by An Liu
110. We are grateful to Jung-Ping Yuan and Bo Lawergren for advice on the proper translation of this sentence. The paired words huanji and xiaoda function as nouns, “tension” and “size,” both of them objects of the verb you . See also 20.16.
111. Retaining xiang in this line, contrary to Lau’s (HNZ 20/222/16) emendation.
112. Reading de for zhong . See Lau, HNZ, 222n.9.
113. See 15.4 and 15.9; and chap. 15, n. 13.
114. Historian Su was an official of the Jin court who divined the calamitous outcome of the duke’s marriage. See Zuozhuan, Xi 15. For Lady Li, see 7.16 and 17.145.
115. He did this by forming an alliance with the lords of the states to resist the hegemony of Jin.
116. Wu Zishu (d. 484 B.C.E.) was a refugee from Chu who took up service in Wu with the hope of avenging his father’s death. He employed the general Sun Wu and led Wu to victory over Chu but foresaw the downfall of King Fuchai. His story is recorded in Shiji 68.
117. He later ruled as Duke Huan of Qi.
118. Later Duke Wen of Jin. See 12.22 and 18.18.
119. Yuantian silkworm, also called yuancan .
120. Taking hui (or huo) as equivalent to hui .
121. Centipedes were said to bore into the ear. See 17.26; and Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 1:1039n.3.
122. Similar language appears in the Documents, “Gao Yao.” As Lau (HNZ, 223n.9) notes, the wording of the passage here differs from that in the received text of the Documents. See also Qu Wanli, Shangshu jinzhu jinyi (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1970), 21–22.
Twenty-One
AN OVERVIEW OF THE ESSENTIALS
“YAO LÜE,” or “An Overview of the Essentials,” brings the Huainanzi to its close. Although “Yao lüe” appears at the end of the work (following the established convention of Chinese works of the late Warring States and early Han periods),1 it is in effect an introduction because it orients readers to the contents of the text. We believe that the chapter was originally written by Liu An himself for oral recitation at the imperial court as a way of introducing the Huainanzi when it was first presented to Emperor Wu.2 Having been recited at court, the “overview” would then have been appended in written form to the twenty substantive chapters of the Huainanzi, serving as a postscript to review and summarize its content. The chapter consists of four complementary sections. The first introduces the work as a whole and provides a rhymed list of the twenty chapter titles. The second gives a thoughtful and illuminating summary of each chapter in turn. The next section links the twenty chapters together in a grand design, showing that each chapter builds on those that precede it. The final section argues for the cogency and significance of the work as a whole by placing it in a comparative and historical framework.
The Chapter Title
We have translated the chapter title “Yao lüe” as “An Overview of the Essentials.”3 As the title suggests, this chapter introduces readers to the most important aspects of both the individual chapters and the work as a whole. Yao, meaning “essential” or “main,” is conveniently ambiguous—referring to the author’s interest in capturing the text’s most distinctive elements while suggesting the author’s ambition to provide the emperor with all the knowledge “essential” to establishing efficacious and enlightened rulership. Lüe, meaning “outline,” “summary,” or “sketch,” with the related meaning of “to put in order,” indicates the synoptic and orderly approach adopted in the chapter’s various sections. An intriguing idea, as Martin Kern has suggested, is that one could assign this chapter the alternative title “Liu An’s fu on Presenting the Huainanzi to the Emperor.”
