in China as well. It makes a fundamental value judgment in favor of
studying over physical pursuits. Ouyang’s position is in stark contrast to
the story recounted inChapter 2 of Liezi being challenged concerning his
skill with archery. It is worth repeating here. Liezi’s friend took him up to
the edge of a cliff and challenged him to shoot from there. Liezi was
paralyzed with fear, and his friend admonished him:
The master archer canfire an arrow under any condition. Whether he sees the clear
sky or faces the yawning abyss, he can still shoot with the same state of mind. He is
not affected by conditions of life and death, for nothing can move the stillness of his
mind. Look at yourself now. You are so scared that you can’t stand up or look
straight. How can you even begin to demonstrate the art of archery?^13
Confucius, for his part, separated archery as a military or hunting skill
from its value in ceremonial performance. He emphasized the proper form
and mental state required for archery and devalued penetrating the target.
Of course, for the warrior, strength was just as important as accuracy,
since merely striking a target with insufficient force to damage it was
useless. This is one of the reasons that military competitions, displays,
and tests always included some kind of strength test, both in general and
with respect to the draw weight of a bow. Mencius followed Confucius
along these lines and used archery as an analogy for virtue. The archery of
the gentleman was, for Confucius, an opportunity to distinguish him from
the more usual values of a contest, as gentlemen did not compete against
each other in terms of accuracy; archery was a means to display cultivation
and to seek inner development within oneself.
While Ouyang Xiu certainly identified himself very strongly with
Confucius and Mencius, and believed himself also to be a member of the
knightly (士) class–understood in the Song as the literati class–he could
not understand archery in the same way. This was a major intellectual step
for the literati away from the martial arts, one that would be given even
fuller expression in the twelfth century by Zhu Xi ( 1130 – 1200 ), the
founder of what is usually known in the West as Neo-Confucianism.
Zhu took pains to explain the Confucius comment about not concerning
oneself with penetrating the target. Archery had ideally been practiced to
observe a man’s virtue. Virtue was displayed by deportment and behavior,
not“success”in the contest. For Zhu, of course, this was an apposite
analogy for moral behavior in general, particularly for the literati. By as
early as the eleventh century, many literati who studied to pass the civil
service exams and become government officials were unable to achieve
those goals because there were more applicants than positions available.
126 The Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song Dynasty