The poem “Nam quốc sơn hà” is extremely famous, especially it’s first two lines:
“The Southern Kingdom’s mountains and rivers are occupied by the Southern Emperor,
This is clearly demarcated in the thiên thư.”
What exactly was this “thiên thư”? This expression has been translated into English by such terms as “Heaven’s book” and the “celestial book,” but what exactly was this “book”?
There is no way to know for sure. Some Vietnamese scholars have guessed that it might have been a text revealed through spirit writing. That is a reasonable guess, but there is no way of proving this.
While this poem dates from late in the eleventh century, in 1008 a “thiên thư” was discovered at the Song Dynasty capital. To quote Suzanne Cahill who wrote about this incident,
“On February 12, 1008, a gate keeper of the imperial city found a yellow silk scroll, sealed and bound up with a blue cord, hanging from a roof tile at one of the gateways of the imperial palace. The Song emperor Zhenzong (r. 988-1022), declaring the scroll an auspicious gift from heaven, named it the “Heavenly Text” (天書 [i.e., thiên thư]) and received it with great fanfare.”
The story about this text and its discovery is complex, but Cahill notes that Chinese historians have interpreted it as a “reaction to the perceived military might of the Khitan or as a result of the political factionalism then dividing the court or both.” In other words, the appearance of this text provided divine backing for the emperor and his policies during a time of danger.
[See Suzanne E. Cahill, “Taoism at the Sung Court: The Heavenly Text Affair of 1008,” Bulletin of Sung-Yuan Studies 16 (1981): 23-44. The quotes above are from page 23.]
The thiên thư mention in the poem, “Nam quốc sơn hà,” appears to have played a similar role as the thiên thư which was discovered at the gate to Song Zhenzong’s palace. Nonetheless, we have no way of knowing for sure what exactly it was.
In later centuries, Vietnamese scholars used the term thiên thư in ways which are more easily understandable. It appears that what was probably originally some kind of text which was produced in a Daoist setting, eventually came to be “Confucianized.”
Confucian scholars believed that there were patterns (văn) in the heavens and on the earth. These patterns were then brought into concordance through the writings (văn) of Confucian scholars. It was through the moral uprightness of Confucian scholars that kingdoms and all of their rituals and rules were established and recorded. As this happened, the borders of these kingdoms became linked to the celestial patterns in the sky, creating a concordance between Heaven, earth and man.
In the early nineteenth century, we can find the Nguyễn Dynasty scholar-official, Lê Quang Định, using the term thiên thư in reference to this process. The following quote comes from a document which he wrote to notify the emperor, Gia Long, about the completion of a new geography of the realm. Part of that document went roughly as follows:
“For the more than 1,000 years from the time of King Kinh Dương and Lord Lạc Long up to the Lý, Trần and Lê, the thiện thư terminated at Hoành Sơn. Our arrayed worthies [i.e., the Nguyễn ancestors] established a domain which covered the area of Champa, Chân Lạp and the four subprefectures of Qui Nhơn, Hoài An, Quảng Nam and Bình Thuận. [At that time,] the land was still divided at the Linh [a.k.a. Sông] River. The people did not understand writing, and governmental institutions were numerous and disorderly. August Heaven graced us with its assistance in establishing a court. Starting from the east, it came to encompass the southern periphery. The borders were brought in order and the land was united as one. The transformative teachings [i.e., “Confucian” teachings] penetrated everywhere.”
[Trần Văn Giáp, Tìm hiểu kho sách Hán Nôm, Tập I (Hà Nội: Thư Viện Quốc Gia, 1970), 331.]
What Lê Quang Định was talking about here is this process by which the patterns of heaven and earth come into concordance through the actions of morally upright individuals. The Nguyễn ancestors had been such people, and through their actions, the “transformative teachings” (聲教, thanh giáo) were able to spread to areas south of Hoành Sơn. The result of such actions was that the thiên thư then extended to areas south of Hoành Sơn as well in order to bring the patterns in the heavens into alignment with the changes which had taken place on earth as a result of the actions of the morally upright Nguyễn ancestors.
I think a good way to translate thiên thư in this context is as “celestial scripting.” I have never found this term used like this in any Chinese sources. I think that in later centuries Vietnamese Confucian scholars looked back at earlier historical records and saw this term in the “Nam quốc sơn hà” and then reinterpreted it in order to get it to fit their view of the universe.
So while it is not clear what thiên thư actually refers to in the poem, “Nam quốc sơn hà,” the meaning of this later usage as “celestial scripting” is quite obvious.
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You can see here some explaination about “thiên thư”:
http://phanthanhvan.vnweblogs.com/print/8200/317413
Thanks, but as far as I can tell, this article just talks about all of the same things that have been said over and over and over (although I like the way that it is written).
