Manchus of the Water

(This post is partially inspired by a recent article by Andreas Hölzl which delves extensively into the "Riverside Hypothesis", holding that the name manju comes from the name of a river, possibly the Amur, possibly from a Proto-Tungusic form like *mamgo.)

On the 27th of November, 1619, an emissary came to Nurhaci's court from the Ligdan Khan of the Chakhar Mongols. He bore a letter that began as follows:

döčin tümen monggul-un eǰen baγatur činggis qaγan-u ǰarlaq, usun-u γurban tümen manǰu-yin eǰen kündülen gegen qaγan mendü buyu oo?

An Order from the Hero Chinggis Khan, Ruler of the Four Hundred Thousand Mongols, to Kündülen Gegen Khan, Ruler of the Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water: Are you healthy?

Ligdan Khan opens with this greeting as a way of asserting his authority over Nurhaci. To him, this is an order (ǰarlaq) not a letter (bičig), and his authority to issue this order came from his position as heir to Chinggis Khan, as well as the numerical superiority of the Mongols over the Manchus.

But why does Ligdan Khan refer to "Manchus of the Water", and what does that mean?

Some context can be found in Nurhaci's response, in which he says that Ligdan Khan is living in the past. Those four hundred thousand Mongols that Ligdan Khan referred to were reduced to sixty thousand when the Hongwu emperor took the Yuan capital, and Ligdan Khan was not even the ruler of all of those Mongols that remained.

If the rest of Ligdan Khan's salutation is couched in terms dating back to the Yuan dynasty, then it seems likely that his use of the expression "Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water" is also a conscious archaicism. If so, what does it refer to?

The Chinese translators of the Manju-i Yargiyan Kooli rendered this expression as 水濱三萬人, "thirty thousand people of the river banks," so from their perspective it seems the term referred to the fact that the Manchus lived along rivers. This was definitely true of the Manchus of Nurhaci's time (despite the often-repeated claim that the Jurchens were nomadic), and was probably true of the Jurchens during Yuan times. Indeed, the centrality of rivers is even baked into the Manchu origin myth.

If you recall the story, the divinely conceived boy Bukuri Yongšon floats down a river from the Long White Mountain to a ford where people come to get water. There he makes himself a throne of willow and artemesia--two plants that grow on river banks--and is discovered and made a prince of the local people.

While they might sometimes bring mythological beings down from the mountains, rivers also provide access to fish and trade routes. More than that, the rivers in Manchuria provided access to gold and iron, both of which were gathered by panning river sand.

Given the wealth that rivers bring to those who live along them, it makes sense to me that the ethnonym manju might ultimately come from a term referring to people living along rivers, though the exact etymology of the name may still be debated.

Dream within a dream

I'm working through Jakdan's Handan Dream, which opens with a discussion of the idea that we all live within a Great Dream. In this section I have collided with the following couplet, which I find relatively easy to parse, but quite difficult to understand:

yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu seci, 

yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka biheni

The syntax here is easy to see, thanks to the parallel lines. Both lines contain a proposition, the first bracketed by the conditional seci, the second by the finite but interrogative biheni. The propositions are both copular, with the first line being of the form NP1 NP2 inu (NP1 is NP2), and the second is simply the negative of that same form, NP1 NP2 waka (NP1 is not NP2). In each case NP2 is a single word (niyalma, tolgin) and NP1 is a quantifier (yaya, yaka) followed by a relative expression (tolgin bisirengge, niyalmai banjirengge).

So it's pretty clear how all the lines are structured, but getting meaning out of it has been tough for me.

My difficulties lie in the relative expressions. Looking at tolgin bisirengge, at first it seems like it ought to mean "what exists in a dream." However, the phrase "what exists in a dream" should actually be tolgin de bisirengge, as attested by examples I have found elsewhere. We are missing the de in the relative expression, so that can't be the right reading.

Instead, I think we have to read this as "that in which a dream exists", or "that which has a dream". If we take it this way, yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu would mean "Each thing in which a dream exists is a person". If you think of dreams as existing in people, then this makes sense.

Moving on to niyalmai banjirengge, the difficulty here is that the verb banjimbi can be transitive ("give birth to") or intransitive ("be born; become; live"). We could read this as "that at which a person is born; becomes; lives" or "that which a person gives birth to". We cannot read this as "that which gives birth to a person" because that would be niyalma banjirengge without the genitive -i.

