Revisiting Angus C. Graham’s Scholarship
on the Zhuangzi 莊子
Angus Graham’s philosophical insights into the Zhuangzi were founded upon his methodical criticism and analysis of the text. In what follows I will attempt to analyze and assess Graham’s scholarship on the text of the Zhuangzi by trying to understand the perspective from which he approached the text, the perspective that led to his many important and controversial insights. I will also attempt to expand upon his achievements by offering answers to a number of questions that Graham’s research raised, but did not answer, including that of how the various intellectual voices that he identified came to be incorporated into the text.
Introduction
When Angus Graham’s almost complete translation of the Zhuangzi was published in 1981 it represented a radical break with all complete English translations extant at that time.1 Rather than translate the entire chapter as a whole as his predecessors James Legge, Herbert Giles, and Burton Watson had done, with the implicit assumption that it was the creation of one person (as per the Analects of Confucius or the Way and its Power of Laozi), Graham treated the text as a collection of distinct (and mostly Daoist) philosophical positions, which he carefully identified and contextualized. This was part of a deliberate strategy on his part to confront the realities of the text as he saw them and we cannot appreciate his singular contributions to our understanding of what is arguably the most significant work of foundational Daoism without grasping how he saw the problems of the text and what to do about them.
Basing himself on the work of a number of contemporary East Asian scholars—the most important of whom was Guan Feng 關峰2—and upon his own research on the text, Graham implicitly applied the principles of form, redaction, and composition criticism that he learned during his undergraduate studies in Theology at Oxford.3 He saw that the Zhuangzi was far from the homogenous product of a single author but was rather a heterogeneous product that embraced at least five distinct philosophical positions that could be identified as Daoist or related to Daoism. These were:
• The historical Zhuangzi of the “Inner Chapters;”
• The “school of Chuang Tzu”: his followers;
• The Primitivist, a “pugnacious” thinker philosophically related to the Laozi 老子;
• The Yangists: followers of the “hedonist” philosopher Yang Zhu 楊朱;
• The Syncretists: early Han eclectic Daoists distinct from the Huainan 淮南 circle.
He further concluded that most of the original scrolls of the text were neither separate essays nor chapters in what we would call a “book” but were instead compilations of various literary forms including narratives, prose, aphorisms, songs, and poetry that were initially put together in the early Han 漢 by someone from the final “Syncretist” stratum. He recognized that the extant recension of Guo Xiang 郭象 (fl. ca. 300 CE) in thirty-three chapters was not the original recension of the text in 52 chapters listed in the “Bibliographical Monograph” of The History of the Former Han Dynasty (Hanshu Yiwenzhi 漢書藝文 志) and that its many textual corruptions and dislocations resulted at least in part from Guo’s editing as he attempted to fit fragments of the chapters he excised into those he retained. He also asserted that the text contained a series of philosophically subtle and significant technical terms that had to be clearly elucidated by understanding their intellectual context before they could be accurately translated.
For Graham the principal failing of all previous complete translations—including that of Watson, which he admired for its outstanding literary qualities—was a failure to come to grips with these outstanding textual, linguistic, and philosophical problems. He reserved praise solely for the work of Arthur Waley who, in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, had attempted to translate only those passages whose problems he felt he was able to resolve rather than translate continuously through them to create an English prose style Graham labeled as the “Rambling Mode.” In “Two Notes on the Translation of Taoist Classics,” Graham defines this translation style as that “which drifts inconsequentially between sense and nonsense with an air of perfect confidence.”4 It results from the translator’s attempt to render the entire text as if it were constituted of unified and integral chapters while ignoring the various literary forms, shifting philosophical positions, and corrupt passages that in reality constitute it. “What seems to be the rambling style of the great Taoist,” Graham writes, “is in the first place an evasive tactic of the scholar who has lost the thread, who is trudging from sentence to sentence with his dictionaries and commentaries and hoping for the best.5”
In order to avoid this problem, Graham made the following decisions:
1.to offer (in the spirit of Waley) integral translations of only those “blocks of text” that are homogeneous. These are: the inner chapters; the Primitivist essays that constitute chapters 8–10 and the first part of 11; the Yangist chapters 28–31; the complete Syncretist essays in 15 and 33; chapter 16 (which Graham failed to link with any known philosophy); and any complete episode extracted from miscellaneous chapters.
