The Chinese Pleasure Book

Introduction

This book traces the evolution of pleasure theories in early China over the course of a millennium and a half, from the fourth century BCE to the eleventh century CE. To signify acts of pleasure-seeking, pleasure-taking, and imparting pleasure, a wide range of thinkers during that time deployed the single graph, le 樂, freely borrowing from one another, sometimes to differing ends, but often with the same goal of arriving at the most versatile model of the human condition.¹ Undergirding their rhetoric was always the dual presumption that pleasure matters a great deal to most people, and how people seek, take, and give pleasure is the truest test of their character.

Why take pleasure as my chosen subject? At first, it was simply because Sinologists for so long sidestepped the topic,² and more recently, because serious consideration of pleasure in academia has reentered the realm of ethical and aesthetic theory, also the histories of early modern Europe.³ Chiefly, however, it is because the steady contemplation of pleasure — not short-term delight or kindred concepts —invites attention to distinctive aspects of Chinese culture, as well as to notions common to Chinese and non-Chinese traditions. Consider the cultural relativity of our division and conceptualization of what we deem the inner states. In German, for example, there are many words approaching pleasure (die Freude, die Lust, das Vergnügen, das Behagen, and so on),⁴ yet none capture the valences of the classical Chinese term le. Equally curious and no less significant is the Chinese opposition of pleasure to insecurity, rather than to pain, its classic antonym within mainstream Western traditions.

The verbal use of le (to take or derive pleasure in) in the classical literature in Chinese takes but a very few objects, almost always those that promise deeper satisfactions in return for steady, long-term commitments.⁵ You can take pleasure in intimate friends (leyou 樂友), in music (leyue 樂樂), in a vocation and legacy (le ye 樂業), in sharing (le yu 樂與),⁶ in being alive and vital (le sheng 棄生), in doing your duty (le yi 樂義), in learning and emulating (le xue 樂學) others of the requisite worth (le ren 樂人), in Heaven or the cosmic operations (le tian 樂天), and in your true home (le jia 樂家). With those thoroughly relational pleasures in mind, this book offers seven chapters to conjure antique scenes for taking and giving pleasure.

Chapter 1, Coming Attractions, has but two aims: first, to sketch in a preliminary way the key vocabulary items and concept clusters at work in the early pleasure talk in order to prepare the ground for the chapters that follow; second, to distinguish the pleasure theories in China from their much better-known counterparts in classical Greece and Rome and in modern philosophy. I will have recourse to the relevant medical and cosmological theories of the early empires positing the physiology of pleasure in order to elucidate the rationales underlying the Chinese claims.

Chapter 2, Good Vibrations: The Allied Pleasures of Music and Friendship in the Masters, discusses the metaphors employed for both music and intimate friendship in light of early resonance theories, for all early passages on music and friendship presuppose the existence of unseen sympathies weaving the cosmic and social worlds together — sympathies capable of greatly and indelibly stamping the characters, attitudes, actions, and even the life spans of well-tempered people. Ideally, both music and close friendships illustrate the inherent value of the process of relating, rather than any predetermined end or goal, because what passes for perfection in music and friendship depends upon continual readjustments or attunements of temper. To situate these principles better, the chapter contrasts mere sociability with intimate friendships. Then, turning to the enormous leave-taking literature in classical Chinese, the chapter reviews the typical pretexts and approved methods for partings.

Chapter 3, Mencius 孟子 on Our Common Share of Pleasure, focuses on one of the best-known Confucians, the fourth-century BCE persuader whose teachings have too often been reduced to the slogan Human nature is good. By placing this slogan within the larger context provided by the first chapter of the writings ascribed to Master Meng, whose single focus is, precisely, pleasure, we find the main thread of Mencius’s argument to various princes: that all goods in life, material and psychological, are most likely to gravitate to the ruler who shares his pleasures with others, imagining them to be very like himself, with the same desires for pleasure and need for security.⁷ Not surprisingly, the chapter ends with a series of contrasts between Mencius and Xunzi, the later Confucian master whom I will review next, partly to give each thinker his due and partly to suggest the degree to which Mencius relies on exciting his leader’s pleasurable intuitions.

Chapter 4, Xunzi 荀子 on Patterns of Brilliance, claims that Xunzi’s application of the pleasure calculus to his theories about human nature and court administration — the body and the body politic — are so sophisticated that they became the touchstone for pleasure rhetoric throughout the early imperial period, up to the fourth century CE and beyond. But Xunzi is still more compelling, perhaps, for his daring to pose the question, What happens if you would teach and advise courts, offering them the best possible advice and remonstrance, but they do not wish to hear you? Xunzi responds by describing the exquisite pleasures to be had from crafting artful lives of integrity, even when one is ignored by the powers that be. He thereby contributes to the creation of the aesthetic potential for living an unofficial life of beauty, dignity, and worth.