There are two things that I think are limiting scholarship on this topic in Vietnam. 1) The focus of scholars is too narrow. They look at how dictionaries have defined “thien thu” and then they look at the 4 lines of the Nam quoc son ha poem. You have to approach this topic from a broader perspective. By the time the Nam quoc son ha poem was written, there was already a very long “thien thu” tradition in East Asia, and as I said in this post, there was a more recent example of it at the Song dynasty capital. The people who created dictionaries in the past did not examine “all knowledge.” Dictionaries are quite Confucian/orthodox in what they cover. There is some Buddhist terminology that was included, but Daoist terminology and terms from popular culture are largely absent. Also, the way that say Vietnamese or Koreans or Japanese might have used terms differently also never made it into any Chinese dictionary (which are what scholars use).
“Thien thu,” as we see it used by Daoists and in the Nam quoc son ha, is precisely the type of concept that “dictionary makers” were not very concerned with. So relying on dictionaries is not sufficient. And simply looking at the 4 lines of the poem is not sufficient either. People need to look at how the term was used in Daoist contexts before the Nam quoc son ha poem appeared, and they need to look at how the term was used by Vietnamese after this point.
My sense is that the meaning of the term in the Nam quoc son ha is different from how it was later used by Vietnamese scholars. To put it very simply, it has a Daoist sense in the Nam quoc son ha, and a Confucian sense in later centuries (that’s what I tried to point out in this post).
The other thing that is limited scholarship on this in Vietnam is that 2) nationalism distorts the way that scholars view the past. In the article you provided a link for, it’s amazing to see how “seriously” scholars have viewed this poem. To many people, it’s very important to show that it is REAL.
Why doesn’t anyone consider the fact that it may simply be something that was created long AFTER any fighting took place. The Dai Viet su ky toan thu and other early Viet texts contain prophesies (like the prophesy predicting that the Ly would be replaced by the Tran). Do scholars today really think that this is what happened? Did someone really predict that the Ly would be replaced by the Tran long before that actually happened?
Of course not. This was a story that was created AFTER the Tran actually replaced the Ly. So why wouldn’t the Nam quoc son ha be the same? Was it really the case that a spirit recited that poem before the battle?. . .
Also, why is it that in the past 50 years the Nam quoc son ha has been talked about over and over and over and over, whereas there is very little mention of it in the records that we have from the previous 900 or so years? If people ask themselves that question, then they might start to understand the biases that they bring to their examination of that poem and the concept of “thien thu,” and maybe then people will be able to provide a more nuanced/sophisticated understanding of what was going on then.
Finally, I’ve mentioned this dissertation (below) before here on this blog. To understand what “thien thu” referred to in the Nam quoc son ha, people need to know the history of such forms of “writing,” and that is precisely what this dissertation discusses. When scholars start thinking of the larger context when they look at the Nam quoc son ha, then I think they will be able to come up with more sophisticated understandings about it.
But as long as people keep looking at the same dictionary definitions and the four lines of the poem, we’re never going to get anywhere.
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Writing from heaven: Celestial writing in Six Dynasties Daoism
Hsieh, Shu-wei. Indiana University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2005. 3195586.
Abstract (summary)
In Chinese mythology, Celestial Writings are conceived as originally celestial signs and texts that have descended to earth, either by direct transmission of their form or by translation into worldly language. In the dissertation I examine various traditions, intending to clarify the processes by which Daoists of the Six Dynasties constructed their scriptural tradition with the concept of Celestial Writing. I suggest the new interpretation of Celestial Writing in Daoist Shangqing texts provided for a synthesis of the traditional notion of wen , the idea of “heaven’s mandate” and the Buddhist idea of Sanskrit as Celestial Writing. The Shangqing approach presents more than ever a cosmologically oriented perspective of Celestial Writing, and thus created a new vision of textual tradition. Later, in Shangqing and Lingbao traditions, scriptures are conceived as sacred because their celestial prototypes are powerful primordial emblems, crystallizations of the primordial pneuma that are accessible only to the high deities who transmit them down to lesser deities, until a feeble version intelligible to chosen saints can be revealed to humans. I examine the concept of Celestial Writing in both traditions in order to demonstrate its distinctive nature.
Indexing (details)
Cite
Subject
History;
Religious history;
Asian literature
Classification
0332: History
0320: Religious history
0305: Asian literature
Identifier / keyword
Philosophy, religion and theology, Social sciences, Language, literature and linguistics, Heaven, Celestial writing, Six Dynasties, Daoism, China
Title
Writing from heaven: Celestial writing in Six Dynasties Daoism
Author
Hsieh, Shu-wei
Pages
476 p.
Number of pages
476
Publication year
2005
Degree date
2005
School code
0093
Source
DAI-A 66/11, May 2006
Place of publication
Ann Arbor
Country of publication
United States
ISBN
9780542436536, 0542436531
Advisor
Bokenkamp, Stephen R
University/institution
Indiana University
University location
United States — Indiana
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertations & Theses
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
3195586
ProQuest document ID
304986030
Document URL
http://eres.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.eres.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/docview/304986030?accountid=27140
Copyright
Copyright UMI – Dissertations Publishing 2005
Database
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text
Hi Le Minh Khai! This is such a good article, thank you for writing this. From my point of view, thien thu just refers to destiny or fate, as in heaven has dictated that Vietnam shall be independent, heaven’s will if you like. I never thought that this word evokes so much discussion.