The Huainanzi
Page 31
At the end of the chapter, it is evident that the authors have not given an adequate account of how resonance produces its effects. Even though they have surveyed the topic, it remains obscure. But the chapter does offer arguments concerning resonance that many contemporary readers would have found persuasive.
First, the phenomenon of resonance is real. This can be demonstrated by a well-known and widely accepted (and true) test: “When a person who tunes a se plays [the note] gong, [another] gong string responds” (6.4). Second, extraordinary individuals transcend the boundaries of human knowledge and skill, and their feelings provoke responses that seem to have no physical basis; the charioteering of Qian Qie and Da Bing illustrates this. Thus the phenomenon goes beyond commonplace physical effects. Third, because the sage-rulers of high antiquity (alluded to again and again in the Huainanzi) were such individuals, it is not surprising that their reigns were times of joyful simplicity and extraordinary cosmic harmony. Fourth, in reigns of surpassingly bad rulers, such as the tyrant Jie, the cosmos responded with portents and anomalies such as unseasonable weather and the strange behavior of animals. Finally, one who has the Way of Heaven, who practices non-action (wuwei ) and is thus-of-himself (ziran )is in a resonant relationship with the entire cosmos, just as a string that has not yet begun to be tuned is not limited to resonating with a single note but (potentially) resonates with every other string on the instrument.
Thus the authors demonstrate that the phenomenon of resonance operates most completely in the person of one of the Genuine (zhenren ), and this leads to the essential message for the young monarch-in-training who is the intended reader of the Huainanzi: it is possible for a transcendent ruler to arise in our own time, to bring about (through the resonant response of the cosmos to his own perfected Potency) a new era of sagely government. Charles Le Blanc puts it well: the power of resonance “is based on the persistent affinity and attraction of things that were originally one, but that became scattered when the world began. Through the True Man, it [that is, ganying] recreates the original unity.”5
Although the concept of resonance forms the entire focus of this chapter, the term ganying itself does not appear in “Surveying Obscurities” or indeed anywhere in the Huainanzi. Gan means “an influence” or “to influence,” “a stimulus” or “to stimulate,” “to evoke a response.” It appears twice in chapter 6. Ying appears seven times in the chapter, with its usual meaning of “to respond” or “a response”—for example, in 6.3: “The sage is like a mirror, . . . responding but not storing up.” Overall throughout the Huainanzi, ying appears much more frequently (151 times) than gan does (39 times), and the two terms are closely coupled in only a few instances. But these instances conform exactly to the meaning of resonance that one expects from the concept of ganying: “responding to things when stimulated” (gan er ying zhi , 1.10); “when stimulated they respond” (gan er ying , 7.7); “the stimulus impels a response externally” (gan dong ying yu wai , 10.27); “[non-action] does not mean that a stimulus will not produce a response” ([wuwei] fei wei qi gan er bu ying [] , 19.2).
While “Surveying Obscurities” must be counted as a key text arguing for the importance of resonance as an operative principle of yin–yang and Five Phases cosmology and attempting to explain how it worked, it would appear that at the time the chapter was written (mid-second century B.C.E.), the term ganying itself had not yet stabilized as a technical term for the phenomenon.
Sources
Because this chapter relies mainly on anecdote and analogy to make its argument for the pervasive reality of resonance, it draws extensively on a fund of mythological, legendary, historical, and other lore that was broadly familiar to all educated people in the early Han. Such figures as Fuxi and Nüwa, the Yellow Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West, the tyrants Jie and Djou, the expert charioteer Zaofu, and the lugubrious musician Yong Menzi all were part of Han China’s common cultural heritage. General references to them are difficult or impossible to trace to specific sources. Much of the content of this chapter shows a broad familiarity with such material but little evidence of direct quotations or borrowing from known sources.
Some passages do have strong parallels to other texts, however, including the Zhuangzi, Lüshi chunqiu, Hanfeizi, and Guanzi. Of these, by far the most important is the Zhuangzi. That is hardly surprising; in the Huainanzi overall, the Zhuangzi is quoted or alluded to far more than any other source, although the quotations are not at all evenly distributed across the book’s twenty-one chapters.6 chapter 6, for instance, has more than twenty allusions to the Zhuangzi.7 Some are brief and relatively trivial, but others are of central importance to the chapter’s argument and shed light on how the Huainanzi’s authors went about their work.
The key passage in this chapter is also the most dramatic instance of borrowing from an earlier source. The observation that a string tuned to a particular note causes vibrations in an identically tuned string on a nearby instrument is central to the chapter’s argument for the concept of resonance. In chapter 13 of the Lüshi chunqiu, this appears as a simple statement of fact: a gong string resonates with a gong string, a jue string with a jue string. Chapter 24 of the Zhuangzi, like section 6.4 of the Huainanzi, makes the additional—physically impossible but philosophically intriguing—claim that an untuned string resonates with all twenty-five of the musical instrument’s strings (presumably because it represents an underlying unity that still contains all possible tunings). Chapter 24 of the Zhuangzi represents a late stratum of that text, very likely not much (if at all) older than the Huainanzi. The idea of resonating tuned strings thus would seem to date back to the pre-Qin period, whereas the notion of the superior resonance of an untuned string represents the milieu of the early Han.
