by An Liu
The Huainanzi authors were consummate literati, however, and as such they were absorbed in and engaged with all the many concerns of literary production. Indeed, as we state in our general introduction, chapters 9 through 20 may effectively be read as an extended discourse on wen in all its various aspects and permutations. Each chapter is both an exploration and an exemplar of a discrete form of wen and its operation as part of a larger edifice of culture. Moreover, chapter 21, written entirely in the fu (poetic expression) style, is a superlative example of wen. Thus for the Huainanzi, although wen may not be regarded as a source of ultimate value, it is treated as an endeavor of profound (if not quite ultimate) significance.
wu without, nothing, non-being, nonexistence, Nothingness
Wu is a common grammatical term of negation in classical Chinese, meaning “without” or “having no . . .” It is used throughout the Huainanzi in this common sense. However, following earlier texts such as the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing, the Huainanzi also constructs wu as a highly charged nominal category of profound philosophical significance. In this sense, wu is contrasted with you (something or being). These two words are simple grammatical antonyms, but the Huainanzi uses them for the two penultimately fundamental parameters of cosmic reality.
Wu and you are often translated as “non-being” and “being,” and we have done so at points in the text where such a translation is required for comprehensibility in English. Conceptually, however, these terms refer to notions closer to “absence” and “presence.” A concrete example is a house. The walls, roof, and floor all constitute the aspects of the house that are you. The spaces for the windows and doors, and the open area in which people move and live, constitute that aspect of the house that is wu. Two points are of axiomatic significance to the Huainanzi (and earlier texts that it draws from). In this example, (1) wu is as determinative as you of the identity of the house (that is, a house becomes a house as much because of what is absent as what is present), and (2) wu is in fact superior to you, in that it is unitary, primal, and more replete with potential.
The sense in which wu is unitary may be self-evident. You realities are characterized as such principally by being distinguishable from one another. Wu, by contrast, is singular and indivisible; all wu forms a boundless unity and thus stands as a reality less contingent and thereby more substantive than that of you. The sense in which wu is more primal and potent than you is less obvious to those who do not share the Huainanzi’s grounding assumptions. One reason that “non-being” is a distortional translation of wu is that no space is ever considered completely devoid of any material substance whatsoever. Even completely “empty” space is permeated by highly rarefied qi in its most primordial and dynamic state, which in fact constitutes the material substrate of wu. As the cosmogonies described in chapter 2 make clear, wu was the original state of the entire cosmos before the appearance of any you phenomena. In that moment before time, the potential for the entire cascade of generation and transformation that would follow was latently contained; thus wu is a state imbued with virtually unlimited power. The you aspects of present-day phenomena therefore manifest a degraded and devolved state of cosmic senescence, whereas the wu aspects preserve the pristine potency of the cosmic origin.
Several other points must be mentioned with respect to the concept of wu as it is used in the Huainanzi. The preceding example of the house refers to the spatial dimension of wu, which is frequently specified in the text as xu (emptiness or vacuity). Wu also has a temporal dimension, which is identified as jing (stillness). Just as different objects cannot be distinguished without the gaps of empty space between them, discrete events cannot be differentiated unless they are punctuated by (or contrasted with) moments of stillness and inertness.
Both these spatial and temporal dimensions of wu are implicated in the Huainanzi’s discussion of its role in human consciousness. Like a house, the functional processes of the mind are conditioned by both wu and you aspects. Thoughts, feelings, and memories are you, but they are differentiated and made coherent only by the mind’s capacity for and continual return to a state of emptiness and stillness. These moments of wu, in fact, are the baseline state of consciousness. The mind is normally empty and still and becomes stirred by thoughts and feelings only on contact with the external world. Much of the Huainanzi’s program of personal cultivation is thus centered on inducing a controlled experience of this original mind, emptying and stilling consciousness through focused meditation and yogic exercise. This is a key step on the path to sagehood demarcated by the text.
Finally, it is important to note that the text does not completely identify wu with the source of ultimate value; instead, that place is held by the Way. Although wu precedes you, the Way precedes wu; it is an ultimate that transcends even the distinction between “something” and “nothing.” In the quest for human perfection, wu is thus a vital juncture, but it is not a goal in itself. As section 12.45 asserts, being “without something” is an admirable attainment, but being “without nothing” is an even higher level of attainment—the point at which the distinction between wu and you dissolves and one is wholly merged with the Way.
wu object, thing
Any differentiable phenomenon may be termed an “object” in the Huainanzi. The status of object is of normative significance, as the source of ultimate value (the Way) encompasses all objects and can never be an object itself. Anything that may be termed an object thus represents a devolution from the ultimate and has diminished normative value.
Nonetheless, the status of object is not absolute but is subject to differing levels of degree. One extent to which a phenomenon is an object is contingent on how many comparable objects it may be contrasted with. Therefore, Heaven is less an object than is an ordinary stone because a stone is one among millions, but Heaven may be truly contrasted only with Earth.
