ I, your little son Lii, dare to use a dark sacrificial vietim # 181 have followed the zheng of Diwang shiji B, the Xunzi, and the Guo yw, but * passions not restrained ' is also possible. 16 The six lines of text in (3) are the six faults of which Tang accuses himself in the Lun heng—see (7), but the first two lines can be read as one, and elsewhere tho Lun heng refers to “five faults? (18/8a, 15/10a). 37 Sow shen ji, Lun heng, Lushi chungiu and Quo yu simply refer to Tang praying personally at the Mulberry Grove here, but the first three of these include the preparation and self-sacrifice in (14) which is also the section in which the Mozi refers to the self-sacrifice. 3 have followed Diwang shiji A, sheng, since this appears to refer to Tang himself; xuan ‘was the colour of the sun-bird and the Shang kings, see p. 529 below.DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 527 and announce to the Lord of Heaven above: !® [(Il) If there be wrongdoing, I dare not pardon it. It is inscribed on the Lord’s heart.] ®° (12) If there be wrongdoing in the ten thousand regions, the wrong is upon my person. If I myself have wronged, do not extend it to the ten thousand regions. Do not let one’s man dullness cause the High Lord, spectres and spirits to harm the people's life ’** (15) Before he had finished speaking, a great rain came, covering an area of many thousand i. This text is set at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty when Tang had defeated Jie. The extant oracle bone inscriptions do not begin until the time of Wu Ding, two or three centuries later, and they do not include any narratives or history. Tang is given offerings as a high ancestor of the Shang, but whether he defeated Jie and founded the dynasty is one of the many questions which the oracle bone inscriptions do not answer. Nevertheless certain aspects of the text—the rites and the role of Tang in performing them—can be compared with the ritual practices and role of the Shang king in the inscriptions to determine whether the text could have originated in the Shang. According to the text, a great drought occurred when Tang had defeated Jie. This lasted for seven, or in some versions, five, years. Rain is a major subject of divination in the oracle bone inscriptions and drought is specifically mentioned. Normally, Di or Shang Di, the High Lord, is the sender and wo ¥, the collective pronoun by which the king refers to himself and his people, the recipient.? For example, ‘Crack-making on the wu-shen day, Zheng divining: perhaps Di will send down drought upon us; erack-making on the wu-shen day, [Zheng] divining: Di will not send drought down upon us.’ In some inscriptions, Di is the subject, drought an active verb and wo, the object. For example, ‘ [Crack-making] on the wu-yin day, Huan divining : perhaps Di will “ drought ” us *.24 In these, as in other Shang oracle inscriptions, the king represented his people and his lands. The power of divination was his and it was his responsi- bility to ensure that correct offerings were made to the ancestors and other spirits, thereby obtaining their favour and avoiding their curses. Di who was at the apex of the Shang spirit hierarchy exercised the most awesome powers ; he controlled rain, lightning, and the wind, and cursed or favoured the major ©The Baihutong quotes the Lun yu as huang tian shang di & FE |. ff (7/6a) and also as huang wang hou di 2 EJ ff (4/2a), thus the extant Lun yu version is possibly corrupt. %°T have included (il) in the translation because it is quoted in the Lun yu as well as the Mozi. (9) does nob occur in any other text and although its form is much like that of a Shang ‘announcement, "Now, Heaven has caused a great drought; it is upon myself La, since it only occurs in the Mosi which omits the first part of the text in which there is reference to the drought, I assume it is an insertion. (10) occurs only in the Mozi and the Tang gao and is the only part of the toxt to introduce a positive virtue (ehan) rather than simply faults to be allayed (and the curse lifted)—see p. 530 for discussion of 2ui. 4 (13) is a comment by Mozi. (14) is equivalent to (6), but the order has been reversed—see note 17. Although the order of the Mozi text differs from that of the Diwang shiji and it is six Dr seven centuries earlier, itean with the exception of (11) which I have included in my translation readily be construed as'a philosopher's derivation from an original document very similar to Diwang shiji Aw # See Chen Mengjia Bi 3% Fe, Vinzw buei congshu AE HE b HE #% st, Peking, 1956, 90-7 % Zhang Bingquan Ge Fe HE, Xiaotun di er bens Yinzw wensi: bing bien ss WH $6 =A: PR A AF: PAG (Tadei: Academia Sinica, 1957), vol. 1, pt. 1, no. 68. Frank H. Chalfont and Roswell H. Britton, The Couling.Chalfont collection of inseribed oracle bones, Shanghai: 1985, no. 1811.528 SARAH ALLAN affairs of state such as warfare and city-building, Rain was frequently cursed by others and the Shang king divined to determine which spirit was responsible, but drought was sent by Di himself. In our text, Tang’s first response to the drought was to zhu ji, perform a rite of invocation. This was a Shang rite. The three-legged ding in which the accompanying offering was made was also an archetypical Shang ritual vessel, its three legs perhaps representing those sun-birds with whom the Shang kings were totemically identified.2® Ding occurs as a term of offering and the character zhen ®4 ‘to divine’ was originally a pictograph of a ding. Mountains and rivers, particularly yue 4% and he ja] were also nature spirits with power to curse the rain. The graphic form of the character zhu in oracle bone inseriptions— a man with his mouth open kneeling before an altar (see fig. 1, p.533)— suggests that the essence of this rite was communication with the spirits. The inscriptions sometimes refer to invocations recorded on bamboo slips (ce zhu J} WR) as in the Jin teng discussed below, but none of these slips are extant and the content of the hu was not a subject of divination recorded in the oracle bone inscriptions. In this text, the lines are rhymed, which suggests a con- ventional formula rather than an invocation created specially for the occasion. The faults of the government enumerated in this formula are simple enough to have their origin in the Shang—distress caused by lack of frugality, palace building, corruption and slander, the acceptance of women’s advice—but they are moral rather than ritual breaches. Although we do not know the content of the Shang invocations, the role of the Shang king with relation to the spirits as we know it from oracle inscriptions was entirely a matter of ritual exchange : the king made offerings to the spirits in order to obtain their favour and to avoid their curses. Rain and defeat in warfare were both among the curses to be avoided by ritual offerings, rather than signs of bad rule or portents which, if left unheeded, would mean a change of rule. ‘The first evidence of the king as a ruler with moral responsibilities sanctioned by divine authority occurs in the Western Zhou chapters of the Shang shu, as I will discuss below. This section of the text may be Western Zhou in origin, but it may also be an even later conflation since the two texts which include it apart from the Ditang shiji—the Xunzi and Shuo yuan—do not include the story of human sacrifice. ‘Thus it may be a Confucian variant of the drought story. Having performed a rite of invocation, Tang proceeded to have a divination made in the traditional Shang form of cracking oracle bones (usually ox scapula or turtle plastrons) by the application of heat. The ‘ Yin scribe’ made the cracks. Shi ft, ‘scribe ’ was a Shang title and the shi may have been involved in crack-making.®® ‘The scribe, having made his divination, concludes that prayer should be made using human offering. Human offerings were a normal part of Shang ritual and whether humans or animals or both and in what combination is a frequent subject of Shang divination. Indeed, there is a particular Shang ritual to which this may be a reference, the chi ft (or jiao 44), sacrifice in which a human was exposed or bumt in prayer for rain. ‘This ritual and its development have been discussed extensively by Chen Mengjia and 2 See my Sonsof suns: myth and totemism in early China ', BSOAS, xt1v, 2, 1981, 290-326, * See Lao Gan 4 if, ‘Shi zi de jiegou ji shiguan de yuanshi zhiwa', "7 0&5 HN Be REE Oy WE HG BR HG, Datu cazhi BE ME AE, 143 (1957), 14.DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 529 Edward Schafer who has also related Tang’s sacrifice to this rite.” The victim was normally deformed (as depicted in the oracle bone seript, see fig. 2) or a shamaness. Ritual bathing and hair-cutting are among the preparations in later performances of the ritual. This ritual is particularly appropriate because the offering was not, as in so many cases, merely a slave or captive, but a sacred person, the shaman or shamaness who was already linked to the spirit world or the sacred cripple. ‘There is no record in the oracle bone inscriptions of a king offering