Other passages in “Surveying Obscurities” show considerable ingenuity in the use of sources. For example, the passage in 6.2 beginning with “mountain clouds are like grassy hummocks” quotes five lines from chapter 13 of the Lüshi chunqiu. A few lines later, the text refers to Fu Yue bestriding the lunar lodges, alluding to chapter 6 of the Zhuangzi; immediately thereafter, it quotes from chapter 21 of the Zhuangzi on maximum yin and maximum yang, capping that quotation with another from chapter 7 of the Zhuangzi about the consequences of having too many males and not enough females. Section 6.2 concludes with a quotation from chapter 2 of the Guanzi and an allusion to chapter 46 of the Laozi. The authors of chapter 6 of the Huainanzi evidently knew these texts and had deft editorial hands in stringing them together to create a novel argument that went beyond the original sources.
One can see a similar process at work in section 6.7, where the passage beginning with “[people] rested in tranquillity” is cobbled together with lines from, successively, chapters 7, 9, and 11 of the Zhuangzi, with the whole passage as strung together from the Zhuangzi seeming to allude to chapter 80 of the Laozi.
A final point about creative allusion pertains to section 6.5, the allegories of the dragons and the mud eels and the phoenixes and the swallows, which strongly echo the allegories of the Kun fish and the Peng bird in the opening paragraphs of chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi. As Le Blanc observed, “The actors (animals) and style are different . . . , but the point of the allegories is, in both works, the same: namely, that petty men are hemmed in by the trivia of their own existence, and cannot understand the grand designs and ambitions of superior men, who have attained the Tao.”8
The Chapter in the Context of the Huainanzi as a Whole
Chapter 21’s summary of “Surveying Obscurities” says in part,
It begins by
grasping things and deducing their categories,
observing them, taking hold of them,
lifting them up, and arranging them,
and pervasively positing them as categories of similarity,
by which things can be understood as ideas and visualized as forms. . . .
[It] then thereby illuminates
the stimuli of the various categories of t
hings,
the responses of identical qi,
the unions of yin and yang,
and the intricacies of forms and shapes.
It is what leads you to observe and discern in a far-reaching and expansive way. (21.2)
Chapter 21’s rationale for including “Surveying Obscurities” in the Huainanzi states:
Had we discussed Heaven, Earth, and the four seasons and not introduced examples and elucidated categories,
you would not recognize the subtleties of the Quintessential qi. (21.3)
The phrase “introduced examples and elucidated categories” seems to be the key to the importance of the chapter itself, by arguing through examples and elucidation for the reality and pervasiveness of ganying resonance within categories of yin and yang and the Five Phases and then contending also that resonance operates on a deeper and more mysterious level so as to permit the sage (who conforms to the Way and identifies with the One) to resonate with the entire cosmos. This contention provides the operative principle for the Huainanzi’s political philosophy of sagely rule. Thus the principle propounded in this chapter pervades the entire work.
John S. Major
1. For an alternative translation and detailed study of chap. 6, including a particular inquiry into the theory of resonance, see Le Blanc 1985; and Le Blanc’s revised translation and chapter introduction (in French) in Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003, 251–87.
2. Ames 1994, 16, translates this title as “Perceiving the Imperceptible”; Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003 render it as “De l’examen des choses obscures.”
3. For a somewhat different view of the organization and arguments of the chapter, see Le Blanc 1985, 191–94.
4. This chapter’s striking description of the world’s devolution from an archaic age of unity, harmony and simplicity (6.7– 6.9) is echoed in chap. 8, which uses the theme of decline from primordial unity as the starting point of an analysis of how sage-rulership might be reinstituted in the present age.
5. Le Blanc 1985, 209.
6. More than half the total appear in just four chapters: 1, 2, 6, and 7. See the chart in Le Blanc 1985, 83.
7. In ascribing passages to “the Zhuangzi,” we do not mean to suggest that the entire Zhuangzi was written by its putative author, Zhuang Zhou, sometime in the late fourth century B.C.E. The Zhuangzi is a layered text, written by several hands over a period of time, so some of its latest portions might be roughly contemporaneous with the Huainanzi. Parallel passages linking the Zhuangzi and the Huainanzi therefore do not in themselves argue for a well-developed theory of ganying resonance in the mid- to late Warring States period. For more on the Zhuangzi as a source for the Huainanzi, see the introduction to chap. 2, esp. n. 1.
Similarly, some material in the Lüshi chunqiu might well date from after the death of Lü Buwei (see the discussion of the LSCQ in the introduction to chap. 5), and the complex textual history of the Hanfeizi has not been sorted out satisfactorily (see our further discussion of the Hanfeizi in the introduction to chap. 12).
8. Le Blanc 1985, 144.
Six
6.1
In ancient times Music Master Kuang played the tune “White Snow,”1 and because of that, spiritlike creatures descended [from heaven]; wind and rain arrived violently; Duke Ping2 became impotent and ill; and the lands of the state of Jin reddened [with drought].
