The Art of Warning—Introduction (b): The Backstory

A year ago on Round and Square (7 August 2012)—Rural Religion in China-3

Two years ago on Round and Square (7 August 2011)—Hurtin' Country: Pocket Full of Gold

[a] Back RF

The next few posts will introduce a new series on Round and Square—one that is intimately linked to my large project called "The Emperor's Teacher" (the management book that will change the world. This series focuses intently on the ways in which Sima Guang's great historical work, the Comprehensive Mirror, "works." You've read the Art of War, perhaps. Now get ready for the main course—the Art of Warning.

Click here for other sections of this introduction to The Art of Warning.

Warning 1          Warning 2          Warning 3          Warning 4          Warning 5          Warning 6

The Backstory

Say the name “Sima Guang” and “childhood” to anyone in China and you will hear one of the most famous stories in all of Chinese history. Today, images of it dominate several distinctive postage stamps, and the first-grade reader retells it for every new generation. It goes like this. On a sunny day in 1026, precocious little Sima Guang, seven years old, sat reading classical historical documents in his father’s well-appointed study. He was the very picture of the diligent young scholar in a culture that admired lifelong learners.

[b] Group RF

As Sima studied, children played in the large courtyard surrounding the family compound. While little Sima Guang read from his texts, the children played a game much like “hide and seek” on the rolling terrain of the family’s grounds. Suddenly, cries of confusion came from the courtyard. Sima Guang’s biography in the Song Dynasty History tells what happened next.

A group of children was playing in the courtyard when one child climbed onto a large, decorative urn. His feet slipped and he fell into deep rainwater in the vessel. The other children fled in fear and confusion, but Sima Guang grasped a stone and broke the vessel, saving the child’s life.

To my mind, this passage shows that it was precisely the little reader—the gifted student of the classical histories—who was able to move directly from text to action, from clear knowledge of his books to making a difference in the world. Far from presenting Sima as a young hermit, it shows that only he was able to take action and save the life of the drowning child. The other, presumably less serious, children were unable to cope with the enormity of the problem and fled. The roughhousing youths likely had far more experience in the world (and with playing “hide and seek” in courtyard vessels) than the seven-year old bookworm in his father’s study. Yet only little Sima was able to bridge the fundamental gap between learning about the world and living in it. Only Sima put down his book, switched roles, and picked up a rock.

[c] Official RF

This story has everything to do with the big, historical, management book Sima Guang would later write.

***  ***

Let’s fast-forward. Forty years later, after passing the highest state examinations at a breathtakingly early age and moving quickly through the administrative hierarchy, Sima Guang found himself in another study—that of the emperor himself. The immensely talented Sima held the prestigious position of chief tutor to the emperor Yingzong (r. 1064-1067). It was a sure route to the premiership, the highest civilian office in the empire. His official task was to explain the lessons of the past to the emperor in a way that could help him function smoothly in difficult political and managerial situations.

In fact, he had been doing this for decades. Sima’s Song Dynasty History biography explains:

[d] Mature RF

 When Sima Guang was seven years old, he already appeared to be a highly accomplished individual. He would hear the classical histories recounted by the family tutor; he admired them, and explained their contents to his family, all the while highlighting the broad outlines and teachings for them. From that point onward, he was never without a book in his hands, to the point that he paid no attention to hunger or thirst, heat or cold.

Now, in 1066, a mature Sima Guang highlighted the broad outlines of the classical histories not for his family, but for the person known in China as the Son of Heaven. He distilled the lessons from China’s history as a way of showing how government should be managed in the present day. He had already spent a lifetime studying, and throughout that life had constantly sought to translate his learning into meaningful results in the world around him.

Sima was on the verge of putting all of that knowledge into practice in a position akin to that of the COO (Chief Operating Officer) of a large company. In this case, it was a very large company—the Song empire. A funny thing happened on Sima’s way to political power, though. In 1067, the emperor Yingzong died, and his eldest son, Shenzong (r. 1067-1085) succeeded him. Sima’s cautious message that it takes years to create peace and prosperity, but only moments to undo it, had appealed to the new emperor’s late father. He quickly learned that he would have a difficult time convincing the son of his perspective. A year later his influence was on the wane and his chief rival was given the premiership over him. Sima Guang, whose entire career had been marked by enormous success in all spheres, found himself on the outside, unable to convince his new ruler of his teachings. By 1070, he had used every argument he could muster, both publicly and privately, yet he had lost.

