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33 Chapter 2 Patronage and the Transmission of the Wang Bi Commentary: Foundations for a Critical Edition THE PROBLEM Having outlined in the first chapter the evidence on which a new critical edition of the Wang Bi Laozi is to be based, we now look at the reliability of the current editions of the Wang Bi Commentary in order to determine whether a new edition is needed, and if so on what material it might be based. It is my contention that all current editions of the Commentary, with the exception of the edition included in Shima Kuniô’s Rôshi kôsei, are based on the text printed in the Daozang around 1445 and taken up by Zhang Zhixiang during the Wanli (1573–1620) period; that a sizably better text can be extracted from the collections of excerpts from Laozi commentaries compiled during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, but that, as no single complete early text of high quality is available to replace the current edition, a critical edition of the Wang Bi Commentary will have to select the best readings for each item as a base text, critically edit it, and note the deviant readings of the other relevant textual traditions . This work will be done in the critical edition of both the Wang Bi Laozi and the Wang Bi Commentary in this book. This chapter will present the evidence through a reasoned history of the transmission of the Wang Bi Commentary. In the process I hope to provide what may be called the social history of a text focusing on the particular type of interest that the Commentary evoked and the patronage it received as a consequence; both were instrumental in preventing the text from disappearing with the disintegration or destruction of the materials on which it was written at any given time. 34 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing In 1927, Wang Zhongmin ᪗⸅ᖁ compiled many of the relevant references in earlier book catalogues and works by bibliophiles to Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi.1 Later scholars down to Hatano Tarô ᘘ घ⸆ठⵀ and Shima Kuniô ஌⴪ᮮ have added references.2 We still lack, however, a reasoned history of the text integrating the various types of information. Such histories have been written for independent texts such as the Wenzi, the Huainanzi, or the Taiping jing,3 but perhaps due to the low esteem in which commentaries have been held, not for the philosophical contributions that took the commentary form. Opinions have ranged from the uncritical assumption that the Laozi inscribed over the transmitted Wang Bi Commentary is indeed the “Wang Bi Laozi” and that the current Wang Bi Commentary editions are indeed the best to be had to the radical suggestion by Hong Yixuan ᙈㆄၨ (1765–1833), who concluded in 1821 from a discrepancy between a Wang Bi quotation in Fa Lin’s ᘍᬅ early-seventh-century Bianzheng lun Ⲉᔌ ⧄ and the Wang Bi Commentary in his hand that “today’s manuscripts of the Wang Bi Commentary all have come to light only during the Ming dynasty and have perhaps been put together by later people.”4 In this he was echoing Qian Zeng ⻶ሯ (1629–1701), who had said: “Sadly enough, [Wang] Fusi’s [= Bi’s] Commentary is not transmitted or sparsely transmitted . The days of this book are already over, alas.”5 In fact, Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi struggled to survive the Confucian suspicion that its ideological influence had contributed to the demise of the Jin ᆽ dynasty and the breakup of China. It competed with the commentaries preferred by the Daoist religious communities and with commentaries written by emperors who had the means to make their reading dominant. The text thus could not rely on the main Chinese patronage lines to secure its own transmission and could not even promise the copyist merit points in the karma register. The difficulty in writing the history of this Commentary is from the outset one of method. Most modern scholars dealing with the history of this text have linked the history of the Wang Bi Laozi to the Wang Bi Commentary, thus they have looked for the earliest monograph editions in which only these two appear, and together. This has led to the adoption of the texts of this type preserved in the Daozang and in the Siku quanshu and their derivatives as the standard base texts, down to the 1980 edition by Lou Yulie.6 As the previous chapter has shown, however, the Laozi text over the Wang Bi...

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