Commonplace Book Begins: Funeral Literature

Example of lei wen, sacrificial memorial writing for funerals

Funerary Writing

What follows is a set of reading and lecture notes and excerpts that I was inspired to begin producing after starting A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) by W.H. Auden. The concept of the "commonplace book" thrills me because it is so much like the best that blogging can be : a sharing of experience, grounded in the written word.

Davis, Albert. T'ao Yüan-Ming: His Works and Their Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

This...chapter contains a cautionary piece, addressed to his sons, and three sacrificial pieces, including the particularly famous In Sacrifice for Myself. All fall within the category of private, family writings, but it is probably necessary to realize that a growing tradition of publication would tend to make a writer who was conscious of literary success aware that initially private writings were likely to reach a wider audience. It was surely this literary self-consciousness that moved Tao to write such a work as In Sacrifice for Myself. From the outset he was presumably addressing those beyond the immediate circle of relatives and friends. (Davis, p. 225)

For the 'cautionary piece,' Davis cites the possible example of To My Son I-en by Zheng Xuan (127-200):

Tao Qian's equivalent admonition to his sons is filled with much more tension because Tao has chosen such a different path for his life. His values are remarkably different from Zheng Xuan's; one wonders by the end of his words whether he would rather his sons also follow their own path, or try for a more conforming and comfortable lifestyle:

I gave the tension here as the reason why I particularly wanted them to see this piece to Tao Qian's sons. Family was important to him, I emphasized. I turned to the piece "In Sacrifice for My Sister Madame Cheng" to show that Tao Qian was anything but a man living a world consisting of just himself and nature. Unexpectedly, I found myself dwelling on the lines at the end of the opening section:

"Stroking your hair, I grew up with you." I'm always particularly moved by that line, and I think I said in class, "This is how a guy in ancient China learned...to be nice. To show affection to another human being. It is a building block of himself, a value learned in his own personal experience. And it shows beautifully that this eulogy or any eulogy is in part autobiographical." I may have put things better than that -- or perhaps not.

Saving the best for last is not always the best policy -- I ran out of time before I could read much of "In Sacrifice for Myself." But I think I was able to get across how unusual and how comic it is to have a writer creating his own funerary literature:

Students enjoyed learning the symbolic significance of yellow leaves, traveller's inn and "original home." A question that I must ask myself is, what are the earliest extant use of these metaphors? Isn't it almost certain to be this piece?