himself as a sacrifice and it is difficult to imagine such an inscription. Yet in a sense these kings were already offerings: they were physical as well as spiritual mediums between the people and the other world. ‘The king’s toothache was as much a sign of the spirits’ displeasure as lack of rain and bad harvest.”8 The king was but ‘ one man ° (yi ren — ) when he stood before the spirits and the High Lord, but as such he symbolized all men and he strove through the vast apparatus of oracle bone divination to determine the needs of the spirits and avoid their curses being sent down upon himself and his people.2” ‘Tang, according to this story and in all the textual tradition, was the first king of the Shang. This story is about his assumption of the sacred role of the king. He both assumes the role of the sacred offering, the primary shaman, and in offering to do so on behalf of the people, assumes his role as king. That ‘Tang ever offered himself in such a manner is unlikely, but the myth does symbolically express the role of the Shang king as a medium between the spirits and his people. ‘That the first Shang king should be confronted with drought and expose himself before the sun in ritual sacrifice is also appropriate to Shang mythology as I have previously reconstructed it, for the Shang were mythically associated with the suns and this myth is evident in the following lines of our text. As I have discussed in ‘ Sons of suns: myth and totemism in early China ’, the Shang were totemically identified with ten suns which rose one by one on the ten days of the Shang ritual week. These suns, which were also birds, perched themselves on the branches of the Mulberry Tree (Fu sang 4 3%) in the far East. In our text, Tang, having prepared himself, made his offering and prayed at the Mulberry Grove (Sang Lin). The Mulberry Grove, in later tradition at least, was the most sacred of Shang altars and it was at Sang Lin that the Shang were enfeofied by the Zhou so that they might continue their ancestral sacrifices.®° Tang then declared, ‘I your little son Lii dare to use * Chen Mengjia if 4% HE ‘ Shangdai de shenbua yu wushu ,” 7A {€ 6) iP HB BL AE ih. Yanjing Xuchao 3 $1 HL $f, 20 (1936), 435-576 ; Edward H. Schafer, * Ritual Exposure in Ancient China’, H£48, 14, 1957, 190-84. Zhang Bingquan, Bing Bian 11-20 are a set of five almost identical plastrons in which series of divinations are made about the king’s toothache and a military campaign. ‘The divina- tions are formally integrated on the plastron. Although most scholars have assumed that such pairing of questions is accidental, it's possibie that the king's tooth ached (ie. he was cursed) because of an ill-advised military’ campaign. For a translation of this series of inscriptions, see David N: Keightey, Sourzs of Shang tory (Berkeley, 1978), 77-80, ‘This iden was siggestd to me by a paper delivered by David Nivison at SOAS in November 1978 in which he suggested that the divinations concerning weather and the king’s illness in Bing Bian 334-5 wore related. If this approach is valid, it provides a Shang precedent for our text and the Jin feng. In any case, the spirits’ curses Could fall upon the king's person just as they fell upon his lands and his activities and the king sought to forestall such curses and gain favour by his offerings. % For discussion of the term yi ren, seo Hu Houxuan if] J&L $f, ‘Shi yu yi ren’ Ee — A, hishi yanji IE BL BF 3E. 1 (1957), and * Chong lun“ yu yi ren” wenti? iff xy Fe — A MA) RB, Guvensi vanjin 5 3 HF GE, 6 (1981), 15-33. 2 Soe * Sons of suns, 305-6.530 SARAH ALLAN a dark sacrificial victim and announce to the Lord of Heaven above . ..” (8)- Xuan, black or dark, the colour of mystery, was the colour of the bird from whom the Shang descended which I have identified with the sun-bird. ‘Thus, Xie $2, the first ancestor of the Shang in the textual tradition was called the “Dark king ’ (ewan wang). This announcement to the Lord of Heaven is that from which the name Tang gao derived. Gao occurs in the oracle bone inscriptions as the name of a ritual in which the king ‘ announced ’ ominous events to a spirit. For example, “Divining: my tooth aches; I should announce it to... Ding ’.