THE WAY TO THE WHITE TIGER HALL CONFERENCE: EVIDENCE GLEANED FROM THE FORMATION PROCESS OF THE BAIHU TONG

Abstract

The White Tiger Hall conference, held in the fourth year (79 c.e.) of the Jianchu 建初 reign in the Eastern Han, was a significant event in both politics and classical learning during and after that time. As the summary of the conference, composed after its conclusion, the Baihu tong 白虎通 is the main resource for investigating the details of this conference. Clarifying the formation process of the Baihu tong is helpful to elicit information regarding the White Tiger Hall conference from the findings recorded in its text. By tracing the history of the court conferences as an administrative institution and considering the particular nature of manuscript compilation, textual genre formats, and literary circulation during the Han, this paper suggests that the Baihu yizou 白虎議奏 referred to in the sources represents the compilation of the positions of the different debaters during the conference by Chunyu Gong 淳于恭 that was eventually sent to Emperor Zhang 章帝 for his approval; the Baihu tongde lun 白虎通德論 would be the corpus of the final rulings that had already been compiled before the conference ended and then edited by Ban Gu 班固. Later, the Emperor instructed his archivists to compose the Baihu tong by condensing the Baihu tongde lun. According to its formation process, the Baihu tong is the work of a collection of experts, rather than a compilation by a single person. Evidence shows that, although Emperor Zhang could weigh in on the court discussions (chengzhi linjue 稱制臨決), he could not ignore the consensus, nor could he simply mandate that the conference participants agree with him. In this regard, the Baihu tong cannot be considered a synthesis of the court's findings, establishing a single court ideology. Rather, it is best to see the text we have now as evidence of vigorous debates among the conference participants, including the Emperor himself and a range of other officials. In conclusion, the best way to uncover the facts about the White Tiger Hall conference via the Baihu tong is to reverse the process of textual formation, to glean information about the probable historical basis for the disputes recorded in the text.