The Commoner Woman3 cried out to Heaven. Thunder and lightning beat down; Duke Jing’s4 lookout tower collapsed; his limbs and body were broken and slashed; and floodwaters gushed from the sea.
Now the blind music master and the Commoner Woman
were of a [social] rank as lowly as swaying weeds;5
their [political] weight was as light as windblown feathers;
yet
by concentrating their essences and disciplining their intentions,
abandoning their [mundane] responsibilities and storing up spirit [energy],
upward, they penetrated to ninefold Heaven, rousing and putting into action6 the utmost essence.
Looking at things from this perspective in regard to the punishments [sent by] Heaven on high: Though one dwells
in a broad wasteland or a dark valley,
at a remote distance or a secluded hideaway,
in a multilayered stone refuge,
or at a frontier barrier or narrow defile,
there is no place where one may escape them. This is clear. [6/49/27–31]
King Wu7 carried out a punitive campaign against [the tyrant] Djou. As he crossed [the Yellow River] at Meng Ford, the waves of the marquis of Yang8 flowed against the current and smashed into [his army]. In the sudden wind and obscure gloom, men and horses were unable to see one another. Thereupon King Wu grasped a yellow battle-ax in his left hand and raised a white battle flag with his right hand and, with flashing eyes, brandished them, saying, “I am here! Who under Heaven dares to violate my will?” Immediately the winds quieted and the waves ceased.
Duke Luyang9 was engaged in a difficult [battle] with Hann. As the battle grew fiercer, the sun began to set. He raised his halberd and waved it, and the sun reversed [its course] for him by three lunar lodges.
Now if you keep intact your nature and guard your authenticity
and do not do damage to your person,10
[when you] meet with emergencies or are oppressed by difficulties,
your essence will penetrate [upward] to Heaven;
You will be like one who has not yet begun to emerge from his Ancestor11—how can you not succeed?
One for whom death and life are the same territory, who cannot be threatened, such a single brave warrior is the hero of the Three Armies.12 Such a one simply seeks fame yet is able for the sake of his own desire to ignore death in this manner. How much more so for one who
holds sway over Heaven and Earth,
embraces the myriad things,
befriends creation and transformation,
and cherishes utmost harmony,
who simply finds himself fitted up in human form, who scrutinizes the Nine and penetrates to the One,13 thereby knowing the unknown so that his mind has no notion of death! [6/50/1–7]
In ancient times, Yong Menzi14 used weeping to gain an audience with Lord Mengchang.15 Having [been received,] he marshaled his phrases and communicated his ideas, laying his hands on his heart and breaking into song. [As he did so,] Lord Mengchang increasingly sobbed and wailed until he choked, and his tears ran down copiously without stopping. [Thus] when Quintessential Sincerity takes form within, outwardly it communicates grief to the hearts of others. [But] the Way of [doing] this cannot be transmitted [to others]. If a commoner who, lacking his ruler’s form, were to imitate [the ruler’s] demeanor, surely he would be laughed at by others. That Bo Juzi16 could draw a bead on a bird a hundred ren17 up [in the air], and Zhan He could scare up fish in the midst of a great abyss, was all because they had obtained the Way of Clarity and Purity and the Harmony of Supreme Vastness. [6/50/9–12]
6.2
That things in their [various] categories are mutually responsive is [something] dark, mysterious, deep, and subtle.
Knowledge is not capable of assessing it;
argument is not capable of explaining it.
Thus,
when the east wind arrives, wine turns clear and overflows [its vessels];
when silkworms secrete fragmented silk,18 the shang string [of a stringed instrument] snaps.
Something has stimulated them.
When a picture is traced out with the ashes of reeds, the moon’s halo has a [corresponding] gap.19
When the leviathan dies, comets appear.20
Something has moved them.
Thus, when a sage occupies the throne, he embraces the Way and does not speak, and his nurturance reaches to the myriad people. But when ruler and ministers [harbor] distrust in their hearts, back-to-back arcs21 appear in the sky. The mutual responses of spirit qi are subtle indeed!
Thus,
mountain clo
uds are like grassy hummocks;
river clouds are like fish scales;
dryland clouds are like smoky fire;
cataract clouds are like billowing water.
All resemble their forms and evoke responses according to their class.22
The burning mirror takes fire from the sun;
the square receptacle takes dew from the moon.23
Of [all the things] between Heaven and Earth, even a skilled astrologer cannot master all their techniques. [Even] a hand [that can hold] minutely tiny and indistinct things cannot grasp24 a beam of light. However, from what is within the palm of one’s hand, one can trace [correlative] categories to beyond the extreme end point [of the cosmos]. [Thus] that one can set up [these implements] and produce water and fire is [a function of] the mutually [responsive] movement of yin and yang of the same qi. That is how Fu Yue bestrode [the lunar lodges] Winnowing Basket and Tail.25 [6/50/14–20]
Thus,
maximum yin is freezing cold;
maximum yang is blazing hot.
The two of them come together and interconnect to bring about harmony, and the myriad things thereby are born.26 If there were lots of males and no females, how indeed would transformation be able to create [anything]?27 This is what is known as