The Huainanzi
Page 4
TABLE 1 Structure of the Huainanzi
* * *
Chapter Title
Dao : The Way
Ben : Roots
1. Originating in the Way The principle of universality: the Way as the origin of all things and the source of comprehensiveness The Way (dao )
* * *
2. Activating the Genuine Cosmogonic principles of nondifferentiation, differentiation, division, transformation, and change Potency (de )
* * *
3. Celestial Patterns Principles of astronomy, astrology, and mathematical harmonics Heaven (tian )
* * *
4. Terrestrial Forms Principles of geography, topography, and ecology Earth (di )
* * *
5. Seasonal Rules Integration of time and space: annual cycles of yin and yang and the Five Phases Cyclical time (shi )
* * *
6. Surveying Obscurities Things respond resonantly to one another: a great mystery Resonance (ganying )
* * *
7. Quintessential Spirit The origins and nature of human consciousness and physiology, principles of self-cultivation, and characteristics of the sage Humankind (ren )
* * *
8. The Basic Warp The distinguishing principles of sagely virtue, the authority of the ancient Five Emperors and Three Kings Morality (renyi )
* * *
Shi: Affairs
Mo: Branches
9. The Ruler’s Techniques The distinguishing techniques of the sagely ruler Techniques (shu )
* * *
10. Profound Precepts Illustrations of correct deportment toward the populace by means of Quintessential Sincerity Precepts (cheng )
* * *
11. Integrating Customs Illustrations of how to integrate diverse customs and ritual practices broadly conceived Records (ji )
* * *
12. Responses of the Way Illustrations of how to respond to diverse circumstances by means of the Way, as the Laozi does Exegesis (jie )
* * *
13. Boundless Discourses Illustrations of how to assess and adjust to change as a sage does Discourses (lun )
* * *
14. Sayings Explained Demonstrations of how to compare by means of analogies and to elucidate the main tenets of human affairs through illustrations from gnomic verse Sayings (yan )
* * *
15. An Overview of the Military Explanations of which military methods should be employed and under what circumstances Overview (lüe )
* * *
16. A Mountain of Persuasions Demonstrations of how to construct persuasive arguments through the use of talking points Persuasions (shui )
* * *
17. A Forest of Persuasions Demonstrations of how to construct persuasive arguments through the use of talking points Persuasions (shui )
* * *
18. Among Others Explications of paradoxes to illustrate the workings of the Way in various life situations Dialectics (bian )
* * *
19. Cultivating Effort Illustrations of why a ruler must devote effort to the task of rulership and how to assert or refute a particular proposition in the course of oral debate or discussion Refutations (nan )
* * *
20. The Exalted Lineage Demonstrations of how the current ruler can continue the illustrious “lineage” of the Five Emperors and Three Kings and bring honor and prosperity to the Liu clan Genealogy (zong )
* * *
21. An Overview of the Essentials Explanations of why the Huainanzi was written and how it is intended to be understood Overview (lüe ) and poetic exposition (fu )
* * *
Table 1 dramatically validates the claim made in chapter 21 that the work should be read sequentially, from beginning to end; to that extent, the Huainanzi can be seen to constitute a carefully constructed curriculum for a would-be sage-ruler. We stress that this root–branch structure may be (indeed, must be) read both diachronically and synchronically. While progressing from chapter 1 through chapter 20, the reader moves through ever-later realms in the progressive history of cosmogenesis and human society, beginning with the origins of the universe in the undifferentiated Way and ending in the diverse and complex world of the Han dynasty. At the same time, the reader moves normatively through realms of descending priority toward the endeavor of universal rule: from the Way that pervades and directs all things to the minute contingencies of interpersonal politics and individual duty. Using this method, the Huainanzi proposes to present a structure within which all human knowledge and effort may be prioritized and integrated.
The Claims the Huainanzi Makes for Itself
In formal terms, chapter 21, “An Overview of the Essentials,” is the final chapter of the Huainanzi, but as noted previously, it effectively serves as an introduction to the work as a whole.31 It orients the reader and provides a navigational guide for the long and complex journey through the text. It is particularly noteworthy that through the “Overview” the reader is introduced to the rhetorical strategy of the text and comes to appreciate the grand design extending to each successive chapter. The “Overview” itself, written in a combination of prose and tetrasyllabic verse in the fu style, is organized into four parts that introduce the text in a progressive and ever-widening purview. It elucidates the theoretical goals of the work, the content of its individual chapters, the progressive organizational flow of the chapters from one to the next, and the contributions of the work within a comparative and historical framework.