2.to provide a clear intellectual context for each of these,
3.to differentiate between the various literary forms in the translation. This involved distinguishing between verse, songs, aphorisms, propositions, provisional formulations, and comments and treating only “true essays,” such as those of the Primitivist, as consecutive paragraphed prose.
4.while striving to retain the order of material in the extant recension, to rearrange and patch in those fragments from the textually heterogeneous Mixed Chapters (23–27) that could plausibly be relocated into the Inner Chapters.
5.to translate only those philosophically significant passages from the Outer (chapters 8–22) and Mixed Chapters (chapters 23–33) that can be classed as “school of Chuang Tzu” material and to group them by theme such as those that present, for example, tales of Zhuangzi and meetings between Confucius and Lao Dan 老丹.
By following these guidelines Graham attempted to provide a translation that was intellectually nuanced and linguistically precise, that never fell into the “Rambling Mode,” yet did justice to Zhuangzi as both philosopher and poet. The foundation for these guidelines and for the translation that was shaped by them was Graham’s research on the various aspects of the text of the Zhuangzi and it is to this that I shall now turn.
Rearrangement of the Text
Perhaps the most original and controversial aspect of Graham’s scholarship on the Zhuangzi is his reconstruction and rearrangement of the text. The reconstruction involves putting passages back together that he felt were originally whole but had been fragmented due to textual corruption and to the drastic editorial work of the fourth century commentator Guo Xiang. The rearrangement involves his establishment of thematically based reconstituted redactions of whole passages from the Outer and Mixed chapters that were distributed randomly throughout these sections of the work. I will analyze each of these in turn.
There are seven significant textual reconstructions accomplished by Graham in his translation of the Zhuangzi and these are detailed and justified in the textual notes:
1.chapter 2, p. 49: adding the poem, “Heaven turns circles …” from 14/1–4.6
2.chapter 3, pp. 62–63: adding “Hence as the ground which the foot treads … we do not know how to put our questions to it” from 24/105–11, 32/50–52, 24/103–5.7
3.chapter 5, p. 79: adding a bracketed commentary misplaced in 6/17–19 but relevant here
4.chapter 5, pp. 79–82: a major reconstruction involving rearrangement of 5/41–52 and the insertion of fragments from the end of chapters 24 and 23.
5.chapter 6/1–20, p. 85: a major reconstruction involving
• relocation of 6/11–14 to after 6/89 (p. 91): “… when the sage goes to war”
• relocation of 6/17–19 to chapter 5 as in item 3 above
• relocation of 6/22–24, the little episode of the fish on dry land, to after 6/73
• insertion of fragments from 24/97 and 96 on the True Man after poem at 6/17
6.chapter 17/1–53, pp. 144–49:a reconstruction of the “autumn floods” dialogue involving:
• relocating 17/24–28 as a separate “great man” fragment on p. 150
• insertion of 22/16–21 (“Heaven and earth have supreme beauty …”) on p. 148–49
7.chapter 8, p. 202: insertion of a fragment at line 26 from 12/96–102: “Century old wood is broken to make a vessel … a leopard in its cage has got somewhere too.”
In all the above cases, Graham makes cogent arguments based upon both meaning and upon grammar. He moves fragments from contexts in which their meaning seems out of place to those in which their meaning fits. He then justifies the move by detailing similarities in specific unique phrases, particle usage, and technical terminology between the relocated fragment and its new context. For example, in the first relocation he reconstructs what he believes to be the original ending to the Ziqi 子綦 narrative by adding the introductory poem from chapter 14, “The Cycles of Heaven (Tianyun 天運).” He justifies this by an argument from meaning: “The poem carries on Ziqi’s question about who it is that causes things to begin and end, with the same metaphor of a wind blowing through everything.” He then follows up with an argument from grammar and terminology:
As in the first two episodes of ch. 2, the ending of things is described in terms of ‘stopping of themselves’ (14/2 自止 similar to 2/9 自已) and being ‘sealed up’ (14/2 緘, variant 咸 in Sima Biao’s text; similar to 2/9 咸 2/12 緘); we also find the metaphor of the trigger which starts things off (機 14/2 cf. 2/11).
