Lectures (3d)—Scholarship

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

[a] Managed pasts RF

Beloit College Mortar Board

26 October 2011
Part Four of Five

I had a whole passel of questions now that I was finding my own way with the Comprehensive Mirror, the book that started me down the path to scholarship. Only a few of them, I was beginning to notice, had been anticipated by scholars in either China or the West. It started with "Why are Liu Bei (good!) and Cao Cao (bad!) treated so differently, even humanely (with positive qualities and flaws side-by-side) in Sima Guang's text? It moved on to the very moment when my entire academic career was set. I regard this as the continental divide in my life between "student" and "scholar." And, before we go any further, let me emphasize that no particularly "lofty" qualities should be associated with the latter. It is just what we do when we move down the path of learning. It happens to everyone who keeps learning—a little like crossing the street...and never being able to turn back.

Thomas Wolfe might have had this part right, at least if "home" means "naming the capitals."

[b] All too RF

And just to reinforce the message, I will admit to deep misunderstanding of this matter when I was in college. During my first year, a political science professor referred to himself as an "intellectual." Even then, I understood completely that he meant that he got paid to think, write, and teach. Still, I could not believe that someone would say such a thing. Even though I knew it to be as matter-of-fact as the "crossing the street" example, above, I was scandalized. It was, to my mind, a little like referring to oneself as "pretty" or "smart" or "striking." I could not get my newly post-adolescent head around the idea that "intellectuals" and "scholars" are just people in a certain line of work. Matter-of-fact. Punch the ol' time clock and start readin'. It didn't make sense to my fiercely (and naively) democratic way of thinking. For me, the professor who called himself "an intellectual" was a little like Napoleon crowning himself emperor. Immodest.

Well, I got over it. You should, too. Being a "scholar" is just a particular habitus in the field of knowledge production. Ask Pierre Bourdieu, a rural French boy who just happened to spend his life being a "scholar," even as he reviled colleagues who thought they were particularly special for researching and writing.

O.k., now that we are over that, let's get back to the book. I was told that the Comprehensive Mirror was one of the world's great works of history, even one of the first truly "objective" historical narratives. One article mentioned that it was "scientific." Even then, I had enough background to prick my ears and be at least a little wary. "Objective?"..."Scientific?...History? You can't be serious とおもいました.* Nonetheless, I had no idea what would come next. I opened the book.

[c] Portentous RF

And then I saw the dragon.

Yes, there it was—a dragon writhing in a rural well. On the pages of one of the world's greatest historical texts, a dragon lay—constricted and frustrated—in a well outside of Ningling. The emperor "identified" with it, feeling that it spoke to his own imperial frustrations.

Every significant path that my career has taken comes back to this point. What were dragons, of all things, doing on the pages of one of the world's greatest histories? And it was not only once (as I would learn) and not only dragons. The pages of this monumental historical narrative are filled with hail as large as hens' eggs, mysterious portents, and leaping white fish. If only, by chance, I had turned to a passage on troop movements during a famous battle (also in the text, I should note), I might have missed all of this and been an untiring "objectivisit," tracing the battle lines of the third century. This path not taken would have been not unlike the one traveled by a senior scholar in Chinese studies who, during my first presentation of these matters to a scholarly audience (the Association for Asian Studies Conference in 1991), asked: 

Is it not possible that the text actually refers to a very large salamander?

[d] Business booking RF

I mangled my answer, not finding it possible to believe (even then) that a great scholar would cling so tightly to the hanging ladder of "reality," fearing even a little metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche...or even a spot of allusion. Because, by that time, I had already spent several years (since my first dragon-sighting...and citing), I had forgotten that much of the world is not terribly comfortable with the realms of "reality" and "fantastical" commingling like waste paper and empty plastic bottles. That dragon set my scholarly path, and all of my questions have emerged, in one way or another, from asking what the heck it was doing there (in the text, if not necessarily the well).

From there, it was a short, two-decade ride to the interpretation of the same text—the Comprehensive Mirror—as a work of eleventh century managerial literature. This was even less welcome among my scholarly peers. Let me assure you that in "scholarly" circles the interpretation of dragons, hens' eggs, and leaping white fish is a good deal more welcome than someone who calls a magisterial work of historical writing a work of management. What? Is Rob LaFleur saying that the Comprehensive Mirror was a business book—a complex combination, in classical Chinese, of The Fifth Discipline, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Well, yes. That is what he is saying.

It had occurred to me as I spent more and more time (years, really) with this 10,000 page text that many of my colleagues have misinterpreted it, and often quite badly at that. It began to occur to me that the misapprehension had a great deal to do with antiquated and somewhat hieratic notions of what is scholarly—(the "record of the past")—and what is merely demotic (management and self-help). But it did not take much research (I had discovered this even reading the translation in college, twenty-five years ago) to realize that Sima Guang and his contemporaries understood that the record of the past and management were all of a piece. Why did my peers fail to notice this? I suspect that it is because many can't quite see how the same book might be studied in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Harvard Business Review...or even in National Geographic and Forbes.

[e] Cross RF

Scholarship is wide-ranging and ever-changing. It is also just something that learners do. They can't help it. They "cross the street" one day by asking just one more question that changes everything. Suddenly, the entire world looks different, and they can't find their way back to "just learning"—merely memorizing the capitals in the vast world of information—ever again.

As for me, I crossed that metaphorical street—arm in epidermal scale—with a coiled dragon...many, many years ago.

NEXT
We'll wrap things up by returning to questions of scholarship as new knowledge and as a way of life.

*I thought to myself.

Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

Breaking the Vessel (10)—Reviewing Plans

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] 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

NEXT

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.