by An Liu
jing vital essence, essence, quintessence
Jing, or “essence,” denotes a form of qi that is more rarefied, potent, and dynamic than the coarse qi constituting gross tangible matter. The character itself originally signified the seed kernel of a grain plant and later came to stand for human semen. As an adjective, jing may mean “essential” or “excellent.” When used to describe troops, for example, jing denotes those soldiers that are most selectively recruited and highly trained: the elite.
In its most common nominal form, however, “essence” is a form of vitalizing energy. Like all qi, it has material substance, but it is not generally perceptible to the ordinary sense organs. Only its effects may be detected by ordinary perception. Essence is responsible for all the distinctive properties of animate beings—for example, the growth of plants and the awareness and mobility of animals. Certain inanimate objects are imbued with special properties by the presence of essence. It gives rise to the luster of jade and the potencies inherent in certain medicines. In human beings, essence impels all the gross motor skills and basic nervous responses.
jing tranquillity, quiescence, stillness, at rest
“Stillness” denotes both a cosmic and an existential state. On the cosmic level, stillness is the original state prior to all change and transformation; all things begin in and return to stillness. Even in the universe of differentiated phenomena, stillness is a primal force, for it is only by contrast with stillness that motion and thus time may be perceived. In this sense, stillness is closely related to Nothingness (wu ). It is, in fact, the temporal embodiment of Nothingness, whose spatial counterpart is vacuity (xu ). Stillness is the opposite of movement (dong).
Existentially, stillness (along with vacuity) is the original state of the mind and the root of all cognitive processes. The mind’s normative condition is stillness; it is moved only by external stimuli. When still, the mind retains and nurtures its vitalizing energies. If the stillness of the mind is chronically disturbed, its energies become depleted, sometimes leading to derangement, illness, or death. “Stilling the mind” through sustained meditative practice is thus a core element of the personal cultivation program advocated by the Huainanzi and a key route to the attainment of sagehood.
jingshen essence and spirit, Quintessential Spirit
The binome jingshen occurs frequently in the Huainanzi. Where parallelism or other factors indicate that the text is treating these concepts separately, we have translated it as “essence and spirit” (see jing and shen ). In some places, however, the Huainanzi clearly uses this binome to denote a particular substance: “Quintessential Spirit.” Like jing, or “essence,” jingshen also is a form of qi, one even more rarefied, potent, and dynamic than essence itself. When essence is responsible for basic animation, Quintessential Spirit is the intensely potent energy that constitutes the mind and gives rise to consciousness and illumination. Quintessential spirit circulates throughout the body, coordinating the body’s activities under the control of the mind. All thoughts and emotions occur within a matrix composed of Quintessential Spirit, and violent feelings or fixation on externalities can cause jingshen to dissipate from the mind–body system. The apophatic self-cultivation of the sage is often conceptualized in terms of preserving and nurturing one’s fund of Quintessential Spirit. Greater concentrations of Quintessential Spirit lead to progressively advanced levels of consciousness and awareness, sometimes developing into the realm of paranormal or what is today called “extrasensory perception.” The Huainanzi’s most thorough discussion of jingshen is in chapter 7.
junzi Superior Man
Junzi originally meant “aristocrat” (literally, “the son of a lord”), and Confucius redefined it to denote a person of extraordinary moral merit rather than high birth. The Huainanzi generally uses the term as Confucius defined it, to mean a person who has acquired qualities of moral excellence, such as Humaneness and Rightness, through extensive study and education. The Huainanzi accords the Superior Man a role in maintaining communal harmony in the latter ages, and some of the “branch” chapters of the text, notably chapter 10, exalt “the Way of the Superior Man.” But the Superior Man is usually seen in the work as a whole as being surpassed by the sage (sheng), the Genuine Person (zhenren), and the Perfected Person (zhiren), whose attainments have reached a higher level.
li pattern, principle, to put in order; to regulate
pattern, principle, to put in order; to regulate “Pattern” denotes the basic tendency of the cosmos to embody and express harmonious order. Originally the word signified the striations that could be seen in a piece of jade. Later it evolved to mean any sort of visual, dynamic, or logical pattern. The Huainanzi conceives of the cosmos as imbued with patterns that may be discerned by the most highly refined and sensitive human observers. For example, both the cycles of the moon and the changes of the seasons were understood as grand and broadly evident cosmic patterns. One of the chief benefits of the personal cultivation of the sage is gaining insight into the patterns of the cosmos, enabling him to construct institutions perfectly suited to the circumstances of the age. Chapter 5 offers an example in which all the seasonal ordinances are presented as human cultural institutions derived from underlying cosmic patterns.
