Page 42 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

to him, Lord Shang (ShangYang, or Gongsun Yang;
d. 338 bce) urged the ruler not to hesitate to
institute changes in his efforts to strengthen his
state. The founders of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou
had not been afraid to make changes, because "wise
people create laws while ignorant ones are
controlled by them; the worthy alter the rites while
the unworthy are held fast by them." Law to him
was the sovereigns will, carefully codified and
impartially applied.
Han Feizi (d. 233 bce), author of the fullest
exposition of Legalist thought, argued that the
Confucian notion of ruling through virtue rather
than force was based on a faulty analogy with the
family. "A mother loves her son twice as much as a
father does, but a fathers orders are ten times more
effective than a mother's." Moreover, the common
people have about as much understanding of what
is good for them as infants who scream when their
loving mothers lance their boils. The ruler who
taxes the people to fill granaries against times of
famine or war should ignore their protests the way
the mother ignores the baby's wails. Rulers should
even be wary of the advice of their top ministers.
Given subordinates' propensities to pursue then-
own selfish interests, the ruler cannot afford to be
candid or warm toward any of them. Rather he
should keep them in awed ignorance of his
intentions and control them by manipulating
competition among them. "When the ruler trusts
someone, he falls under that person's control."''
By Han Feizi's time ideas about the ruler were also
colored by myths about the Yellow Emperor
(Huangdi), first of the sage-kings of high antiquity. to succeed the Zhou, which had ruled through
Han Feizi at one point referred to the Yellow
Emperor summoning the ghosts and spirits to the
top of Mount Tai, travelling there on a chariot
pulled by dragons, with tigers and wolves leading
the way, ghosts and spirits following, lizards and
snakes below, a phoenix above. In the version of the
myth current in Han Feizi's day, the Yellow
Emperor was notable above all for his military
might. He had overcome the Divine Husbandman
(Shennong), who had introduced farming but shied
away from the use of arms. By teaching the bears,
leopards, and tigers to fight for him, the Yellow
Emperor had been able to conquer all those who
opposed him. In addition, the Yellow Emperor had
associations with rain and with dragons; some texts
say he had the face of a dragon and that dragons
appeared when he received Heaven's mandate. 7 The
later chapters of the Daoist text Zhuangzi present
the Yellow Emperor sometimes as an arrogant
conqueror, dangerous in the excess of his zeal for
bringing order to the world, sometimes as a
devoted disciple of the master Zhuangzi, listening
to teachings on longevity. Often he was identified
with the Daoist Sage, a being of immense powers,
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART 40
physically and mentally free, able to wander freely
to the four corners of the universe and to live in
perfect unity with everything in the cosmos. 8
During the fourth and third centuries, as the
smaller states (such as Zhongshan, prominent in the
exhibition) were eliminated by their larger
neighbors, the competition between the surviving
states became even more intense. The state of Qin
systematically eliminated the hereditary lords of the
states it conquered, a policy that led to
unprecedented concentration of resources in the
hands of a single ruler, the king of Qin. Legalist
ideology insists on rationality and efficiency as the
means to achieve and exercise authority; there is no
implication in the writings of Lord Shang or Han
Feizi that the ruler would be wise to spend freely
on luxuries in order to impress his subjects with his
power. But Legalist ideology does not explicitly
urge austerity on the ruler, or indeed set limits of
any sort on his actions, and the man to oversee the
unification of China by Legalist means, the First
Emperor of Qin (Qin Shihuangdi, r. 246—210 bce)
(see cats. 88-92) did not set many limits on himself.
Drawing together the resources of All-Under-
Heaven made possible enormous construction
projects. Although he already had several hundred
palaces and scenic towers, in 212 the emperor
conscripted seven hundred thousand subjects to
build his tomb and a huge new palace complex,
large enough to seat ten thousand people. Many of
his palaces were connected by elevated walkways
and walled roads so that the emperor could move
between them undetected.
Although he was rigorous in enforcing such
Legalist policies as strict rewards and punishments,
the First Emperor of Qin was personally open to
non-Legalist ideas as well, including the more
grandiose conceptions of rulership conveyed by the
myth of the Yellow Emperor and cosmological
schemes that proved to him that the Qin ruled
through the power ofWater and thus was destined
Fire. This cosmological strain of thought drew on
very old ideas about the production of the myriad
things through the workings of Yin and Yang. Yang,
identified with the sun, Heaven, light, the male, the
assertive, and the changing, contrasts with Yin,
identified with the moon, earth, darkness, female,
dampness, receptivity, and continuity. The
movement from Yin to Yang and back again
corresponds to such phenomena as the daily
changes in the position of the sun and moon and
the yearly succession of the seasons. The theory of
the Five Phases (earth, wood, metal, fire, water) is a
much more complex system, which divides and
classifies the cosmos in both time and space on the
basis of equivalencies, resonances, and influences
connecting cosmic principles, astral events, and