Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China

Introduction

1 Early medieval China was a time of profound change.1 The fall of the Han dynasty altered drastically the Chinese political and intellectual landscape. Leaving aside changes on the political front, which fall outside the scope of the present work, questions about “heaven” and the affairs of the world that seemed to have been fully resolved under the once sure and confident guide of Han Confucianism resurfaced and demanded fresh answers. In this context, new currents in philosophy, religion, and other domains clamored to the fore and left an indelible mark on the subsequent development of Chinese thought and culture. Although continuity is never entirely absent in historical and cultural change, early medieval China saw the rise of xuanxue 玄學 (learning of the mysterious Dao), the establishment of religious Daoism, and the introduction of Buddhism that fueled major renovation in Chinese tradition. The eleven essays presented here address key aspects of these developments. In the companion to this volume, Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China, also published by SUNY Press (2010), a different team of scholars examine some of the equally important changes in hermeneutic orientation and literature and society. The first five studies in this volume are devoted to xuanxue, the principal philosophical development in early medieval China. Xuanxue is complex and merits an introduction.2 The word xuan 玄 depicts literally a shade of black with dark red.3 In the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Poetry), for example, xuan is sometimes used to describe the color of fabrics or robes.4 Xuan is tropically paired with huang 黃 (yellow),5 and the two have come to be understood as the color of heaven and Introduction Introduction 2 earth, respectively. The Yijing 易經 (Book of Changes), indeed, explicitly states that “heaven is xuan [in color] and earth is yellow.”6 As the noted Eastern Han Yijing commentator Xun Shuang 荀爽 (128–190) explains: “Heaven is yang and starts from the northeast; thus its color is dark red. Earth is yin and starts from the southwest; thus its color is yellow.”7 Without going into the cosmological underpinnings of this reading, it should be clear at least how xuan has come to be invoked as a general emblem of heaven in later usage. Chapter 1 of the Laozi 老子, in its received eighty-one chapter form, as is well known, speaks of the Dao as xuan (cf. chapters 6, 10, 15, 51, 56, and 65). The question is, of course, What does it mean? An Eastern Han interpreter might not unreasonably consider xuan as referring to heaven here as well, as the Heshang gong 河上公 commentary to the Laozi, for example, did, given the established meaning of the word.8 However, Wei-Jin scholars in the main saw much more in it than a direct reference to heaven. In engaging the Laozi anew, they contended that xuan harbors a deeper significance, signifying the utter impenetrability and profound mystery of the Dao, both in its radical transcendence and generative power. In a general sense, then, xuanxue denotes philosophical investigation of the unfathomable, profound, and mysterious Dao, although the term itself did not come into currency until later. During the fifth century ce, xuanxue formed a part of the official curriculum at the imperial academy, together with Ru 儒 or “Confucian ” learning, “literature” (wen 文) and “history” (shi 史).9 The subject matter of xuanxue (or better, “Xuanxue,” capitalized and without italics, as it is used as a proper noun) in this narrower, formal sense revolves especially around the Yijing, Laozi, and Zhuangzi 莊子—then collectively called the “three treatises on the mystery [of the Dao]” (sanxuan 三玄)10—and selected commentaries to them. Later historians traced the origins of this scholarly tradition to the third century, or more precisely to the Zhengshi 正始 reign era (240–249) of the Wei dynasty, and applied the term xuanxue retrospectively to designate the perceived dominant intellectual current of Wei-Jin thought as a whole. This focuses attention on the general orientation of Wei-Jin philosophy, but it may give the wrong impression that xuanxue professes a single point of view. In traversing the world of thought in early medieval China, it is important to bear in mind that xuanxue in the general sense—as distinguished from a branch of official learning, which reflects political interest and is the result of a long process of intellectual distillation —encompasses a broad range of philosophical positions and does not represent a monolithic movement or “school.” Introduction 3...