V. Corroboration from the Masters

Having spoken of a vision shared by all the masters, it is time to call the witnesses. The first witness: Master Zhuang, of the Daoist school.

Some may suppose that talk of order and differentiation of positions is a Confucian predilection, and that Daoists, who exalt nature and the equalization of things, would never speak in such terms. Quite the contrary. In the Tiandao ("The Way of Heaven") chapter of the Zhuangzi, there is a passage that reads almost like a commentary on this very chapter of the Xi Ci:

Exalted and lowly, before and after — these are the movements of Heaven and Earth. Therefore the sage takes his images from them. Heaven exalted, Earth lowly — these are the positions of the spirits. Spring and summer come first, autumn and winter come after — this is the sequence of the four seasons. The myriad things transform and grow; buds and sprouts take their shapes — this is the gradient of flourishing and decline, the flow of transformation.

Exalted-and-lowly, before-and-after: these are the inherent workings of Heaven and Earth, and so the sage models himself upon them. Heaven is exalted, Earth is lowly — these are the positions of the spirits. Spring and summer precede, autumn and winter follow — this is the sequence of the four seasons. Note how Master Zhuang places "Heaven exalted, Earth lowly" in parallel with "spring and summer first, autumn and winter after" — this juxtaposition makes the nature of zun and bei as transparent as can be. Spring and summer are listed before autumn and winter — does that make spring and summer "noble" and autumn and winter "base"$18 Of course not. No one would say that autumn is oppressed by spring, or that winter is beneath summer's dignity; the sequence of the four seasons is merely sequence, not hierarchy. By the same token, "Heaven exalted, Earth lowly" is merely position, not ranking. Master Zhuang uses the four seasons as guarantors for the two characters zun and bei: there is no injustice here, just as there is no injustice in the turning of the seasons. A thinker who carried the "equalization of things" to its furthest reach — who would even equalize life and death in his contemplation — still serenely says, "Exalted and lowly, before and after — these are the movements of Heaven and Earth." Clearly, when pre-Qin people read these four characters, what they read was the natural articulation of the world, not the seating chart of power.

The second witness is the Yueji (Record of Music) of the Confucian school. The Yueji contains a passage that overlaps with this chapter of the Xi Ci almost line for line: "Heaven exalted, Earth lowly — thus ruler and minister are established. The low and the high are arrayed — thus the noble and the humble find their places." The only change is from "Qian and Kun" to "ruler and minister." Which text came first is a matter of age-old scholarly debate, and we need not adjudicate it. What matters is the divide exposed by that single substitution. The Xi Ci says "Qian and Kun are established," speaking of the positioning of two fundamental cosmic forces — cosmology. The Yueji says "ruler and minister are established," already transposing the order of Heaven and Earth onto the political order of human society. We must be honest: from the pre-Qin era onward, these four characters "Heaven exalted, Earth lowly" were repeatedly appropriated to justify human hierarchies — ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife were routinely hitched to them. The later the age, the heavier the hitching. This tendency toward abuse is undeniable; the discomfort people feel before the word "hierarchy" is largely directed at this line of abuse, and that discomfort is healthy. But the abuses should be charged to the abuses, not to the source. As far as this chapter of the Xi Ci is concerned, the text speaks throughout of Heaven and Earth, movement and stillness, the firm and the yielding, thunder and lightning, wind and rain, sun and moon, cold and heat — not a single character mentions ruler and minister, not a single character speaks of governance. And the Yueji itself does not speak only of order without harmony; its famous dictum reads: "Music is the harmony of Heaven and Earth; ritual is the order of Heaven and Earth. Through harmony, the hundred things all transform; through order, the myriad things are all distinguished." Ritual is order; music is harmony. Order without harmony and the world becomes a barracks. Therefore the ancient kings who instituted rites always composed music alongside them, so that people within their differentiated stations would love and be close to one another. Order and harmony are like bone and blood; a body with only bone is a skeleton. The pre-Qin teaching of ritual and music was always a body complete in both bone and blood.

The third witness: Master Meng. If the pre-Qin Confucians spoke of "position" and "station," what kind of position and station did they mean$19 In the Lunyu (Analerta), Duke Jing of Qi asked about governance, and the Master answered in eight characters: "Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son" (jun jun, chen chen, fu fu, zi zi). Examine the grammar: the ruler should behave as a ruler should; the minister should behave as a minister should; the father should behave as a father should; the son should behave as a son should. Every position is a set of demands — and the demands are upon whoever holds that position. When the ruler fails to be a proper ruler, only then does the minister fail to be a proper minister. The person this framework constrains first is precisely the one in the highest position. Here, position is not the credential of privilege but the name of responsibility; to occupy a position without fulfilling its duties — the higher the position, the graver the offense. Master Meng went even further. In Mencius, Gongsun Chou II, he refused a royal summons and said something of great moral backbone: "Under Heaven there are three things universally honored (da zun): rank is one, age is one, virtue is one. At court, nothing ranks above title; in the village, nothing ranks above age; in assisting the age and shepherding the people, nothing ranks above virtue. How can one who possesses only one of these presume to slight the other two$20" Three kinds of "honor" are universally recognized in the world: rank, seniority, and virtue. At court, rank prevails; in the community, age prevails; in the work of aiding the world and guiding the people, virtue prevails. A king possesses only rank — how dare he use that one thing to look down upon virtue and seniority$21 Look: in Master Meng's view, zun (honor) is not a single peak but three peaks standing side by side; the honor of political power counts for nothing once one steps outside the court gates. A commoner can be honored above a sovereign in virtue — a conception of zun and bei like this, far from bolstering a hierarchy of power, is plainly drawing boundaries around power.

What the three witnesses say, taken together: the Daoists say that exalted-and-lowly is like the four seasons, the natural order; the Yueji says that order must be tempered by harmony to constitute true ritual and music; Master Meng says that among the three forms of honor, virtue outranks title. "Heaven exalted, Earth lowly" in the pre-Qin context hangs beneath just such a sky of moral philosophy. It can be — and historically was — dragged down to serve as the signboard of a caste system; it was dragged thus for two thousand years. But in its own sky, it was always a different star.