Confucian Discourse Being Formed: Transmutation of Bo Yi and Shu Qi Allegory in Early China

Abstract

Through the process of sanctification over generations, Bo Yi and Shu Qi, the two adherents to Shang, have, to some extent, become the moral models in Chinese cultural memory. While their starvation to death for the sake of the Right Way has been extolled by non-imperial and imperial scholars, it must not be neglected that the account of Bo Yi and Shu Qi is naturally marked by an inescapable contradiction: their sage allegiance to the Shang Dynasty was, in fact, a very dismantling of the legitimacy of Zhou in the sense of Heavenly Mandate that the Zhou had constructed. Scholars of ancient China had shaped and presented the two as models for their times and future generations, but almost none of them showed direct interest in boldly discussing the contradiction. By focusing on how Chinese classics in an early stage dealt with the dilemma of judgment between the moral paragons and the legitimacy of an ideal era in accounts of the Bo Yi allegory, this paper demonstrates the changing process from the abstract and general narration of Confucius and Mencius to the comprehensive, paradoxical, and dialectical narration of Sima Qian, reflecting Confucianisms progression in maturity in early China.