by An Liu
51. A variant of this saying occurs in 10.91.
52. Compare Zuozhuan, Duke Xi, year 14: “When the skin has been lost, where can you place the hair?” See Legge 1895, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew [Chunqiu] with the Tso chuen [Zuozhuan], 162.
53. For Zou Yan’s theory that the world comprises nine continents (jiu zhou ), see John S. Major, “The Five Phases, Magic Squares, and Schematic Cosmography,” in Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology: Papers Presented at the Workshop on Classical Chinese Thought Held at Harvard University, August 1976, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr., Journal of the American Academy of Religion Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (1984; repr., Charleston, S.C.: Booksurge, 2006), 133–66; see esp. 134–37.
54. Compare Laozi 41.
55. Meaning, apparently, that the sacred Mount Tai will not allow itself to be climbed by an unworthy person.
56. A zu was a kind of raised platter used to hold meat placed on the sacrificial altar.
57. The chieftain of the Rong tribe sent the beautiful Lady Li to seduce Duke Xian (r. 676–651 B.C.E.). See 7.16 and 17.57.
58. Shusun Bao (d. 538 B.C.E.), a grandee of Lu, was head of the Shusun clan; he served for a time as prime minister.
59. Shu Niu was a knight who served as Shusun Bao’s steward and enjoyed his total trust. He tricked Shusun Bao into killing his own two sons and eventually starved him to death when he became ill and was bedridden. The story is recorded in Zuozhuan, Zhao 4; and Hanfeizi 30.
60. Zheng Zhan was a grandee of Zheng during the Spring and Autumn period. When Qi was ascendant, Zhan counseled that Zheng should switch its allegiance to Chu. The judgment of him as a “deceitful person” is recorded in the Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan, Zhuang 17.
61. The object of doing so is to beg some wine from the gentleman.
62. Xiang rou can be taken literally to mean “elephant meat,” but that leads to the demonstrably false statement that “elephant meat cannot be tasted by the mouth.” The extended meaning of xiang (representational, simulated) is correct here, as the statement refers to simulated goods made of wood, ceramic, or other materials for burial with the dead—a practice that was gaining currency at the time the Huainanzi was written.
63. See chap. 9, n. 91. Meng Ben was known for his acute vision. See 16.91. The rats “would die in no time,” even though he could not see them, because of his skill at finding, catching, and killing them, but this would come at a cost to Meng Ben himself.
64. That is, they will be killed in battle. Note the pun here: “hundred names” normally means “the common people,” but here it also has the more literal meaning of “one hundred commoners,” in parallel with the “one hundred houses” of the previous line.
65. The phrase yin yang xiang bo also occurs in 3.2 as an explanation of thunder, and in 4.19 five times as part of an explanation of how mineral ores grow and mature within the earth. See chap. 3, n. 5.
66. A similar statement appears in 16.103.
67. The implication seems to be that linked circles—for example, interlinked rings of jade—can be separated only by breaking them. Compare the story of Ni Yue (16.20), who “solved/untied” the knot of Song by recognizing that it could not be untied. See also 18.21 and chap. 18, n. 132.
68. See 17.113.
69. Bai she bu xiu ; she means a “stage”—that is, a day’s journey.
70. Sages conceal their virtues and stay in the background, whereas ordinary people live more visible lives.
71. One qing equals a hundred mu. See n. 32.
72. Commentators describe it as a great eagle that flies close to the water’s surface and flaps its wings to roil the waters, thereby exposing fish that it then grabs and eats.
73. Cheng here implies something like an irresistible perfection of will.
74. The hejin plant is not securely identifiable; presumably, from context, it is a poisonous plant that is also an antidote to poison.
75. Following Lau’s (HNZ 17/183/11) reading of the passage and rejecting the interpolation of qing er fan before zhong , as suggested by Tao Hongqing and other commentators. See Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 2:1817n.9.
76. This is a reference to the [Fu]Sang mulberry tree of the east, from the branches of which the sun crow rises at dawn, and the Jian elm tree of the west, on whose branches the sun crow perches at sunset.