Summary and Key Themes
The most conspicuous feature of this chapter is its literary form. It is a fu, a “poetic exposition,” a form of oratory that was both very popular and highly admired in the Western Han period. Fu were intended above all for oral presentation, but the person reciting the fu would in most cases have been reading from a prepared written script. Although the Han imperial library catalog in the Han shu lists more than a thousand fu, only a few dozen examples now survive. Fu were polished literary pieces, but they often were written specifically as works of political and moral argumentation; their literary brilliance added credibility to the points they made. Fu are in that sense akin to the “persuasions” that appear in many Warring States and Han works, including some chapters of the Huainanzi.4
Typically of the genre, the “Overview of the Essentials” is characterized by the intense use of rhyme, metrical variety, deft shifts from one metrical form to another (for example, from classical tetrameter as found in the Odes to more complex meters echoing some of the poems of the Chuci), frequent use of syntactic parallelism, occasional passages of prose demarcating stages of the poetical argument, rich vocabulary, and an overall air of linguistic and literary virtuosity. The “Yao lüe” would have been recited at the court of Emperor Wu, perhaps by Liu An himself or perhaps by a skilled performer reciting on his behalf, in the course of presenting a copy of the Huainanzi to the throne; the dexterity of the oral presentation would have been understood as part of the argument for the validity of the work.
An example of the ingenuity that went into the composition of this expository piece is the list of chapter titles at the end of 21.1, which turns out to be not simply a series of titles, but a passage of rhymed trisyllabic verse. (Note that words that rhymed in Han dynasty Chinese do not necessarily rhyme in modern Mandarin.) Here is the list, with rhymes noted by numbers in parentheses:
You yuan dao It has “Originating in the Way,”
you chu zhen (1) It has “Activating the Genuine,”
you tian wen (1) it has “Celestial Patterns,”
you di xing (1) it has “Terrestrial Forms,”
you shi ze it has “Seasonal Rules,”
you lan ming (1) it has “Surveying Obscurities,”
you jing shen (1) it has “Quintessential Spirit,”
you ben jing (1) it has “The Basic Warp,”
you zhu shu it has “The Ruler’s Techniques,”
you mou cheng (2) it has “Profound Precepts,”
you qi su it has “Integrating Customs,”
you dao ying (2) it has “Responses of the Way,”
you fan lun it has “Boundless Discourses,”
you quan yan (3) it has “Sayings Explained,”
you bing lüe it has “An Overview of the Military,”
you shui shan (3) it has “A Mountain of Persuasions,”
you shui lin it has “A Forest of Persuasions,”
you ren jian (3) it has “Among Others,”
you xiu wu (4) it has “Cultivating Effort,”
you tai zu (4) [and] it has “The Exalted Lineage.”5
From this, a number of interesting conclusions follow: the chapters of the Huainanzi were assembled in a deliberate order; the chapter titles were added during or after the compilation of the text, and were worded so as to rhyme; and there are an even number of chapters in order to allow chapter titles to follow the standard fu scheme of rhyming on even lines (with optional rhymes on a few odd lines as well). One can even gain insight into fine-grained editorial decisions affecting the compilation of the text. For example, one can see that if based on content alone, “Shui shan” (A Mountain of Persuasions) and “Shui lin” (A Forest of Persuasions) could easily have been a single chapter. But it was necessary to divide their content between two chapters in order to have an even number of chapters in the book (excluding the final twenty-first chapter) and to have an unrhymed odd line, in the list of chapter titles, between the rhymed even lines “Shui shan” and “Ren jian” (Among Others). Clearly, this evidence of deliberate editorial care shows the old view of the Huainanzi as a miscellaneous compilation, lacking order or coherence, to be completely untenable.
In keeping with the rhetorical strategy of the lüe, “overview,” this fu surveys the entire Huainanzi —not once, but four times, each with a different approach. “An Overview of the
Essentials” begins by outlining the chapter’s aims and giving a rhymed list of the twenty chapter names. It next summarizes the twenty preceding chapters, then shows how the chapters are linked together in an organizational chain, and concludes with a review of previous writings on related subjects, declaring the Huainanzi to have surpassed them all.