I think we should go with the intransitive reading in this case, because we have no reason to believe that it would be idiomatic in Manchu to say that a person gives birth to dreams. This forms a nicer parallel with the first line, and gives us a rhetorical question: yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka, "What does a person live in that is not a dream"?

These two copular phrases are linked together as P1 seci, P2 biheni. It is tempting to take seci...biheni as an if-then clause, but I don't think the mundane idea of dreams residing in people logically leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that people live in dreams. I think Jakdan means to contrast these two statements with each other and call out the curious idea that dreams are within people, while at the same time people live within the Great Dream.

So putting all of that together, the best I can come up with is:

While every dream is said to exist within a person,

is there any person who does not live in a dream?

Dù Fǔ and his Father (via Jakdan)

Dù Fǔ wrote On Climbing the Yǎnzhōu Tower about a visit to his father during the last year of his father’s life. The poem reminds me of the last years of my own father’s life, when I would go to visit him in Tucson to take care of things for him. When I had free time, I would go out of town and climb up into the Saguaro National Park.

In the second quatrain of the poem, when Dù Fǔ looks on the remains of the past, I think he is reflecting on the end of his father’s life. A man that once seemed to have a place in the world is now standing alone, and things that once seemed permanent are now in ruins.

Here is my translation of Jakdan’s translation.

Yan jeo-i hoton-i taktu de tafakangge

dergi giyūn ama uilere fonde,

julergi taktu tuktan tuwame elehe,

neore tugi hai dai nurhūhai,

necin tala cing sioi nikeneme,

cin-i eldengge wehe emteli dabagan debi,

lu-i hoton deyen arkan susuha hede,

julgei unesi udu labdu bicibe,

enggeleme karade emhun guwele mele.

When attending to my father in the east county,

I first got my fill of the view from the south tower.

Just as the floating clouds connected me to Hǎidài,

the level plain drew me near to Qīngxú, and

the stele of Qín was alone on the mountain pass,

the city and palace of Lǔ were just a desolate scar.

Though the ancient relics were many,

when I leaned forward to look out, I did so alone, and furtively.

Notes

hai dai and cing sioi: Since Jakdan left hai untranslated, and did not render it as mederi (ocean), I take hai dai to be a proper name for the region from Mount Tai to the sea, rather than a phrase referring to two places, “Mount Tai and the sea.” Since cing sioi parallels it in the next line, I took that in the same way.

nurhūhai and nikeneme: The verb nurhūmbi means “to link together without a gap,” as in idu nurhūmbi, “to do shifts back-to-back without a break between them.” (That example comes from the Qianlong dictionary.) Presumably the subject of the verb is the thing that does the linking, and in this line that would be the floating clouds. However, if we are taking hai dai to be a single noun phrase, then what is being linked to what?

I think Jakdan understood these two lines to describe the way that the view from the tower connected the poet to the distant places around him. The clouds above connected him to the Hǎidài region, and the plain below connected him to Qīngxú.

It is interesting that nikeneme is not a finite form, giving the impression that the thought in the first quatrain is not yet complete. I tried to convey that by putting a dangling “and” at the end of the quatrain.

An Idea about the Poet(s) of SB 34981

I was re-reading the introduction to Chiu's Bannermen Tales this morning when I noticed something that I had missed before. She translates a passage from a zidishu text called "Ziditu" (子弟圖), which includes the following line:

風流乞丐貶江湖

Chiu's translation: "People who are romantic but go about begging for money are derogatively called jianghu [roamers throughout the lakes and rivers]."

The expression ula tenggin, which would translate 江湖, occurs in SB 11.1 and 14.30, the Fishing poem, in which the poet talks about the romantic lifestyle of a wandering fisherman:

	nimaha butarangge [漁]		Fishing
	Staatsbibliothek 11.1 (View Online)
	tugi mukei ba,		A place of clouds and water.
	mini boo,		In what quarter
	ya falga,		is my home?
	ula tenggin hūi ciha,		Among rivers and lakes, wherever I please,
5	asu maktara,		I will cast my net.
	nimaha niša,		The fish are plentiful,
	nure hūlašacina,		I hope I can trade them for wine.
	wei sasa,		Who am I with?
	nurei hoki --		The companions of wine —
10	bele edun biya.		Rice, wind and moon.

I had previously assumed that this poem was written by someone like an official translator, whose ordinary life was stressful and boring, who dreamed about being able to retire to the quiet life of a fisherman.

But what if this poem is a romantic description of the poet's current life? That is, what if this poem was written by a member of the class of itinerant performers disparaged as jianghu? In that case, we can see the act of fishing as a metaphor for something like busking, performing one's art in the chance hope of receiving a little money.