77. An almost identical statement appears in 16.68.
78. Once the choice was made, the potentiality would be lost.
79. Zhi and yu are two of the five pentatonic notes; the reference is to stately music that takes those notes as dominant.
80. Zuozhuan, Duke Wen, year 3 (624 B.C.E.). The Zuo account states that Chu was besieging Jiang. Du You’s commentary to the passage records that the Chu commander, Zizhu, lifted the siege on hearing that the Jin army was on the march for Chu and that the Jin army also withdrew on hearing that the siege was lifted.
81. Possibly a reference to the cangue, a heavy wooden yoke that criminals were made to wear as a punishment. But that interpretation is speculative; the text may be simply making an analogy between an (enslaved) captive and an ox.
82. See 13.11 and 16.100; and ZZ 29/88/10. Wei Sheng waited for a woman under a bridge. When she did not come, he continued to wait for her until he was drowned by the rising waters.
83. Sui Niu . The identity of this figure is unclear. Gao You associates him with Xian Gao, the merchant of Zheng who was able to stave off a surprise attack by Qin through subterfuge. See 12.40. Yu Yue suggests that is a mistake for , making this figure “Mr. Sui,” or Sui He , a rhetorician who served the early Han court. Yu Shengwu rejects that reading and proposes that is a mistake for . Thus the two characters are not a proper name at all but mean “to present cattle,” making the entire phrase read “the deceit of presenting cattle.” This would explain the association with Xian Gao, as part of his ruse was to present the Qin army with some cattle, claiming that they were a gift of the ruler of Zheng. See Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 2:1828n.15.
Eighteen
AMONG OTHERS
“A MONG OTHERS” explores the vagaries of human affairs and the paradoxical impulses that constantly change the patterns of human society. This chapter is essentially an extended exercise in persuasive prose, using symmetrically arranged anecdotes to demonstrate that radically divergent principles and forces direct events from situation to situation and from moment to moment. The overarching theme of the chapter is that only a sage can hope to navigate the turbid waters of human politics and social intercourse.
The Chapter Title
Chapter 18 of the Huainanzi shares its title—“Ren jian” —with chapter 4 of the Zhuangzi, and although stylistically they differ, the two texts are thematically quite close. The title of chapter 18 shows the elasticity of classical Chinese syntax; that is, the part of speech of each of the characters in the title can have multiple variant readings. For example, ren means “person” or “human being” but also “humanity” in general or “human” as a quality. Jian usually is a preposition meaning “between” or “among/amid,” but it can also be used as a noun meaning “realm” or “domain.” The chapter title thus could also be translated as “Among Human Beings” or “The Human Realm.”1
Also of significance to chapter 18 is its place in the overall structure of the Huainanzi. Whereas earlier chapters of the text move sequentially through the cosmogonic processes and energies at the root of all existence and the interior spaces of the human psyche, “Among Others” and the other later chapters articulate the gross dimensions of the phenomenal world. Thus one of the common nominal meanings of ren is germane to the thematic valence of the chapter’s title. In classical literature, ren could be the antonym of ji , “self,” thus generating the meaning of “other people.” As the introductory section of chapter 18 explains, here we have left the internal domain of the mind and nature and entered the multidimensional world of time and space populated by ren, “other people” or, simply, “others.” For this reason, we translate the title of chapter
18 as “Among Others.”
Summary and Key Themes
Even though most of “Among Others” is composed of the same discrete prose units that constitute both earlier texts like the Lüshi chunqiu and later anthologies like the Shuo yuan, in structure it resembles the former text much more than the latter. The anecdotes compiled in chapter 18 are not grouped into topics, as they are in the Shuo yuan. Rather, as in the Lüshi chunqiu (albeit in an even more deliberate and stylized manner than that text evinces),2 the anecdotes in chapter 18 are set in a formal matrix framed by linking segments of parallel prose and verse. Viewed as a whole, the chapter is designed to follow (or establish) the conventions of a particular prose genre.