In the chapter’s introductory paragraph, the author lays out his broad philosophical claims about the text and identifies the contents of each chapter. The opening lines explain that the Huainanzi contains all the knowledge and techniques needed to govern the Chinese empire both effectively and virtuously. The author states that the Huainanzi provides an account of the Way and its Potency and describes their relationship to human beings and their affairs. Arguing that previous and contemporaneous works had failed to make this connection explicit, the author’s most important task, according to the account of the text given in “Yao lüe,” is to demonstrate the critical link between cosmic and political order. Thus both the beginning and the end of this introduction emphasize the interrelationship between the Way and human affairs, asserting that such knowledge will enable the ruler to adapt to the times and so will ensure the efficacy and longevity of his reign. This short introductory section ends by listing the twenty chapter titles.
The second and largest section of “An Overview of the Essentials” comprises the individual chapter summaries. It introduces the main topics of each chapter as well as the categories, concepts, and vocabulary pertaining to them. Most important, it outlines both the practical applications and the benefits of the knowledge derived from mastering the contents of each chapter. This link between the theoretical and the practical, or the descriptive and prescriptive, qualities of the chapters is evident in the semantic and syntactic structures of the chapter summaries. Here, again, we see the author’s effort to harmonize the “Way” (dao) and “human affairs” (shi)— that is, the cosmological and political dimensions of the work—which the author claims is one of the principal and distinctive contributions of the Huainanzi’s twenty chapters.
In contrast to the second section, which treats chapters separately, the third section of “An Overview of the Essentials” summarizes the chapters in relation to one another. The Huainanzi is a systematic, coherent, and exhaustive arrangement of topics, intended to be read and studied from beginning to end. Accordingly, this section demonstrates that comprehending the content of each succeeding chapter is predicated on successfully mastering the principles presented in the preceding one. Both this summary and the text as a whole move from cosmogony to cosmology to ontology; from the metaphenomenal Way as utter nondifferentiation to the phenomenal world of differentiated things that it generates and sustains; 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 movements of human history; and from the cultivation of oneself to the virtuous and efficacious rulership of the world. Hence, this summary describes the text’s authority as a compendium encapsulating everything worth knowing and using in governing the world.
The conclusion to the third section once again highlights the Huainanzi’s unique adeptness at clarifying the inherent connections between the Way and human affairs, by drawing analogies from history, culture, and the arts. The theme of each analogy is incompleteness. Yet each deficiency noted can be remedied by supplying the missing component, thereby achieving a synthesis. Similarly, the author asserts that discussions of the Way are incomplete, and so the distinctive contribution of the Huainanzi is that it speaks of the Way not in isolation but in relation to concrete things and that it speaks of techniques (shu) not in isolation but in relation to concrete affairs. By elucidating the links between both the “Way” and “things” and “techniques” and “affairs,” only the Huainanzi, the author explains, expands the discussion of their interrelation until “it will leave no empty spaces”—in other words, until nothing more can be said. Its contribution, therefore, lies in its capacity to relate them, a quality of the text that is emphasized throughout the different sections of “An Overview of the Essentials.”
The fourth section deepens the author’s claim for comprehensiveness by situating the Huainanzi at the culmination of an evolution of practices and texts stretching from King Wen of the Zhou dynasty through innovations in Warring States times and during the Qin dynasty. The author summarizes several noteworthy events during these diverse periods by recounting both their particular historical circumstances and the technical and textual contributions made by key advisers and thinkers who figured prominently in each era. Nonetheless, the creation of the Huainanzi is different from the time- and context-bound nature of these earlier innovations because of its purported timelessness and comprehensiveness. This polemical claim is reinforced in the concluding passage of this narrative, in which the author summarizes the “book of the Liu clan” itself and characterizes the Huainanzi as an exhaustive repository of knowledge concerning matters both theoretical and practical.
