Guodian Laozi and Taiyi Sheng Shui: A Cognitive Science Reading

Scholarly debate continues as to the nature and purpose of the Guodian edition of the Laozi (also known as the Daode jing). Its age, its mainly “Confucian” tombmates, and its written contents make it an extremely unusual version of the text.

Many themes “characteristic” of the text are not present: urgings to be weak and passive like water and the female, references to Confucian terms and values, plus most chapters referring to Dao. Its three bundles contain previously unseen material, including a new cosmology, called the Taiyi shengshui, which does not correspond to any other allegedly Daoist cosmology.

Putting the Guodian Laozi in its historical, philosophical, and political context has provided insight into the reason this text (and the whole collection) was assembled the way it was. Several scholars support the idea that the Guodian Laozi was meant to be a tool for rulership, and specifically used for instructing the Crown Prince Qingxiang of Chu.

Recognizing rulership as the dominant theme of the text, I was able to use cognitive science to develop a new lens through which to read the Guodian Laozi, based on the embodied experience of Verticality, which includes the entailments of status, power, and leadership. The received Laozi has traditionally been read through the lens of dichotomy, driven by the prominence of yin and yang metaphorical entailments. However, since the contents of the Guodian Laozi do not seem to correspond well to the received text, I believe it should be read through a different lens—one more suited to its particular contents and themes. This new lens not only retains the relevant entailments of the yin-yang metaphor, but it goes much farther in explaining the terms and images present in the Guodian edition of the text, and reframes them such a way that clearly shows how almost every verse in the text relates to rulership.