Chuci zhangju
Creators: name: Du, Heng
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2021

description: The /Chuci zhangju/ 楚辭章句 (The Section and Sentence Commentary to the /Verses of the Chu/) is a collection of verses written in the Chuci—or “Verses of the Chu”—genre, compiled and annotated by Wang Yi 王逸 (fl. 130–140 CE), a scholar-official of the Eastern Han (25–220). The word “Chu” designates the watery southern region of present-day China along the Yangzi River, at one point an independent kingdom before its conquest in 223 BCE by the expanding Qin empire (221–206 BCE). The founders of the subsequent Han empires (202 BCE–220 CE) hailed from the Chu region. As one of the two oldest extant collections of Chinese verses, the /Chuci/ is traditionally conceived of as the younger, southern, and “romantic” counterpart to the /The Classic of Poetry/ (Shijing 詩經), the older, northern, and canonical anthology associated with the culture of the Zhou polity (ca.1046–256 BCE). The term “Chuci” can be used to designate both this anthology and the Chuci genre or style (also known as the /sao/ 騷). Poems written in the Chuci or /sao/ style employ a distinctive meter and a specialized repertoire of vocabularies and formulae, in addition to references to the landscape and mythology of the south. They also tend to be fantastical and elegiac in content and tone. Wang Yi ascribes the first seven titles (in the received 12thcentury /Chuci buzhu/ 楚辭補注 edition), roughly the earliest layer of this compilation, to the archetypical poet of the Chuci genre, Qu Yuan 屈原 (trad. 343–290 BCE). An upright minister of Chu, Qu Yuan is said to have been exiled on account of slander and wrote a body of verses during his banishment, before drowning himself in the Miluo 汨羅 river. The most well-known among these verses is the first piece of the compilation, “Li sao” 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow). Except for the final piece associated with Wang Yi, the remaining titles are attributed either to Qu Yuan’s purported disciples or to literary figures of the Western Han (202 BCE–7 CE). The earliest historical event known to be associated with this text took place in 139 BCE, when Liu An 劉安 (179?–112 BCE), the King of Huainan, paid a visit to his nephew, Emperor Wu of Han (r.141-87 BCE), and is said to have presented Chuci materials to the young emperor (/Hanshu/ 44.2145). Wang Yi claims as the basis of his commentary in /Chuci zhangju/ earlier exegetical writings, which include a work attributed to Liu An. Prior to its introduction to the Han imperial court, verses composed in the Chuci genre might have been employed in ritual and performative settings, although the extant poems in /Chuci zhangju/ are best understood as literary rewritings that indirectly preserve traces of the earlier ritual contexts. Each piece within the poetic suite “Nine Songs” (Jiu ge 九歌), for instance, addresses a god or a type of spirit in a pantheon of deities, most of whom are associated with nature. Two of the three “Summons” (/zhao/ 招) pieces, such as “Summoning the Soul” (Zhao hun 招魂), call upon deceased spirits, and might have evolved from funerary chants. “Heavenly Questions” (Tianwen 天問) contains over 150 questions concerning cosmogony, cosmology, legendary and historical heroes, including the kings of the Chu state. “Far Roaming (Yuan you 遠遊) suggests a process of self-cultivation or even self-divinization. Some of the motifs and formulae appear to have religious significance, such as the failed quests for goddesses and heavenly processions encircling a mandala-like cosmos. The formation process of the anthology /Chuci zhangju/ attests to the incorporation of this body of materials into Han elite literary culture. The composition of the written pieces in this anthology involves the reworking and reinterpretation of existing verses as the literary compositions of the scholar-official class, whose ethos is embodied by the archpoet Qu Yuan. Its later, imitative pieces, along with its exegetical writings, are centered around the political and moral concerns of the scholar-officials. Formulaic phrases that might have once been associated with ritual purification, for example, became metaphors for moral purity in the context of court politics. Since the Han, composing Chuci verses and imitating the /Chuci zhangju/ often functioned as a space of negotiation between political loyalty and dissent. The /Chuci zhangju/ also has its legacy in popular culture. Folk worship of Qu Yuan during the Duanwu 端午 (Fifth Day of the Fifth Lunar Month) became one of the major yearly festivities in traditional and contemporary China. The commemoration of the drowned poet serves as the etiological explanation for customs such as the dragon boat race. In existing scholarship, the Chuci corpus has often been understood through the lens of shamanism—translators from Arthur Waley to Gopal Sukhu have rendered the religious specialist “wu” 巫 as “shaman”—which is nevertheless a much-debated interpretative framework. Due to the near absence of direct evidence external to the text, reconstructions of the time, place, belief systems, and practices of its earlier religious contexts are at best educated guesses. This entry focuses on the formation process of the /Chuci zhangju/ as a literary anthology in the Han imperial and elite circle, between Liu An’s visit in 139 BCE and Wang Yi’s period of activities. It will nevertheless acknowledge the religious elements explicitly mentioned within the poems, such as its pantheon and cosmology.