Sources
The most obvious and important influence of “An Overview of the Essentials” is the long-standing genre of inventories or taxonomies that originated with such well-known Warring States exemplars as the “Fei Ru” (Opposing the Confucians) section of the Mozi, the “Xianxue” (Eminent Learning) section of the Hanfeizi, and the “Fei shi er zi” (Opposing the Twelve Masters) chapter of the Xunzi. The “Tianxia” (The World) chapter of the Zhuangzi may also have been a source for the author of “An Overview of the Essentials”; these two chapters appear to reflect a common literary and intellectual milieu. In this regard, the Huainanzi’s postscript and the taxonomy it contains are not unique, and undoubtedly the author is not the first to include them in a work. However, with the different examples of this genre in mind, the author of “An Overview of the Essentials” used various methods of categorization to construct his rationale for depicting early China’s intellectual landscape so as to highlight the uniqueness of his own literary production. For example, unlike earlier examples of this genre, the taxonomy included in “An Overview of the Essentials” explicitly links past innovations to specific historical events and circumstances, thereby serving one of the overarching rhetorical purposes of the postface—to demonstrate that the Huainanzi both completely subsumes and surpasses all that came before it by virtue of its innovativeness, timelessness, and comprehensiveness. And by couching the postface in the performative fu genre, Liu An achieved the considerable feat of using an aesthetic act to reinforce the chapter’s intellectual argument.
The Chapter in the Context of the Huainanzi as a Whole
“An Overview of the Essentials” stands out from the rest of the chapters in the Huainanzi on several accounts. Its form sets it apart; whereas the other chapters of the text are by no means lacking in literary sophistication, and some even contain extended passages in the fu style (for example, 5.15, 8.9, and 19.1), this is the only chapter that is a fu in its entirety. The chapter’s literary style is dense and sometimes difficult; it includes some of the most arcane terminology in the entire text and clearly was intended to dazzle its audience. The unique literary qualities of this chapter are matched by an equally striking originality of ideas. Whereas the novelty of most chapters derives from a combination of selection, arrangement, and topical comment, “An Overview of the Essentials” is far less indebted to and dependent on received sources to argue its main points. This is all the more striking when this feature of the chapter is considered in conjunction with its distinctly uniform voice, which in turn derives from the essentially performative character of the fu genre. Rather than the deliberate diversity of viewpoints characteristic of the body of the work, this chapter employs a singular and consistent voice to survey the content of the text and explain its indispensable contribution to rulership. Moreover, this voice explicitly identifies the Huainanzi as the “book of the Liu clan” and tries to persuade the reader
(that is, the ruler) that one imperial relative is willing and able to make a substantial contribution to the cause of empire. In this chapter, we seem to hear the voice of Liu An himself, who used the occasion of his visit to the imperial court to recite this fu (or have it recited on his behalf) in the course of formally presenting the Huainanzi to Emperor Wu and who then added its written script as a postface to the book itself to preserve it for posterity. In this poetic exposition, Liu An recounts the vision that inspired him to attract to his court the best minds of his day to create this literary monument to a syncretic and pluralistic vision of empire. The Huainanzi’s authors deliberately used the elastic and malleable terms dao and de, with their multiplicity of conceptual and practical resonances, as universal subjects of debate and discussion shared by all the traditions across the empire and spanning the earlier dynasties and generations. With such a conception of the Way and its Potency, therefore, the Huainanzi was not limited to one perspective or interpretation, or one application of its meaning, but tried to harmonize these different resonances and thereby provide a new account of the Way in all its multiplicity, which would encapsulate and surpass all preceding literary endeavors and ensure that this illustrious work would stand the test of time.6
Sarah A. Queen, Judson Murray, and John S. Major
1. See, for example, the similar concluding summaries in Zhuangzi 33 and Shiji 130.
2. We are very grateful to Martin Kern (private communication) for sharing his seminal views on the literary form of the “Yao lüe.” See also Martin Kern, “Western Han Aesthetics and the Genesis of the Fu,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63 (2003): 383–437, and “Language, Argument, and Southern Culture in the Huainanzi: A Look at the ‘Yaolüe’” (paper presented at the conference “Liu An’s Vision of Empire: New Perspectives on the Huainanzi,” Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., May 31, 2008).