A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi's Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation

A NOTE ON THE EDITION

107 Chapter 4 A Reconstruction and Critical Edition of the Laozi Text Used by Wang Bi; a Reconstruction and Critical Edition of Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi; an Extrapolative Translation of the Laozi through Wang Bi’s Commentary; and a Translation of Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi A NOTE ON THE EDITION The Laozi text printed over the Wang Bi Commentary in all available pre-modern editions is not the text used by Wang Bi himself.1 The Wang Bi Laozi Receptus has to be abandoned in its entirety. The reconstruction of the Wang Bi Laozi attempted here is based on the identification of the textual family to which Wang Bi’s Laozi belonged. For this purpose Laozi quotations in Wang’s Commentary were compared to extant textual traditions. The result was a textual family consisting of the following four texts: 1. Fu Yi ϼस. ⳬോ⃻‫מ‬቏. Contained in the Zhengtong Daozang, Schipper 665. Quoted as ϼस‫מ‬቏. 2. Fan Yingyuan ⑌ະҀ. ≘ઈⳬോ⃻‫מ‬቏ゝᘜ. Contained in the ↲‫לⳚמ‬ሬ. Quoted as ⑌ະҀ቏. 108 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing 3. Mawangdui ㈸᪗࡬ Laozi manuscript A. Contained in ㈸᪗࡬ឤ ࣌ీሬᄮ᫧ଅ⃅ (ed.), ㈸᪗࡬ឤ࣌ీሬ 1 (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1974), vol. 1. Quoted as ㈸᪗࡬ A. 4. Mawangdui ㈸᪗࡬ Laozi manuscript B. Contained in ibid., vol. 2. Quoted as ㈸᪗࡬ B. In this reconstruction of the Wang Bi Laozi, the Wang Bi Commentary forms the basis because its Laozi quotations in this Commentary survived most changes of its original Laozi text and because many other textual features can be extrapolated from the Commentary. In areas where there is no direct guidance from Wang Bi, the occasional notes in Lu Deming’s なോᆙ Jingdian shiwen ⃻Ҥ⸃ᄽ, as well as the common reading within the textual family, have been followed, with Fu Yi and Fan Yingyuan being most important. All deviations within the family are listed. The Mawangdui deviations very often are based on phonetic or graphic similarities at a time when writing was still a fairly unstable form of communication with a small number of standardized characters. The readings of the three Guodian Laozi batches from Chu from a tomb dated around 300 b.c.e. support a fair number of the Mawangdui readings, especially in the realm of particles, but offer in many other aspects readings so different from all known traditions that they would require an altogether separate treatment . I have noted their readings where they supported the plausibility of an otherwise weakly documented reading that seemed to impose itself on the basis of the Wang Bi commentary, but I have not given all deviations from my Wang Bi Laozi. My work has most profited from the approach pioneered in Shima Kuniô’s ஌⴪ᮮ Rôshi kôsei ≘ઈዮᔌ. He grouped the available Laozi texts into families and tried to establish a critical text for each family. His Wang Bi Laozi is based on the readings of the Wang Bi Commentary and members of a textual family based on the Daozang monograph edition of the Laozi with Wang Bi’s Commentary. To this he adds occasional references to textual traditions such as Zhuang Zun ⒜ⴃ and Xiang Er บᦲ, which he considered close to Wang Bi because of their proximity in time. Based on the approach he had pioneered, I arrived at different results. The texts he groups together as the Wang Bi textual family are all Ming texts, and he is often forced to go against their common reading in his critical edition of the Wang Bi Laozi, the changes in most cases in the direction of the Fu Yi and Fan Yingyuan Old Texts. A close study of these links showed that, in fact, these two, along with—at some distance—the Mawangdui texts (published only after Shima Kuniô’s work had come out), were part of Wang Bi’s textual family. I have therefore abandoned the transmitted Wang Bi: Commentary on the Laozi 109 Wang Bi Laozi texts altogether. For each Wang Bi Laozi phrase, I have looked in the quotations and the textual family for the best available text (“base text”), and I have taken this as the basis for the edition with all deviations from this text given in the notes as variation (“Var.:”) with “om.” meaning “omitted.” Those elements in the base text which had to be changed are changed as “x for y:aaa቏,” which means that, instead of the y in the base text, the reading x of the aaa቏ is preferable. Where necessary, I have given a short explanation. The Wang Bi...