The Idea of kooli in Old Manchu

In the Autumn of 1612, rumors came to Nurhaci’s ears that a daughter of his, Lady Onje, had been shot with bone-tipped arrows by a man named Bujantai, to whom she had been given in marriage. Bone-tipped arrows make a whistling noise when they fly, and to shoot someone with a bone-tipped arrow was a fairly dramatic form of public punishment.

According to the Manchu account, Lady Onje had committed no crime to deserve this punishment. Instead, rumor had it that Bujantai wanted to marry the daughter of Bujai of Yehe, so shooting Onje was apparently a part of dissolving his alliance with Nurhaci and re-establishing old ties with Yehe. This calculus was no doubt informed by the fact that Nurhaci lived beyond Yehe to the south, making former seem a less dangerous enemy than the latter.

The shooting of Lady Onje provoked Nurhaci’s anger not only because it was a direct attack on his flesh and blood, but also because he had spared Bujantai’s life in battle and felt he deserved his loyalty. Nurhaci gathered his troops and rode for the Amur river, on the far banks of which Bujantai’s walled city of Ula stood.

When they reached Ula, Nurhaci’s soldiers captured five or six towns on the south side of the river and burned their granaries, cutting off supplies to Ula in an effort to draw Bujantai out. Bujantai knew he was in trouble and delayed as long as he could (maybe hoping for reinforcements from Yehe), but eventually he saw no option other than to come out and face Nurhaci. He came in a boat to the middle of the river, and Nurhaci rode out into the water to meet him.

Bujantai groveled and begged Nurhaci to leave, but Nurhaci challenged him to explain his actions, saying:

mini jui ehe weile araci minde alanjicina. abka ci wasika aisin gioro halai niyalma de gala isika kooli be si tucibu. tanggū jalan be sarkū dere, juwan jalan ci ebsi si sarkū bio. mini aisin gioro halangga niyalma de gala isika kooli bici, bujantai si uru okini mini cooha jihengge waka mujangga.

If my child committed a crime, then I hope you will tell me. If there is a kooli for acting against a person of the Heaven Descended Aisin Gioro clan, then produce it! You may not know a hundred generations, but do you not know the last ten generations? If there is a kooli for acting against a person of my Aisin Gioro clan, then let you be found to be in the right, Bujantai, and my coming here with my soldiers will be deemed wrong indeed.

Here, Nurhaci is laying out two possible justifications for Bujantai’s shooting of Lady Onje, and challenging him to prove either one. In the first case, if Lady Onje had committed a crime, Bujantai could justify his actions by simply saying what the crime was. In the second case, if there were a kooli that would allow him to do something like this to a person of Nurhaci’s clan, he could produce it.

In later Manchu we find kooli equated to the Chinese term meaning lì 例, meaning “rule, norm, precedent, case.” This was not an especially important concept in Chinese law, but referred to a substatute that provided a very specific example of the implementation of a punishment for a crime, or else a previous decision by the Board of Punishments that could be used as a precedent for a later decision if there was no applicable law.

Among the Jurchens, however, there was no written code of law and no Board of Punishments, so kooli meant something very different to them than what it meant to later Manchus. Several clues to its original meaning can be seen in the event described above. While the existence of a mere crime would have allowed Bujantai to take action against Onje as an individual, it is implied that a kooli would have allowed him to take action against her as a member of her clan, putting him in the right (uru) and Nurhaci in the wrong (waka.) In order to produce the kooli, however, Bujantai would have had to call on a knowledge of history that might go back long before he, Nurhaci or Lady Onje were even born.

From this example, it seems that kooli was a concept that governed the idea of justice between clans and across generations. This would have made a knowledge of history important to the Jurchens, because the leader with the better knowledge of history would be better able to justify his actions against another clan.

However, since Jurchen histories would have been primarily oral, they would have been at a disadvantage when interacting with the Chinese, whose long written traditions would have given them more material to draw on. Nurhaci himself felt the bite of this in 1614 when the Wanli emperor sent a military official to him named Xiao Bozhi, bearing a letter to which he demanded that Nurhaci bow down. The exact content of the letter is not recorded in the Manchu history, except to say that:

hacin hacin i ehe gisun, julgei ufaraha jabšaha kooli be feteme hendume bithe arafi

A letter had been written, full of all kinds of wicked talk, and dredging up ancient kooli of success and failure.

