by An Liu
66. This sentence does not read very smoothly in the original Chinese and may be defective. Various commentarial suggestions have been made for emendations, none of them very satisfactory.
67. These four lines appear (in slightly different form) in ZZ 7/20/5; the first two are also in ZZ 29/87/24.
68. These two lines also appear in Zhuangzi 9 (ZZ 9/23/27). The state of bovine tranquillity described here is also reminiscent of the peasants depicted in Laozi 80 (LZ 80/27/10–11).
69. A wangliang is a kind of corpse monster, said to feed on the brains of the buried dead.
70. These two lines, with some differences in wording, appear in ZZ 11/28/12.
71. Closely similar lines appear in Hanfeizi 49 and Wenzi 2.
72. Not merely surface soil, but the earth at the floor of the subterranean Yellow Springs, land of the dead.
73. Ying long , conventionally understood to mean a dragon that is able to fly.
74. The first character of this three-character sentence should be a verb, in parallel with the two that come before it and the two that follow. We read huang , “yellow,” as guang , “broad; to spread out,” even though there is no commentarial tradition to suggest this. Yu Yue proposed changing the order of the sentence to lo huang yun , “they made tendrils of yellow clouds.”
75. Lists of the “Five Thearchs” (wu di ) vary; here, presumably, the list would include both Fuxi and the Yellow Emperor, mentioned favorably earlier, possibly also the Divine Farmer, and would probably end with Yao and Shun.
76. Conventionally, Yu the Great, Cheng Tang, and King Wen, supposed founders of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. Note, however, that this passage refers specifically to Jie, last king of Xia, so strictly speaking, Cheng Tang and Wen Wang do not fit chronologically.
77. Zhun —that is, a water level.
78. That is, people disregarded kinship ties.
79. The sense of this enigmatic pair of sentences would seem to be that dogs and pigs fled from their usual associations with humans in response to the breakdown of government and morality and to the earthquakes that occurred as a consequence of that breakdown.
80. Ting qi le (or yue) is a complicated phrase. Usually one would take it to mean “hear its (or the) music,” but here it is parallel to the phrase “express the fullness of grief” (jin qi ai ) in the previous line and so must mean “obtain joy (from it).” As usual, the double meaning of le /yue cannot be conveyed in English.
81. That is, Xiwangmu , the “Queen Mother of the West.” See chap. 4, n. 37. She is conventionally depicted wearing a distinctive headdress called a sheng .
82. That is, Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. His sighing and moaning, like Xiwangmu’s snapping her hair ornament, is presumably a sign of frustration at the parlous state of humanity.
83. For hu and li , see 10.14 and (for li) chap. 1, n. 32.
84. Leaves of both cattails and sedge were used for making raincoats.
85. The implication is that the disks were being used so excessively in divinatory and other rituals that their surface decorations were worn away. This pair of four-character phrases is enigmatic: in particular, bi xi wu luo depends on nonstandard interpretations of xi and luo. The translation given here relies on the commentary of Wang Yinzhi and should be regarded as tentative.
86. Taking qing as qing .
87. According to the Gao You commentary, the seven states referred to here are Qi , Chu , Yan , Zhao , Hann , Wei , and Qin .
88. That is, alliances of northern and southern states versus eastern and western states.
89. Le Blanc 1985, 181, and Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003, 285, translate tai chang as “minister of rites,” one of the chief ministers in the Han government. We think that is too literal and that a philosophical principle rather than a government office is intended here. We suspect that this is an allusion to the “constant Way” (chang dao ) of Laozi 1.
90. This and the previous line appear, with variations, in ZZ 6/19/21, where (through the mouthpiece of Confucius’s disciple Yan Hui) they are part of a passage about achieving “sitting in forgetfulness” (zuo wang ). A longer version appears in ZZ 11/28/16–18, where the speaker is Hung Meng.
91. For the hun and po souls, see also 7.6, 7.7, and 16.1.
92. Presumably the Yi Zhou shu , but this quotation does not appear in the surviving fragments of that work.
93. Han Feizi (also known as Han Fei [d. 233 B.C.E.]) was a scion of the royal house of Hann and a prolific writer on politics and political theory. The text that bears his name, the Hanfeizi, is one of the richest works of early statecraft thinking and a source from which much material in the Huainanzi may have been drawn.
