Breaking the Vessel (10)—Reviewing Plans

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[a] Dragon art

[b] Machiavelli's art

This month's main entries (entitled “Breaking the Vessel”) will chronicle an author and a book—Sima Guang (1019-1086) and the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling, which was submitted to the (Northern) Song dynasty throne in what we in the West call January of 1085. I like to say that this book is the missing piece in management education, during which MBA students read carefully through translations of the Art of War and then seem to think that they understand Chinese management thought. (Good luck with that, pardner). I like to say that Sunzi (Sun-tzu) is “lunch” and the Comprehensive Mirror is “what comes next—it’s what’s for supper.”  It is essential reading for everyone at any level of management—from parent and foreman to ruler of the world (and everything in between). The problem is that it is 10,000 pages long (I am not kidding) and is in Chinese—“medieval” Chinese, at that. That is where I come in. I want to help you. 

Welcome. 歡迎. I have been waiting for you.

X

Reviewing Plans

[c] Early review

The early reviews, as we say in today's publishing 'biz, were excellent. One of the earliest of them was written almost as the project was getting underway, but it set such a positive tone for the entire work—and its reputation throughout Chinese history—that it is worth pondering. The young Emperor Shenzong, having just taken the throne for himself after his father's death, read the initial manuscript sections that had so pleased his father and decided to give the work a new title (emperors get to do things like that). Instead of Sima Guang's modest working title of Comprehensive Records (通志), Shenzong bequeathed on it the florid alliteration of Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling (資治通鑑).

Let's see what Shenzong had to say about the managerial thought of the manager he was about to pass over for promotion. In this preface to the text, Shenzong suggested that the book was to be used, writing that it should be "presented daily for study."

The Book of Poetry, The Book of History, and Spring and Autumn Annals are all great works of history that clarify the traces of rise and decline, contain the correct Way of early kings, and cast a reflection of warning upon later ages...

This is formidable opening. Sima's work is being put in the context of fine company, all masterworks included in the roll of Chinese classics (經). It also appears that the emperor "got it," and that he saw precisely what was different in this chronicle from the confused narratives of the dynastic histories that Sima had criticized before undertaking the project. Shenzong has much more to say, however.

[d] Early plan

Here recorded are enlightened rulers and beneficent ministers mutually encouraging the way of rule, essential teachings of critical discussions, good regulation of reward and punishment, the mutual relationship between heaven and man, the underpinnings of danger and prosperity, flourishing and decline, the effect of models of profit and loss, the strategic plans of skillful commanders, and the orthodox teachings of upright officials.  

[e] Bored room

If you can see through the imperial (and heavily Confucian) prism, it should not be difficult to see in the lines above...a management book. Look at them again, and think back to The Fifth Discipline and From Good to Great. Critical discussions (presented in what we might almost call a "case study" format), regulation of incentives, the inherent risks in any large scale operation, success and failure, profit and loss (no "translation" needed there), and strategic plans. Just a little tweaking of the thousand year-old imperial wording shows a lively engagement with the kinds of ideas that every leader in every era has understood.  Emperor Shenzong understood it in 1068; Mao Zedong understood it in the mid-1930s. Shenzong continues:

 

[All of the above] is judged in light of heterodoxy and orthodoxy and highlighted with reference to governing and anarchy; the profound structure of assenting memorials and the deep and penetrating righteousness of critical remonstrance are presented skillfully and completely therein...The Book of Poetry states, "The mirror of Shang is not distant; it rests in the Xia rulers' age."  Therefore I bestow the title Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling on this text, so as to make known my intentions thereby.[1]

[f] —doxy

Shenzong's conclusion cements it for the managerial reader. After a little statement about orthodoxy (which, let us not forget, was important to Shenzong and his flock), he reaches the heart of the managerial message. He notes the text's "profound" use of memorials and remonstrance, topics that reach to the heart of a serious leadership message, as we will see in subsequent essays. He then concludes with another "framing" quotation from a great classic and changes the earlier title, which conveys a sense of "records of administration" to the resonatingly managerial title that stresses the uses to which it can and should be put by leaders.

[g] Songyang academia

Seventeen years later, Sima Guang had a whole book to go along with Shenzong's awe-inspiring preface. I could quote at length from what his peers—both allies and opponents—said of the text, but you probably can sense it already from the positive glow of two reformers, Shenzong and Mao, nine hundred years apart. He did good, as we say back home, but he didn't have much left in the tank. He was heading for that great archive in the sky.

