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

Chapter Five: The Craft of Wang Bi's Commentary

THE CRAFT OF WANG BI’S COMMENTARY 257 257 Chapter Five The Craft of Wang Bi’s Commentary ntroduction The general strategy of Wang Bi’s commenting is to reduce to a minimum the ambivalence of the individual passages and terms of the text. This ambivalence was in practical fact evident in the coexistence of wildly varying readings of the very same words by different commentators as we have documented above; and it was a theoretical fact in that many of the Laozi’s phrases do not have an explicit subject; many of its metaphors and comparisons are difficult to grasp; and its terminology sometimes does not seem consistent. Wang Bi’s general technique of reducing ambivalence consists in linking the obscure section with a section that deals with the same issue in less diffuse terms, and of explaining the diffuse section in the light of the clearer one. The result of this merger is a dramatic shrinking of the number of issues Wang Bi’s Laozi is thought to deal with. Wang Bi’s statement on the single core issue of the Laozi has been quoted above, and the analysis of his Laozi indeed yields a finite and small number of tightly interlocked issues that flow out of one single core thought. A detailed study of their philosophic content will be presented elsewhere.1 258 THE CRAFT OF A CHINESE COMMENTATOR Wang Bi’s commenting takes on many specific forms. He explains individual words, metaphors, or similes. He makes explicit certain implied consequences of the Laozi’s statements. He indicates subjects, objects, logical and grammatical links, wherever they seem presupposed by the text but are in danger of being missed by the reader. And he points out structural parallels with other sections of the text. ntegration of Commentary and Text Wang Bi’s Laozi Commentary is transmitted in 81 zhang. For zhang 31 and 66 there is no commentary. For zhang 31 a tradition reported in Song texts says that Wang Bi considered that zhang spurious. For zhang 66, no other cause for the absence of a commentary is discernible except the lack of ambivalence in the text, which seems to make a commentary of Wang Bi’s type superfluous. We do not know whether sections of Wang Bi’s Commentary were lost. The agreement between early quotations from the Commentary and the transmitted text is extremely high, and thus the probability of major losses small.2 In all forms in which it has come down to us, the Commentary is inserted into the text in the manner that must have become popular during the last decades of the second century. We have, however, no manuscript evidence of the exact way in which text and commentary were interlaced. There is reason to assume that the single source claiming that Ma Rong pioneered the insertion of the commentary into the text—namely Kong Yingda—may be correct. Wang Bi himself interlaced what up to his time were separate “wings” of the Zhouyi with the text directly attached to the hexagrams; this elevated these commentaries to the hexagrams and their lines to the level of the main text and made them an organic part of it. A few decades after Wang Bi, Du Yu did the same for the Zuozhuan by making this originally independent text into a commentary to the Chunqiu with an authority status akin to the Chunqiu itself. He did not, however, proceed by inserting the respective Zuozhuan section under each day, month, or event, but by cutting the Chunqiu record into years and inserting the Zuozhuan section for the entire year after the entire Chunqiu section on that year.3 His own commentary, however, seems to have been inserted straight under the respective THE CRAFT OF WANG BI’S COMMENTARY 259 texts to which they referred. Transferred to Wang Bi’s Laozi Commentary , this would give two attested options for the way in which Wang Bi originally wrote it. He could have added his complete commentary for each zhang at the end of that zhang, or he could have inserted his commentary notes directly under its respective parts. In the texts handed down, Wang Bi intersects the remaining 79 zhang of the Laozi with a total of about 403 commentary statements . While this gives roughly five comments per zhang, there are some extremes on both ends in terms of number and length...