In the first paragraph of chapter 21, the author lays out his broad philosophical claims about the text and introduces the chapter titles that identify the content of each chapter. The opening lines explain that the Huainanzi is an account of the Way and its Potency, clarifies their relationship to human beings and their affairs, and encompasses all the knowledge one needs to govern successfully. Implying that previous and contemporaneous works have failed to make these connections adequately, the author defines his task as explicating the critical link between cosmic and political order. The introduction emphasizes the interrelationship between the Way and human affairs and asserts that such knowledge will empower the ruler to be both efficacious and adaptable to the times. At the end of this section, the twenty chapter titles are named in rhymed verse that serves to emphasize the careful and deliberate ordering of the book’s contents.
The second section of chapter 21, summaries of the previous twenty chapters with their respective titles, introduces the main topics of each chapter and familiarizes the reader with the categories, concepts, and vocabulary pertinent to each of them. Most important, it outlines the different practical applications and benefits of the knowledge derived from each chapter. This link between the theoretical and practical or the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the chapters is evident in both the semantic and the syntactic structure of the chapter summaries. Whereas the first section of the “Overview” discusses the relationship between the Way and human affairs, this second section is a concerted effort to harmonize the theoretical and the practical, the cosmological and the political—a process that the author claims to be a distinctive contribution of the twenty chapters of this text.
The third section takes a different look at the chapters. Rather than describing them one by one in sequence, this section shows how the chapters relate to and build on one another, implying that they have been arranged in a deliberate and coherent fashion. The text, we are shown, is to be read and studied from beginning to end and demonstrates how comprehending the content of any one chapter is predicated on successfully mastering the principles presented in the preceding one. Reflecting the text itself, this section moves from cosmogony to cosmology to ontology; from the meta-phenomenal Way as utter nondifferentiation to the phenomenal world of differentiated things that it generates; from the Way’s macrocosmic aspects visible in Heaven, Earth, and the four seasons to its microcosmic manifestations in human beings; from cosmogony to human genesis; from the motions of the celestial bodies to the m
ovements of human history; and from the cultivation of oneself to the governance of the world. This section thus outlines the text’s demonstration of its authority as a compendium encapsulating everything worth knowing and utilizing in governing the world.
The fourth and final section of chapter 21 deepens the author’s claim for uniquely valid comprehensiveness, by situating the Huainanzi within a (partly legendary) evolution of practices and texts stretching from the exemplary King Wen of the Zhou, through innovations in the Warring States era, to the Qin dynasty, and beyond to Liu An’s time. This taxonomy or inventory of the past summarizes the noteworthy events of nearly a thousand years by recounting both their particular historical circumstances and the specific contributions made by key people and texts that figured prominently in each era. The high points mentioned include the strategies of the Grand Duke in advancing the affairs of King Wen, the teachings of the Confucians, the writings of Master Guan, the admonitions of Master Yan, the reliance on Vertical and Horizontal Alliances and Long- and Short-Term Coalitions, writings on performance and title, and the laws devised by Shang Yang. The creation of the Huainanzi is contrasted with the time- and context-bound nature of all those policies and teachings. The Huainanzi itself is presented as being both timeless and utterly comprehensive, because it is said to have both subsumed and surpassed all these important historical innovations. This claim is reinforced in the concluding passage of this section, which speaks of “the book of the Liu clan” itself in terms quite unlike those used in describing all the earlier developments and characterizes the work as an exhaustive repository of theoretical and practical knowledge.
One of the main rhetorical purposes of the final section’s historical digression is showing how in each era, some figures stood apart from the throne or even from the royal court itself. Such personages as Guan Zhong, Confucius, and the Grand Duke were not rulers themselves, but they laid down the basic principles by which kingship was conducted in their era. This embodies a special plea by Liu An and his court: although their presentation of a comprehensive summa that could (and should, according to the text’s own claims) serve as the ideological blueprint of the Han Empire may seem like an unforgivable act of lèse majesté, there is in fact ample historical precedent for it. Note that this claim somewhat attenuates the “threat” posed by the Huainanzi but is still quite audacious; Liu An is claiming for himself and his court a role of “partnership in rule” comparable to that perceived to have been played by Guan Zhong, Confucius, and other towering figures of the past. To use a classical allusion that would have been clear to his contemporaries, Liu An is setting up Huainan to be the “Zou and Lu ” —the home of high-minded sage advisers—of the Han era.
The Place of the Huainanzi in Early Han History
We return to the questions posed earlier: For whom was the Huainanzi written, and with what intended effect?