94. That is, disputing over fine points of no importance.
95. Baixing , the “hundred surnames.”
96. Heng E (also known as Chang E) was the wife of Archer Yi. To this day, many Chinese people still speak of her living on the moon.
Seven
QUINTESSENTIAL SPIRIT
“QUINTESSENTIAL SPIRIT” is the first chapter of the Huainanzi to introduce human beings systematically into the grand scheme of things. The text continues its methodical explication of the underlying powers, patterns, and forces of the cosmos and its creatures before turning, in the later chapters of the work, to illustrations and amplifications of the workings of the Way in the world of affairs. Chapters 1 and 2 introduced cosmology and ontology; chapters 3 through 5 explored the various dimensions of Heaven, Earth, and Time; and chapter 6 explained the mysterious operations of ganying resonance by which things in the world interact through stimuli and responses. In chapter 7, the authors now turn their attention to human beings, the third leg of the early Chinese conceptual tripod of Heaven, Earth, and Man.
The chapter begins with a brief reprise of the cosmology relevant to understanding the origins of the vital energy that constitutes the cosmos and the creatures that inhabit it before going on to consider humans in their guise as physical/spiritual bodies and microcosms of the universe. The chapter then introduces the concept of the Quintessential Spirit as the force that animates the physical body and consciousness itself. It also discusses the paragons of human perfection, Genuine Persons (zhenren), sages, and Perfected Persons (zhiren), who are characterized by, among other qualities, their ability to ignore external stimuli and to draw Potency from their source in the Way and by their indifference to the exigencies of life and death. The qualities of human perfection are not cultivated through self-mortification but through an apophatic inner-cultivation practice in which the adept empties the mind and body of passions, prejudices, and thoughts until realizing the unification of innate nature and the Way. The resultant indifference to ordinary desires and the ability to respond spontaneously and harmoniously to whatever situation arises takes on political coloration in a discussion of the attitude of the sage toward government: able to serve unerringly as ruler when the time is right but not covetous of power, not greedy for wealth, and not concerned with self-aggrandizement. The chapter ends with a striking image of the goal of this inward training and the self-discipline it requires: it is not the arrow that misses the bull’s-eye but the archer who fails to guide it accurately.
The Chapter Title
The title of the chapter is “Jing shen” , which we translate as “Quintessential Spirit.”1 Jing means “essence” or “quintessence” or, in adjectival form, “quintessential.” It refers to the most highly refined and true to its own nature form of any quality. It is often used nominally as a shortened form of jingqi (quintessential vital energy). Shen is “spirit,” covering a wide range of meanings within the spectrum of that term, from “deity” and “divine” to “animating spirit” or “vital force.” In the Huainanzi, it is associated with properties of consciousness and having the ability to oversee or coordinate the various mental activities of perception and cognition (see 1.20). As section 7.1 explains, everything in the world is made of qi, “vital energy,” whether the pure, rarified qi of Heaven or
the turbid, gross qi of Earth. Shen can be thought of as composed of the most highly rarified and purified kind of qi, and jingshen as the quintessence of shen. To the extent that shen itself has a basis as a form of qi, it is this jingshen, the quintessential vital energy of the spirit. The Quintessential Spirit occupies and animates the physical form but must be guarded lest it leak away or become sullied. A good way to prevent this leakage is to minimize perception and the passions and prejudices that result from it.
Although we prefer to see the primary meaning of the chapter title as an adjective–noun phrase, it can also be understood as a double noun phrase, “quintessence (= quintessential qi) and spirit.” In some passages of the Huainanzi this meaning is confirmed by parallelism with another double noun phrase; for example in 7.6:
Their ethereal and corporeal souls are settled in their dwelling;
their Quintessence and spirit are preserved in their root.
