With the publication of Madman of Chu: A Myth of Loyalty and Dissent in 1980, Laurence Schneider established the view that the controversy over Qu Yuan between various erudites during the Han dynasty was a dispute between adherents and opponents about the question of what the Chu minister and poet stood for. The present study challenges this view by demonstrating that, aside from the so-called biographies by Sima Qian and Liu Xiang, all other contributions to the debate represent readings of the Li sao. Once this is understood, each contribution to the debate can not only be seen in its own light but it can also be examined in its relation to the section and sentence commentary by Wang Yi written in the second century C.E. The understanding of the controversy as a discourse of rather varied interpretations of the Li sao enables us to regard the Chuci zhangju by Wang Yi as a commentary that stood at the end of this controversy that lasted more than three centuries. It also enables us to see that the controversy rested on a particular set of premises, especially the question of the literary status of the Li sao and its author. The final thesis resulting from the present study is that the main reason for the lasting influence of Wang Yi's commentary together with the fact that it remained unchallenged until the twelfth century is that it was built on a sound and varied exegetical foundation, namely the controversy on the Li sao during the Han.
The first part of this article examines the contributions to the controversy by Jia Yi (201–165), Liu An (?178–122), Sima Qian (145–?86), Liu Xiang (79–8), Yang Xiong (53 B.C.E-18 C.E.), Liang Song (?–83 C.E.) and Ban Gu (32–92) in chronological order. The second part juxtaposes their works with the commentary of Wang Yi in order to understand how the Eastern Han commentator employed the contributions of his predecessors and how he reacted to them.