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Chapter Three:Technique and the Philosophy of Structure: Interlocking Parallel Style in Laozi and Wang Bi
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TECHNIQUE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF STRUCTURE 53 53 Chapter Three Technique and the Philosophy of Structure Interlocking Parallel Style in Laozi and Wang Bi ntroduction Wang Bi’s (226–49) commentary to the Laozi is not the first of its kind. By his time, the market was flooded with other commentaries , and Wang Bi’s readers were most likely to have first read the Laozi through one or the other of these earlier commentaries. Whatever survives of these earlier commentaries does show a strong emphasis on understanding the purport and meaning of the Laozi but little emphasis on the language of the text as well as its statements on language.1 In this respect, Wang Bi fundamentally differs from the earlier commentators. He pays very close attention to the formal and structural devices used by the Laozi, and even more to the Laozi’s pronouncements on language and its limited capacities in dealing with the Dao. His analysis of the language and statement structures of the Zhouyi and the Lunyu shows the same focus. All three texts suggest through their often highly elaborate formal structure and their use of paraverbal means of articulation—which is especially marked in the Zhouyi hexagrams—a high consciousness of the limited uses of plain language in discussing the mysteries of the Dao, the universe, and the Sage. Their use of nonverbal means of 54 THE CRAFT OF A CHINESE COMMENTATOR expression such as formal stylistic patterns, hexagrams, or selfcontradictory language can thus be read as a conscious effort to expand the means of articulation beyond words, and their explicit statements about language suggest that this is a conscious strategy. In his diatribes against other commentators of the Laozi from different schools, Wang Bi claims that they do not understand the Laozi’s use of language, and that they disregard not only the actual features of the Laozi’s language, but also the explicit statements of the text on language. Instead, he claims, “according to what their eyes happen to perceive, they assign a name [of a school to which the Laozi purportedly belongs]; depending on what they like, they cling to that meaning.”2 Against this attachment to the verbal surface of the text, Wang Bi quotes the Laozi’s explicit warnings against such a procedure. His criticism of the “school” reading of the Laozi implies a program of his own: Wang Bi will extract his own strategy of reading the Laozi from the implicit and explicit parameters provided by the text itself. The Laozi itself has to provide the key to its proper reading, and Wang Bi will articulate and make explicit the features of this key. While Wang Bi presents his own hermeneutic procedure in stark contrast to that of all others, Han-dynasty commentators of other texts such as the Mengzi and the Chuci have started to move into this direction. This is especially true for Zhao Qi (?–201) who reads Mengzi’s strategy of reading the Shijing as an advice to the reader about how to read the Mengzi itself, an advice that, sure enough, had not been heeded by previous readers of the Mengzi.3 Again these previous readers stuck to the surface text with the result of missing the intended meaning of the Mengzi. The hermeneutic procedure of extracting the strategy for reading a text from the indicators given in the text itself will claim the authority of an authentic reading, and will from this position reject other readings as being wantonly imposed. At the same time, it subjects itself to a rigid set of rules and procedures that dramatically reduce the interpretive leeway of the commentator by making his readings falsifiable on the basis of its own standards. While this more scholarly approach might on occasion seem to signal a reduction in the vitality of appropriating a text to contemporary needs, it certainly makes it more compatible with modern hermeneutic approaches, and inserts these commentaries as serious participants into a modern scholarly discussion about the reading of classical Chinese [3.92.84.196] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:07 GMT) TECHNIQUE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF STRUCTURE 55 texts. In other words, Wang Bi’s handling of the Laozi transcends in terms of method the historical limits of his own time, and his discoveries concerning the coding features of the Laozi or the Zhouyi have the potential of being tested and verified/falsified by modern scholarly methods of textual research. This chapter will begin...