It would not be incorrect to render the chapter title as “Quintessence and Spirit,” but “Quintessential Spirit” more nearly captures the subject matter of the chapter itself. Moreover, contextual research indicates that when jing and qi are unqualified, they are most often followed by predicates of fluid motion (for example, “flows,” “swirls,” “seeps”). When shen is unqualified, it is often followed by a predicate of instrumentality (for example, “directs,” “makes,” “orders”). However, the compound jingshen is most frequently followed by predicates of fluid motion, as are jing and qi. Thus jingshen has the properties of a type of qi. It is, basically, the quintessential vital energy of the spirit, its most quintessential form. Hence in most passages, it is translated as “Quintessential Spirit.”2
Summary and Key Themes
“Quintessential Spirit” begins with a recapitulation of chapter 1’s Laozi-based cosmogony, but in this instance with the specific purpose of explaining the origins of the Quintessential Spirit. Two “spiritlike powers” differentiated into yin and yang and became manifested as qi, and various sorts of qi congealed to form different sorts of creatures. Humans are distinguished from beasts by being made of purer and more refined vital energy. They contain Quintessential Spirit—that is, their heavenly dimension that is preserved by sages who can maintain tranquillity and emptiness. Section 7.2 differentiates between Quintessential Spirit, received from Heaven, and physical form, received from Earth. Humans recapitulate the cosmos in microcosm. Their heads are round, like Heaven; their feet (side by side) form a square, like Earth; and their 366 joints match the year’s 366 days. The fetus develops in stages over a ten-month period, and the five visceral orbs connect to the organs of sense and correlate with various natural forces.
The Quintessential Spirit is exalted above all these aspects of human beings: it alone, as section 7.6 states, is more precious than “the jade half-disk of the Xiahou clan.” It is important both to preserve one’s innate store of Quintessential Spirit and to generate new stores. The way to do this is consistent with the recommendations of the Daoist inner-cultivation tradition to avoid excessive sense stimulation, perception, and concomitant desires (as we find in sections 7.4 and 7.5). Sections 7.3, 7.4, and 7.12 offer advice on how to accomplish this: concentrate your breathing and attention and relinquish thoughts, feelings, and desires, “cast aside wisdom and precedent.” Eventually, you will reach a condition of complete equanimity and pure emptiness, a state in which your “inborn nature is merged with the Way” (7.7). Then when returning to the world of dualities, you will have many valuable qualities. Your sense perceptions are always clear and accurate; your emotions are always calmed; and you rest in harmony amid the turmoil of the world. People like this are sages and are able to avoid the pitfalls of the physical body: the eyes and ears that can drain off vital energy and the lusts that excite the senses. This is very much in the tradition of thinkers like the author, for example, of Laozi 12: “The five colors blind human eyes; the five notes deafen human ears,” and so on. Sections 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7 explain that sages exhibit a cultivated indifference to life and death, to sorrow and joy, and to success and failure; they do not allow emotional states to cause their Quintessential Spirit to leak out externally. When they become perfected, they are profoundly spiritlike; “they contain nothing, and things cannot disturb them.”
This chapter also discusses some of the paragons of inner cultivation. In addition to sages are the Perfected (zhiren) and the Genuine (zhenren). Both are described in sections 7.7 and 7.10 as being able to concentrate on their inner lives and take their outer lives lightly. They can maintain the Origin (that is, the Way) amid the chaos of the dusty world by practicing non-action (wuwei) and maintaining a body like “withered wood” and a “mind . . . like dead ashes.” They are metaphorically said to “study with the Undying Teacher” and to be so indifferent to self-preservation that “they take life and death to be a single transformation.”
Perhaps this treasured indifference is why the authors of this chapter take pains to differentiate their practices from common techniques of physical self-cultivation to attain health and longevity, known in the late Warring States and early Han periods as daoyin (guiding and pulling [of qi]), that now survive principally among the early Chinese medical corpus, especially the texts discovered at Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan.3 These exercises, which often involved stretching and bending and mimicking the positions of animals, are criticized in section 7.8, which opens with a surprisingly dismissive reference:
If you huff and puff, exhale and inhale,
blow out the old and pull in the new,
practice the Bear Hang, the Bird Stretch,
the Duck Splash, the Ape Leap,
the Owl Gaze, and the Tiger Stare:
This is what is practiced by those who nurture the body. They are not the practices of those who polish the mind.