[e] Outside RF

So he retired to a city two hundred miles away and wrote a very long book.

I often say that the Comprehensive Mirror is a brilliant combination of painstaking scholarship and angry revenge. The tale of those fifteen years in the city of Luoyang would lead us far afield, but suffice it to say that Sima Guang sniffed the political winds even as he worked on his increasingly massive tome. And it was massive. One document notes that the draft version of just one-fifth of the book filled two rooms in his home. In a nutshell, Sima and his five assistants scoured over three hundred original historical sources, placed what they saw as the best elements into their new book, and then provided layers and layers of commentary from the time the events happened, from later pundits, and in their own words. It is these commentaries that constitute the managerial gold in the Comprehensive Mirror, because they create a series of linked case studies showing not only “what happened,” but how the various actors outlined, argued, and implemented the policies. It covers 1,362 years of policy-making, and hammers home several themes so powerfully that every careful reader has been influenced by them for almost a thousand years. 

Let’s turn to those lessons now.

Click here for other sections of this introduction to The Art of Warning.

Warning 1          Warning 2          Warning 3          Warning 4          Warning 5          Warning 6

[f] Lessons RF

Breaking the Vessel (11)—Bustin' Stuff

Click here to go to section one of "Breaking the Vessel."
Click below for the other "Breaking the Vessel" posts.
1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         10          11          12

[a] Tangut Art of War

[b] Parisian Art of War

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.

XI

Bustin' Stuff

[c] Remonstrance

Sima fled back to Luoyang. He was not comfortable with being called "prime minister," and was decidedly ambivalent about asserting political power after almost two decades in plush, self-imposed exile. Still, in the months that followed,  the empress dowager frequently sent requests for help or clarification. Sima was happy to provide a bit of advice during this tentative stage of political transition. The earliest—and arguably best—advice he gave came soon after he returned to Luoyang in the third lunar month of 1085. He urged the empress dowager to "open the paths of remonstrance." This is a theme that appears throughout the Comprehensive Mirror and is, in itself, the single-most powerful management technique that can be learned from the best management text ever written. 

[d] Remonstrance

Open the paths of remonstrance. One can go so far as to say that "remonstrance" is the "rock that breaks the vessel," saving the organization. I will be devoting an entire essay the length of "Breaking the Vessel" to that very subject this summer, but suffice it to say here, that remonstrance requires the "lower ranking" person in a hierarchy to offer advice and criticism to the "higher ranking" person. It is complicated, even when just two people are involved (child criticizes parent; student implores teacher to change). Imagine how challenging it is for an entire government.

[e] Disputation

Sima Guang argued that it is always necessary, and that organizations (and governments) that cannot accept critiques will fail. He and the empress dowager both felt that the reform program had failed, and Sima's "first step" was to open the channels of communication—from bottom to top. That is the key to remonstrance. Make sure the underling can challenge the boss, and the latent power of the organization will become clear. In a time of repressed and secretive bureaucracy, it was very good advice. Quite tame, even.

[f] Harmony

So far, so...not bad. The greater challenge was that the entire governmental machinery, even in the best of times, was not geared toward smooth operation of a system that empowers underlings. And these were hardly the best of times. It wasn't just Shenzong's death in 1085 that stifled the momentum of the reform program. Wang Anshi had only lasted in office until 1076 before retiring, frustrated and hemmed in, as he saw it. 

As anyone who studies politics and history knows, however, that the reform program wasn't just made up of Emperor Shenzong and Wang Anshi. The "reformers" were a strong and well-placed group of politically adept partisans who were able to effect a number of significant reforms in the 1070s. Some of the New Laws had become embedded over the course of a decade and a half, and were showing signs of "institutionalization." From the perspective of the equally adept partisans on the conservative side, there was barely time left to mute the reforms before they became a lasting part of Song dynasty policy. In short, there was urgency on both sides. The reformers—stung by setbacks to the program and then isolated by Shenzong's death—sought to hold on; the conservatives sought to undo the program before it was government. If this doesn't sound familiar to American readers, you need to read the papers or watch the news.

[g] Service

Still, "opening the paths of remonstrance" wouldn't cut it on its own, and Sima knew as much. The time had come for a decision, and he cast his lot with government service. He would work himself to death in high office.  The careful student of biography should take a deep breath here. Many of us would like to think that such a situation—the choice made freely, and without the pressure of obligation or financial need—might lead an individual toward selfless decision-making for the good of everyone. Many of us have read enough biography—or lived long enough to watch decades of news reports—that we know it doesn't always work this way. Enormous political power, debilitating ailments, and impending death can be a dangerous combination for politics. It was precisely this intersection of forces and opportunities that Sima Guang found midway through 1085.

