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Octopartite Parables: Living in a Parallel Universe
The octopartite or "eight-legged essay" bagu wen was developed over many centuries as an instrument of examining candidates for the Chinese civil service examination. Somewhat like progymnasmata in classical rhetoric, and later taxonomies of argument taught in Western European universities, study and training for the octopartite essay required extensive reading, a highly developed ability to emulate the styles of different exemplary authors, and a fluency in exegesis that combined subtle commentary juxtaposed with deft use of allusions. While the discussion in this essay focuses primarily on the octopartite or bagu essay, other essays in this symposium, particularly those by Lu Liu and Xioaye You, warn against reducing Chinese rhetorical history and practices to the bagu tradition and the related misunderstanding that Chinese rhetoric avoids logic and adversarial argumentation. The correction of these and other misunderstandings is an important and valuable focus of recent comparative studies of Chinese with Western rhetorics. Careful examination of similarities as well as differences between the two traditions forms a dialectic that can improve our understanding and set new directions for comparative studies.
Like their peers in European universities, Chinese students in the Ming and Qing dynasties prepared for the civil service examination by reading and memorizing ancient texts composed two thousand years earlier, during the Chou and Han dynasties (Elman 16). Like medieval Latin university education, preparation for tests and the eight-legged exam essay required competence in a written language that diverged from vernacular Chinese of later imperial China. In order to pass the tests and become certified as officials, students acquired a new spoken dialect-Mandarin as a second language and a written language-classical Chinese, whose linguistic terseness, thousands of unusual written glyphs, and archaic grammatical forms required memorization and constant attention from childhood through manhood.
Four hundred thousand characters' worth of textual material had to be memorized to master the examination curriculum-the Four Books (Mencius and Confucius predominantly) and Five Classics (Songs, Documents, Changes, Spring and Autumn Rites) by the age of eleven, poetic composition by the age of twelve, and composition of the pa ku, or bagu-the eight-legged essay (Elman 16). Although the civil service examination was abolished in 1910, and the bagu along with it, the style of the pakuwen...