This criticism, also found in Zhuangzi 15, gives a fascinating glimpse into the similarities, perceived even then, between the qi cultivation practiced for physical benefits and the qi cultivation practiced for more transformative and deeply satisfying spiritual benefits, which seems to have involved more still sitting than active movement.4 The reference here is to a process of “nourishing the spirit” (yangshen), the aspect of human beings that is “born together with Heaven and Earth” and that is not transformed at death.
Having established the definitions of spiritual paragons and their qualities and methods of attainment and after having given some examples of such people in the narratives of section 7.9, the authors of “Quintessential Spirit” then address the reasons why a government led by such perfected human beings is superior to any other kind. They emphasize the assertion that these sages do not have any ambitions to rule; power, wealth, and the elaborate trappings of state are of no interest to them. As section 7.12 states: “Possessing and not possessing the empire are the same reality to them.” True sages are utterly indifferent to such things, simple in their tastes and tranquil in their demeanor; possessing the empire is nothing to them. They eat enough to survive and wear enough clothing to be protected from the elements, that is all. Various examples of sage rulers—familiar figures such as Yao and Shun—are used to illustrate these points and to contrast with the shallow scholars and narrow-minded literati of the present age.
Sections 7.11 and 7.15 single out the Confucians for such criticism. While the authors do express a grudging admiration for exemplars of the ethically superior Confucian paragon of the junzi (Superior Man), they see them as inferior to their own Daoist paragons: “People like them act only according to what is right and are not drawn to material things. How much more is this so for those who act through non-action?” (7.11). Section 7.11 then compares scholars who study the Odes and the Documents with impoverished villagers who are satisfied with the music they make by drumming on pots and pans. By contrast, those who “know the meaning of the Great Discourse” are like those who make the music of the great ceremonial bells and drums. Section 7.14 states,
Shallow scholars in
this declining age do not understand how to get to the origins of their minds and return to their root. They merely sculpt and polish their natures and adorn and stifle their genuine responses in order to interact with their age.
They are contrasted with “those who penetrate through to the Way” who cultivate the “Techniques of the Mind,” find repose in Potency, and desire nothing yet attain what they desire. Section 7.15 explicitly critiques Confucians who “do not get to the foundations of why they have desires but instead prohibit what they desire.” They are contrasted with perfected adepts who “rest in the vast universe, roam in the country of the Limitless, ascend Tai Huang, [and] ride Tai Yi . . . [and] play with Heaven and Earth in the palms of their hands.”
The chapter’s final section (7.16) lists those rulers who allowed themselves to be distracted by desires and so came to bad ends.
The message of the latter parts of the chapter especially is that incompetent and greedy rulers and advisers abound in the present age and that sage-rulers are in short supply. Because of this, it is important that we create them through the inner-cultivation practices outlined in this chapter.
Sources
“Quintessential Spirit” appears to draw its cosmogony and cosmology from the Laozi and, perhaps more directly, from the early chapters of the Huainanzi (which themselves are based on the Laozi) and to borrow its image of the Perfected Person—tranquil, empty, self-contained—from the Zhuangzi. In particular, chapter 15 of the Zhuangzi, “Ingrained Ideas” (Keyi ), shares much of this chapter’s perspective on the attainment of spiritual perfection. Specific turns of phrase, technical terminology, and critiques of practitioners of daoyin (Grandfather Peng’s Ripe Old Agers) and of embittered or self-promoting moralists (Confucians) are so close that one could make a fair case for common authorship.5 The other major influence of this chapter is the inner-cultivation tradition preserved in such texts as Guanzi’s “Neiye” (Inward Training) and “Xinshu” (Techniques of the Mind). The interest in the cultivation of jing, qi, shen, and jingshen in chapter 7 of the Huainanzi seems to be directly drawn from this tradition. Indeed, as explained earlier, although the actual phrase “Techniques of the Mind” is used and advocated, it is not clear in this instance if it is the specific text or the psychospiritual cultivation practices that is intended.