Chapter 5, "Vital Matters: The Pleasures of Clear Vision in the Zhuangzi 莊子," seeks to explain why the much-beloved Zhuangzi compilation resists all post-facto attempts to cast it either as a set of injunctions to model oneself on the spontaneously generating cosmos or as an extended exhortation to embrace freedom (aside from freedom from disquietude) or go with the flow. Starting from the Zhuangzi’s Supreme Pleasure chapter, Chapter 5 shows Zhuangzi urging readers to conserve their energies so that they may more fully live out the days they have been allotted, rather than vainly wishing for a yet more perfect life. Three of the chief strategic insights fostering Zhuangzi’s fully present way of life are knowing that no creature, great or small, can attain sufficient understanding of the unfolding situation, so no one can be sure that he or she is ever right (which realization constitutes the only clear vision of the world that is available), and recognizing that death must be confronted in small, homeopathic doses if lives are not to be eaten up by needless worry.

Chapter 6, Yang Xiong 揚雄 on the Allure of Words Well Chosen, considers the monumental figure of Yang (53 BCE – 18 CE), the Han philosopher and court poet. Yang delighted in Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi, but for Yang, as for the poet Callimachus (d. ca. 240 BCE) halfway round the world, the deepest and most inviolate forms of pleasure come from immersing oneself in the great writers of remote antiquity, not from sharing with others, say, or from crafting an artful life, or from being fully present in the moment. Books are as alluring as women, he opined. Since Yang playfully presented his own work through autocommentaries, new genres and styles of writing, not to mention carefully wrought defenses of his writings, there are excellent reasons to deem him one of the first fully self-conscious authors in Chinese history. This chapter surveys his remarkable output once he had gained entrance to the imperial library, including his etymological dictionary, conceived as an entryway into the archaic period.

Chapter 7: Semidetached Lodgings: The Pleasures of Returning Home in Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 and Su Shi 蘇軾, turns to two of the most famous poets in Chinese history. Tao Yuanming (365?–427) is admired for his poem cycles celebrating his return home and his concomitant refusal to serve another day in office. Su Shi (1037–1101), the polymath who relished court service as his second home, nonetheless used Tao’s poetry as a psychic refuge during three increasingly uncongenial exiles from the capital during the last decades of his life. In the end, Su matched all but four of Tao’s poems through a rigorous use of identical end graphs in couplets, creating a revisionist Tao in his own image. While Su’s portrait of Tao is wildly anachronistic, Su clearly thought long immersion in Tao’s poetry might help him to resign himself to the reclusion that Tao reveled in. The larger question broached in this chapter is this, then: Do the consolations of emulating an earlier author ever suffice to make up for personal isolation? Judging from Su Shi’s case, we would have to say no.

When I was a graduate student, Wolfgang Bauer came out with his lengthy tome entitled China and the Search for Happiness: Recurring Themes.⁸ My own search, though in some ways indebted to his, has followed the traces of le wherever they led. My analysis rests on retranslations of a wide array of relevant sources, received and excavated, in a studied refusal to play it safe. My reading of the Zhuangzi, for example, moves outside the familiar territory of the so-called Inner Chapters to take stock of the entire thirty-three chapter compilation, and my research into Su Shi’s matching poems complicates the romantic portrait of a transcendent Su favored in most secondary literature today.

To give readers a brief taste of some early pleasure theories this book chooses for its subject, let me quote passages from two long speeches ascribed to the supremely effective prime minister Zichan 子產 of Zheng (act. 542–522 BCE), which touch upon the main themes of many discussions in early China about pleasure-taking. In the first, Zichan explains to an envoy from the more powerful state of Jin how diplomacy was better managed in the glorious days of yore:

Nowadays, our humble domain is small and placed among great domains that make insatiable demands on no set schedule. For this reason, we [in Zheng’s leadership] dare not take our ease, but instead must try to muster all our meager resources for meetings and court visits. … I have heard, when Lord Wen of Jin was covenant chief, his palaces were small and low, devoid of terraces and towers affording fine prospects. … Hosts and guests shared their cares and pleasures. When something came up, Lord Wen attended to it, instructing guests in those matters of which they were ignorant and taking care of whatever they lacked. The guests, upon arrival, felt as if they were coming home. How could there be any troubles or calamities? … Now your Tongti Palace extends for several miles, while even princes are lodged in abodes fit only for servants.⁹

In the second, Zichan expands upon the theme: It is very hard, in truth, to be entirely without desires. Let all get what they desire, so they can focus on their assigned tasks and concentrate on completing them.¹⁰

As Zichan’s view gradually unfolds, it becomes clear that his policies of governance are predicated upon calculations of pleasure. All people are bundles of desires, he says, though the type and force of the desires that drive a particular individual are functions of that person’s character and inclinations. To thwart people’s desires does no one any good at all. Far better, then, to learn how best to accommodate each person’s desires in such a way that, at a minimum, they are productive members of society doing the least harm to others in the community. In that way, a widespread sense of satisfaction will unobtrusively reinforce communal ties. Meanwhile, inculcating a desire to emulate worthy models can alter undirected and unbridled impulses and produce more constructive dispositions and inclinations.¹¹ Zichan’s speeches make it clear that refining the desires of power holders and commoners alike, far from being an inconsequential matter best left to the discretion of individual ministers and rulers, is their fundamental business.

