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Wise Man of The Wilds: Fatherlessness, Fertility, and the Mythic Exemplar, Kongzi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Lionel M. Jensen
Lionel M. Jensen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Colorado at Denver
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 20 , 1995 , pp. 407 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1995

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References

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