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6 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing The expression tiandi ट߸ of the received text of the Laozi neither occurs in the commentary to the passage itself nor in the reference to it in the commentary on Chapter 21. Both comments suggest, instead, that wanwu ┋᧎ was the reading in the Wang Bi Laozi. That sloppy quoting by Wang Bi accounts for these differences should be dismissed for two reasons. First, the readings suggested by the Commentary and the other texts by Wang Bi find strong support in the available “old manuscripts,” including the Guodian and Mawangdui. Second, the philosophical authority of the text in the eyes of Wang Bi, who obviously took the exact wording very seriously, would seem to preclude sloppy quoting. We are thus left with the following preliminary conclusions: first, the Wang Bi Laozi Receptus is not identical to the Laozi text actually used by Wang Bi, the Wang Bi Laozi; second, another Laozi text has been superimposed over Wang Bi’s Commentary, while the Commentary itself has not been changed to conform. That this reflects careless editing has to be dismissed as well. The extreme importance that the different traditions attached to “their” versions as being uniquely true and authoritative would seem to preclude this possibility, but why was the Wang Bi Commentary not changed? The only explanation seems to be that it had an authority of its own. While the Laozi text was adapted to fit the dominant school, Wang Bi retained his credentials as a philosopher in his own right, the text of his Commentary remaining untouched. Obviously, we are now called upon to reconstruct the Wang Bi Laozi, to try to figure out how the changes in the received text came about, and to establish the Wang Bi Laozi in its proper position within the stemma codicum. WANG BI’S ORIGINAL RECENSION OF THE LAOZI Since it is possible that Wang Bi’s Laozi differed greatly from all known Laozi texts, we will have to secure a fair number of firm readings of the Wang Bi Laozi before looking at other versions of the Laozi text. For evidence about the Wang Bi Laozi, we will draw on the following sources: 1. Wang Bi’s quotations from the Laozi in his Commentary and other writings (with the provision that these might have problems in their transmission); 2. Inferences based on the wording in Wang Bi’s Commentary; 3. Quotations of Laozi passages with Wang’s commentary in preTang and perhaps early Tang texts, on the assumption that in these cases the wording of the Wang Bi Laozi was used; The Wang Bi Recension of the Laozi 7 4. Explicit statements by Lu Deming in his Laozi Daodejing yinyi about the readings of the “Wang Bi text” available to him (a text, however, that might already have undergone some changes);15 and 5. Explicit statements by Fan Yingyuan in his Laozi Daodejing guben jizhu, relating his Wang Bi Laozi manuscript to one or several “Old Manuscript(s).” These are listed in a decreasing degree of reliability, however, the reliability of the external sources (quotations and explicit statements about the Wang Bi text) can be enhanced if they coincide with the internal evidence in many places. In seventy-nine passages, the wording in Wang Bi’s Commentary deviates from the Wang Bi Laozi Receptus (see Appendix A). In all but one, the reading suggested by the Commentary also can be found in the Guodian and Mawangdui manuscripts, texts such as the Huainanzi ᛓ֡ઈ, Wenzi ᄽઈ, or Zhangguo ce ໴ߡᾋ, dated manuscripts such as the Suo Dan manuscript of c.e. 270, or the pre-Tang Xiang Er manuscript from Dunhuang, or the “Old Manuscripts” on which Fu Yi ϼस (554–639) and Fan Yingyuan based their own editions. In short, it can be assumed that these readings represent the text of the Laozi known to Wang Bi. On the basis of these confirmed readings, we can proceed to check on the reliability of the other sources for the reconstruction of the Wang Bi Laozi. There are hundreds of phonetic glosses by Lu Deming, but only three deviate from the readings common to all strands of the received tradition. In those three cases, the deviant reading is corroborated by either Fu Yi’s or Fan Yingyuan’s “Old Manuscript” or by Wang Bi’s own commentary.16 A number of Lu Deming’s readings have to be discarded, however, because strong evidence supports other readings for the Wang Bi Laozi. It is...

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