Every student of early and middle-period China recalls similar passages detailing pleasure’s efficacy. The excavated and transmitted literature — whether the standard histories, medical treatises, philosophical texts, or bawdy poems — abounds in talk about pleasure, relating the physiological processes entailed in pleasure-giving and pleasure-taking to patterns in the larger realm or cosmos. To the modern reader, the sheer pervasiveness of the pleasure discourse in early writings is startling on first reading, for Zichan is but the tip of the iceberg. Further reflection leads us to see the prevalence of this discourse as great good sense, for nearly every piece of extant writing reflects the preoccupations of the governing elite, who saw that if power is pleasure, then the way pleasure is managed has direct consequences on the nature of power itself.¹² This book represents a first attempt to build upon recent scholarly insights regarding pleasure, vitality, commemoration, cultivation, insight, and spectacle in order to open new avenues for research. To aid in that exploration, I provide a historical narrative, part of it necessarily speculative, proposing reasons why the pleasure theme arose in classical Chinese at a specific time to address a particular set of problems.

Historical Background

Already in the Zhanguo era (475–222 BCE), treatises by would-be advisors to thrones advocated several ways to increase one’s security in pleasure-taking, none of which was particularly easy to follow. The main directives for instilling a greater single-mindedness of purpose were: reduce both the number of one’s desires and one’s degree of dependence upon others for their satisfaction¹³ and thereby decrease the chance of being harmed by a profusion of seductions and allurements;¹⁴ refine and so redirect one’s desires to the higher (and fewer) sorts of pleasures derived from connoisseurship, even if such refinement does not automatically preclude dependence upon others to achieve one’s heart’s desire, as in career advancement; and secure one’s pleasures by sharing them with others in the belief that pleasures taken in common mitigate envy and resentment.¹⁵ Simply by sharing pleasure with their underlings, those in power might forge stronger bonds within their communities, allowing power holders to savor their pleasures in far greater security. Tighter bonds, in turn, might prompt still more community members to conceive and confer pleasures on behalf of the group — through cooperative ventures or the provision of communal festivals, performances, and spectacles, for instance. This last rationale, whether expressed or tacit, underpinned a great many political calculations.

Why the apparently sudden emphasis on careful or delayed pleasure-taking during the centuries before the common era? I suspect that the vast scale and unprecedented scope of sociopolitical and economic changes during that time elicited two questions: What form of equitable distribution of resources best guarantees a state’s stability, and what methods of rule best enable the expanding states to integrate newly conquered populations?

On the question of equitable distribution, admittedly, the available sources consist mainly of recorded pieties. Yet the early texts would have readers believe that before the decline of the Zhou political order in the eighth century BCE, the sumptuous sacrifices offered to the royal ancestors, followed by the division of the sacrificial meats among the descendants, had distributed goods and prerogatives in ways that were generally conceded at the time to be equitable — at least by members of the governing elite. With each member of that elite partaking of the numinous life force contained within the sacrificial meats, each sacrifice served as an outward sign of the inner commitments binding the partakers to their same clan or body politic, notwithstanding their potentially disparate interests.¹⁶ But in the wake of the demise or usurpation of many noble houses, the associated sacrificial orders no longer sufficed to confirm the basic laws of hierarchy, reciprocity, and equitable exchange so vital to any cohesive community. Political elites had to devise entirely new, reliable modes of fair distribution if they hoped to attract the necessary men and materiel to their service. Gradually, the local communal feast, offering a different model of sociability and rewards, came to rival or transcend in importance the blood sacrifices made by ruling lines during ancestor worship, the feast having the signal advantage of being far less likely to entail huge losses of life, including human as well as animal sacrifice.¹⁷ Meanwhile, loyalty to a single superior or group of superiors within the noble lineage (promoted through ancestor worship) yielded to ideals requiring service to a larger community or even to the known world under Heaven.

Would-be and actual unifiers wanted to instill allegiance and enforce control within vast new populations not persuaded by hereditary ties or local custom to uphold the relatively small kin, surrogate-kin, and cult groups associated with the court. The formal ming 命, charge or writ, recorded on Western Zhou bronzes had once certified the obligations due the ruling house by a few allied families.¹⁸ Later, the Chunqiu blood covenants (meng 盟) bound far greater numbers of aristocrats and their dependents in temporary agreements. But by the dawn of the fifth century BCE, in Zhanguo times, any state determined upon conquest had to sponsor and direct much larger (even overlapping) networks of loyalty in the social, political, military, and economic spheres, networks that would be capable of mobilizing assorted talents to devote their best efforts and those of their men to the conquerors. The conquerors’ usual rationale for this was disarmingly simple: the stability enjoyed by the principal unifier best guaranteed the stability of all other social units, public or domestic, in his realm and nearby. For without stability, no pleasures could ever be secure for any resident, high or low.

In the end, the ruler’s force majeure could go only so far in stabilizing the state. The anxieties, insecurities, and disaffection experienced in the sociopolitical order could be laid to rest only if the antidotes spoke to the strong desires felt by all members of the ruling elite, at every level, to preserve and maximize their prerogatives, perquisites, and pleasures while addressing the precarious living conditions of some of their subjects. As one celebrated master put it, in peaceful times, one may not overlook dangers, nor in secure times forget perils.¹⁹ Effective persuasion pieces had to allay their fears and insecurities in an era of rapid social change and ideally assuage the deep sense of unease that beset many of the most successful in middle age.²⁰ The idea of converting the consuming pleasures into sustaining ones succeeded so brilliantly at courts all across the central states of the North China Plain, I wager, because it precisely suited the ruling elites’ own experiences and hopes.