In this incident we see kooli associated with the ideas of success and failure, but this is not unrelated to its association with justice. In the Jurchen view, Heaven would reward those whom it deemed to be right with success, and punish those whom it deemed to be wrong with failure. For this reason, while a knowledge of history was important for justifying action against another clan, it was also critical for determining who would have the favor of Heaven in any resulting conflict.

The important connections between kooli and the study of history persisted after Nurhaci’s death. When a translation of the Jurchen Jīn history was undertaken in 1636, the office in charge of the project was called Kooli selgiyere yamun, the “Office for the Promulgation of Kooli.” In his preface to the Jīn history, the Grand Secretary of that office, a man named Hife, explained the importance of the study of history and kooli as follows:

julgei kooli suduri be tuwaci, jabšara ufarara weile asuru narhūn, taifin facuhūn i forgon ambula somishūn. damu enduringge niyalmai dabala, gūwa sarkū. tuttu ofi han niyalmai dasan yabun jabšaha ufaraha babe bithei niyalma yooni arahangge, ne be olhome ginggulekini. amaga be olhome alhūdakini sehengge kai.

If one considers kooli and history, acts of success and failure are very subtle, and periods of peace and turmoil are quite obscure. Aside from divine people, others would not know of it. Therefore, literary people record all of the rules and deeds, successes and failures of kings and people, in order that those at the time should fearfully respect them, and those who come later should fearfully imitate them.

Go and Water the Horses Again

A while back I posted about a song in Grebenshchikov 45 about going to water the horses. I have now found a second, longer version of it in Grebenshchikov 45, and I have also determined that this is yet another extract from Jakdan’s translation of the Liáozhài. This makes the third work from G45 that is traceable to a Chinese original, and strengthens my feeling that this manuscript is composed largely of selections of other authors’ translations from Chinese.

It will be interesting to see if G45 contains any copies of Jakdan’s translations of classical Chinese poetry from Jabduha ucuri amtanggai baita, or Jakdan’s own compositions.

The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple

This poem is kind of like my experience this morning. I got up early and worked on Manchu poetry, with early morning sun shining through the windows, and a clear blue sky outside. Then my kids came downstairs and started playing video games.

破山寺後禪院 （常健）

清晨入古寺，初日照高林。
曲徑通幽處，禪房花木深。
山光悅鳥性，潭影空人心。
萬籟此俱寂，唯聞鐘磬音。

Po šaṇ juktehen-i amargi samadi hūwa		The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple
erde julgei juktehen de dosikade,		When I entered the ancient temple early in the morning,
mukdeke šun-i fosoko bujan-i sihin,		the canopy of the woods was lit up by the rising sun.
mudanggai doko daniyan-i ici hafungga,		A winding path went through toward the refuge,
samadi hūwa-i ilha moo fisin.		and thick were the flowers and trees of the monastery.
alin eldepi cecikei banin selacuka,		Birds rejoiced that the mountain was illuminated,
juce helmešehei niyalmai mujilen kenggehun,		as the pond reflected it, the human mind became empty.
eiten asuki nerginde [e]lenggei ekisakai,		For a moment, as all the fainter sounds became quiet,
donjihangge damu jungken kingken-i urkin.		all I heard was the clamor of bells and chime stones.

You might notice in my transliteration of the title, I used a dot under the n of šaṇ instead of šan. This is to reflect the fact that the n has a dot on it in Manchu, as you can see in the image below.

The general rule is that syllable-final n does not have a dot. One of the Jesuits (probably either Verbiest or Amyot, I don’t remember) tells us that the n without a dot indicates nasalization of the previous vowel. In this case, Jakdan adds the dot because the Chinese word shān 山 ends in a consonant n, not a nasalized vowel. This is something that is easily overlooked, but can sometimes help you tell the difference between a reference to the khan (han) and the Hàn (haṇ).

What is the genitive marker on ekisakai doing? Normally it would make an adverb, like “quietly,” but there’s no verb here for it to modify. From the context here, I think maybe this structure is comparable to the converb -hAi, which conveys that as one action proceeds, a second action proceeds along with it. This form appears in Jakdan’s translation of Lǐ Bái’s “Sitting Alone on Jìngtíng Mountain,” where he says geren cecike deken-i deyehei wajiha, “as the birds flew higher, they disappeared.”

In this case, since we have an adjective, I think Jakdan’s use of this form means that as the fainter sounds (of birds) became quiet, all the poet could hear was the ringing of bells and chime stones. He reinforces this idea by using the noisy word urkin to contrast with the fainter asuki of the previous line.