Unrighteous Rulers: A Comparison of Zhou Xin and Pentheus

The episode involving the tyrant Zhou Xin and the righteous King Wen in book twenty of the Lüshi chunqiu (Knoblock & Riegel p. 532) illustrates a Chinese deuterotruth about rulers and rulership which clashes with western ideas about the same sort of scenario. In the western - specifically, the Graeco-Roman - tradition, unrighteous kings are to be immediately destroyed, one way or another. Furthermore, in the course of this destruction, filial concern and family ties are no obstruction. In the Chinese picture we find in Lü Buwei's book, however, King Wen cannot speak out against the tyrant Zhou, let alone destroy him. He is the ruler, and King Wen's relation to him as a subject (not to mention a brother-in-law), like the relation of a son to his father, must not be violated. "No matter how the king acts," King Wen enjoins, "is it permissible to rebel?"

The quotation from the Shi jing which follows the account of King Wen's conduct identifies his action as righteous both in the sense of being morally rectified, but also in the sense of being in the right relation to the divine: "Brightly he served the Supreme Sovereign". From ancient Greece comes an entirely contrary example of a destroyed ruler, in which the divine is intimately involved, and in which familial concern is entirely contravened, namely Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae. In these two cases, standing in a righteous relation to the higher powers means entirely different things. Similarly, the attitudes of each to the position of the ruler are strikingly at odds, and may have far-reaching implications for the way heirs of either tradition view government and their role within it.

Euripides' dramatic tale of rebellion, unrighteousness, and dismemberment touches on many of the same issues at play in the story of King Wen and tyrant Zhou. On the other hand, the relations of the characters to some of those issues are reversed, as it were. For instance, Pentheus, the ruler of Thebes in The Bacchae, is actually a decent king who finds his city disordered and disturbed by the less-than-decent cult of Dionysus. In the context of the play, Pentheus'
unrighteousness lies in his disregard for Bacchus, his refusal to acknowledge the miscreant as a legitimate god, and his efforts (against the interests of Dionysus) to return order to the city. By contrast, Zhou Xin's poor rule ruins the Shang dynasty, bringing it to disorder. He is the very archetype of a bad king (his name, of course, became one of the tropes for evil rulers), and his unrighteous conduct includes the murder of two of his vassals, and the presentation of their remains as meats at an ancestral ceremony, an extreme violation of ritual propriety. Both kings meet their demise in contravening the divine order, though one sought (against the divine disorder) to restore the order of his government, while the other wrecked both the order of the state and the order of the rituals in his carelessness. This instance of reversal points to a collateral deuterotruth: in the west, divine order and human order are separate and often opposed, while in ancient China the proper human order is an extension below of the divine order above.

The ends met by each of the two kings bear careful consideration, of course. Typical of a Greek tragedy, Euripides' Pentheus sallies forth to personally put the bacchantes' disturbance to rest, only to be mistaken for a lion by the raving women - among them, his own mother - and torn limb from limb by them (his mother draws first blood, naturally). The point of contrast in the example of Pentheus that should immediately be noted is the disintegration of familial connections. Of course, The Bacchae is a tragedy, and what makes it so tragic is precisely that Pentheus is killed by his mother. We must not forget, however, that this play is not an isolated instance of this sort by any means. Simply put, the Greek tragedians did this all the time: the Oresteia is practically a litany of familial murders, beginning with Agamemnon killing his daughter as a sacrifice, continuing with Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra killing him on his homecoming from Troy, and ending with their son Orestes killing his mother to revenge his father. In the Antigone, the protagonist of the same name is buried alive in a cave by her uncle, the king, as punishment for properly burying her brother, fallen in his attack against the city. The crowning achievement of Oedipus (Antigone's father, incidentally) also comes to mind. If there remains any doubt that this sort of intra-familial murder is a deep-seated Greek trope, recall the mythological account of how Zeus, highest of the gods, gained his rulership by killing his father, Kronos, who in turn is known for eating his own children to prevent them from killing him as he had killed his own father Uranus.

The situation between King Wen and Zhou Xin could not be more different. Though King Wen "wept and wailed" over the evil conduct of the tyrant, he refused to overstep the bounds of his place as a vassal of the ruler. The relationship between lord and servant, parallel to that between father and son, is properly maintained. Of course, Zhou met his fated end at the hand of King Wen's son, Wu; but while the demise of the last Shang king was more or less ubiquitously viewed in a positive light, nonetheless one of Lü Buwei's scholars notes that King Wu may be disparaged for "plotting the expulsion and assassination of [his lord]" (Knoblock & Riegel p. 504). Even though King Wu's overthrow and replacement of the tyrant was welcome, the overthrow itself is not considered an ideal turn of events, precisely because of the violation of the relationship of lord to servant it entails, and the violation of the relationship of father and son which it implies.

In these two contrary examples, righteousness and unrighteousness mean different things, especially as they pertain to rulers. For Pentheus, unrighteousness lay in acting against the conflicting agenda of Dionysus, and refusing to give in to his divine inversion of normal order. The vengeful Bacchus punishes him for his stubborn resistance by inverting the relation Pentheus would normally have with his mother, that is, she who gave him life gives him death. For the tyrant Zhou, unrighteousness was his carelessly doing as he wished (Knoblock & Riegel p. 505), neglecting all other nodes on the net of relations, including the connections to the ancestors through the sacrificial rituals, through which he was in turn connected to highest Heaven.

As rulers, their conduct was completely different, yet they both met destruction in the end. Pentheus acted out of concern for his city, but failed to recognize the inversion of order imposed by the divine, and so in acting as he normally ought, in fact acted contrary to the demands of the time. Zhou Xin acted without any concern for his state, and failed to recognize the degradation of order that such action caused, acting poorly in his role as ruler. Significant to the present examination is the respect accorded to the person of the ruler as the ruler: in the Greek example, properly acting in the role of the ruler is precisely what leads Pentheus to his demise; in the Chinese example, even though Zhou is a terrible ruler, he still is the ruler, and is held in high regard as such despite his failings. To hold him in such respect is righteousness, as it preserves the order which spans both Heaven and Earth, even as the figure central to that order ruins it. While the example of Pentheus is an unusual one on account of the circumstance of the Bacchic inversion, there are sufficient other examples - the Oresteia outstanding among them - of rulers readily being overthrown without any worry that the overthrow is reprehensible.

The implications of each of these deuterotruth-informed viewpoints are weighty. The outlook for heirs of the Greek tradition would appear to be rather dire. With the deuterotruth notion that bad kings should be deposed despite their being kings, how can the ruler have any security? Perhaps the kind of government which has emerged from this tradition is significant: in the modern western democracy, there is indeed no inherent respect for the position of the ruler which would inhibit the his impeachment. Some people, granted, will admit a 'respect for the office,' but this they usually do in preface to their criticism of the officeholder. The position of the ruler in the modern west is indeed tenuous.

Following the same logic, one might expect to find in China a history of very well-established rulers and stable governments, but this is, of course, far from the case. It must be borne in mind that the Lüshi chunqiu is not a description, but an argument: the period of warring states before the Qin unification was anything but a stable one for rulers.

Nonetheless, it is important to note the relative stability of the form of imperial government in China after the advent of the Han, despite the bumps of dynastic change and other disruptions. The presence of the notion that the position of the ruler requires a certain inviolable respect, especially as parallel to a familial relation, is the important point.