After years of relative neglect by Western scholars, there was an upsurge of interest in the Huainanzi beginning with the publication in 1962 of Benjamin Wallacker’s translation of chapter 11.32 A main strategy for trying to understand the Huainanzi was trying to locate the text in one or another “school” of early Chinese thought, and over a period of many years, the intellectual affiliation of the Huainanzi became the topic of considerable debate and disputation. During that time, almost every major Huainanzi scholar (including some of us) weighed in with views on whether the Huainanzi was a “miscellaneous” or an “eclectic” work, a Daoist or a Huang-Lao text, or an example of syncretism. We do not propose to prolong that debate in these pages. We take note of the voluminous literature on the subject,33 but even more of the consensus that has begun to emerge in very recent years that the whole question is neither as unproblematical nor as useful as was once thought. Many scholars now feel that there may be little to be gained from arguments that “the Huainanzi is a text of the ‘X’ (or ‘Y’ or ‘Z’) school.”
The essence of this position can perhaps be summed up in this way: writers of the Warring States and early Han periods spoke often of the bai jia, the “Hundred Traditions” (or “Hundred [Intellectual] Lineages” or “Hundred Specialists”).34 The term appears three times (in this sense) in the Huainanzi itself. Even granted that in this context, “hundred” just means “many,” the implication of the term is great variety, fluidity, and diversity of thought. But that means that in writing his famous essay on Han intellectual life,35 the “Liu jia yao zhi” (Essential Tenets of the Six Lineages), Sima Tan at the very least conflated a great deal.
From this perspective, another problem is that while Sima Tan was writing as a historian with the aim of giving a schematic account of the major intellectual traditions up to his time, his essay seems to prefigure the work of the bibliographers Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin in classifying and cataloging the Han imperial library. Their scheme, in turn, was incorporated by Ban Gu into the “Monograph on Arts and Literature” of the Han shu (History of the [Former] Han Dynasty),36 a source on which so much of the debate on texts and their filiation turns. In the view of some scholars, the categories thus created are basically designed to answer the question of where any given book should be placed on the shelves of a library rather than being attempts to comprehend and analyze the complexities of contemporary intellectual life. Applied retrospectively to the thinkers of the Warring States and early Han periods, these “school” categories can be seen as true Procrustean beds; within each school, one size fits all. From this perspective, therefore, the classification of Warring States and Han texts on the basis of what are essentially mid-Han bibliographical categories obscures as much as it clarifies. Early Chinese intellectual life was more dynamic than the classificatory rubrics would imply. Intellectuals created texts not only as contributions to and within particular lineage traditions but also in response to new, complex, and shifting social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances.
A narrow reliance on bibliographic categories also obscures the role of praxis in constructing intellectuals’ group identity during the Warring States and early Han. To early thinkers, the shared performance of common rituals or methods of personal cultivation was ample cause for affinity. Furthermore, it is clear that Sima Tan was aware of the importance of praxis in the intellectual lineages he identifies. For example, he mentions the Confucian emphasis on ritual and hierarchy, and the Daoist practices of self-cultivation. Hence his categories were neither arbitrary nor unprecedented. They bear a direct relationship not only to the content of the texts from which he drew to develop his classifications but also to the distinctive practices associated with them. Thus, used judiciously, Sima Tan’s classificatory scheme is one source of useful insights into Han and pre-Han intellectual life. It becomes problematic when developed into—and applied as—“one size fits all” bibliographical categories, as did the later Han bibliographers and those who rely on their scheme. In our analytical comments on the Huainanzi in the chapters’ introductions and footnotes, we have taken pains to identify links between the text and both written sources and specific techniques, and to point out their intellectual affiliation where appropriate. At the same time, we have been mindful of the Huainanzi’s own claim that it draws on a great number of traditions but transcends all of them.
From this perspective, the starting point for any discussion of the place of the Huainanzi in the intellectual history of the Han should be to remember that the Huainanzi was the product of a particular group of intellectuals clustered in a particular place in a singular geopolitical context. Accordingly, we begin with the text itself, asking what explicit and implicit claims this particular group of intellectuals is articulating. In this regard, chapter 21 is germane, as it describes the specific concerns that inspired the production of this text, its goals, and its structure and organization. It also situates the Huainanzi in a long history of textual production beginning with the Strategies of the Grand Duke attributed to King Wen.
Our discussion thus turns on the issue of what message
s the text may be perceived to encode, how those messages would be understood by a Han readership, and what pragmatic effects would have been if the program of the text had been adopted.
The immediate milieu within which the Huainanzi was created was one of political turmoil over whether the empire was to be a centralized bureaucratic state or a relatively decentralized neofeudal one. This explains why the Huainanzi is best understood as the conceptual blueprint for a vision of a decentralized empire that aspired to a diffuse or shared form of governance in which the central court worked out an accommodation with local sources of power and authority, particularly the royal relatives enfeoffed as kings throughout much of the empire. The numerous references to the seemingly historical narratives of the Three Kings and the Three Dynasties37 are a thinly veiled commentary on the contemporary scene and call on the imperial regime to reinstitute the decentralized governance that the Three Kings represent.