There is a block of four chapters distinguished by titles which sum up their themes (chapters 28–31, ‘Yielding the throne’, ‘Robber Chih’, ‘The discourse on swords’, and ‘The old fisherman’); since the rest of the Outer and Mixed chapters have titles taken from their opening words, these must have composed a single collection before they entered the book. They seem not to be Taoist at all, but to come from late representatives of the Yangist school, towards the end of the third century BC. Its traditionally recognised founder, Yang Chu (c. 350 BC), is not known to have left any writings, but his tenets are summed up in chapter 13 of Huai-nan-tzŭ (c. 120 BC) as ‘keeping one’s nature intact, protecting one’s genuineness, and not tying the body by involvements with other things’. The philosophical encyclopedia Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu (c. 240 BC) includes him in a list of ten philosophers as the advocate of ‘valuing self’ ; it also has five chapters which expound the doctrines which we have noticed ascribed to him,1 although without naming him. Similarly in Chuang-tzŭ the Primitivist mentions the disputation of ‘Yang and Mo’,2 but Yang Chu is not named in the present chapters, which seem to be actual documents of Yangist disputation contemporary with the Primitivist. It may be guessed that the Yangists, unlike the Confucians and Mohists, did not look back to a founder or depend on a book, and that Yang Chu was no more than an early representative of the movement whom it was convenient to pick out when a name was needed to identify it.
The ‘Yangist miscellany’ had already been incorporated in Chuang-tzŭ by the time of the great historian Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien (145–c. 86 BC), who in his biographical note on Chuang-tzŭ mentions both ‘Robber Chih’ and ‘The old fisherman’ among his writings. As for ‘Robber Chih’, we shall offer when we introduce the chapter evidence that it comes from the same period as the Primitivist, the interregnum between the Ch’in and Han dynasties (209–202 BC). ‘The old fisherman’ implies a time of settled government, presumably under the Han, but is not necessarily much later; one can imagine that with the reunification of China under a relatively benign government in 202 BC the political atmosphere would change from the cynicism of ‘Robber Chih’ to the contentment of ‘The old fisherman’ almost overnight. Of the other two chapters there is little to say except that ‘Yielding the throne’ is later than the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu (c. 240 BC), with which it shares not only many stories but comments on them characteristic of that book.
Yangism is the oldest Chinese philosophy of life which caters for the person of some means who prefers the comforts and limitations of private life to the prospects and dangers of office. So does the Taoism of Chuang-tzŭ and his school (and from the early centuries AD so does Buddhism); but it differs from these philosophies in having nothing mystical about it, in posing only the question ‘What are my true interests?’ These interests are weighed with as much calculation as the benefits and harms of mankind in general are weighed by the rival Mohist school; we are not yet in the antirational world of Taoism, for which calculations of prudence and of morality are seen as equally disruptive of spontaneity. There is only one place in all the four chapters where we seem for a moment to be making the jump from rational self-interest to Taoist mysticism, in the second of the three ‘Robber Chih’ dialogues.3 Here a debate between advocates of Confucian morality and of worldly success is referred to a third party, who begins his reply with a Taoist-sounding verse culminating in the advice: ‘In accord with the Way walk your meandering path.’ But in the late third and second centuries the didactic verse even of a Legalist such as Han Fei tends to use Taoist imagery, and as soon as the arbiter descends to prose he talks like a Yangist, judiciously advising both parties not to endanger their lives by being either too moral or too greedy.
The Primitivist’s pairing of the disputation of the Yangists with that of the Mohists is by no means arbitrary, for although the latter asked ‘What benefits the world?’ and the former ‘What benefits me?’, they have points in common in the terminology and technique of debate. For example, the later Mohist dialectical chapters, the Yangist chapter Shen wei (‘Be aware of what you are for’) in the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu, and the second and third dialogues of ‘Robber Chih’ all share a technical use of falling-tone wei, ‘for the sake of’, to pose the question of what one is for, one’s end in life, the final criterion by which all actions are to be judged. But there are also significant differences. Mohist disputation had become by the third century BC purely logical, a sustained effort, comparable with the Greek, to settle problems definitively by reason alone. But the less philosophical applied the word pien, ‘disputation’, to the art of political persuasion, and used it adjectivally (‘subtle, eloquent’) of rhetorical skill in advising a prince or negotiating an alliance. The Yangist disputation is of this sort. The dialogues in ‘Robber Chih’, ‘The discourse on swords’ and ‘The old fisherman’ are demonstrations of virtuosity in the art of persuasion, in which both Confucius and Chih are described as pien, ‘eloquent’. The highest proof of this eloquence is having at your fingertips a wealth of historical examples. Robber Chih, after overwhelming Confucius with fourteen such illustrations (which he numbers in groups), continues: ‘Of the instances you might use to persuade me …’ .4 In the next dialogue in ‘Robber Chih’ we find four neat pairs of illustrations summed up by ‘These are the examples which former generations passed down and recent generations preach’.5 ‘Yielding the throne’ turns out when related to the rest of the Yangist miscellany to be an actual handbook of illustrations for use in debate, some of them used in ‘Robber Chih’. These are assembled from a variety of older sources. A by-product of the Yangists’ interest in literary skills is that their original stories are longer and technically more sophisticated than anything elsewhere in Chuang-tzŭ. Indeed ‘The old fisherman’ is a landmark in the development of narrative technique in China.