Throughout their disquisitions on pleasure, the court persuaders made much of a seemingly self-evident truth that contained more than a bit of paradox: most of our present delights merely taunt us by their brevity; even as we indulge ourselves, we suffer from the anticipation of their loss. Additionally, the craving for pleasurable stimuli inevitably generates competition, and the sense of unceasing competition grows more arduous and more frustrating with age. For those who have worked hardest to build constructive orders commonly expect to bask in the results of their achievements, but sadly, as the self-aware ruefully observe, continually fending off all rivals in the bloody contests over territory or material goods requires the stamina of youth. Adding insult to injury, no one can possibly attain as much as they desire before they die.²¹ Only those who have managed somehow over the years to reduce or refine or stabilize their pleasures can hope to retain a measure of self-regard. For good reasons, then, the cautious use of pleasure as a way to preclude disorder in the realm and in the individual promised to offset the strange melancholy that pervades the prime of life, especially in those who possess a surfeit of material goods or power. In that respect, the court persuaders’ disquisitions on pleasure did far more than provide simplistic answers to two of the first questions most frequently asked: What pleasure is there in being a prince, unless one can say whatever one chooses, with no one daring to disagree? and How can a person in power not only be happy, but happier than other people?²²

In this setting at court, talk about pleasure was liable to be pragmatic, geared to the here and now.²³ Only a few assertions about human nature and motivation commonly preceded a persuader’s advice to a patron or student about the wisdom of present or intended social engineering policies or the benefits of present and ongoing personal and social cultivation. Nearly all extant accounts omitted systematic treatment of, say, the origins or qualities of pleasure, though our persuaders most probably considered these, if only to equip themselves with defenses against their opponents’ rhetorical jabs. Doubtless, those with the luxury of time on their hands asked whether the sensation of pleasure inheres more in an object, in the activity itself, or in the capacity for pleasure developed by the owner or actor.²⁴ Some surely noticed that the experience of pleasure, no less than of physical pain, is fundamentally inexpressible and therefore potentially isolating. But persuaders were obliged to forgo overspecificity in outlining propositions about pleasure, lest bored or inattentive court power holders start to quibble over minor points or lose the thread of an argument. Accordingly, the surviving passages on pleasure seek to nudge powerful members of the governing elite toward improving their policies and personal modes of behavior, thereby promoting greater contentment and insight among the governed, which in turn would likely preserve their persons and properties from harm at the hands of a disaffected populace.

In proposing the best possible course of action, most of the persuasions ascribed to the late Zhanguo, Han, and immediately post-Han thinkers kept well within a few accepted talking points. It sufficed for the persuaders to allege that the probable sources of pleasure are easily recognized; the preponderance of human activity consists of the pursuit of pleasure; each person hopes to maximize his or her own opportunities for pleasure-taking, although their objectives may differ; so when humans act recklessly, it is usually because, having mistaken the nature and hence the effect of their own actions, they have miscalculated the odds that their actions will conduce to pleasure.²⁵ By such reasoning, they concluded that if the body and the body politic are to continue to flourish, it is crucial for those in charge to distinguish sustaining from consuming pleasures. Naturally, they emphasized that long-term, sustaining relations nearly always yield appreciably more satisfaction over the years than impulsive, immediate consumption. So although in their writings no abstract theories assign a fixed, quasi-numerical value to each type of enjoyment experienced by every person, the pleasure discourse figures significantly in the priorities the persuaders allotted to different policies and commitments. In this regard, they took into account the duration and intensity of specific pleasures, as well as the different pleasures aroused by anticipation, by experience, or by memory.

By postulating a generalized human nature or human condition shared by the ruler and his subjects, persuaders could posit methods whereby the elite might induce a sense of community among their social equals and inferiors in hopes of forestalling all manner of destructive behavior. Analyzing human nature, in other words, was but the prelude to determining effective motivation. For just as the body had its interests, so did the realm have what spurred it on, and discernment in these things meant just estimates about relative importance.²⁶ Since the crudest of those at the apex of power were often at a loss to figure out what ratio of carrots to sticks would best motivate underlings and mobilize resources, the Classics and masterworks dealt extensively with that question, at least since the time of Mozi 墨子 (ca. 470—ca. 390 BCE) and his followers. Certainly, the later Mohists and a host of Zhanguo masters (zhuzi 諸子) saw the focus on pleasure and desire as fundamental to every human being, even if few in society had the luxury to choose freely among rival goods and courses of action. For those masters, to act on account of something is to take into account all one knows and judge that something [as in a scale] by one’s desires.²⁷

