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23 There is little question that the concept of wu 無, variously translated as “nothing,” “nonbeing,” and “negativity,” is central to the early medieval Chinese intellectual enterprise. Famously, the Jin shu 晉書 (History of the Jin dynasty [265–420]) relates that during the Zhengshi 正始 reign period (240–249) of the Wei dynasty (220–265), He Yan 何晏 (d. 249), Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249), and others established the view, on the basis of their interpretation of the Laozi 老子 and the Zhuangzi 莊子, that all beings “have their roots in wu” (以無為本).1 In this context, the concept of wu serves to bring out the meaning of Dao, which according to the Laozi can only be described as utterly profound and impenetrable, and in that sense “dark” or “mysterious” (xuan 玄), especially in that it remains “nameless” despite the fact that it is the “beginning” and “mother” of all phenomena.2 The new sound of the Zhengshi era, to borrow a phrase from the fifth-century work Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, soon gained currency, which later scholars aptly labeled “inquiry into the profound” or “learning of the mysterious Dao” (xuanxue 玄學) and which captured the imagination of the educated elite well into the sixth century.3 The Wei-Jin rendition of wu is often presented as an “ontological ” breakthrough, against earlier “cosmological” accounts that trace the origins of beings to the transformation of vital “energies” or “pneumas” (qi 氣).4 As a general characterization, the accent on ontology is useful because it highlights a key concern in early medieval Chinese thinking. Nevertheless, this does not render the meaning of wu explicit. Moreover, it should not be assumed that ontology was the only concern or that xuanxue was a monolithic movement. Metaphysics 1 Sage Nature and the Logic of Namelessness Reconstructing He Yan’s Explication of Dao Alan K. L. Chan Alan K. L. Chan 24 and cosmology served a practical end, weaving an integral discourse with ethics and politics—wu not only “originates things” (kaiwu 開 物) but also “completes affairs” (chengwu 成務), as the Jin shu goes on to say in its review of Zhengshi learning—and there was considerable disagreement among proponents of xuanxue on a variety of issues, such as hermeneutics and law. The concept of wu may have provided a point of departure, but it generated competing analyses of order, at least partly as a response to the perceived decline of the rule of Dao in an age of pronounced disunity after the demise of the Han empire (206 bce–220 ce). At the ethical level, the “nothingness” of Dao brought new questions that forced open the critical space that had been filled by Confucian traditions. Does wu annihilate Confucian virtues or can it subsume them under its mysterious fold? Can “nothingness” be realized or “embodied” (ti 體) in one’s being, and what does “embodying wu” (tiwu 體無) mean? Does it signal radical transcendence and thus a mystical state, or should it be understood metaphorically as pointing to a mode of being characterized by deep insight into the nature of things and a heightened spirituality? While any answer rests on a prior understanding of wu, to He Yan, Wang Bi, and most of their contemporaries, it is also inseparably linked to a conception of the nature of the “sage” (shengren 聖人), the human exemplar represented especially by Confucius . This is because only a sage can realize Dao completely in his being and action. Indeed, the entire project of order hinges on this; but is it the case that the sage is able to realize Dao because of his special inborn nature, or does “sagehood” follow from embodying wu? Related to this, as we shall see, is the often cited but easily misunderstood debate between He Yan and Wang Bi on the place of the “emotions” (qing 情) in the nature of the sage. As an ethical ideal, embodying wu naturally finds expression also in “nonaction” (wuwei無為), which likewise forms a part of the mystery of Dao and thus requires explication. Wei-Jin intellectuals shared similar concerns and a basic philosophical vocabulary. Overlaps in their approaches to the establishment and maintenance of order are to be expected, but they do not amount to uniformity. Rather, especially given the value placed on analytic rigor in “pure conversation” (qingtan 清談), the predominant intellectual activity of the time, what one should be able to find is internal coherence for particular conceptions of the mystery of Dao. In what follows, I examine He Yan’s understanding of Dao as wu, and the ethical landscape that develops from it. The evidence...

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