[h] Wang man

He was in, and the unambiguously good advice with which he started suddenly began to get...well, ambiguous. Even "remonstrance" became problematic, because the conservative clique sought to use it to attack its enemies and re-people the bureaucracy with members from "their side." That was not all. While Sima had always been respectful of the emperor, and mostly civil with Wang Anshi—even through the harshest disappointments he felt in the 1070s—the tone changed abruptly, and viciously. Sima set up Wang (let us not forget that he had been out of office for close to a decade by this time) as the straw man in a series of attacks in public memorials meant, it appears, to "soften up" public opinion. These diatribes are accurately recorded by Sima's friend and colleague, Fan Zuyu, in the incomparable Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror. 

In them Wang is vilified, and Sima comes dangerously close to an attack on the now dead emperor:

He did what he wanted to do, without even the ruler being able to prevent him...He rewarded sycophants and shoved critics into the ditch...He was thoughtless and reckless...causing the bodies of myriad soldiers to litter the fields, abandoning equipment and personnel in faraway lands.

[i] Perspective

By the time he had written these attacks, it was as though Sima was drunk with power and revenge. He set himself up as the anti-Wang, the patron saint of an older, more sane, and more refined order. Historians have targeted a number of points at which it seems that Sima's long-sturdy clarity and rationality slipped away. I myself point to somewhere around June of 1085. One historian has called him, from this period on, "tragically quixotic." He was in obvious physical decline, and seemed to be losing his perspective along with his health. As the chief councilor to the empress dowager, he advocated a complete dismantling of the reform program. 

Even some of his allies from the long exile in Luoyang were baffled when he advocated overturning even some of the obviously "successful" reforms, and quietly urged him to check his actions. The overturning continued unabated, but it didn't get truly "ugly" until the calls for change were followed by what can only be called a purge of reformers. No amount of rhetoric could change the fact that the Song state was a vast bureaucracy, and political ideas only mattered to the extent that people could put them into practice. 

The purge took a year, and the Song government looked decidedly different by the early months of 1086. A few reformers (at least one of a quite sinister mien) hung on, but, even Sima's fellow conservatives could not hold the line of what was beginning to look like old-fashioned "payback" rather than "re-reform."

[j] Nuance

Even his closest allies were concerned. Many conservatives had begun to see the same kind of nuance and blending of old and new that is highlighted in any careful reading of the Comprehensive Mirror. Twelve months before, he was the consummate historian, interpreting the shadings of the past for readers who sought to understand just how complicated and subtle life could be—a world Sima had masterfully narrated without simple good and evil, hero and villain. Suddenly, though, Sima Guang had become the clunky, unsubtle bull-in-the-China-shop he had criticized and out-thought for the last sixty years, ever since he used his subtle apprehension of text and world to do the right thing for a drowning child.

It was as though Sima Guang had forgotten just about everything he had ever taught and written.

And then he died.

[k] Loss

The abolition of the reform program continued, and the next forty years of the dynasty's fortunes would be decidedly problematic. The reformers regained power in the 1090s, and purged their enemies. And while the factions struggled in Kaifeng, the northern forces to the east and west kept building their power. By 1126, they would sweep down, capture the imperial family, and drive the court southward, occupying the traditional heartland of Chinese power for the next two centuries. The rest of the Song dynasty (now called the "Southern Song" because its capital was based in the southern city of Hangzhou) was—at least in territorial terms—a fragment of the dynasty's original scope. For the next seven hundred years, China would live through long periods of dominance by "foreign" powers. Sima Guang, the historian, would have understood, and would likely have stated the importance of challenging periods and even negative examples for the study of history's management lessons.

[l] Sima Tomb

For his part, Sima Guang was mourned by both his allies and his opponents. He had managed, at least in the local popular imagination, to side with "the people," who lacked a voice in the large-scale movements of Chinese government policy. At least one—perhaps apocryphal—story has it that the whole country mourned, and that the streets of Kaifeng were so thick with mourners that the funeral could not proceed.[1]  A number of historians have described even the problematic last year of his life as one devoted completely to service, and a high point in the government of the era. It was better than what followed.