He also provides corroborating evidence in the form of a Tang dynasty Buddhist source citing the poem as an example of the distinctive thought of the Inner Chapters He argues further that the poem must have been excised from chapter 2 by Guo Xiang because it duplicated the opening of chapter 14, which needed to be retained because the chapter title was taken from it.
In general, Graham makes a reasonable case in favor of each reconstruction. A minor problem with all of them is that they are difficult to locate in the translation, even by using the finding list on pages 36–39 of Chuang Tzu: the Inner Chapters, and the reconstructions make comparisons between Graham’s translation of these passages and all others virtually impossible. Graham ameliorated this in the first paperback edition of 1986 by providing alist of each Zhuangzi chapter and where it is found in his translation. This has been included in all subsequent reprints. My major hesitation in accepting all of them is that it is not clear how many of these textual dislocations could have taken place. Graham only provides such an explanation for the reconstruction of the end of the Ziqi narrative and it is a plausible one. The second, third, and fourth reconstructions could be explained if we assume that damaged versions of chapters 3 and 5 were transmitted along with their missing passages, which found their way into the ends of chapters 23, 24, and 32. If so however, was this the case in the original 52-chapter recension or in the expurgated Guo Xiang recension? Also how did 6/17–19 get displaced to this location in chapter 6 from chapter 5? The reconstruction in chapter 6 implies that several larger fragments were displaced from later to earlier in the chapter. Perhaps all could be explained if we assume that a series of bamboo strips simply became detached from their proper positions in the redaction of the original 52-chapter recension that Guo Xiang possessed and that he simply tacked them onto the ends of chapters 23, 24, 32, and 12 (in the seventh reconstruction) or found new places for them in chapters 5 and 6 (or in chapter 22, for the dislocated fragment from chapter 17). While this is certainly not impossible by any means, it does seem rather implausible. If true, we should all have less confidence that the text we now have of the thirty-three chapters that survived Guo Xiang’s excision is an accurate reflection of those chapters in the original recension.
Graham’s thematically based textual rearrangements derive from his identification of the different philosophical positions in the text and upon topics within those positions. These rearrangements remind me of the scholarly practice of creating reconstituted redactions of lost works. Originating during Qing 清 dynasty with scholars like Ma Guohan 馬國翰 and Tao Fangqi 陶方琦, these redactions collected passages from the indirect testimony to lost works.8 A superb modern example of this genre is Wang Shumin’s 王樹民 collection of lost fragments for the Zhuangzi.9 Of course the major difference is that Graham assembled passages from within one extant textual collection while these other scholars worked from a great variety of sources of indirect testimony; yet both were reestablishing lost works of distinct philosophical viewpoints.
The first of these rearrangements is the group of sixteen passages Graham assembles from chapters 23–27 and 32 that he considers directly related to the Inner Chapters by virtue of the fact that they contain themes and the highly specific technical terminology of logical debate that would “hardly have outlasted” the lifetime of Zhuangzi. In addition to this principal rationale for their inclusion, Graham concluded that the chapters from which they were taken “include strings of miscellaneous pieces, some no more than fragments, which may come from any or all of the authors in the Chapter” (p. 100). He implies that the passages he includes in this section came from Zhuangzi without explicitly stating so. Other scholars, such as Liu Xiaogan 劉笑敢, have taken the similarities in meaning and wording between these passages and those of the Inner Chapters to indicate that the chapters in which they are found are the product of later disciples attempting to emulate their master.10
In fact both these theories could be right. If we analyze, for example, chapter 23, “Gengsang Chu” 庚桑楚, we see that it is made up of two distinct parts. The first is a long continuous narrative involving a quest for the Dao undertaken by a character named Nanrong Chu 南榮趎 who first studies with Gengsang and later with his teacher Lao Dan. While it is arguable where this narrative ends, I see it continuing to line 42. The second part of chapter 23 is a collection of eleven different fragments with no discernable link to one another except for their being distillations of general Daoist wisdom. These fragments could have been added to an original narrative by the Syncretist compilers in the second century BCE or to an original short chapter (recall that Zhuangzi 15 has twenty-two lines and 16 has twenty-one) by Guo Xiang from material he wanted to save from chapters he was deleting. Without subjecting these chapters to a detailed composition criticism we cannot settle the issue.