In the classical political rhetoric of pleasure-taking, power holders planning to unify the realm or to maintain their standing at court were to supplement the old aristocratic forms of excellence (prowess in warfare, filial conduct toward the ancestors, and practical shrewdness) with the new virtues of fair dealing and self-restraint. One basis for good rule lay in assessing and dispensing the proper shares of access to pleasure through ritual according to the contributions made to the general welfare. The ruler’s own model of self-restraint validated the allocation of favors, so the wise ruler would not let inborn inclinations to delight, pleasure, worry, and sorrow move him (dong zhi 動之), except by rule (yi ze 以貝). Such rituals tended to confirm the status quo among the elites, whether hereditary or not. But no abstract ideas in support of the ruler’s or ruling elite’s control could have been imposed on those below unless they struck them as admirably suiting prevailing conditions. As I see it, throughout the classical period, in order to feel secure, people at every level of society sought as best they could to place themselves firmly within webs of mutual obligations (do ut des), signified and cemented by regular formalized exchanges in the forms of gift, tribute, and sacrifice.²⁸ Such exchanges, rendered highly visible at intervals by specific changes in the form of the rituals, demonstrated to potential friends and allies, no less than to oneself, the reliable nature of the protection afforded those within a web of obligation.²⁹ For at the very same time that the person of high status reaffirmed his protected status through public or semipublic acts, those outside the web were put on notice that it would be foolhardy to harm anyone who could call upon the collective strength of the communal network. Obviously, no small store of wealth was needed for the frequent outlays in ritual, but status and safety were secured less through force or sheer spending than through the periodic public manifestations of loyalty by family members, allies, and subordinates. Hence the continual reiteration in the treatises of the period that other people constitute one’s own chief security. At the same time, when honor and glory (rong 榮) are in the gift of the people before whom they are paraded, then honor and glory can be withdrawn by those same people swiftly and absolutely, as many biographies in Sima Qian’s 司罵遷 Shiji 史記 and the Xici 繫辭 tradition to the Changes (Yijing) classic so poignantly attest.³⁰

It would be hard to overestimate the pervasiveness of the webs of trust formed within and beyond polite society through public display, webs that bound the living and the dead and also — what is infinitely more difficult — people of quite different status. From the court on down, provision was made for nearly all levels of society to experience, directly or indirectly, some of the pleasures of public exchange and display. The extant writings of the period show the royal courts’ quite intentional deployment of visual display to render palpable the protective bonds ordering society. And the archaeological record leaves no doubt about the sumptuousness of court extravaganzas, orchestral performances, royal progresses, massive building projects, and spectacles. In illustration, I cite just one anecdote dating from the first years of the Han empire: shortly before 200 BCE, the new chancellor, Xiao He 蕭何, set about building palaces, arsenals, storehouses, and gate towers on a lavish scale while war still raged outside the capital. Xiao defended his priorities on the grounds that if the true Son of Heaven does not dwell in magnificent quarters, he will have no way to display his authority or establish a base for his heirs to build upon.³¹ Perhaps the most striking change documented by classical archaeology, then, is the shift from highly circumscribed rituals conducted for very limited audiences to increasingly splendid displays intended for ever larger groups of onlookers,³² wherein suasive authority was said to be lodged in four ceremonial aspects: the insignia (badges, seals, tablets, and weapons); the dress (clothing, caps, and coiffure); the demeanor (gestures indicating the degree of poise); and the rhetoric (forms of address and discourse).

Until about 140 CE or so, the capacity of this social display culture to conflate the rewards for public service with the pursuit of domestic pleasures and personal interest seemed one of the best means of insuring stable dynastic rule.³³ But somehow, by the mid to late Eastern Han (roughly by 140 CE), through social processes still not fully understood by historians of the period, elites turned inward. No longer trusting to the expansive webs of relations to protect them and their families from harm, they took to rearming themselves. The signs of collapse were everywhere. Professional and private estate armies replaced conscript armies in the interior.³⁴ In the absence of adequate cadastral surveys by the imperial court, taxes were no longer gathered fairly. As peasants fled wars and the tax men, they sought protection from local strongmen, becoming tenant farmers on large estates and swelling the ranks of their armies. With the growth of large, virtually independent estates, the court, protected at one point by a mere four thousand guards, lost secure access to the best men in service at court, because they competed with the estates. Less supervision over local governors and their administrations and breakdowns in the court recommendation procedures ensued, so much so that at one point, the court complained that the provinces were sending men who could not read or write to stock the ranks of its bureaucracy.³⁵ The ordinary business of the court foundered, with failures of water control a symptom of the court’s dual inability to organize labor details and to extract the necessary funds from the provinces. Invasions on the borders multiplied as soon as local warlords ignored a central command. Even before 184 CE, when a massive peasant rebellion rocked the empire, the inadequacies of the court to meet the challenges became abundantly clear to all. As Étienne Balazs pointed out decades ago in his essay Political Philosophy and Social Crisis at the End of the Han, the hundred years from 150 to 250 CE exerted on China’s future development an influence no less important than that of the third century BC.³⁶ Both periods saw disorder, injustice, and monstrous disparities of wealth, an increasing articulation of the sense of crisis, and a great diversity of proposals for rectifying the defects and reversing the degeneration of state and society. But whereas thinkers in the Zhanguo period had anticipated unification and planned well for the new pax Sinica, by the end of the Eastern Han, the most acute thinkers, having lost their serene trust in the ability of civil mechanisms to order society, turned their attention to devising tighter controls.³⁷