And then Shenzong died.

[h] Dragon heirs

The death of the emperor caused quite a stir in the capital, as you might guess. It usually does. He had been ailing for some time, and had chosen his eight year-old son as heir apparent. This, too, created a stir. The messy politics of "regency" is not our concern here, but it meant that the young emperor would have someone making decisions on his behalf for up to a decade. The new regent would be Shenzong's mother, the new emperor's grandmother. For our purposes, however, it is much easier to see a clearer connection. The woman who would be the dowager empress Xuanren had been the principal wife (empress) of Emperor Yingzong—he of solid devotion to his teacher and advisor, Sima Guang, until his death in 1067. Xuanren thought just as highly of Sima Guang as had her imperial husband. It was not long before she began sending invitations for Sima to visit Kaifeng.

[i] Pensive

Sima Guang remained in Luoyang, but was at length persuaded to return to the capital to pay respects to the deceased emperor. It was hard to avoid, since staying put had the potential to make him look petty. So he went, riding, we are told, a fine horse. The best source for this period, the Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror written by Sima's most trusted associate, Fan Zuyu, puts it colorfully. Let us not forget that Sima Guang was a rock star, a major public figure with a powerful reputation at least in the territories where the Yellow River flowed. Apparently alerted in advance of Sima's arrival, a crowd of thousands awaited him near the palace gates. When he arrived (it is said) several palace guards addressed him as "Prime Minister Sima." There was shouting and thronging. Tumult.

"Please do not go back to Luoyang," they shouted; "stay here and help the emperor revive the people!" Remember, now, that Sima was sixty-six years old, exhausted from his historiographical labors, and had just taken a trip of over a hundred miles during a time of mourning. What comes next makes it hard not to have some compassion for him. He was tired, ambivalent, and maybe a little scared.

Alarmed by the crowds and the adulation, he rushed back to Luoyang.[2]

[j] Longmen heterodoxy

If this were the end, it would make a nice documentary. Very genial; quite touching, really. The once-powerful official, worn thin by his labors, rushes back to safety and relative seclusion. Fade to black; roll the credits. But it is not quite the end, and Sima would live eighteen more months. Usually historians should be chastised for writing this way (their subjects don't know the future, and historians shouldn't "telegraph" it too much). In this case, though, Sima knew. His writings and his peers' assessments made clear that he knew quite well that this was about to be the last rodeo. It was just a matter of where he was going to spend it—in the quiet, peony pavilions of Luoyang or the faction-ridden capital in Kaifeng.

[j] Light reading

Let me put it another way. His choice was a difficult one. Was he going to drift off into reveries of Chinese philosophy? He had said at one point that if he had more time, he would study deeply the patterns of the Yijing (I-ching). Well, now he had the time. On the other hand, as several of his compatriots told him, he had the opportunity to put his ways into practice—to manage in the Big Show, and with the added credibility of a distinguished author whose book was already famous throughout the empire. It is clear that he had been thinking about "leadership issues" for decades (just take another look at Shenzong's preface, above, if you have any doubts). Was he going to wax philosophical or join the fray?

[1] Comprehensive Mirror, 33-34.
[2] Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror, 8465.

Breaking the Vessel 1         Breaking the Vessel 2         Breaking the Vessel 3         Breaking the Vessel 4

Breaking the Vessel 5         Breaking the Vessel 6         Breaking the Vessel 7         Breaking the Vessel 8

Breaking the Vessel 9         Breaking the Vessel 10       Breaking the Vessel 11       Breaking the Vessel 12

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Friday, April 22

Bustin' Stuff

It all started quite inconspicuously. We'll take a look at Sima's first steps into policy debates, followed by a full-fledged trashin' of the reform program of his rivals. And then he died.  We are left to figure out what it all means.

