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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 1 1 ntroduction D uring my dissertation work on early Chinese Buddhist thinkers, especially Shi Daoan (312–385) and Shi Huiyuan (334–416), I found Buddhist arguments were often understood and expressed in a language originating in third century Xuanxue , the “scholarly investigation of that which is dark,” to use a cumbersome translation.1 Though the importance of Xuanxue in Chinese philosophy, including Chinese Buddhist philosophy and even Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism, was acknowledged , and though its general outlines were mapped and arguments about its presumable sociopolitical orgins and purposes were available , there were no detailed critical studies of particular texts and issues. It seemed natural to take up the study of Wang Bi, unquestionably the most sophisticated and influential Xuanxue thinker. There is a dearth of critical editions of Chinese texts and of detailed studies of individual philosophical works. In studies of the Western classics, there has been a division of labor between scholars collating, editing, commenting, 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 the study of the Christian Testament who had managed to span the entire breadth of the enterprise, from painstaking philological research through broad analyses of religious, social, and political currents, to hermeneutical explorations of the internal logic of philosophical texts and religious beliefs. This model I set out to emulate, 2 INTRODUCTION assisted by some years of studying hermeneutics with Hans-Georg Gadamer at the University of Heidelberg. The resulting work includes: — A volume with critical textual editions of Wang Bi’s Laozi text, Wang Bi’s Commentary to the Laozi, and his Structure of the Laozi’s Pointers, Laozi weizhi lueli; translations of all three texts, and studies on the textual transmission and philology of these works. These will form a volume separate from the present book, but this volume will contain the editions on which the textual analyses presented here are based; — The present volume, which is dealing with the art and technique of Wang Bi, the commentator of the Laozi, and the intellectual currents from and against which his approach developed; — A study of his philosophy of language that is underlying his treatment of the classical texts, of his ontology that marked a watershed in the history of Chinese philosophy, and of his political philosophy for which his ontology provided the model and logic. It is quite a modest enterprise, the many pages notwithstanding . The length only reflects a certain backwardness of Chinese studies in terms of securing their philological fundaments. My study does not even include the entirety of Wang Bi’s oeuvre, leaving out as it does most of his work on the Zhouyi. The study of Chinese philosophical commentaries has suffered much from the European disdain of the Reformation and Renaissance period for the dark ages of “scholasticism,” which has been regarded as second-hand thought. The Urtext, the original meaning, and the author’s original intention have since been extolled as the only proper focus of scholarly research, while the “prescientific” commentators and exegetes have been summarily denounced as subjectivist and unscholarly, bent on making their own points instead of explaining what was “really” meant by the text. This trend has directed large and often brilliant energies into consolidating this “scientific” approach. The weakness of the uncritical transfer of these Renaissance prejudices to China (and their acceptance by INTRODUCTION 3 much of the Chinese scholarly community) lies in having created large desert areas summarily denounced as second-hand thought not worthy of the best scholarly energies. We do know that, at least since the second century CE, classical texts were generally read in China through commentaries. We do know that a very large segment of the best Chinese minds since preQin times have focused on the interpretation of the classical texts as the only available heirloom of the Sages of antiquity. And we do know that to check the meaning of a fifth- or tenth-century reference to the Spring and Autumn Annals or the Laozi, it obviously makes little sense to go back to a reading presumably focusing on the Urtext and the original intention; the person quoting the passage as well as his readers will have read it through a particular commentary or commentaries which probably situated it within a completely different context than what might be construed as the “original...