® Or ‘ Crack- making on the jia-shen day, Bin divining: I should announce the (plague of) locusts to He (the River)’ The events announced are usually curses and the intention of these divinations is apparently to determine which spirit was responsible for the curse. As I have discussed above, droughts were the curse of the High Lord himself in the oracle inscriptions. ‘The Mozi also begins with a statement of the ominous event, the drought, though this appears to be the philosopher's own insertion. ‘Tang then acknow- ledges that all wrongdoing is known to the High Lord and takes responsibility for all wrongdoing in the ‘ ten thousand regions’ upon his own person while praying that his own wrongdoing should not be blamed upon the people. ‘The ‘Mozi then tells us (13) that with these words he became Son-of-Heaven and was enriched with all-under-Heaven. I take this line to be the philosopher's own, but it aptly summarizes the sense of the text: by expressing his willingness to take the responsibility for the wrongdoing of ail his people upon himself and physically offering himself to allay the curse of the drought sent by the Lord, he becomes king—and before his words are ended, rain begins to fall. ‘The wrongdoing which Tang took upon himself is stated in the most general ‘terms and can include ritual or social offences. The term used—zui, graphically a net over the verb to do wrong—does not occur in the oracle bone inscriptions nor is there any questioning in these inscriptions about whether faults have been committed, only questions about what offerings should be made and whether good or bad fortune will be conferred. Our text, however, is set. at the time when Tang had defeated Jie and there is a specific crime of which ‘Tang was guilty and from which he wished to protect his people, the defeat of his former ruler. ‘The idea of a changing mandate of Heaven first occurs in the Western Zhou chapters of the Shang shu, in the proclamations of the new Zhou rulers to the Yin and other peoples (e.g. Da Gao, Kang Gao, Jiu Gao, Luo Gao, Duo Shi, Duo Fang). They argued that Heaven or Shang Di (both terms are used) had terminated the Yin mandate and transferred it to the Zhou. They obtained evidence of transfer by oracle bone divination. According to the Da Gao, “The serene king (Wu Wang) followed only the oracle, and (thus) was able tranquilly to receive this mandate’. ‘The truth of this divination was displayed by their suecess in overthrowing the Shang and confirmed by the 4 Frank H. Chalfont, The Couling-Chalfont collection (Ku), no. 1957. hang Chengeuo FH 7K ii. Yin qi vi oun fi $2 Ge Fe (Peking: 1999), 525, % David Keightley has speculated that by the late Shang, misfortunes were increasingly intrprted a the role of human flings. tual failing ("Shang divination the magi. religious legacy ', a paper prepared for the Workshop on Classical Chinese Thought, held. at Harvard, 2°13 August Tere 13). It is also possible that moral failings had come to play a role, but there is no evidence of this. ‘See 8, Allan, The heir and the sages dynastic legend in early China (San Francisco, 1981), p.8, 1.9, for the dating of these texts to the early Western Zhow. Bernard Karlgren, The Book of Documents, p.37, ¥..DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 531 oracle bone cracks which continued to be auspicious.%* The reason for this change, according to the Zhou rulers, was the dissolute behaviour of the last Shang ruler. ¥rom oracle bones found at Zhou Yuan we now know that the Zhou rulers practised oracle bone divination before their conquest. Although there are many peculiar features in the Zhou divination inscriptions, the writing system and method of divination are essentially the same as those of the Shang and we can reasonably assume that Zhou divination derived ultimately from the Shang. Some of the Zhou Yuan oracle bone inscriptions also appear to have been made by the Shang king. Possibly, the Shang ruler set up a centre for divining that was usurped by the Zhou rulers, but once the Zhou began to make their own divinations, the Shang religious monopoly was threatened : the Zhou might prove by their own divination, as they did, that Shang Di had favoured their own cause. Herein lay the seeds of the theory of a changing mandate of Heaven.