[m] Large life

The story was "read" by his supporters as one of exilic triumph. Sima Guang had moved, in that most optimistic of perspectives (happily ignorant of the intense factional backlashes that would cripple the Song dynasty government) from personal critiques to public remonstrance, followed by public rebuke and voluntary exile. At the last moment, he had "succeeded," ultimately in grasping the reigns of government and achieving vindication in the year before his death.

It was not an uncontested reading, to be sure, and both scholars and students have struggled to resolve the greatness of the Comprehensive Mirror with the challenges presented by his political actions in the year before his death. Is he to be admired, reviled, or something-in-between?

What can we make of a "messy" and very human picture of greatness? Can those words even go together?

[1] Songshi [336], 10,760

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

Monday, April 25

Managing History

Nine hundred years later, nothing is resolved. The book is iconic and the man is problematic. Whatever happened to easy, "heroic" narratives? Do we have to figure this out for ourselves? And how can we learn from the lessons of the past? What is a manager to do?

 

Breaking the Vessel (9)—Crafting a History

Click here to go to section one of "Breaking the Vessel."
Click below for the other "Breaking the Vessel" posts.
1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         10          11          12

[b ]孫子兵法

[a] 武蔵

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.

IX

Crafting a History

[c] Comfortable pillow (not log)

 So Sima Guang became one with the text, sleeping when he could on his log-pillow and channeling the vision for a monumental work of history and management that he had articulated before all of his plans fell apart with Yingzong’s death in 1067. In those heady days of almost-power in the mid-1060s, Sima produced a series of memorials to the throne (think of these as elaborate and literary policy memos of a kind unknown in government or business today, even in China). In one of those memorials, called “Five Principles,” Sima reviewed the complete span of Chinese history, noting that there had only been five centuries of stability during the past 1700 years. Those of us seeking management lessons in the great text might want ask the question: why would Sima Guang spend twenty years carefully explaining the ins-and-outs of government policy, knowing that fully two-thirds of the book would contain flawed examples of damaged states?

[d] Tang c. 700

[e] Five Dynasties (907-959)

No worries. Sima knew something that every good manager (and historian) has known. A lot can be learned from bad examples—sometimes more than any number of shining pictures of managerial perfection could ever teach. What is more, he understood that not even the periods of unity were unproblematic. All he had to do was look around. He was living during a time that he knew historians would consider a unified period. A fairly strong emperor was on the throne, and he ruled over a considerable territory—not as vast as the Tang (618-906) before it, but much larger than the little states in the north and south that made up the Five Dynasties (907-959), right before his time. For over a century, the Song dynasty government had achieved solid rule. Still, all it took was a peek under the “unity” façade to see that infighting was prevalent at court, and that what seemed like half the talent in the empire had moved away from the capital in a fit of pique. This unity stuff, he reasoned, might be overrated, at least when it comes to management lessons.

[f] Northern Song

And then there was the most convincing reason of all. If history is to be understood—if the flow and tensions of one period are to be understood in the next—the narrative should not be chopped up into little blocks that make sustained understanding impossible. That was how Sima saw the writing before his time—as so many slices of time (carved by the big turkey knife of dynastic history, whether the “dynasty” lasted 300 years or just thirty). Worse yet, these same hunks of time and space were hacked further into subsections dealing with powerful individuals, influential families, and scattered points of geography. You may recall what Sima had to say about that. Those “standard” histories were jumbles of verbiage, and even specialists struggled to find the story and the lessons. How could anyone garner lessons from them?

[g] History of the Southern Qi

Since my youth, I have perused the various histories; it appears that in the standard historical form, the text's characters are diffuse—although learned specialists read them time and again, they cannot understand them as a whole.  It is still more difficult for the emperor, having myriad daily concerns but desiring to know comprehensively the gains and losses of past events. 

But what if a talented scholar were to take all of those mangled bits of history and management, piecing them back together into a satisfying whole that created a sense of continuity for readers? That was the model that many scholars had shared for the great historical works of the long distant past—the era surrounding Confucius’s time, when philosophers were kings’ (advisors) and big ideas rioted upon the earth. In those days—already being transformed in the minds of Sima and his fellows into “mythistory”—history was written in chronicle form. Unlike Europe, the chronicle was seen as the very highest form of historical writing in China. Sima’s ambitions were great; he was going to write a chronicle, and it was going to change everything.