The sections into which this translation is divided correspond to the formal, generic segments into which the chapter as a whole naturally breaks (with the exception of the first segment, which serves as a thematic introduction). Each of the twenty-six segments following the first exhibits the same basic structural properties, with some slight degree of deviation overall. The structure of each segment has the following outline (the examples here are from 18.2):
Proem: A short introductory passage, often in verse or parallel prose, which establishes the topic of the segment.
The world has three perils:
To have little Potency but [enjoy] much favor is the first peril.
To have lower talent and high position is the second peril.
For one’s person to be without great merit and yet to receive rich emolument is the third peril.
Motif: A symmetrically counterpoised pair of aphorisms, usually outlining a contradiction or paradox and delivered as the linked “legs” of a parallel prose dyad.3
Thus, as for things,
some are increased by being decreased;
some are decreased by being increased.
First example: A modular prose anecdote that illustrates the first leg of the motif. This often opens with the formulaic segue “How do we know that this is so?” and is concluded by the formula “This is what is called X.” Section 18.2 relates an anecdote about Sunshu Ao safeguarding his descendants by requesting a poor fief from his king.
Second example: A modular prose anecdote that illustrates the second leg of the motif. This often opens with the formulaic segue “What is called X?” and concludes with the formula “This is what is called X.” Section 18.2 here has an anecdote about how Duke Li of Jin was destroyed because he overextended his power through conquest.
Envoy: A closing statement, sometimes delivering a “moral” to be derived from the motif, usually in verse or parallel prose.
When Confucius read the Changes, on arriving at [the hexagrams] “Loss” [] and “Gain” [],4 he never failed to sigh loudly, saying, “Gain and loss, are these not the affairs of a king?”5
Whether this structural arrangement invokes a prose genre that would have been recognizable to a literarily educated Han audience is an open question. Existing testimony of generic prose forms during the Han is sparse, and examples of many of the attested genre forms are lacking. One attested genre that could be compared with the prose composition of “Among Others” is that of lianzhu, or “Linked Pearls.” Shen Yue (441–512) attributes the origins of this genre to Yang Xiong (53–18 B.C.E.);6 thus it is of somewhat later provenance than the Huainanzi. No Han examples of the genre survive, but one piece by the Western Jin author Lu Ji (261–303), “Linked Pearls Elaborated to Fifty Stanzas,” is anthologized into the imperially sponsored Literary Selections of the Liang-dynasty court. Each stanza in that composition is constructed from a pair of symmetrically counterpoised aphorisms parallel to the typical motif of each section of “Among Others.” One stanza reads:
I have heard,
though accumulated substance may be subtle,
it will certainly move objects.
Though exalted vacuity may be expansive,
it will not shift hearts.
Thus,
a capital denizen of charming mien
will take no delight in the shadow of Xi Shi.
A carriage horse that is running in circles
will not be stopped by the shade of Mount Tai. (Wen xuan 55)7
Although much more laconic, the parallels between this generic form and the compositional structure of “Among Others” are clear.8 Whether “Among Others” is a generic antecedent of the “Linked Pearls” form cannot be determined, but both texts illustrate common aesthetic preferences of literary artisanship. In this sense, whether the formal structure of chapter 18 was a conventional or recognizable genre of the Former Han or a novel invention of Liu An and his collaborators is moot. In either case, there is good evidence to suggest that the Huainanzi’s authors would have expected “Among Others” to be perceived as a virtuosic performance of literary composition. Any cursory survey of the surviving works of the Han and later eras demonstrates the building enthusiasm for symmetrical construction and parallelism in all fields of literary production.9 Accordingly, at the very least the authors of “Among Others” would have congratulated themselves for showing how the modular anecdotes that had become so important to the philosophical and rhetorical prose of the Warring States and Han could be worked into a structure with the elegance and aesthetic refinement increasingly attributed to symmetrical and parallel literary forms.
Moreover, whether the formal structure of “Among Others” was received or invented, it was perfectly suited to the thematic valence of the chapter. As the introductory section of chapter 18 declares:
The arrival of calamity is generated by human beings [];
the arrival of good fortune is effected by human beings.
Calamity and good fortune share a gateway;
benefit and harm are neighbors.
No one who is not a spirit or sage can distinguish them.