The fundamental principle of Yangism is that the life of the body is more important than the things which serve to nurture it. Possessions are replaceable, the body is not; therefore one should never sacrifice as much as a hair of the body in exchange for any object external to it, even the throne of the empire. Not that the Yangist chooses poverty on principle; he may on occasion, after weighing the circumstances, judge it safe to accept a throne, and he especially despises the man so proud of his own incorruptibility that he will commit suicide rather than debase himself by accepting a worldly honour.6 But he is careful not to be deluded into seeking power and possessions at risk to life by the two great temptations, greed for wealth and the moral demand to contribute to the good government of the people. The ‘Robber Chih’ dialogues wage campaigns in both directions, first against moralism, then against worldly ambition. The central issue which divides the Yangists from the moralists, whether Confucian or Mohist, shows up most clearly in a story of probably Mohist origin which survives by good luck in Lieh-tzŭ (a Taoist book of c. AD 300), about a confrontation of Ch’in Ku-li, the chief disciple of Mo-tzŭ, with Yang Chu and his disciple Meng Sun-yang:
‘Ch’in Ku-li asked Yang Chu
‘If you could help the whole world by sacrificing one hair of your body, would you do it?’
‘It would surely be of no help to the world to give one hair.’
‘But supposing it did help, would you do it?’ Yang Chu did not answer him. When Ch’in Ku-li came out he told Meng Sun-yang.
‘You do not understand what is in our Master’s heart,’ said Meng Sun-yang. ‘Let me explain. If you could win 10,000 pieces of gold by injuring your skin and flesh, would you do it?’
‘I would.’
‘If you could gain a state by cutting off one limb at the joint, would you do it?’
Ch’in Ku-li was silent for a while. Meng Sun-yang continued:
‘It is clear that one hair is a trifle compared with skin and flesh, and skin and flesh compared with one joint. However, enough hairs are worth as much as skin and flesh as one joint. You cannot deny that one hair has its place among the myriad parts of the body; how can one treat it lightly?’7
What the Mohist calls ‘helping the world’ the Yangist calls ‘gaining a state’, and since it is by winning political power that one becomes able to benefit the people, neither party quibbles over the identification. What for Yang Chu is a high-minded indifference to possessions is for Ch’in Ku-li a selfish refusal to help others. The narrator, who seems to be a Mohist, says that according to Yang Chu ‘a man of ancient times, if he could benefit the empire by the loss of one hair, would not give it, and if the whole empire were presented to himself alone, would not take it’. The Confucian Mencius says similarly:8 ‘What Yang Chu was for was self; if by plucking one hair he might benefit the whole world he would not do it.’ This last is a one-sided description of his thesis, but it picks out the point which for moralists was crucial, and which in the story just quoted embarrasses Yang Chu himself. However, the Yangist values self against external things rather than other selves. We are more than once told9 that it is the man who puts his own life and health before the possession of a throne who deserves to occupy a throne – a point made also by the Primitivist10 and in Lao-tzŭ chapter 13. This may seem a curious claim, but the reasoning is presumably that the Yangist ruler would put the lives of his subjects, like his own, before his throne and any other mere thing, the only function of which is to nurture life. This is exemplified in the story of the Great King Tan-fu.11
Chuang-tzŭ appears once in the Yangist miscellany, as the hero of ‘The discourse on swords’. This is sufficient to explain how the Yangist miscellany came to be incorporated into Chuang-tzŭ, where it is only slightly incongruous; Taoism after all inherited the Yangist thesis that health and longevity matter more than property and office, even if it inclines rather to the view that you avoid damage to the spontaneous process of life by not thinking about it. ‘The discourse on swords’ is so unlike any story of Chuang-tzŭ elsewhere in the book that many scholars doubt that it can be about the same man, although when he follows the custom of referring to himself by his personal name (which in translation has to be replaced by ‘I’) he too turns out to be called ‘Chou’. But if it is correct to infer from the story of the huge magpie that Chuang-tzŭ was at one time a Yangist12 it becomes comprehensible that there might be a divergent tradition about him in Yangist literature.