The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi

Chapter Four: Deconstructing and Constructing Meaning

DECONSTRUCTING AND CONSTRUCTING MEANING 115 115 Chapter Four Deconstructing and Constructing Meaning The Hidden Meaning Wang Bi not only wrote commentaries on the Laozi and the Zhouyi, which have had a formative influence on the reading of these texts in later centuries down to the present; he is also the first commentator from whom texts are transmitted that outline the philosophic and methodological bases for his commentaries, namely the Laozi weizhi lüeli (LZWZLL) for the Laozi and the Zhouyi lüeli (ZYLL) for the Zhouyi. As evident from Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong, the commentary of this period was subsumed under the genre of the essay, lun .1 Its formal fragmentation into small items dealing with phrases of the main text did not prevent its being seen as presenting a full and cohesive argument on its own. As the lun used to a large extent the “classics” as the reality they were studying, the commentary and the essay are essentially based on the same kind of material and approach. Wang Bi was writing during a time when many of the best and best-educated minds were focusing on the Laozi, Lunyu, and Zhouyi as their prime sources of philosophic insight. The fierce competition for intellectual excellence in this difficult field greatly contributed to enhancing the philological and philosophical quality of the commen- 116 THE CRAFT OF A CHINESE COMMENTATOR taries written during that period. Wang Bi’s construction of the Laozi thus presents a serious scholarly and philosophic challenge to a highly educated environment where the need for still another commentary certainly was not evident. This chapter will not deal with Wang Bi’s philosophy, but with his craft. Oddly enough, the craft of Chinese commentators has received very little attention. Historians of philosophy have operated on the assumption that the commentators basically present their own philosophy in the guise of a humble comment on the classics, and they have therefore as a rule quoted passages from these commentators which looked relatively independent of the text on which they were commenting. Studying Wang Bi’s craft is also a means to check the assumption implied in this previous treatment, that Wang Bi’s comments are basically impositions on the text with little or no respect for that work; and to find out whether his comments are based on a consistent and arguable methodology, and if so which? Wang Bi’s two “Structures” do not focus on giving short summaries of the main tenets of the Laozi and Zhouyi respectively, but try to spell out the silent formal structures of these texts. They try, moreover, to discover the philosophic implications of these structures to the reader. The following pages deal primarily with the LZWZLL. The ZYLL was written later and focuses on a different type of coding. I shall cite it only when and insofar it helps to highlight certain arguments implied in the LZWZLL but not fully developed there. Both essays start from the implied philosophic puzzle about the highly unusual means of communication used by these texts. In fact, in the reading of Wang Bi and his contemporaries, the Laozi consists of a large number of short independent chapters, their sequence by and large serendipitous. Each zhang starts anew, but the limits between the zhang seem fairly firm. The Laozi uses a broad array of linguistic and rhetorical devices, ranging from onomatopoieia to similes, from quotations and stylistic parallelism to authoritative pronouncement or bald philosophical statement of fact without explanation; at the same time it constantly warns the reader that language, including its own, is an unreliable medium for communication about ultimate things: “A way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way” (Laozi 1.1); “Forced, I give it the style, zi , ‘Way’” (Laozi 25.5). The Laozi as a written book is thus an attempt to continue to use language for the DECONSTRUCTING AND CONSTRUCTING MEANING 117 philosophic inquiry into the ultimate things in the full knowledge that language as a defining instrument is, in the last analysis, insufficient. These and similar Laozi statements are taken up in the LZWZLL. The Zhouyi establishes layers of superimposed explanations from the words in the verbalized explanations to the overall meaning of a hexagram, the image used and the individual lines, the guaci , xiangci , and tuanci , through the symbols occurring within them to the “meaning” encoded into the silent structure of...