%7 The Zhou rulers explained their overthrow of the Shang on moral grounds the last Shang king was dissolute and did not care about the wrongdoing in his kingdom. Shang Di thus became a moral figure, a god who made judgements on the conduct of the ruler. And the Zhou cited a precedent—the defeat of the last Xia ruler Jie, who had also been dissolute, by Tang, the founder of the Shang Dynasty. Our text is set within this context of the changing mandate of Heaven—at the time that Tang had defeated Jie. Di sent an omen, a drought. The new king had defeated his former ruler and now asked by this rite of self- sacrifice that his life be taken or that his authority as a medium for his people, responsible for all crimes and able to allay the curses of the High Lord, be recognized, and the curse was indeed allayed. There is a parallel for this text in the Zhou chapters of the Shang shu—the Jin teng, in which Wu Wang became ill three years after defeating the Shang, but the Duke of Zhou offered himself as scapegoat. and the king recovered. I have demonstrated above that our text draws on Shang traditions but it is also set in the context of the changing mandate of Heaven and the original text from which our versions drew probably took its form in the Western Zhou. The Jin teng is also difficult to date. Qu Wanli suggested, primarily on the basis of the use of the relatively late pronoun yu F, that it was late Western Zhou or early Spring and Autumn in date, but as the different transmissions of our text demonstrate, yu =f may easily be substituted in transmission for int $x and its content indicates an origin closer to the period from which it purports to come, the early Western Zhou. ‘When Wu Wang became ill, the two dukes Tai Gong and Shao Gong wished to divine by cracking oracle bones, but the Duke of Zhou first offered himself asascapegoat. He made an announcement (gao) to Wu Wang’s three immediate ancestors and the scribe recorded the invocation on bamboo slips. He stated, % Seo Da Gao, vv.2-6. (Soe also Luo Gao, ibid, 51-2, vv. 1-5, for auspicious oracles in the time of Cheng Wang). "Chang Tsung-tung (Der Kult der Shang Dynastic im Spiegel der Orakelinschriften, Wies- aden, 1971, 259) and David Keightley (‘The religious commitment: Shang theology and the genesis of Chinese political culture’, History of Religions, 17, 3/4, 1978, p. 220 and n. 40) have Argued that the mandate-of-Heaven theory has its roots’ in Shang theology. Although I agreo in-a general sense, T do not agree with their suggestion that Di could sponsor an enemy attack in Shang inscriptions. He conld cause them to be cursed in warfare, just as he could cause a plague of locusts, but I do not know of any inscriptions which could be interpreted aa favouring fan onemy. But once another king could divine independently, he could elaim Dis favour. In his eyes, the defeat of the Shang king was not simply a eurse, but sign that ho had been favoured. % Qu Wanli ff , Shang shu jinzhu jinyi fi} BE 4 Ye 4 FE (Laiboi: 1973), 84. You. XLVI. PART 3. 37532 SARAH ALLAN “Your chief descendant So-and-so has met with epidemic sickness and is violently ill. If you three kings really owe a great son to Heaven, then substitute me, Dan, for So-and-so’s person...’ Declaring his greater virtue and ability to serve the spirits he exhorted the great tortoise and holding the bi and gut jades asked permission for the substitution, ‘He then had a divination made by cracking three tortoises, all of which were auspicious. He opened the bamboo documents and looked at them. They likewise indicated that this was auspicious. The Duke said, “ According to the configurations, the king will suffer no harm”? Wau Wang recovered and the rest of the chapter is about how the suspicion cast upon the Duke of Zhou’s loyalty after Wu Wang’s death was allayed when the documents were found in the metal coffer in which they had been placed.*? Information about divination and ritual practices at the beginning of the Western Zhou is as yet sparse, but this chapter accurately reflects many Shang ritual and divination practices which may well have continued into the early Zhou. There is an announcement of the omen and an invocation, as in our text. The turtles were cracked in a series and plastromancy and milfoil divination e practised in concert.#! Most important, the conclusion is in the style to ich most late Shang inscriptions have been reduced, simply ‘the king will suffer no harm’. In both our text and the Jin teng, there was an omen at the beginning of the dynasty. In our text, the cause of the omen is only implicit and the burden of the text is Tang’s assumption of the ritual power of the king. In the Jin teng, the theme of regicide is more apparent : a son is owed to Heaven and the Duke of Zhou offers himself to pay the debt. If the High Lord appointed the ruler, then the new king had killed the ruler previously sanctioned by him. The omen signified that debt, but when Tang offered himself and the Duke of Zhou offered to replace Wu Wang who was lying ill, the Lord recognized their right to replace the former rulers and they replaced them. The theme of regicide is developed in the legends of the late Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in which the themes of rule by virtue and rule by heredity are continually juxtaposed and mediated. I have discussed the legends of this period in great detail in The heir and the sage and so will restrict myself to some general observations here. By this period, there was no longer a unified dynasty. ‘The rulers of large and small states contended for supremacy or simply survival. Kings hoped to unify the empire and obtain the mandate of Heaven, but this was a secular age and philosophers had replaced priests as their advisers. The philosophers did not divine by oracle bones or milfoil stalks, but turned to the pattems of history from which they extracted principles which would be applicable to the future just as they had been applicable in the past. Heaven was a moving force in that history, but it had become an abstract power. The idea of a dynastic cycle which originated in the Western Zhou chapters of the Shang shu embodied the two conflicting principles of rule by virtue and rule by heredity. The theory of a changing mandate of Heaven provided an explanation of the conflict but a paradox remained: the man of the greatest 4 This translation is based on Karlgren’s, p. 36, v. 5. 4 For discussion of this metal coffer and the practice sealing written spirit communication in ritual containers, see D. Harper, A Chinese demonography ', paper presented to the Workshop on Chinese Divination and Portents, Berkeley, June 1083, 4-5. "S00 Qiu Xigui 3E $B 2, ‘Du “ Anyang chutude niu jingu ji gi keci”? A Je BM Hh Ac 05 42 AB 2 HE Bl BE, Kaogu, 1972.5, 43-4.DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 533 Fig.1 ae Fig. 2 virtue, he who had attracted Heaven’s mandate when an evil ruler had lost it, had nevertheless committed regicide to achieve his rule. In the legends, the heir continued the rule and a new dynasty was established, but only after a wise and virtuous minister had ceded rule to him, recognizing his hereditary right. These themes are continually juxtaposed and mediated in the legends and the thematic repetitions at different periods of ‘history’ make their implicit meanings apparent. Jie, whom Tang had defeated when this drought occurred, was an archetype of evil like Zhou Xin, the last king of the Shang, although his evil character is much less developed in the early texts. He was infatuated with the two women of Meng Shan, heeded the advice of his wife Mo Xi rather than that of his good ministers, and relied on the cruel and sycophantie strongman Tuiyi Daxi for support.¢® Omens are not an important element in the legends of this period except in the Mozi, although no text questions their existence. The time of Jie was a time of lan @L, ‘ confusion’ or ‘ disorder ’ as opposed to the zhi #4, ‘ order’ of the time of Tang. Omens could reflect. these disorders. According to the ‘Mozi (5/11b), ‘ the sun and moon appeared at the wrong time; hot and cold came in confusion ; and the five grains were scorched and died. Ghosts wailed ital and cranes shricked for ten nights and more . ..’. And the Guben ‘ian, which records the legends in the same pattern of transformations found in the Hanfeizi, reports that ‘ in the last year of Jie of Xia, the altar of earth split open ’.° That confusion on earth should be reflected in the heavens during the time of the evil Jie is not surprising, but why should there be disorder in the heavens when the virtuous Tang defeated the evil Jie ? Though no text questions that ‘Tang was the appropriate recipient of the mandate of Heaven, he had never- theless overthrown a hereditary ruler. This theme is made apparent when his lack of purity is contrasted with the pure virtue of Wu Guang and Bian Sui, worthies who, like Bo Yi and Shu Qi of the Zhou Dynasty and Xu You and. Shan Juan of the predynastic era, committed suicide at the mere suggestion that they accept rule to which they had no hereditary right or serve a ruler who had overthrown his king. #2 S00 The heir and the sage, 85-7. © Guben zhushu jinian jijiao dingbu, 16,534 SARAH ALLAN In the legend, Tang’s breach of virtue in overthrowing Jie is mediated by his cession to Wu Guang. But in a cynical transformation of the story, Hanfeizi (7/5a) made the issue of regicide explicit, ‘ Tang was afraid to be known as avaricious but also afraid that Wu Guang [to whom he had ceded the rule] would accept the rule and so he sent someone to tell him, “Tang killed his ruler and wishes to devolve the taint upon you, so he yielded the empire to you”. Wu Guang consequently threw