A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi's Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation

THE BASIS FOR THE EDITION OF THE TEXT

80 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing in the text itself. It is philosophical in inserting itself into a philosophical enterprise, the Laozi, but it develops out of the careful reading of its insights its own systematized philosophic arguments. And it is political in developing from the first two approaches a philosophically guided political science, which explores the dialectics of social and political behavior in a strongly hierarchical society. THE BASIS FOR THE EDITION OF THE TEXT The text in the edition included here is based on • Laozi weizhi lilüe ≘ઈെᅼ͛ᯆ in 2,552 characters contained in the Zhengtong Daozang; • the excerpts from the Laojun zhigui lüeli ≘‫྆؃‬ᔖᯆ͛ in 1,350 characters contained in Zhang Junfang’s Yunji qiqian (they overlap with zhang 1–5 of the separate edition); • critical notes on the text contained in the following works: a. Wang Weicheng, “Wei Wang Bi zhuan Laozi zhilüe yiwen zhi faxian ” b. Yan Lingfeng, “Laozi weizhi lilüe jiaozi,” in Yan Lingfeng, Laozi weizhi lilüe, as well as his notes on this text in his Lao Zhuang yanjiu (1959) postface, 413, and Lao Zhuang yanjiu (1966), 636 c. Zhongguo kexueyuan zhexue yanjiusuo, Zhongguo zhexueshi Beijing daxue zhexueshi jiaoyanshi, eds., Zhongguo lidai zhexue wenxuan, liang Han Sui Tang bian, 308 ff. d. Lou Yulie, ed., Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, 195–210 (this work is largely based on a and c) Translation of the LZWZLL The translation is based on my study on IPS.34 The standard form is: (1) a (2) b (3) a (4) b (5) c Wang Bi: “The Structure of the Laozi’s Subtle Pointers” 81 The numbers give the sequential order of the phrases, the letters a and b the two chains, respectively, and the letter c, in the middle, contains argumentative elements without parallelism referring to both chains. Phrases written on the same level are parallel. There are three standard variants to this basic form. The first is the sequence ab ba c instead of ababc: (1) a (2) b (4) a (3) b (5) c The second is the parallel “staircase” of the form a b c d . . . a b c d . . . The IPS comes in an open and a closed form. In the former, the phrases belonging to one chain (e.g., a) explicitly refer to each other by using the same vocabulary. In the closed form, no such explicit reference exists; the link is by implication. Given the possibility of the variant ab ba, this often leads to problems of attribution of individual phrases to one of the two chains. Chang Chung-yue has included a translation of the LZWZLL into his unpublished dissertation in 1979. It is very unsatisfactory. My own translation was published in 1986, and Richard Lynn produced another translation in 1999.35 Although Lynn was aware of the earlier translations , he decided to go his own way and has not engaged in a critical and detailed discussion with his predecessors. The result is a translation that instead of correcting the mistakes and weaknesses in the earlier attempts makes full use of the privilege to impose its own readings, and repeat the mistakes of Lou Yulie’s edition. We thus have zhang split right down the middle (5 and 6) to the point that a zhang starts with “however,” a disregard for rhetorical conventions of Wang Bi’s such as ᆯ˫ and ᆯᄑ being read as logical links addressed to the reader instead of references to a known passage in the Laozi with the meaning “this is the reason” [why ...