Breaking the Vessel (8)—Luoyang Longing

Click here to go to section one of "Breaking the Vessel."
Click below for the other "Breaking the Vessel" posts.
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 Click here for pronunciation help with "Luoyang."
April 2011

[b] Artisans of war

[a] Sunzi bingfa

This month's main entries (entitled “Breaking the Vessel”) will chronicle an author and a book—Sima Guang (1019-1086) and the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling, which was submitted to the (Northern) Song dynasty throne in what we in the West call January of 1085. I like to say that this book is the missing piece in management education, during which MBA students read carefully through translations of the Art of War and then seem to think that they understand Chinese management thought. (Good luck with that, pardner). I like to say that Sunzi (Sun-tzu) is “lunch” and the Comprehensive Mirror is “what comes next—it’s what’s for supper.”  It is essential reading for everyone at any level of management—from parent and foreman to ruler of the world (and everything in between). The problem is that it is 10,000 pages long (I am not kidding) and is in Chinese—“medieval” Chinese, at that. That is where I come in. I want to help you. 
Welcome. 歡迎. I have been waiting for you.

VIII

Luoyang Longing

[c] Capital, many times

Sima Guang’s strategy “worked,” but it required enormous patience and was filled with uncertainty. You see, only historians “know the future” of their subjects, and to be human is to have little idea how things will work out. Sima was a historian, of course, but he didn't know what his own future would hold. He left the capital at the age of fifty, not knowing if he would ever return. As Wang Anshi and Emperor Shenzong instituted their ambitious reform program, Sima returned to a life of reading, writing, and reflecting. He had a book to write. His afternoons in the 1070s and 1080s were not very different from those he spent in the 1020s and 1030s—with a book in his hands that (I sometimes think) he was ready to exchange at any moment for the rock that would destroy the reform program of his rival. From the perspective of Sima and his admirers, the “saving” that would take place was not that different from the one achieved at home as a young child. This time, as his poem hints, he would save the state.

For now, he would bide his time. In any case, he had work to do. Indeed, Sima Guang’s self-imposed exile in Luoyang over a fifteen-year period enabled him to remain clear of the most intense infighting of his day, and to complete the Comprehensive Mirror. He studied hundreds of historical works written many centuries before his time, and was even said to have invented a peculiar kind of log-pillow that ensured he would not get too much rest before returning to his task. This should not surprise anyone. It should already be apparent that Sima was anything if not driven.

[e] Storied capital

Still, he also was hardly alone in this storied city on the river. Many of the great intellectual and political figures of the day chose to seek refuge in the same area, and the city quickly became a thriving center for reactionary (I use the word in its precise sense) political and social life. It was a place of shelter, respite, and startling intellectual production. This is not the picture of a lone genius, reading in the quiet of his study while people of lesser abilities played all about him. No, Sima was surrounded by genius in Luoyang—a city that lacked nothing in comparison to, say, eighteenth century Edinburgh...or even Paris. Sima could easily have given Diderot a run for his money. Let us call it the Luoyang Enlightenment (and this playful title of mine has layers of nuance that we have not even begun to approach…yet).

[f] Ouyang Xiu, 1007-1072

That decade and a half in the 1070s and 1080s was a time of creation for some of the very best essays, poetry, treatises, and historical writing in all of Chinese history—rivaled by only a few comparable periods in a 3,000-year tradition of writing and scholarship. Among dozens of formidable scholars were the venerable essayist and historian Ouyang Xiu, the cosmologist Shao Yong, the natural philosopher Shen Kuo, and a formidable pair of…pairs of fraternal kin—the Cheng brothers (Hao and Yi) and the Su brothers (Che and Shi—the later already becoming known then as one of China’s greatest poets). 

For a comparison, cross time and space and think of the present. It was as though a large cross-section of great American minds (all agreeing on politics, more or less, and forming a kind of “think tank”) came together in Philadelphia (the ancient capital) for more than a decade of writing, repartee, painting, eating dainties, and drinking (in no particular order). Except that Luoyang was more beautiful.

[g] A fanciful Bo Juyi (772-846)

Luoyang was a city of endless gardens and flowers, a place with a rich veneer of shared memory—with echoes of the Duke of Zhou two millennia earlier and of the poet Bo Juyi’s “semi-retirement” amidst political controversy in the waning years of the Tang dynasty (618-906).  The varied historical sources for the late-eleventh century reveal a consciousness on the part of writers that they were composing in the literary shadow of the past. Even now, many centuries later, the documents give off a palpable self-consciousness. We sense that they knew they were forming another formidable layer of tradition on a place and time that would be remembered throughout history. And they were right. This kind of gathering of ideas only comes along two, three times in a millennium. They sensed this blossoming, and grabbed its fecund opportunities.