Another plane along which the “objectness” of a phenomenon may be measured is its degree of agency. The more that any object may autonomously act on and influence other objects, the less an object it is. Here, again, Heaven compares favorably with a stone in this regard. Related to this sense of the word is the text’s occasional use of wu as a verb (for example, in 10.107). If the English word “to thing” existed, it would be an appropriate translation. Lacking that verb in English, we translate wu in its verbal sense as “to differentiate.”
These conceptual principles inform the Huainanzi’s discussion of the human existential condition. Human beings are likewise less like objects than are rocks, but only as a matter of degree. Moreover, this degree varies from human being to human being. The more that human beings are controlled by their attachments and responses to external objects, the more like objects they become. One way in which the Huainanzi conceptualizes the process of personal cultivation is as a path toward becoming more an agent and less an object. The final goal of that process is to become a sage, whom the text describes as “treating objects as objects, not being made an object by objects.”
wu wei non-action, non-deliberative action, non-intentional action, non-purposive action, non-striving, without striving, inaction, do nothing, without effort, effortless action
Wu wei is a central concept to the cosmological, political, and ethical thought of the Huainanzi, but its use is informed by earlier texts, especially the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. In all these writings, wu wei denotes a mode of activity that is common to both the Way and the sage. It is thus a potent means of articulating how ultimate value is instantiated in the phenomenal realm.
Wu wei presents a bevy of translational and interpretive problems, as its layers of accrued association, meaning, and implication are exceptionally rich. The phrase literally means “inaction” or “doing nothing,” and in the Huainanzi it frequently is used in this sense. This is indeed the meaning with which it first appears in the early philosophical literature: the Analects describes Shun as a ruler who was so morally elevated that he could “order [the world] by doing nothing”
(that is, rule by moral example alone). The Huainanzi and its antecedent texts appropriated the original implication of the term and fashioned new meanings from that figurative template. In this new mode, wu wei can apply to behavior that is to all appearances quite active, but even in such kinetic instances, a genuine moment of wu wei is not wholly unrelated to “doing nothing.”
For the Huainanzi, these affinities are explicable in terms of the text’s understanding of human psychology. The baseline of consciousness for all people is the original stillness and emptiness of the mind; thoughts, feelings, and actions arise only on contact with external stimuli. What distinguishes ordinary people from the sage is that they self-identify with (and are thus controlled by) these latter active products of consciousness. Thus the only time that ordinary people instantiate wu wei is when they are literally doing nothing. Only then are they grounded in the original stillness and emptiness of the mind. In contrast, the sage is always grounded in the original stillness and emptiness of the mind, even when he is responding actively and thoughtfully to external stimuli. His subjective, existential state when he is engaged in deliberation, combat, or any other activity is thus indistinguishable from that when he is doing nothing. In this sense, he is always engaged in wu wei.
Wu wei does not imply a state of unconsciousness, but it does indicate a total transcendence of self-consciousness. For the Huainanzi, the implications of this fact are both psychological and cosmological. When the Way impels some change (for example, the shift from spring to summer), it likewise does not do so self-consciously or through any prism of preconception or bias. Wu wei is thus the constant mode of activity of the Way itself, and when the sage engages in wu wei, he embodies the basic motive dynamism of the cosmic source. The difference between the activity of the sage and that of ordinary people is therefore not merely subjective. Because the sage channels the cosmic source through wu wei, his actions are infused with the same spontaneous power and efficacy as those of the Way itself and (despite occasionally appearing otherwise to ordinary perception) are just as conducive to cosmic and human harmony.
The Huainanzi uses wu wei in many different contexts, with a flexibility as to part of speech or shades of meaning that is very difficult to capture in English. We have tried to translate it in each instance using English phraseology that will be comprehensible in context but still will give some sense of the larger conceptual discourse informing the text’s use of the term. This has required using different English phrases chosen to match the inflection of the term in the particular context in which it appears.
wu xing Five Phases, Five Conducts (Mencian contexts)
The binome wu xing became increasingly common and significant during the Han and subsequent eras. The basic meaning of xing is “to walk,” although it also could mean “action” or “conduct.” There was, in fact, a particular context in which wu xing meant “the Five Conducts,” and this sometimes appears in the text of the Huainanzi. The more prevalent Han-era usage of wu xing is for the five basic forms in which qi appears in the material world: Earth, Water, Wood, Metal, and Fire. In the Warring States text Lüshi chunqiu, these five forms of qi were referred to as the wu de, or “Five Powers.” By the Han period, it had become more common to refer to them as wu xing, a construction reflecting the fact that no qi was thought to remain in a single form permanently but to cycle perpetually through different forms in sequence. For this reason, it has become conventional to translate the binome as “Five Phases,” and we have followed this convention. Here the word “phase” is borrowed from the vocabulary of modern chemistry; for example, ice, liquid water, and water vapor have quite different properties, but all are phases of H2O. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water have different properties, but all are phases of qi.
