Ruan Ji and Jiu Kuang: sixty days drunk to dodge a marriage

Someone has come with a marriage proposal. The visitor speaks for Sima Zhao, the real ruler of the state of Wei in the third century; within a few years his son will be emperor. Sima Zhao wants to match that son, Sima Yan, with the daughter of this house.

It is a proposal no one dares refuse. To refuse would be to insult the Sima family, and in recent years a good many people who insulted the Sima family have died.

The master of the house does not refuse. He simply gets drunk. The next day, when the visitor returns, he is still drunk. On the third day, the tenth day, the thirtieth day, he is drunk. Each time the go-between comes, he finds the man lying there, unable to speak clearly, unable to open his eyes.

After sixty days, the Sima family stops sending anyone.

The man's name is Ruan Ji. Of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the famous circle of poets and free spirits of the third century, Ji Kang is the one who was executed and Ruan Ji is the one who survived. The way he survived was by drinking.

Sixty days

The History of Jin (Jin Shu), the official history of the dynasty that the Sima family founded, records the episode very briefly in its biography of Ruan Ji: Sima Zhao "wished to seek a marriage with Ji's family for the future Emperor Wu, but Ji was drunk for sixty days, no word could be spoken, and the matter stopped".

Another visitor, Zhong Hui, called on him many times, hoping to catch him out: "he repeatedly asked him about current affairs, intending to convict him by whether he approved or disapproved". Ruan Ji "escaped every time by being thoroughly drunk". Zhong Hui was the man who later brought about Ji Kang's death (see The end of Guangling San). Ji Kang did not escape him. Ruan Ji did.

The History of Jin sums up his life like this:

He had originally the ambition to set the world in order. But he lived at the turn from Wei to Jin, when the empire was full of troubles and few men of note kept their lives intact. So he took no part in affairs and made heavy drinking his habit.

"Few men of note kept their lives intact." That is the whole reason Ruan Ji drank.

Blue eyes, white eyes, and weeping at the end of the road

Two more stories about Ruan Ji appear in the History of Jin.

The first is the "blue and white eyes". People he respected, he looked at directly, with the dark of his eyes (called "blue" in Chinese). People he despised, he looked at with the whites. When his mother died, Ji Xi came to offer condolences. Ji Xi was a career official, and Ruan Ji gave him the whites of his eyes; Ji Xi left in a temper. When Ji Xi's younger brother Ji Kang heard about this, he came carrying wine and a qin. Ruan Ji was delighted and gave him the blue. The Chinese expression "to give someone the white eye", meaning to treat them with contempt, comes from this story.

A man who shows a guest the whites of his eyes at his mother's funeral does not misunderstand etiquette. It was his way of saying: I am not inside your rules.

The second is the "weeping at the end of the road":

At times he would drive out alone as the fancy took him, not keeping to any road. Where the wheel tracks could go no further, he would weep bitterly and turn back.

No one knew what he was crying about. He never said.

The man who met the world with the whites of his eyes and wept at the end of the road, and the man who met the powerful with drunkenness, were the same man. Drinking was his way of dealing with the world outside. Weeping was his way of dealing with what was inside.

Poems from the heart

Ruan Ji left eighty-two poems under the title Yong Huai (咏怀, "Singing of My Feelings"), the most important poetry of the Wei and Jin. The first one reads:

At midnight I cannot sleep; I rise and sit and play the sounding qin. The thin curtain mirrors the bright moon, a clear wind blows against my robe. A lone wild goose cries in the open fields, circling birds call in the northern wood. Pacing back and forth, what will I see? Only anxious thoughts, and a heart alone in pain.

There is a qin in this poem. "At midnight I cannot sleep; I rise and sit and play the sounding qin." Ruan Ji played when he could not sleep, and it is the same thing as his drinking: drunk by day, playing at night, both from "anxious thoughts, and a heart alone in pain". The History of Jin says he "loved wine, could whistle, and played the qin well", the whistle being the long chant practised by the eccentrics of his age.

Jiu Kuang

The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, "Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), compiled by the Ming prince Zhu Quan and the oldest surviving collection of qin music, includes a piece called Jiu Kuang (酒狂, "Drunken Ecstasy"). Its preface says:

This piece was composed by Ruan Ji. Ji lamented that the Way could not be put into practice and that he was out of step with his times. So he put the cares of the world outside his bodily form, lodged his feelings in heavy drinking, and took this as the pleasure of his whole life.