[h] History of the Northern Qi

I have always desired to compile, roughly following the form of the classical histories a chronological account entitled Comprehensive Records beginning with the Warring States and continuing to the Five Dynasties [a period of almost 1500 years].  It would select from books other than the standard histories, and concern the state's flourishing and decline, with its consequences for the people's good and ill fortune.  It will include those events that it is necessary for rulers to know—good can then be emulated, and evil shunned.

[i] Northern Song landscape

The emperors (both father and son, Yingzong and Shenzong) liked this idea very much. After Yingzong died, and even after Sima had left the capital for Luoyang, the new emperor provided him with support and more than a little pestering. Like the avid reader of a riveting book series—just waiting for the next one to be published—Shenzong was said to have sent express messengers repeatedly to Luoyang to ask how the work was coming along. This increased the pressure on Sima, and drove him to even more intense work, as well as nights spent tossing and turning on the log-pillow. Although there was still some time for friends, plum wine, and delicacies, he became painfully aware that he was under deadline, and accountable to two of the strictest bosses one could ever have—the emperor…and death.

[j] Northern Song vase

You see, Sima was getting up there. As the emperor sent his minions to call throughout the 1070s and into the 1080s, Sima was turning fifty-five, sixty, and then sixty-five. All the while, what was holding up our author was his desire for a kind of narrative perfection that only a talented student of management can understand. It was an intricate balance of detail and instruction, information and lesson. He was racing against the clock of life, but he thought always of his audience—the emperor and his highest officials. The entire project flows out of Sima Guang’s “teaching experience,” stretching back to his time as an imperial tutor in the capital. Blending a chronicle of historical events with multilayered commentary, Sima Guang sought to create a book capable of use by perceptive sovereigns in the present and future, not merely a recitation of events in a long history. He sought to teach imperial management through the lessons of more than ten centuries of history. No one had ever achieved this before—not even close.

[k] Comprehensive Mirror revisions

While his assistants compiled texts from over 300 sources from earlier Chinese history, he managed the project and provided guidance about his goals. When his assistants finally completed the “long draft,” however, the work was all—or mostly—his alone (a compatriot and scholar, Fan Zuyu, remained an extraordinary help throughout the process). This was no simple task of “light revision”—pen in hand, correcting typos. It was an ocean of work. One small anecdote should give a sense of the challenge he faced in making a book that leaders would read and use for centuries. Sima edited the “long draft” of the Tang dynasty sections from 600 “chapters” (twice as long as the entire Comprehensive Mirror…or bordering on 20,000 pages) to eighty. Those 600 chapters had filled two rooms in his home in Luoyang. It required all of the intellectual talents that Sima had cultivated from the time he was a studious child. It was exhausting, and required all of his mental energy to keep the narrative focus on the lessons of the past and the instruction of later rulers. Like a fine craftsman, he measured twice, and cut once, achieving in the process a set of teachings that would be read and used by leaders from the current emperor to even the Hunan province peasant son who would “rule” China in the twentieth century.

[l] Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling

And then he was done. Sima Guang submitted the completed Comprehensive Mirror to the throne in 1085, and wrote in the accompanying memorial that he had sapped all of his intellectual strength in compiling it. It was a work of such prodigious breadth and depth that many of his predecessors had only dreamed of compiling anything like it, so burdened were they by official positions in their later years. When it was finished, it covered 1,362 years of China’s past, from 403 BCE to CE 959—right up to the beginning of Sima’s own dynasty (which no sensible Chinese history would cover, since it was still considered “politics,” and not yet “history”). The Comprehensive Mirror’s 294 “chapters” are a powerful combination of event, commentary, and enormous swaths of material quoted from over three hundred fragmented sources, many of which have since been lost. It is the world’s greatest management book, a masterful narrative showing the workings of administration at the highest level—a text that would influence China’s leaders right down to the present. It is a work that has endured.

[m] Northern Song imperial tombs

As for Sima, enduring was the last thing on his mind in January of 1085. He was old and exhausted, and might as well have imagined a Shenzong/Luoyang twist on the words of Prospero, six hundred years and half a world away:

Sir, I invite your Highness and your train

To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest

For this one night; which, part of it, I’ll waste

With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it

Go quick away—the story of my life,

And the particular accidents gone by

Since I came to this isle…

…And thence retire me to my Milan, where

Every third thought shall be my grave.[1]

The trail had grown cold; Sima was done.

And then everything changed…again.

[1] The Tempest V.i, 300-311

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

Monday, April 18

Everything changed, and Sima used his flagging strength to pick up a big rock, and…

Stay tuned.