A Fatal Encounter: Anger, Ritual, and Righteousness in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The orthodox Daoxue (Learning of the Way) teachings, particularly that of Zhu Xi, paid considerable attention to the emotion of anger. The influential thinker not only defended anger from unwarranted dismissal, but also proposed three concrete scenarios to legitimate the emergence of the emotion. More precisely, he affirmed the virtue of righteousness to be the moral conditioning of anger and held that ritual improprieties justified the emotion’s outburst. Furthermore, Zhu Xi regarded the absence of indiscriminateness from anger as evidence of the emotion’s righteousness. The classical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is similarly concerned with whether an angry character possesses righteousness, and whether ritual deviation triggers a character’s anger. The novel’s earliest extant edition questions the coherence and compatibility of Zhu Xi’s proposed conditions for the emergence of righteous anger. However, the heavily commented early Qing edition realigns the novel with the orthodox thinker’s teachings on anger, effacing the potential incoherence through textual modification and commentarial intervention. The re-alignment evidences the further canonization of Zhu Xi’s thought in the early Qing dynasty.