li profit, (material) benefit, advantage
“Profit” was an extraordinarily important and versatile category in the philosophical writings of the Warring States period. The character itself depicts a stalk of grain and a knife, indicating that it was meant to be understood in strictly material terms: harvested grain. Profit thus denotes material necessities like food, clothing, and shelter that are the mainstays of life. The Warring States thinker Mozi proposed that all moral and political imperatives be quantified and prioritized in terms of profit. Although his position was far from universally adopted, it was broadly influential. The Huainanzi does not give profit such an elevated status but insists, in contrast to Mozi and others, that states of being can be reached through personal cultivation that put the adept beyond the control of or desire for profit. The Huainanzi does concede, however, that profit is a useful and versatile measure by which to gauge the efficiency and utility of political institutions. The term is occasionally used verbally, as in the phrase li min , “benefiting the people.” See also lihai .
li propriety, ritual, the rites, protocol
“Ritual” is a fundamental concept in the writings of Confucius and his later disciples. As such, it denotes all forms of symbolic action, ranging from the grandest ceremonies of the state cult to common courtesies such as bowing. Confucians asserted that ritual was the ideal instrument of social organization in that participation in ritual could coordinate human activity without recourse to bribery or threats. They conceived of a utopian community in which all social interaction would unfold with the same harmonious spontaneity of a ceremonial dance. Moreover, Confucians exalted ritual as among the essential instruments of personal transformation, because (according to them) sincere participation in ritual refined the energies and capacities of the mind–body system and cultivated the moral disposition of the individual.
The Huainanzi does not assign ritual such primal value. According to the Huainanzi, ritual did not exist in the earliest ideal societies, and at one time it was possible to order both the person and society at large in the complete absence of ritual. The text does agree with contemporary Confucians, however, that ritual has become an indispensable tool of state power in the current latter age. The Huainanzi also basically agrees that ritual can have beneficial effects for those who have not been improved by personal cultivation, although it would not accept (as Confucians insist) that learning or participating in ritual is a necessary path to the highest levels of personal attainment. Finally, the Huainanzi differs with Confucians over the normatively correct origins of ritual. Confucians insisted that correct rituals were the creations of the ancient sage-kings and that current-day rituals must be painstakingly reconstructed from the evidence of ancient practice.
In contrast, the Huainanzi asserts that ritual must be made appropriate to the age and that correct ritual can be created in the current day only by a sage-ruler who can fathom the patterns of the cosmos and human history, thereby creating rituals perfectly suited to the circumstances of his own day. The Huainanzi ’s views on ritual are detailed in chapter 11.
lihai benefit and harm, advantage and disadvantage
“Benefit” and “harm” are a matched pair in the statecraft theory of the Warring States period. The desire for benefit and the avoidance of harm were adduced as the two poles that conditioned and controlled human action, and so many early thinkers regarded the state’s ability to dispense both forces (in the form of rewards and punishments) as the seminal instrument of state power and the structural foundation on which all order and prosperity could be built. The Huainanzi does not share the enthusiasm of such early statecraft thinkers as Mozi and Han Feizi for benefit and harm as instruments of state control, but it does acknowledge their utility to the efficient operation of certain institutions indispensable to government in latter ages. The Huainanzi insists, however, that benefit and harm are truly effective as instruments of state power only when they are wielded by rulers and officials who, because of their elevated levels of personal cultivation, are themselves beyond the controlling effects of benefit and harm. Only such rulers can use the instruments of benefit and harm completely dispassionately and with perfect insight into the appropriateness of their application from situation to situation. See also xingde .
lihai numinous, divine
Ling denotes a quality of marvelous or extraordinary power that may exist in an object or a person. The ability to foretell the future or perceive current events from great distances, for example, are qualities described as “numinous.” Numinous phenomena are assumed to display the same capacities as spirits, as they are able to transcend the ordinary limits of time and space, albeit within discrete contexts. Although numinous qualities might be colloquially described as “magical,” the Huainanzi does not view such phenomena as supernatural. Rather, an object or a person is made “numinous” by possessing the same types of highly rarefied, potent, and dynamic qi (jingshen, “Quintessential Spirit”) of which spirits are composed and which forms the material basis of their marvelous powers and properties.
liuhe the six coordinates
The “six coordinates” refer to the spatial realm encompassing what might be called “the known world.” The six consist of the four cardinal directions (probably in practice conceived of as “front and back” and “left and right”) combined with the dimensional planes of “up” and “down.” Although in principle the vectors of the six coordinates extend without limit in all directions, as used in the text “the expanse within the six coordinates” is usually synonymous with “the known world.” The whole universe of human habitation (both civilized and not), in contrast, is sometimes referred to as “the Nine Continents” (jiu zhou ), and the farthest distance one can travel is denoted as “the Eight End Points” (ba ji ). The entire cosmos is encompassed by the very expansive term “space-time” (yuzhou ).
lun to reason, to assess; assessment, argument, discourse
Lun denotes logical speech in various forms and contexts. Any instance of reasoned argumentation may be called lun, as may an argument or the task of reasoned argumentation in the abstract. Beyond this, lun may be used verbally in the sense of “to assess,” or in the related nominal sense of “an assessment.” A loosely defined genre of polemical writing known as lun was quite popular during the age of the Huainanzi’s composition, and the text contains many discussions and examples of it (most prominently, chapter 13). When lun is used in this sense, we have translated it as “discourse.”
