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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2015
There is no more salient figure in early Chinese literature than Kongzi and yet he remains a figure about whose beginnings we know very little. The present essay explores this paradox of bibliographic salience and biographic silence through an in-depth examination of the principal narratives of the Kongzi legend from the Shiji and the Kongzi jiayu, paying particular attention to the language of their respective accounts of the birth of the sage. Finding a distinct lack of fit between the form and content of these these stories, I propose a narrative alternative drawn from the early Han weishu accounts of Kongzi's beginnings. Finding in this alternative a more coherent fit between language and narrative structure as well as recurrent themes such as divine visitation, infertility, jiaomei sacrifice, and cranial disfigurement, vestiges of which are also found in the accounts of Wang Su and Sima Qian, the essay suggests that the weishu texts preserve a fuller popular legend of fertility sacrifice by the childless coordinated with the winter solstice also present in the very name Kongzi and resonating with the charter myth of the Zhou, “Sheng min.” The evident implication of this finding is that the historicity of Kongzi is arguable. The name is more like a mythic literary fiction and probably began, as did that of Hou Qi, as a symbolic deity that was made historical in one of its many Warring States incarnations, that one transmitted to us exclusively through the normative biographical tradition.
中國文學中最爲著名的人物莫過於孔子.可是關於他的出身家世我們知道得微乎其微.本文詳細考查了《史記》、《孔子家語》以及漢朝緯書中有關孔子出生的故事.筆者認爲漢朝的緯書對婦人無子而於冬至郊楳״這一通俗傳說保留得最爲完整.故事中不但直接提到孔子的名子,從其事跡亦可以隱約看到《大雅》״生民״神話的遺跡.本文的結論是孔子的歷史眞實性是大可爭議的.這一名子很可能與周的始祖后稷一樣,最先亦是源於神話傳說,到了戰國時期才演化成歷史人物.並如眞實的歷史人物一樣被地寫入了傳記.此後人們所見到的便無不是這一經過歷史化了的孔子了.
1 . The narrative of events of summer in the tenth year of Ding Gong provides an exemplary portrait of Kong Qiu as adjudicator of the proper conduct of the meng 盟 rite. See Bojun, Yang 楊伯峻, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan 春秋左傳注, 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 4, 1578–1579Google Scholar.
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3. Lunyu zhusu 論語注疏 (Shisanjing zhusu ed.), 77.2.
4. See Lunyu zhusu, 26.1-27.1. Here Kongzi confesses that he knows nothing of the di 蹄 ancestral sacrifice.
5. Lunyu zhusu, 27.2, with modifications of Waley, Arthur, Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage Books, 1938), 6Google Scholar.
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16. As late as the twelfth century we find Kongzi identified with his mother's and not his father's clan. In December of 1194, Zhu Xi 朱蕞 marked the founding of the Cangzhou jingshe 滄州精舍 with a sacrifice to Kongzi in which he addressed him as “original teacher, Duke of 20M kingdom, of the Van clan 先師郝國公顏氏.״ See Xi, Zhu, Hui'an xiansheng Zhu Wengong wenji 晦庵先生朱文公文集(congkan, Sibu ed), 86, 1548.1Google Scholar.
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19. On the gengxu day of the ninth month, the first day of the month, the sun was occluded. In the winter on the gengchen day of the tenth month, the first day of the month, the sun was occluded 九月庚戍朔, 日有食之.冬十月庚辰朔, 日有食之; Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, vol. 3, 1055–1056Google Scholar.
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23. Chunqiu Guliang zhuan zhusu 春秋穀梁傳注疏 (Shisanjing zhusu ed.》 156.1; Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan zhusu 春秋公羊傳注疏(Shisanjing zhusu ed.), 256.1.
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25. In subsequent centuries the legend contained within this sacred mound of narrative was handed down with little modification and when modifications were made it was usually with respect to the story of conception and/or sacrifice. So, in reading Jiang Yong ׳s江永 (1681-1762) Kongzi nianpu 孔子年譜, as well as Di Ziji's 狄子奇 (19th century) Kongzi biannian 孔子編年, it is hardly surprising to find that the Shi ji birth story, without the serial citation of Song descent pedigree, provides the foundation of their chronologies.
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Linguistic facts reveal the intimate relationships between the word wu (*myu) “shamanka” and such words as “mother,” “dance,” “fertility,” “egg,” and “recep-tacle.” The ancient shamanka, tVien, was closely related to the fecund mother, to the fertile soil, to the receptive earth. The textual evidence supports these philological associations. In Shang and Chou times, shamankas were regularly employed in the interests of human and natural fertility, above all in bringing rain to parched farmlands — a responsibility they shared with ancient kings. They were musicians and dancers and oracles.
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