In hindsight, we see that the practical problems associated with the application of the pleasure theories and display culture had made a mockery of their theoretical elegance. For one thing, the spiraling costs of competitive displays, each more dazzling than the last, led elites to extract ever greater sums from their social inferiors, in this way undermining any potential the display mechanisms had to unify different segments of society by offering many levels of satisfaction. The gap between names (titles, assignments, reputations, social roles) and actualities widened, in consequence, whence the Eastern Han complaint that it is difficult to get names and actualities to correspond (ming shi nan fu 名實難副).³⁸ The extravagant rhetoric fashioning the emperor as supreme model for all the virtues seemed ludicrous when countered by a string of underage, incompetent, or disinterested rulers. And from the standpoint of the ruling house, it was regrettable that regional powers and local cults, in a refeudalizing era, could so easily appropriate the display mechanisms once emanating principally from the center, to the detriment of the singular authority of king and capital. Meanwhile, the vast estates of the Eastern Han magnates, enclaves of mock-courtly life in a sea of worsening impoverishment, exacerbated perceptions of sociopolitical injustice and fomented rebellions on an empire-wide scale. The formation — not coincidentally — at that point of Daoist religious organizations, which stepped in to fill the vacuum left by the court’s withdrawal from the provinces, further divided loyalties and complicated the entwined notions of security and pleasure, even as they made for unprecedented modes of local spectacular display.³⁹ The widespread interest in Buddhism evinced after the fall of the North China Plain in 316 CE accelerated such trends by calling into question the very reality and consequences of pleasure-taking.

But it was not a case of Après ça, le déluge. In lives once again nasty, brutish, and short, pleasures seemed more fragile, more fraught, and more difficult to secure, but all the more valuable, for some. Thus the post–Eastern Han Periods of Disunion, with their succession of dynasties that looked to the Western and Eastern Han for models and institutions, hardly prevented those enjoying high cultural literacy from waxing eloquent on the subject of pleasure they found so arrestingly laid out in the early Classics, masterworks, and histories. The survival and application of the pleasure rhetoric of the Zhanguo, Qin, and Han masters were then assured in latter-day situations.

So despite some shifts in the basic presumptions of the cultural elites from the Zhanguo era through the Northern Song, the main threads of sympathetic response theories did not fray badly for well over a thousand years. Readers continued to imagine official and unofficial, public and domestic exchanges, including encounters between fine writer and ardent reader, as embodied fields of relations contributing to the continual process of construction of the cultivated person⁴⁰ while confirming the beauty of the densely patterned cosmic fabric within which people lived their lives.⁴¹

But nearly everything about the discourse of pleasure would have to change once Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) and his True Way Learning came to dominate Chinese tradition, for Zhu felt compelled to condemn or erase any older traditions that might impede his ascendancy.⁴² So whereas earlier thinkers and writers looked to empathetic reading of the right sort to afford glimpses of the unfolding, unremitting transformations, Zhu Xi and his disciples deplored fond musings on wondrous particulars. (That may explain why Zhu favored his Four Books, to divert attention from the historical Annals and Documents classics supplying abundant evidence for the wide range of human propensities to messy worldly engagement.)⁴³ Asserting that the perfectly resonant nature of a sage like himself, pure in mind and body, allowed immediate, unmediated, and comprehensive knowledge of the entire universe, past and present, Zhu demanded that his followers direct their gaze as much as possible to the ineffable grand totality, rather than luxuriating in manifold specificities. As Zhu wrote in the late 1160s, "Let me propose that all under Heaven is just Heaven’s Pivot giving life to things (tianji huowu 天機活物).… Now how could there be a particular, within time and space, that can be distinctly named," apart from and outside this single flow?⁴⁴ Reverence for abstract and unseen principles was to replace pleasure in the near to hand and palpable; by Zhu’s theory, pleasure was too subversive, anyway, for lesser men left to their own devices to cultivate.⁴⁵ The search for pleasure went underground, in consequence, becoming more transgressive in the process. And so my story, which will, in essence, bear witness to the sustained and sustaining benefits secured through constructing pleasurable relations with people and things in all their distinctive charms, ends necessarily before Zhu and his adherents came to dominate mainstream thinking in China.

Larger Implications

A tired series of dichotomies has occupied far too much of the Sinological community’s attention, including inner versus outer, subjective versus objective, pragmatic versus ethical, truth versus rhetoric, nature versus culture, emotion versus reason, and mind versus body. What blessedly seems to have run its course among astute readers is the simplistic impact-response model or a variation thereon, the sender-medium/ percept-receiver model. (Unfortunately, Orientalists and self-Orientalists still cling to the gratifying notion of the Western impact on a passive, receptive China, one instance of Jack Goody’s theft of history.)⁴⁶ If this book breaks new ground, it charts unfamiliar terrain via more nuanced translations of both familiar and seldom-read texts that imply the deep interpenetration of fact and value, objectivity and affect. The wisdom of consulting the Ancients should be evident in our more distracted contemporary age of anxiety.⁴⁷ But I do not wish to contend for relevance. As a historian, I aspire mainly to acquire fuller evidence, in the firm belief that the historian’s task is to reveal the unpredictable contours of this polygon that we call human experience and to restore their original silhouettes to events and ideas that have been concealed under borrowed garments.⁴⁸ If some portion of the litanies celebrating categorical alterity and the clash of civilizations is jettisoned, so much the better.