ming life span, life circumstances, fate, destiny, to order, a decree
The base meaning of ming is “order” or “decree,” from which came its alternative significance of “fate.” The Huainanzi conceives of many contingencies affecting the human condition that are beyond individual control and are thus attributed to fate—for example, whether or not one is born in an orderly or a chaotic age. From this meaning comes that of “life span,” as people were understood to have a certain fixed span of years mandated by their physiology at birth. An individual could generally do nothing to exceed his or her mandated life span, but it was possible to fall short of it by inviting harm or ruining one’s physical constitution by overindulgence. One of the benefits of apophatic self-cultivation is refining both the energies of the mind–body system and personal conduct so that an individual’s fated life span can be fulfilled.
ming name, reputation, (official) title
The question of naming became a central controversy in the philosophical discourse of the Warring States period, which influenced the Huainanzi’s use of this term. There was general agreement that name should correspond to reality (shi , with which ming was frequently paired in the binome mingshi, “name and reality”). But whether particular realities required certain names or whether the initial pairing of name and reality was a matter of convention and, if so, by what mechanism such conventions were legitimately established, were contested issues. The Huainanzi generally holds that “naming” is a matter of human convention, although it asserts that the relation of name to reality cannot be completely arbitrary. Language as a system of names must have an organic integrity if the harmony of the human community and its alignment with the cosmos are to be maintained. For this reason, names should ideally be selected and assigned by a sage, as his comprehension of human and cosmic conditions empowers him to find the most appropriate name for each thing or affair. Above all, the Huainanzi asserts that ultimate truth cannot be captured in names. The Nameless (wuming ) is another sobriquet for the Way that generated, contains, and controls the cosmos. The sage’s unique naming ability comes about because his consciousness is merged with the Nameless.
Throughout the ancient literature, the same term is used to denote “name” and “reputation.” This was not a case of metonymy but arose from the particular understanding of how “reputation” was constituted: it hinged on whether a particular “name” (for example, “loyal,” “humane”) could be legitimately applied to the “reality” of a person’s conduct and character. The Huainanzi frequently uses ming in this regard, and we have translated it accordingly. The text does not treat the question of personal reputation as completely inconsequential, and it expresses concern that distortion of reputation and reality can cause disharmony in the social and political realms. As in the case with “names,” the Huainanzi insists that the ultimate power to rectify misalignments of reputation and reality lies in a domain transcending all moral and ethical distinctions. An individual’s reputation is therefore never, even in ideal social and political circumstances, an infallible gauge of his or her worth, and the nurturing or preservation of one’s reputation is not an ultimately efficacious path of personal development.
ming to clarify, clarity; to discern, discernment; to illuminate, illumination, bright, brightness
The basic meaning of ming is “bright.” The character combines the pictographs of the sun and the moon, a visual image of brightness. From that basis come the meanings “to clarify/clarity” and “to discern/discernment.” The Huainanzi uses the term in all these senses. Beyond these basic meanings, the Huainanzi follows earlier texts like the Zhuangzi in using ming to denote the state of elevated consciousness that can be achieved through personal cultivation and is characteristic of the sage and the Genuine Person. In this sense, the term signifies a state of mind marked by exceptional cognitive and perceptual sensitivity and incisiveness, and we have generally translated it in these contexts as “clarity” or “illumination.”
Mingtang “Hall of Light” (generally not translated)
The Mingtang is a special structure mentioned in much of the early literature on ritual and sacrifice. Throughout imperial history, debates about the precise design and function of the Mingtang were frequent an
d heated. Generally it was agreed that whatever its function or design, the construction and use of a Mingtang was the exclusive prerogative of the Son of Heaven. Confucian canonical texts describe the Mingtang as a temple in which sacrifices were conducted. In the Huainanzi, the Mingtang is a multichambered palace building of simple construction and austere appearance in which the ruler holds court in a prescribed pattern of shifting from room to room in order to carry out the seasonal ordinances.
qi vital energy, vital breath (paired with jing or in inner-cultivation contexts); otherwise qi (not translated)
Qi is both matter and energy, the basic substance out of which the entire universe is composed. The original meaning of the character was “steam” or “vapor,” and in later cosmological thought, a vapor or gas was understood to be the original and pristine state of qi. Before time and space came into being, all qi was one and undifferentiated, existing in its primordial gaseous form. In that state, qi displays maximum dynamism and potential, and so it can (and does) transform into any shape or substance. During cosmogenesis, qi differentiated, combined, and transformed, acquiring the characteristics that produce the diversity of the phenomenal world. The most basic transformation was the division of qi into yin and yang polarities, and from that state qi further differentiated into the Five Phases of Earth, Fire, Water, Metal, and Wood. These five remain the most elementally perceptible forms of qi in the phenomenal universe, and most of the observable qualities and activities of matter are a product of one or more of these forms of qi. No quantum of qi remains perpetually in one form. All qi cycles continuously between the two poles of yin and yang and the stations of the Five Phases, returning periodically to its original, undifferentiated state. All the observable motions of the cosmos and all the organic processes of living beings are produced by this perennial movement of qi between different states and forms.