This passage plays self-consciously with the multiple significances of ren. The first line reads simultaneously as “the arrival of calamity is generated by human beings” and “the arrival of calamity is generated by others.” When an individual ventures into the realm of time and space inhabited by other people, he will encounter among them both benefit and harm, and both are engendered in identical contexts and by identical means. Demonstrating this is the object of juxtaposing anecdotes throughout the chapter that operate at cross-purposes to each other.
The conclusion to chapter 18 is thus encapsulated in the final line just quoted, that one must be a spirit or a sage to distinguish whether others are bringing harm or benefit from instance to instance and moment to moment. Here, again, the ambiguity of ren as human beings or other people is significant. The resource that empowers us to discriminate between benefit and harm—the spirit that when actualized through personal cultivation transforms the individual into a sage —does not lie with others but within ourselves. Simultaneously, actualizing the spirit raises the practitioner to a plateau that transcends the human realm. As Michael Puett notes in To Become a God,10 by using the character shen (spirit) to describe the realized adept, texts like the Huainanzi claim for such individuals, literally and audaciously, the acquisition of superhuman qualities like those of the deities of the ancestral cult. This is the rhetorical stance underpinning all the literary gymnastics of chapter 18: conditions, “among others,” are such that only a person who has transcended them through the forms of personal cultivation advocated earlier in the Huainanzi can even hope to survive them, much less exercise any significant leadership over them.
Sources
“Among Others” is closely related to another chapter of the Huainanzi that likewise is a composite of short, modular units of anecdotal prose: chapter 12, “Responses of the Way.” The bulk of chapter 18 is composed of the same type of short prose anecdotes11 that also make up chapter 12, although these two chapters use the anecdotes for quite different ends. Included among these modular units are many that seem to have been taken verbatim from the Lüshi chunqiu, the Hanfeizi, the Zhuangzi, the Zhanguoce, and the Liezi, to name
only a few; some appear again a century later in Liu Xiang’s Shuo yuan. The transfer of these prose units from text to text leads to the question of which texts constitute the definitive “sources” of “Among Others.” Many anecdotes appear in more than one other text besides the Huainanzi, and even for those that do not (or for which the Huainanzi stands as the current locus classicus), we cannot be certain of their original source. An anecdote that appears only in the Hanfeizi and the Huainanzi may have entered the latter text from the former, but it just as easily may have been circulating in another now-lost text or as a unit of “loose prose” in either written or oral form.12 As our fund of archaeologically recovered manuscripts has increased, we have learned more about the material media in which various forms of writing were produced and circulated. Nevertheless, we still do not know enough about the pathways of textual transmission during the Han era to describe confidently the process by which the textual components of “Among Others” were collected and compiled.
The Chapter in the Context of the Huainanzi as a Whole
“Among Others” is a late chapter in the Huainanzi, and as such it is structurally relegated to a position in the text that is emblematic of “branch” concerns. Chapter 18 forcefully and elegantly describes the paradoxical nature of human affairs and reinforces the importance of personal cultivation and transcendence to political leadership. Neither of these accomplishments is enough, however, to account for its inclusion in the text as a whole. To understand the role of chapter 18, therefore, we must appreciate both the efforts by Liu An and his collaborators to establish their credentials as literary stylists and connoisseurs and their motives for doing so. The Huainanzi was written for an audience of intellectuals13 who increasingly defined themselves as producers and consumers of texts, in a milieu in which literary skill was highly prized. If the Huainanzi’s novel vision of universal empire failed to identify a place for literary artistry and refinement, its authors could not have hoped for an enthusiastic reception. The Huainanzi’s veneration of ideas like those of the Daodejing (“those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know”) left its authors open to the charge of endorsing literary primitivism or Philistinism. In other words, the authors of the Huainanzi would have been sensitive to the possibility that their political opponents might charge that they had taken a stand against literary elegance and refinement as a criterion for state employment and promotion. In “Among Others” (and in many other of the later chapters), the authors of the Huainanzi reassure their readers that the intrinsic values of their vision do not denigrate or preclude literary artisanship and aesthetic engagement.