That said, the payoffs from attending to the early Chinese sources seem huge. For example, the stipulation of the precise circumstances for pleasure-giving and pleasure-taking neatly obviates the knotty Anglo-American philosophical problem of how to get from is to ought,⁴⁹ for the sources are at once highly contextualized and praxis-guiding, commonsensical (designed to mirror the world that is), and regulative of human practice. And insofar as they did not hazard a host of unprovable assertions about social units or the cosmos, the early advice comes to today’s readers without theoretical superfluity and entanglements. As some have argued, the Ancients were in appreciably better shape than we moderns, if only because they did not cordon off moral from practical considerations when deliberating. So it seems high time, past time really, to recall the unique potentials invested in the word pleasure itself.⁵⁰

CHAPTER ONE

Coming Attractions

Pleasure, wrote Oscar Wilde, the nineteenth-century English aesthete, is the only thing worth having a theory about. More recently, Andre Malraux’s The Temptation of the West poses the question, Of all his ideas, is there any one more revealing of a man’s sensibilities than his concept of pleasure?¹ Either formulation could be plausibly ascribed to the most important classical masters in the region we now call China, since they deemed pleasure one of the most effective rhetorical tools to motivate right action, as each defined it, as well as to discern a person’s character. Nearly all of the thinkers from the Zhanguo period (475–222 BCE) through the eleventh century addressed the problem of converting the consuming pleasures — those that expend vast wealth, time, and physical energy — into sustaining pleasures that could support, rather than deplete or corrupt the polity, the family, or the body.² The vast majority held that the sociopolitical realm must accommodate or transform the innate desires for pleasure into desires to do good and — no less pressingly — encourage people to delay certain types of gratification for the sake of future, more secure and lasting pleasures. For the ruler and his ministers intent upon promoting such pleasurable orders through institutions and edifying behavior, the chief task was to devise appropriate policies, because a particular pleasure’s pursuit could increase or diminish the health of the body and the body politic and bind subjects more closely to the throne or risk dangerous disaffection. And since health tended to imply stability and duration, more often than not, the relative value accorded a specific pleasure was loosely gauged by its potential for prolongation. In articulating modes of appropriate pleasure-taking, thinkers wanted not only to devise methods to prolong a given pleasure, but also to augment the security of the ruling house and its leaders.³

The aims of this chapter are but two: first, to explain the vocabulary considered before adopting the translation of pleasure so as to highlight the particularities of the pleasure rhetoric against the larger backdrop of related concepts in classical Chinese, and second, to discuss the physiology of pleasure as sketched in the relevant medical and cosmological theories of the period. Because the English words I necessarily employ have themselves long and convoluted histories, my analysis at points will seek to distinguish the Chinese pleasure theories from the much better-known theories of classical Greece and Rome and early modern philosophy. All this by way of preparing for the six later chapters, each of which examines proposals by different thinkers concerning preferred ways of giving and receiving pleasure.

The Vocabulary of Pleasure

The word I translate as pleasure is le 樂, denoting an action, pleasure-seeking or pleasure-taking, rather than a state such as happiness. (More on this below.) To describe the emotions, drives, and sensations, the classical thinkers used a host of terms running the gamut from desire to delight, from gratification to fondness.⁴ Many, if not all of the classical masters rely on particular terms to distinguish logically the pleasures that bring deep, rich, and enduring satisfactions (le) from the fleeting emotions or those potentially destructive drives deemed excessive and indulgent.

Because their persuasions seldom highlight the gap between the phenomenon that imparts pleasure and the pleasure-taking itself,⁵ they help situate the pleasurable sensations in the act of making contact and finding it good. (For that reason, they conceive no pleasure to be purely sensory or purely mental, without the engagement of the evaluating heart and mind.)⁶ On the relatively direct experiential sensations, thinkers superimposed a category of relational pleasures, said to require more continuous and more insightful perceptions by the connoisseur of pleasure. Such relational pleasures included, for example, inducing good men to serve in office through suitable politicking; cultivating the fine arts of social intercourse; taking pleasure in virtuous conduct or in music; taking pleasure in one’s profession or in family traditions; and taking pleasure in conforming to moral imperatives or cosmic operations.⁷ (The expectation that one association of le would be romantic or sexual love betrays a modern sensibility.)⁸ Far more than mere sensual gratification or pride of possession, the relational pleasures presupposed an ability to discern the long-term utility and value of things, conditions, and people; seeing beyond the immediate, and the distractions and impulses it engenders. They took a substantial share of curiosity and imagination, astuteness and self-restraint, not to mention commitment and grit. For in not a few cases, to procure a relational pleasure, strong impulses toward quick gratification must be delayed or checked. Gratifying one’s taste for exquisite foods and wines may in no way impinge upon pride of ownership in a fine stallion, but routine gastronomic overindulgence likely slackens one’s dedication to prudential action.

