A Note on the Feng Ritual of 742--In Response to Professor Elling Eide

Abstract

A NOTE ON THE FENG RITUAL OF 742 IN RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR ELLING EIDE D. 1. McMu llen Professor Eide in his fascinating and learned article on Li Po's riddle poem conferring a name on Hsu Yun-feng g~ \~ f1 and Professor Wechsler whom he consulted are surely right that no source other than Li's own works points to an intended or actual performance of the Feng j1 and Shan t' rites on Mount Tlai in or near A.D. 742.(1) The silence of the basic annals in the Old and New T'ang Histories, of their ritual monographs and of the institutional compendia as well as of less formal sources on a matter of a kind that all categories of source material tended to document fully makes it very unlikely that the Court itself repeated the costly and spectacular grand progress east to Shantung at this late stage in the reign.(2) On the other hand it may not be irrelevant to assessment of the historicity of the riddle anecdote that in late K'ai-yuan and r'ien-pao times there was continual demand that the Feng and Shan rites be performed not on Mount r'ai but rather on mount Sung ~ or Mount Hua~, two of the four other sacred peaks of the Chinese ritual tradition. Not only were these mountains much closer and more convenient of access from the capitals than Mount T'ai, but for Hsuan tsung to celebrate on them at this point would also have been for him to have fulfilled an ambition defined earlier in the dynasty. The possiblity of a performance of the rites on a sacred peak other than Mount rlai had been raised first in r'ang times by r'ai tsung himself.(3) His successor Kao tsung, after he had successfully performed the ceremony on Mount r'ai early in 666, "wished to go round all the five sacred peaks [performing the] Feng [ritps].(4) He very nearly fu1fill ~d this aim as far as Mount Sung was concerned in 682.(5) His intention was carried out by the empress Wu in 696, in a celebration that, because of its association with her, was all but discounted in official sources.(6) There is clear evidence that HsUan tsung, when he passed by ~ount Hua on his way to Loyang in the eleventh month of 724 and composed a text for it, was already considering a celebration on the mountain.(7) But his successful and, in the later r'ang view, particularly illustrious performance of the rites on Mount T'ai in the eleventh month of 725, almost exactly one sexagenary cycle after Kao tsung's, intervened. After this however attention reverted to Mount Sung and Mount Hua. In 730 the officials and elders of Huachou repeatedly asked for n performance there.(8) In 735 the officials led by Hsiao Sung it ~ ' an expert in state ritual by virtue of having been given responsibility for the great K'ai-yuan ritual code completed in 732, again repeatedly requested performances on Mount Sung and Mount Hua. 37 A NOTE ON THE 旦逕Q. RITUAL OF 742 IN RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR ELLING EIDE D, L. McMullen Professor Eide in his fascinating and learned articl e on Li Po's riddle poem conferring a name on HsU Ytin-feng 堂封 許 and Professor \-Jechsler whom he consulted are surPly right that no source other than Li's own works points to an intf'ndf'd or actual performancf'of the 旦墜封 and 罕懌 rites on Mount T'ai in or near A.D. 742.(1) The stlence of thP basic annals in the 卑 and New T'ang Histories, of thE>ir ritual monographs and of the institutional compendia as wf'll as of lpss formal sources on a matter of a kind that all categories of source material tended to document fully makes it VP.ry unlikP.ly that the Court itself repeated the costly and spectacular grand progress east to Shantung at this latP stage in the reign.(2) On the other hand it may not be irrelPvant to assPssment of the historicity of the riddlP anecdotP that in late K'ai-yiian...