[h] Taking the Luoyang view of history

We know a great deal about these matters today because the scholars left thousands of writings, from “random jottings” and essays to some of the finest poetry of the age—a peculiar kind of rhyming narrative that mixed song and verse in sometimes startling ways. These lyrics rarely celebrated Luoyang’s temples, gardens, and grottoes as mere places. They were, rather, invoked as places filled with associations with those who had written about them many centuries earlier. It wasn’t just that a poet might admire a particular vista and set it to words in his own verse. Instead, he wrote of admiring the same scene that was admired by generations of famous writers and travelers. Luoyang was like that. Even today, cab drivers will acknowledge Ouyang and the Su brothers, Sima and the Cheng brothers as another of the many layers of hometown heroes. They will also tell you that Luoyang was the capital of twelve different dynasties (although this figure is somewhat challenged in terms of scale). No dynasty was housed in Luoyang in the eleventh century but, to this day, the Northern Song “anti-capital” has figured prominently in Chinese history.

[i] Luoyang Lushness

These same, rich source collections also speak of the pleasure of strolls through the city, finding out-of-the-way temples, or contemplating magnificent gardens. The “elder statesman” Fu Bi’s garden was a marvel among them, and this prompted one writer to note that “the man who had ordered the affairs of the empire now controlled even more absolutely the plan of his garden."[1]  Continuing with the varied temples, caves, and carvings, one could go on almost endlessly about the fascination Luoyang, and a life of relative leisure, held for its “exiled” inhabitants after 1070. 

Luoyang indeed represented for many officials a freedom from the burdens of office, and even from the constraints of a somewhat stern literati tradition.  The city’s Buddhist temples were prominent features, and many wrote of them—as well as the monasteries, intricate caves, and surrounding central “sacred” mountain—in what could be called a literature of enthrallment regarding their environment.  Many scholars, too, pursued studies of Daoist and other works that, several decades earlier, would have been regarded as unscholarly, at best, and heterodox, worst.

[j] Sima's sabbatical

But the city—and time spent drinking, painting, and conversing among friends—represented a problem for many exiles. As much as it was an opportunity for freedom from official life, it also blocked them from the positions to which they had spent their entire careers aspiring.  For older officials such as Fu Bi (he of advanced years and the capacious garden), Luoyang represented a somewhat bittersweet retirement after a lifetime of government service. For many younger officials, though, its beauty masked the painful reality of political ambitions extinguished in mid-career. This was Sima Guang’s situation, and no amount of log-sleeping and text editing could change the longing he felt for the rush of deadlines, budgets, flow-charts, and management with consequences. Sima channeled that frustration, and the Comprehensive Mirror would lay the foundation for those who—reading it in the future (perhaps on the back of a donkey)—would prepare to rule.

Sima wanted to advise the ruler, but instead, of necessity, he wrote. To use a Daoist phrase more current at the time in Luoyang than the strict, Confucian setting of the capital in Kaifeng, he became “one with the history.” A poem by Su Shi—composed just after he and others of the Luoyang group had returned to the capital in the mid-1080s—might as well have summed up the focus of those “on leave” for fifteen years—they became their work.

[k] Su Shi, "enjoying the moment"

When Yu Ke painted bamboo

He only perceived bamboo—never people

Do I mean he saw no people?

So enthralled that he forgot even himself

He became the bamboo

Perpetually growing new fibers

The great and playful thinker Zhuangzi is no more

Who, then, can begin to grasp his uncanny ability?

[1] Michael Freeman, "Lo-yang and the Opposition to Wang An-shih: The Rise of Confucian Conservatism" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1973), 38.

Breaking the Vessel 1         Breaking the Vessel 2         Breaking the Vessel 3         Breaking the Vessel 4

Breaking the Vessel 5         Breaking the Vessel 6         Breaking the Vessel 7         Breaking the Vessel 8

Breaking the Vessel 9         Breaking the Vessel 10       Breaking the Vessel 11       Breaking the Vessel 12

NEXT

(Wednesday, April 13)

Being the Text; Crafting a History

Sima Guang had work to do, and an agenda to keep. Luoyang was beautiful (as we have seen), but he didn't create almost three hundred chapters (and thousands of pages) by painting peonies and drinking plum wine. Don't forget the log pillow...or his lingering resentment. Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at just what went into creating the greatest management book of all time—one that every student should read in every business school in the world. Sima wouldn't have had it any other way, and Mao probably wouldn't, either.