Whether Ruan Ji wrote it cannot be proved; no qin piece of the Wei and Jin has a securely documented composer. But the preface explains Ruan Ji's drunkenness very clearly. It was not a weakness for wine. It was his way of living once "the Way could not be put into practice". Zhu Quan, twelve hundred years later, understood him.

A piece that slept for five hundred years

After the Shenqi Mipu, Jiu Kuang hardly appears in the handbooks of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and nobody played it. It was brought back in the 1950s.

The qin player Yao Bingyan reconstructed it from the jianzipu (减字谱, the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters) in the Shenqi Mipu. This kind of reconstruction is called dapu (打谱, reconstructing a piece from a historical score). Jianzipu does not record rhythm, so the reconstructor must decide it. Yao Bingyan made a bold decision: triple time.

Triple time is extremely rare in qin music, which is mostly in free rhythm or duple meter. Yao Bingyan chose it to portray a drunkard's walk: one heavy beat and two light ones, one foot planted firmly and then two stumbling steps. Plant, stagger, stagger; plant, stagger, stagger. The piece also has several sharp zhuang (撞, a quick upward slide and return) and sudden accents, like a man who lurches, nearly falls, and catches himself. This became the standard: every Jiu Kuang played today is Yao Bingyan's.

So the Jiu Kuang we hear today has three authors: Ruan Ji (possibly), Zhu Quan (who preserved the score) and Yao Bingyan (who decided the rhythm). For more on what dapu involves, see What is dapu? (in Chinese). A piece slept five hundred years and woke in triple time, at the hands of a twentieth-century player. That could happen only on the qin.

Ruan Ji and Ji Kang

Ruan Ji and Ji Kang were the closest of friends among the Bamboo Grove sages, yet their lives ended in opposite ways. They faced the same problem, the Sima family demanding that they declare where they stood, and they gave different answers.

Ji Kang wrote his Letter Breaking Off Relations with Shan Juyuan, in which he refused office and left no room for retreat. Then he played Guangling San on the execution ground. Ruan Ji wrote his eighty-two Yong Huai poems, not one of which says anything plainly, and then drank for the rest of his life. Ji Kang lived to forty. Ruan Ji lived to fifty-four.

Later generations call Ji Kang the martyr and Ruan Ji the one who kept himself whole. But one detail deserves attention. When Ruan Ji heard that Ji Kang had been killed, no record says that he did anything at all. He simply went on drinking. And late in Sima Zhao's life, when Sima Zhao was to receive the Nine Bestowals, the honors that traditionally came just before a usurpation of the throne, someone had to write the formal address urging him to accept. The man who wrote it was Ruan Ji. He was drunk, he was woken up, and he wrote it in one sweep of the brush. The History of Jin says its language was "very clear and vigorous". It was an excellent piece of writing.

That address is the greatest stain on Ruan Ji's life, and it was the price of keeping himself whole. The staggering man of Jiu Kuang, at the end of all his staggering, still went down on his knees once. Anyone who plays the piece should probably know this too.

What drunkenness meant

Drunkenness in the Wei and Jin was not the same as drinking to forget in later ages. It was a stance: I am not taking part.

In Ruan Ji's time, to state a view was to choose a side, and choosing a side could get you killed. He Yan, Xiahou Xuan and Ji Kang all died for choosing the wrong side or refusing to choose. Being drunk was the only way to avoid declaring yourself without openly disobeying. You ask me a question: I am drunk. You give me an order: I am drunk. You want my daughter: I am drunk. No one can convict a drunkard.

But Ruan Ji was not really confused. The Shishuo Xinyu (世说新语, "A New Account of Tales of the World"), the fifth-century book of anecdotes, records that he "never passed judgement on others", never saying whether anyone was good or bad. Sima Zhao himself said of him: "The most cautious man in the world must be Ruan Ji." A man who stayed drunk for sixty days was called the most cautious man in the world. That is what drunkenness meant in the Wei and Jin: only a man who was utterly clear-headed needed to act so very drunk.

This is what Jiu Kuang is about. On the surface it is a drunkard stumbling. Underneath, it is a sober man stumbling. Players say it needs "wakefulness inside the drunkenness", or it is just a mess. Play the triple time too precisely and it sounds like a dance. Play it too loosely and it sounds like someone who really is drunk. It has to sit between precision and disorder, like a man who knows he is pretending, the way Ruan Ji lay there for sixty days while the go-between came and went.

That is also why Jiu Kuang is listed among the intermediate pieces (see the guide to classic qin repertoire (in Chinese)). The triple time is not hard for the hands. What is hard is playing the refusal to take part.