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

Introduction

Introduction During my work on early Chinese Buddhist thinkers, especially Shi Daoan ⸃ⳬમ (312–385) and Shi Huiyuan ⸃๬⳵ (334–416), I found that Buddhist arguments often were understood and expressed in a language originating in third-century Xuanxue ᪐ણ, the "scholarly investigation of that which is dark," to use a cumbersome translation. Though the importance of Xuanxue in Chinese philosophy, including Chinese Buddhist philosophy and even Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism, is known, few detailed critical studies of particular texts and issues were available. It seemed natural to take up the study of Wang Bi (226–249), by all accounts the most brilliant of the Xuanxue philosophers. There is a dearth of critical editions of Chinese texts and detailed studies of individual philosophical works. This is most pronounced for the works of commentators, even though China’s best minds were working with this medium. In studies of the Western classics, there has been a division of labor between scholars collating, editing, and perhaps translating texts and scholars mostly bent on analyzing the works thus made available. There were some scholars, however, such as Rudolf Bultman, in his work on the environment of the early Christian dispensation, who managed to span the entire breadth of the enterprise, from painstaking philological research, through broad analyses of religions, social, and political currents, to hermeneutical explorations of the internal logic of philosophical texts and religious beliefs. This model I set out to emulate, assisted by some years of studying hermeneutics with Hans-Georg Gadamer at the University of Heidelberg. This volume is a workbook for the study of Wang Bi’s writings on the Laozi. It includes studies on the textual history and available editions of Wang Bi's Laozi text, as well as Wang Bi’s Laozi commentary, which show that the current editions are late, and very deficient; critical reconstructions and editions of both texts on the basis of internal evidence and new sources, including the new manuscript finds Mawangdui (1973) and 1 2 A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing Guodian (1993); and fully annotated translations of Wang Bi's Laozi text, his Commentary, and his The Structure of the Laozi's Subtle Pointers, Laozi weizhi lüeli. We have a great many translations of the Laozi, and even a few of Wang Bi’s commentary. These Laozi translations are based on the privilege boldly claimed by the modern scholar to understand earlier Chinese philosophers better than anyone in the long tradition of Chinese commentaries . The present translation focuses on a Chinese reading of the Laozi, in particular on that by a young genius called Wang Bi, whose influence on later readings is unanimously and justly described as second to none other. It reads the Laozi through this commentary, and while this might arrive at a philosophical rather than historical reading, it certainly makes available an exciting contribution in terms of the sheer brilliance of the solutions it offers to many an enigmatic line in the Laozi. It is an even more exciting work in its own right by being a highly original philosophical approach that actively and philosophically engages with the giants of the past. The translation thus sets out to be extrapolative and to extract from Wang Bi’s Commentary the exact way in which he read or constructed the Laozi. For many things evident to Wang Bi’s implied reader, a modern reader from whatever background—Chinese, Japanese or Western—will need an explicit hint. This might be an unannounced quotation from another part of the Laozi or from another text altogether, the implied subject of the entire chapter, or rhetorical information about the links between the different phrases. Mr. Haggett from SUNY Press has nicely matched Wang Bi’s making sense of the Laozi phrases by putting on the cover of this volume a structure each node of which is in fact constituted by linkages to other nodes. The translation has tried to take seriously its duty of cultural mediation by supplying, in brackets, the relevant information. The purpose is to achieve a similar absence of ambiguity in the translation as Wang Bi managed to achieve through his commentary. The result is, I hope, a translation that is explicit enough to be falsifiable. In places that have remained hard to understand, I have gone out of my way to avoid the opaqueness of grammar, terminology, and rhetoric with which such passages often are rendered. A serious scholarly debate can only be based on translations that are in this sense falsifiable so...