himself into the river’. In the Zhwangzi (9/30a), Wu Guang also protested that ‘to cast aside one’s superior is not right ’¢ The Duke of Zhou was a critical figure in the legends surrounding the transfer of rule at the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty. Wen Wang established the virtue of the Zhou line and his son Wu Wang overthrew Zhou Xin, the last Shang ruler. Bo Yi and Shu Qi starved themselves to death rather than serve as a subject of the new king. The Duke of Zhou with the other two dukes mentioned in the Jin teng served as Wu Wang’s minister. After Wu Wang’s death, the Duke of Zhou was regent to his young son Cheng Wang. It is because of this regency in which the powerful and virtuous Duke of Zhou recognized the hereditary right of the son that the Duke is celebrated in late Zhou legend. Thus, when the story of Jin feng is recorded in the Shi ji, Wu Wang's illness is transformed into two illnesses, one that of Wu Wang taken from the Shang shu chapter and another that of Cheng Wang. In the second illness, Zhou Gong once again acted as a scapegoat, this time throwing his pared nails and cut hair into the river, a symbolic sacrifice by drowning. In sum, our text which is set at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty drew upon the Shang ritual tradition in which the king was a medium between the spirit world and his people. Primarily it is a myth of the first king who achieved the right to act as a medium by offering himself as a sacrifice to the High Lord to allay the curse of a drought. But it is set in the Western Zhou context. of dynastic change. The drought, like Wu Wang's illness at the beginning of the Zhou, is in this context, a sign that regieide has been committed ; the king offers himself to protect his people and in so doing achieves the appointment of the High Lord. Finally, the paradox of the virtuous ruler who commits regicide to achieve his new dynasty is an important theme in the legend of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods, but the omens by which Heaven signifies its will are not stressed in the Zhou philosophic texts ‘Soe The heir and the sage, 85-1. 48 Shi ji (Peking: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), Lu ahi jia, ahuan 35, pp. 1615-16. (This story does not appear in the Ben ji.)® BCDEF aD aa a nan mae eR BB Ba, DROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE B Bee & RAR he SM Boe TF TR me FS w 2m ne RE Cig Ait ie AR ae Go amon aR Sa aR a s a8 3 e =z tt @ ABCDEF mm BRR 8 8 ate fete nae thik KAARKAR seeeeR tettte REEER aie ath Be RR OR wu i) Bee & RHADAMSEREA EM FLMHRFR BRRBRRA + fa eR aE & th aR K AEKET BERR RRR t t-t-B ee RR w am ai am SRM S> wee HweoH w =e ay 2)536 SARAH ALLAN ® 8 = & E mew & z gee & te ROAMOwEERR A] e ROAMORSHBH FB 2 RFSFLOVBFTR B] a RFMFLGRBTB FBC DEF RecDEF z a @ e Bs 5 BG aR xi \ BH an aa ae a bw AR RR mm i 22 22 ee we x (o) a H RRRR a ae a eR Ah bth a gaan a Bo OMMEE x Boe me “) min i 2 PF ee z mmm m tor be t e 5B 6 eB 8 be Let ake : @e2 ee aon Ty «2 ae ® ~ ARRA ALLEL hbk ae o ® AK AK A nonin nepee a im a8 3 a CL aaa ie FORO HH FR 2 RR a 6) Eeieiade BARR 6 8 es ae HaRAEAE HEAR ARE : 2 2222 22 at taht tP aDROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE 537 = e a e co a z Raw & = eee & rs SADeRem Ee we ROAM RE 2 RFLP ETB e RECDEF a S (ay a a & * * a a oo a * ™ * a ep 1 eos ® ae Ss ny B 1 m moo N = * a #0 Fa * = ® F * b eR F B ee 6 (3) 4 : Ao) tt a 8 * FF = # vis Be F FF z % s ae e & & @ ® ke A AR OA w |e EEE * sa att tt it B eR am: mm mg ne oR & ae 8 aR F FFF we 6 a fe2ob nih ¥ ze ® -| 8 BE ® 5 a a538 ae a eecner 2 ul BAND! ee Ree a HHH a 8 wew & SARAH ALLAN ROAMOREORS F FOF Fi MTS aS 1818 OH) HON eon SS exe as) s a a z wew te RHADOMEMEM @ REM FLORETS ABCDEF % s B am mm ae BR wee m RRRAL BRBBD RREBA RRA amo BBR RRABH AanaE naene aa Re = EERE See # ——— aE AKAA BR teow BS Se HSN ah OB SOL WR Sb abo a a> lw 4eBo eHDROUGHT, HUMAN SACRIFICE Textual REFERENCES DIWANG SHIJI JICUN BEWLMA, XU ZONGYUAN GFT. ED. , PORK, LH, 1964, 65-66, SHUOYUAN i8#, 1/158, Bil, XUNZI SF, 19/15A-8, 8, SHANG SHU DA ZHUAN EAM 27148, HUAINANZI MF, =mal, LUSHI CHUNGTIU 82H, 9/38-4A, BR. SOUSHENTI Wre2, 18, HH EH, 1957, 88,67. LUN HENG ii, S/14A-15, Sa. GuO YU MM, 1715A, BBL, 974n, Moz! BF, 4/148, #RT. LUN YU Mi, 10798-8, RB, DAeH # WH BO SU OF Aa HO oF 8 a> 3 + om : a+ 4+ Bt ne * F Bahan (ay 8 few & 139 ROAD SMSO FMF MAB FB 3B BIE OH SH ov Bo FRE ROD MER REREAE me RE FF aan oe BAA ee WE AR WH sae FF ttt BBR +k Bh BE wee mans moe * 2k memmm AREMTTS E:EEX eee wes m2 F #ho B28 ed Seah HeHS * aay as)