While the classical writings are not entirely consistent in their use of le, over time, master persuaders came more and more to pair the verb le with noun objects of consequence, such as you 友 (intimate friends), tian 天 (Heaven), de 德 (edifying, graceful, and charismatic acts), or ye 業 (one’s family profession or heritage).⁹ Significantly, the word most often paired with le is an 安,to secure X or to feel secure in X, where X may be a situation or action, and the words most often used as antonyms for le are you 憂 (anxious, worried, or concerned), wei 危 (in danger or apprehending danger), and ai 哀 (grieved by a loss).¹⁰ (See below.) These concept clusters reveal that the classical theories in China were more apt to contrast pleasure with insecurity than with pain, unlike their Western counterparts. (Certainly, an equivalent for physical pain or psychic misery in classical Chinese exists, tong 痛 / 恿, but pleasure theories do not foreground it, because some pain is unavoidable.) Essentially, if the conventional objects of desire are to be fully enjoyed, many thinkers argue, the subject must know that they do not threaten his person, his livelihood, or his community, now or in the foreseeable future. For that reason, precarious or fleeting pleasures do not warrant the term le.

Early in my work, I considered three possible translations for the word le: pleasure, happiness, and joy. For four negative reasons, I chose not to translate le as happiness, to the consternation of multiple colleagues. The ubiquity of the anodyne Happy Face in America has ruined the word for some Americans, and worse, confirmed a link between happiness and psychosocial clinical normality. Also, for much of Euro-American history, happiness meant favored by fortune (a connotation grossly inappropriate in the Chinese context, as will become clear). Moreover, by 1725, happiness was associated (in the work of Francis Hutcheson and later writers) with the utilitarian concept of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, hardly a theory found in early China, even with Mozi.¹¹ And finally and most importantly, happiness refers to a state of being, whereas the Chinese graph for pleasure implies actions: pleasure-seeking, pleasure-giving, and pleasure-taking.

But more positive reasons call for the word pleasure. Li Zehou, the premier philosopher of aesthetics in contemporary China, has made the case — to my mind, superbly — that the early Chinese men and women of letters came of age in a culture uniquely alive to pleasure (legan wenhua 樂感文化).¹² The English word pleasure encompasses many feelings: those of enjoyment, gratification, satisfaction, sensual or sexual contentment or stimulus, even elation, among others.¹³ But pleasure is always a response to something or someone present or in the mind’s eye; it cannot be experienced in the mind or body in true isolation. The early thinkers contended that the keenest sense of pleasure comes from long-term relational pleasures, presupposing steady practice and the patient accumulation of embodied knowledge about other people and surroundings. Immersed 潛 is the Chinese word, the antithesis of half-attending. As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s discussions of flow and the poet Donald Hall’s Lifework suggest, full enjoyment in an activity often, if not invariably, entails total absorption in it.¹⁴ Importantly, too, pleasure is the only English word capacious enough to allow for the complex bodily processes registered in the senses and emotions and in the sensitive heart and evaluating mind.

The complexities of those processes becomes evident when one sees the early thinkers in their pleasure calculus generally taking into account the different time frames for pleasure (pleasure in anticipation, in experience, and in retrospect),¹⁵ the duration and intensity of the pleasure, and the person’s changing sense of belonging and identity vis-à-vis the communities in which he or she participates. The pleasure calculus recognizes no arbitrary distinction between sensory pleasure (percepts, experienced feelings or sensations) and attitudinal pleasure¹⁶ (that is, the consciousness of taking pleasure in something or someone). Instead, Chinese theories of the body’s physiological processes, construed as one locus among countless sympathetic resonances reverberating throughout the cosmos, tend to entangle sensory experiences and conscious attitudes, autonomic movements and intentional awareness, motivations and actions, in the social world, as well as in the imagination (Figure 1.1).

Such theories deeply embed each person within a series of relations whose members ideally sustain and certainly transform one another. So by the end of this book, I hope to persuade readers that my true subject is pleasure and related propositions about the best conceivable lives, with best meaning most sustained and sustaining and most fulfilled.¹⁷

In English, however, if we accept the central hedonist contention that the good life is a life full of pleasure, that contention can convey at least five different ideas: that good is identical with morally good (as if that concept were clear!);¹⁸ that good means causally good (having good effects); that good means aesthetically pleasing or beautiful, albeit with elements of tragedy or pain; that the good is embodied in exemplary people; or that good simply means good for the one living that life (no matter how much selfishness or depravity a person requires for personal welfare or flourishing). Add on the potential conflicts when local, global, actual, and hypothetical preferences are factored in.¹⁹ So how are we to assess the competing claims of such seemingly absolute goods as virtue, pleasure, knowledge, flourishing, and justice, or, for that matter, the general good against an agent’s own pleasant life?²⁰ To understand what follows requires probing the vocabulary that Euro-American academia still adopts reflexively. For that reason, I briefly rehearse some of that vocabulary below.

Pleasure, Not Happiness or Joy

As one writer insisted, Don’t mistake pleasures for happiness. They’re a different breed of dog.²¹ Certainly, upon first reading, pleasure may sound disreputable,²² whereas happiness sounds morally acceptable, thanks in part to the famous, if ill-understood phrase in the Declaration of Independence guaranteeing the citizen’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.²³ Perhaps because of the Declaration’s lofty aspirations, few have troubled to think through the connotations attached to the words happy and happiness.²⁴ True, there is an idea behind Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, that money can’t buy enough contentment, just as ideas spur UC-Berkeley’s Science of Happiness project and the academic revival of interest in phenomenology. But evidently, the modern preoccupation with happiness is a