A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (review)

Scholars of Chuang Tzu—and "children of Angus"—will enthusiastically welcome Harold Roth's A Companion to Angus C Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, a collection of A. C. Graham's scholarly studies of the Chuang Tzu. Thanks to Roth's concerted efforts, Graham's scholarship on the Chuang Tzu has now been made readily available in a single volume. A. C. Graham was one of the most distinguished Western scholars of classical Chinese philosophy and one of the leading interpreters of the philosophy of Chuang Tzu. His pioneering research—textual, linguistic, and philosophical—on the Chuang Tzu and on its philosophical predecessor, the Later Mohist Canon, have laid the scholarly groundwork for further explorations of this philosophical and literary masterpiece.

This collection includes: Graham's "Textual Notes to Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters," first published as a scholarly monograph in 1982 as a supplement to the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, under the title "Chuang-tzu: Textual Notes to a Partial Translation"; "How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write?" which first appeared in 1976 in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion; "Chuang Tzu's Essay on Seeing Things As Equal," written in 1968 for the Bellagio Conference on Taoist Studies and first published in a volume of History of Religions; "Two Notes on the Translation of Taoist Classics," which first appeared in 1991 in Interpreting Culture Through Translation: A Festschrift for D. C. Lau; and "Taoist Spontaneity and the Dichotomy of 'Is' and 'Ought,'" first published in 1983 in Victor Mair's Experimental Essays on the Chuang Tzu. The Companion ends with a Colophon by Harold Roth, "An Appraisal of Angus Graham's Textual scholarship on the Chuang Tzu."

Chapter 1 reproduces Graham's textual notes on his translation of the Chuang tzu. Graham had written his "Textual Notes to Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters" while working on his translation of the Inner Chapters, and he had hoped to include them in the final version of Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Since this was not possible, Graham had them published instead by SOAS as a supplement to their Bulletin. Roth begins the Companion with a painstakingly reproduced computer-input version of Graham's original typewritten manuscript, which he also reorganized so that it corresponds to the (somewhat idiosyncratic) order and structure of Graham's translation. For ease of cross-reference, page numbers are provided to both Graham's translation and the Harvard Concordance (Chuang-tzu yin-te), the source text with which Graham worked.

Chapter 2 is Graham's study, "How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write?" This was written in large part as a response to Fu Ssu-nien's extraordinary and controversial claim that chapter 2, "Qi Wu Lun," is not the work of Chuang Tzu but of Shen Tao. In this paper Graham also attempts to identify how much of what he calls the "ragbag" chapters could have come from the same author as the Inner Chapters. The technique he uses is a straightforward tabulation of occurrences of characteristic usages and expressions in the various chapters, followed by a set of detailed comments. He compares carefully chosen idioms, grammatical particles and patterns, philosophical terms, and references to persons and themes. Comparisons are made specifically between the Inner Chapters, the "ragbag" chapters together with chapter 32, and the rest of the book.

This is followed by a detailed justification of his "reconstruction" of what he believes to be the original introductory paragraph to chapter 3, "Yang Sheng Zhu." The next two sections put forward reasons for dividing the "Anarchist" chapters (8 to 11a, and 28 to 31) into two sections, the former group (8 to 11a) attributed to a person he calls the "Primitivist," the latter (28 to 31), following the argumentation of Kuan Feng, attributed to the...