Originally qi was uniformly undifferentiated. With cosmogenesis, it first was differentiated into yin and yang polarities and then into the Five Phases. All perceptible matter is a manifestation of one or more of these Five Phases in various combinations and degrees of rarefaction. At their most rarefied, none of the Five Phases can be completely identified with the concrete materials from which they take their names. Rather, each may exist in a highly essential form that is more akin to energy than matter. Moreover, all qi is intrinsically volatile and dynamic, and it not only cycles perpetually among different phases and yin–yang polarities but also occasionally returns to its undifferentiated original state.
Yin, yang, and the Five Phases are the basic categories of all traditional correlative cosmology, and much of the cosmological thought of the Huainanzi is constructed around the elaboration of various systems of Five Phases correlations. Since almost all tangible material properties were thought to arise from the essential qualities of the Five Phases, many correlative links could be forged on the basis of Five-Phase affinities. For example, since Wood qi was thought to both suffuse the spleen and give rise to the flavor of sour, eating sour foods was asserted to be beneficial to the spleen. Wood was further correlated with the color (blue)green, the spring season, the direction east, the musical note jue, and so forth, creating an unlimited range of permutations of cross-correlation among spatial, temporal, physiological, cultural, and material dimensions. Such Five-Phase correlations are most prevalent in chapters 3, 4, and 5, but they appear prominently throughout the Huainanzi and constitute a conceptual template informing the text’s discussion of the physical world.
As mentioned earlier, another usage of wu xing is “Five Conducts” rather than “Five Phases,” and that sense of the term also appears in the Huainanzi. The “Five Conducts” are mentioned in the Xunzi as a doctrine attributed to Zisi and his latter-day disciple, Mencius. The exact referent of this phrase was a mystery until the discovery of a text entitled Wu xing pian among the writings recovered at Mawangdui. That text enumerates the Five Conducts as Humanity, Rightness, Propriety, Wisdom (the virtues that grow from Mencius’s “Four Buds”), and Sageliness. Textual parallels—for example, in chapters 10 and 20—suggest that the Huainanzi’s authors were familiar with the Wu xing pian, and where wu xing appears to refer to the “Five Conducts,” that is how we have translated it.
wu zang Five Orbs
The term wu zang is not original to the Huainanzi but comes to the text from what by Han times had already become a rich literature on medicine and human physiology. Wu zang corresponds to the five organs of the human physiology that were thought to be critical generative and coordinating junctures for the dynamic matrix of qi that composed the mind–body system: the lungs, liver, spleen, gall bladder, and kidneys. As a noun, zang literally means “storehouse” or “repository,” but in the physiological model built on these constructs, no one of the wu zang was envisioned as exclusively active or situated in the particular organ from which it takes its name. Each organ was thought to be the central coordinating point of a distinct ramified network of qi that pervaded the entire body, and it is to these five networks rather than to the specific organs themselves that the term wu zang refers. Thus (following the lead of the historian of Chinese medicine Manfred Porkert) we have translated the term as “Five Orbs,” reflecting the expanded scope of each orb throughout the mind–body system.
The Five Orbs are important to the Huainanzi because they provide a conceptual bridge among the cosmic, physiological, and cognitive realms. In medical theory, each of the Five Orbs was correlated with one of the Five Phases of qi and was understood to be responsible for the generation and circulation of its particular form of qi throughout the mind–body system. The Five Orbs thus provide, through the extended network of Five-Phases cosmological correlations (see wu xing), an analytical scheme of relationships between the inner workings of the body and the external structures and transformations of the physical world. Moreover, the Five Orbs were thought to be the governing faculties of the five organs of sense perception, which were in turn the five gateways by which external stimuli gave rise to the qing (emotional responses) of the mind–body system. The Five Orbs were thus
conceived to be the material locus in which emotional responses were experienced, setting up a mutual feedback mechanism between physiology and consciousness. If the emotions were overstimulated or erratic, qi would hemorrhage from the Five Orbs; if the Five Orbs were well nourished and replete with qi, it would help regulate the mind’s emotional responses to external events.
xin mind, heart
Xin denotes both “heart,” in the sense of the physical organ located in the chest, and “mind.” These meanings are related in more than a metonymic sense. The heart is conceived of as the generative and coordinating point of a larger matrix of qi in the same way that the lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, and gall bladder are coordinating points of their respective orbs (see wu zang). The heart is distinguished by two aspects. First, it is the controlling mechanism of the total system of which it and the Five Orbs are part; all Five Orbs normally operate under the coordinating regulation of the heart. Here again, as with each of the Five Orbs, “the heart” does not refer to the organ alone but to the matrix of qi, whose coordinating point is the heart. Second, it is the exclusive seat of discursive intelligence and self-awareness. Whereas the Five Orbs are the locus of discrete emotional responses and thus in some sense may “feel,” the heart is the only component of this dynamic system that may think and thus perceive its own activity.