5.2: Rivals to the Confucians at Court

Historians used to think that the Han dynasty rejected Qin Legalism and established Confucianism as its state orthodoxy. But this view is wrong, and indeed, some scholars refuse to use the term “Confucianism” to refer to anything before the mid-nineteenth century. This book uses it mainly to underline the great variation and change over time among thinkers who looked back to the Classics and took Confucius as a model. As for Han: Confucius would hardly have approved of Liu Bang and Lü Exu, while Wudi worshipped the Daoist deity Queen Mother of the West and sought Daoist transcendence. Confucius was widely revered, but imagined in very strange ways. The first state cult to Confucius was established only after the Han fell. Finally, the Confucianism of Han times had nothing to do with the family lives of ordinary people. Han was, indeed, the age in which Confucianism as an ideology – a set of ideas justifying power – came into being. But that happened through a fractured process with internal contradictions.

Even after Shusun Tong helped Liu Bang tame his unruly generals, Confucians had to compete with many other kinds of experts, and members of the inner court, for rulers’ attention. All Han schools of thought accepted yin-yang cosmology – the idea that complementary energies in the universe rise and fall – and a more complex theory of Five Phases (wuxing 五行) that constantly replaced one another. They and their cycles were associated with elements (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water), seasons, colors, musical tones, smells, tastes, organs of the body, stars, and so on. Harmonizing oneself with whatever phase was in the ascendant was a way to assure health for self, society, and nature. Qin, for instance, claimed that it represented the Water element (black), and so was able to extinguish the red Fire of Zhou. Correlative cosmology held that the state, people, and the whole natural world, including animals, plants, heavenly bodies, and spirits all resonated with each other, so that harmony in one meant harmony in the others and disturbance in one disturbed the other.⁷ Portents like eclipses could predict political trouble, and omens like the appearance of a unicorn could signal the presence of a good ruler. This way of thinking continued into the twentieth century.

Among other rivals at court, Confucians faced competition from Daoist magicians (fangshi). Daoists advised the imperial family on personal health and spirituality. But Daoists also developed Five Phases theory into methods of governance sponsored by Empress Dou and others and compiled a vision of Daoist government in the Huainan zi in 139 BC. Emperor Wen (r. 203 – 157 BC) – perhaps adhering to his Empress Dou’s Daoist laissez-faire principles – eliminated restrictions on the amount of land and number of slaves a household could own, a dangerous revision to Legalist practice that helped undermine the small farmer class. Magicians also offered very practical services to both the court and the wider community: interpreting dreams, reading horoscopes and faces to discern fortunes, divining with the Yijing to help people decide what to do next, teaching gymnastic exercises, bringing rain through prayer, and healing illnesses with herbs, massage, acupuncture, charms, rituals, and exorcism of demons.⁸ The visions and services Daoists offered seemed to many both more practical and more appealing than what strait-laced Confucians buried in old texts and rituals had to offer.

Confucians and other officials wanting to influence policy also had to work against, with, or around imperial family members. As well as empresses and their kin, imperial princesses held great influence at court – the emperor’s aunts, sisters, and daughters. They passed their royal status, their titles, and their Liu family membership on to their children matrilineally. Royal princesses were not punished with their husbands’ families; only the emperor himself could punish princesses and their children. They often maintained very good relations with their brothers: Wudi, for instance, lavished farmland, money, and slaves on his sisters. Furthermore, as women, princesses could go freely into the inner chambers of the palace, so they mediated between the inner court of the royal family and the outer court of officials. Royal princesses often ran their husbands’ families; their status made them officially the head of the family. (In the Period of Division after Han, there were even princesses who demanded a harem of secondary husbands.) Royal women could be formidable rivals.

Other intimates of the emperor also wielded considerable influence. A wetnurse, hired to nurse a royal baby, often stayed with the prince or princess for her whole life. They educated their charges and protected them, sometimes with their own lives, in the murderous factional disputes of the Han court. Their grateful charges loaded wetnurses with wealth and honors, mourned like family members at their deaths, and sometimes asked their advice in ruling.⁹ Second, a bureaucracy of palace ladies organized into carefully delineated formal ranks with specific duties managed the affairs of the thousands of people living in the palace. Third, eunuchs, chosen from poor families so that they would be loyal to the emperor, served the imperial family, who rewarded them with political power at court, land, and salaries. In the Latter Han, eunuchs put Emperor Shun (Shundi) on the throne in 125, helped Huandi remove a powerful general in 159, and independently eliminated a Confucian (Dou Wu) who had tried to have the leading eunuchs executed as part of his family’s struggle for power.