虎賁班劍考 : 漢六朝の恩賜・殊禮と故事

Abstract

The term en-ci 恩賜 refers to the various types of gifts or privileges bestowed by the emperor on his subjects. Among these gifts and privileges were special ones called shu-li 殊禮. In this article I take up the case of the Hu-ben ban-jian 虎賁班劍 a variegated sword of the soldiers brave as tigers, which is representative of the special privileges bestowed in the Han and Six Dynasties periods, and then consider its historical significance. The term hu-ben 虎賁, literally brave as a tiger, originally designated a soldier in the emperor's service, but in the period of the Han and Six Dynasties ornamental arms bestowed on subjects were given this appellation. The ban-jian 班劍 was a wooden replica of a sword which had been used at court since Jin 晉 times. The soldiers, hu-ben, decorated with the ban-jian, were thus known as hu-ben ban-jian (abbreviated ban-jian). It is thought that the imperial bestowal of the Hu-ben ban-jian was a special privilege granted to distinguish Grand Councilors 宰相 who held the honorary title Bulwark of Government 輔政 (or other offcials of equally exalted status) and that the numbers of possessors alloted on one constituted various status boundaries. The number of the emperor's hu-ben, Warriors Brave as Tigers, was conceived as ideally numbering eight hundred. Those alloted one hundred sword-bearers were situated on the boundary between the emperor and his subjects, but the bestowal of the even larger number of three hundred sword-bearers (one of the nine types of awards 九錫) indicated the recipient was no longer a subject. Thus, the number bestowed was limited to one hundred for national funeral rites on the basis of the "the tale of Huo Guang 霍光" (General-in-chief Serving as Commander-in-chief 大司馬大將軍 of the Former Han), following the Wei and Jin periods, but, in reality, an upper limit of sword possessors who might be bestowed on a subject was set at sixty on the basis of the "the tale of Zhu-ge Liang 諸葛亮" (Counselor-in-chief 丞相 of the state of Shu 蜀 of the Three Kingdoms). However, following the period of the alternating Jin and Song dynasties, this number was limited to those bestowed at funerals on the basis of "the tale of Wang Hong 王弘" （the Grand Guardian of the Song 宋). The greatest number bestowed on a living recipient was forty under Liu Yu 劉裕, Wu di of the Song, and this number was further reduced to thirty in the late Southern Dynasties period. On the other hand, under the Northern Dynasties, Xiao-wen di 孝文帝 of the Northern Wei 北魏, in what is thought to have probably been an adoption of Southern practice, soon limited the practice to funeral rites on the basis of "the Tale of Wei Yuan 尉元" (An Elder 三老 of Northern Wei), and this practice was continued into the early Tang. The practice of bestowing hu-ben ban-jian on living recipients ceased with Tai zong's 太宗 award to Li Shi-min 李世民 and his brothers, and posthumous awards also ceased after the Zhen-guan 貞觀 era. The numbers of the hu-ben ban-jian bestowed within the hierarchy in which the emperor stood at the apex indicates that the emperor's authority in the Han and Six Dynasties had yet to be established as absolute. Therefore, the aim of imperial authority to gradually reduce the number of bestowals on subjects can be understood as an effort to centralize imperial authority.