The Undyed Silk Problem: Why No One Could Tell What Liu Shan Felt

After Shu Han surrendered in 263, its former emperor Liu Shan was brought to Luoyang. According to the Han Jin Chunqiu, written by Xi Zuochi in the following century and preserved in Pei Songzhi’s commentary on the Records of the Three Kingdoms, the regent Sima Zhao held a banquet and had the entertainments of Shu performed. Those around Liu Shan were moved to grief. Liu Shan laughed and was at ease, 喜笑自若. Sima Zhao asked his adviser Jia Chong: 人之无情，乃可至于是乎, “Can a man be so without feeling as this?” On another day he asked Liu Shan whether he missed Shu, and received the answer that became a proverb: 此间乐，不思蜀, “It is pleasant here; I do not miss Shu.”

The anecdote is not in Chen Shou’s main text and may well be polished, but it has been read for seventeen centuries as the decisive evidence about Liu Shan’s mind, and three readings of it compete. The oldest, Sima Zhao’s, is that he felt nothing; his childhood name, Adou, later became shorthand for a man who cannot be helped. A second, popular in modern reassessments, is that the laughter was a performance, since a captive ruler who shows longing for his lost state gives a suspicious regent a reason to kill him. A third, Daoist in vocabulary, holds that the contentment was real, a release from the role of emperor in the spirit of Zhuangzi’s “Discussion on Making All Things Equal.”

All three predict the same behavior. A man who feels nothing laughs at the music; so does a man performing harmlessness, and so does a man at peace. This is the problem of other minds in concrete historical form. An observer never sees another person’s feeling, only behavior, and reaches the feeling through some model of the mind producing it. Each reading is such a model. Given the same laughter, each returns a different interior.

One episode in the sources does discriminate among them. Liu Shan’s former secretary Xi Zheng coached him privately: if asked again, he should weep, say that not a day passed without his thinking of his ancestors’ tombs in Shu, and close his eyes. Sima Zhao asked again, and Liu Shan delivered the speech. Sima Zhao said: 何乃似郤正语邪, “How is it that this sounds just like Xi Zheng?” Liu Shan looked at him in surprise and answered 诚如尊命, “It is exactly as you say.” Everyone present laughed.

A ruler skilled enough to play the fool would not need lines written for him, or name their author the moment he was asked. A sage who had stopped grieving for Shu would have no reason to recite a grief he did not feel. What the episode shows instead is a man who took the feeling his former minister handed him, delivered it, and then took the regent’s account of it just as readily.

That last step raises a second problem, running in the opposite direction. A long tradition in philosophy holds that whatever an observer cannot know about a mind, its owner can. Sima Zhao must infer, but Liu Shan simply knows what he feels. Yet told where his grief came from, Liu Shan did not consult himself; he accepted the observer’s version. Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson’s 1977 review suggests this is less unusual than it appears: people’s explanations of their own choices often matched the guesses of outsiders who had only been told about the situation. Liu Shan’s reply is that finding at its limit.

Chen Shou, who had served Shu before writing its history under the Jin, offered his own model in his closing assessment: 后主任贤相则为循理之君，惑阉竖则为昏暗之后, “When the Later Ruler trusted a worthy chancellor, he followed reason; when he was misled by eunuchs, he was benighted.” He then quoted a saying whose image goes back to the Mozi, where Master Mo watches a dyer at work: 素丝无常，唯所染之, “White silk has no constant color; it takes whatever it is dyed.”

The record fits this model. Under Zhuge Liang the court was disciplined; after his death in 234, and especially once the eunuch Huang Hao rose to dominance in 258, it declined. In 263 Liu Shan accepted Qiao Zhou’s case for surrender, and in Luoyang, surrounded by comfort, he was comfortable. Chen Shou’s model also explains the coaching. Sima Zhao assumed a fixed interior that happened to be empty. Chen Shou describes an interior with no fixed setting, which would sincerely enjoy a banquet, sincerely grieve when handed words for grief, and sincerely agree when told whose words they were. None of it would be a disguise, though all of it would look like one to an observer who assumes a stable self behind the behavior.

That assumption is contested. In the 1973 Good Samaritan experiment, John Darley and Daniel Batson sent seminary students across campus past a man slumped in a doorway. Of those told they had time to spare, 63 percent stopped to help; of those told they were late, 10 percent did. The philosopher John Doris, in Lack of Character (2002), used results like these to argue that situations explain more of our conduct than the stable traits we attribute to one another. On that view, undyed silk describes everyone, more or less.

Shu’s own record limits that conclusion. Liu Shan’s son Liu Chen heard the same news and the same arguments for surrender, argued for a last stand, and when his father refused, wept at the shrine of the dynasty’s founder and took his own life. The situation did not decide for him. What Chen Shou saw in Liu Shan was not the power of circumstance over any mind but a particular mind in which circumstance met almost no resistance: a disposition, paradoxically, to have no fixed disposition.

The same trait that cost Shu its independence let its former ruler live out his life in peace. He died in Luoyang in 271, and according to Wang Yin’s Shu Ji received the posthumous title 思公, Duke Si, with the same 思, to long for, that he had used when he said he did not miss Shu. The reader may still wonder which of his feelings was his own: the laughter, the recited grief, or the surprise when he was found out. It is not clear that Liu Shan himself could have said.