Graham also provides a small collection of passages from the Syncretist position taken from chapters 11–14 and divides them into two sections, “Syncretist Fragments” (pp. 268–70) and “Three Rhapsodies on the Way” (pp. 271–73). These chapters are often taken together as representing a coherent viewpoint, although Graham sees them as miscellaneous collections containing some Syncretist material. Again I would argue that without a detailed composition criticism we cannot reach conclusions about which position is correct. I presented a partial composition criticism of chapter 12 in the second chapter of the present volume, arguing that the presence of Syncretist and non-Syncretist material therein was not the result of tampering on the part of Guo Xiang but was part of the original version of this chapter. However, I did not take it farther to see if I could find a rationale for the inclusion of each of the fifteen passages that make up the chapter.11 I did conclude that this chapter was assembled by a later Syncretist than the author of its overtly “Syncretist” passages and that this person was a member of the Huainan circle of Liu An 劉安.
By far the most extensive collection of thematically rearranged passages is contained in Graham’s “’School of Chuang Tzu’ selection” (pp. 116–94). Drawn principally from chapters 16–22 but including passages from chapters 11–14, 23–26, and 32, they are organized into ten topical headings such as “stories about Chuang Tzu,” “dialogues of Confucius and Lao Tan,” “the advantages of spontaneity,” and so on, and they constitute Graham’s most significant reorganization of the text. This section results directly from his decision to translate only those passages that are clearly understandable, have a definite viewpoint, and are intellectually interesting, and from his conclusion that there was no organized school of Zhuangzi surviving his death but rather a tradition of “thinking and writing in the manner of Chuang Tzu” that led to these writings. There are a number of problems however with this methodology.
To begin with, removing these many passages from their contexts within specific chapters makes it impossible to perform a composition criticism of how each of the chapters was assembled using Graham’s translation alone. This in turn makes it impossible to derive any shred of historical evidence about who might have written the material in these chapters and who might have assembled them into these units. Furthermore without this kind of information we have little idea of how the Inner Chapters might have been transmitted after the death of their author. Indeed, I would argue that it makes more sense to see at least some of these chapters—particularly 17–22—as the products of the followers of Zhuangzi who were attempting to continue writing in his style and practicing the meditative inner cultivation techniques he advocates in the Inner Chapters. Certainly this is the position of many Chinese scholars, including Liu Xiaogan, and of the doctoral thesis of Brian Hoffert.12 Graham’s decision to rearrange this material also fails to give any evidence for why the various philosophical positions that he accurately identifies actually became assembled into a text and in many ways leaves us with more questions than it answers. Of course, when he did this research, Graham was not primarily concerned with such historical issues; he was concerned with providing a clear and coherent translation, first and foremost. Nonetheless, I would argue that their resolution will only augment the insights into the philosophical positions in the text that he identifies. In addition, this radical rearrangement of the material in these chapters makes comparison with other translations impossible, except for the very short chapter 16 which he translates as a whole.
Redaction Criticism
Graham’s expertise in both philosophy and philology come together again in his influential study, “How Much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write?” This work, which implicitly adheres to the principles of redaction criticism, was the first in the West to differentiate the distinct philosophical positions in the text and provide a detailed rationale for so doing. He begins with the question that many have taken for granted: can we provide evidence that the Inner Chapters were written by one person? In the most thorough analysis in this article Graham proceeds to identify four general categories of linguistic tests through which he compares the Inner Chapters with the Outer and Mixed Chapters:
1.idioms: for example, those concerning life and death, perfection, and distinctive turns of phrase such as “How do I know?” wu hu zhi 惡乎知 and “it is caused by Heaven//man” wei ren/tian shi 爲人//天使
2.grammar: for example, “never yet” wei shi 未始 and “only now” nai jin 乃今.
3.philosophical terms: for example, “that which fashions and transforms” zao hua zhe 造化者 and “lodging place” yu 寓.
4.persons and themes: for example, the madman of Chu as a spokesman for the author of the Inner Chapters and the absence of any textual parallels to the Laozi in the “inner chapters.”
Acknowledging that these tests are heterogeneous, of unequal value, and in need of refinement, Graham nonetheless maintains that they indicate a sufficient consistency in philosophical outlook, technical terminology, and literary style so that we need not seriously question that they were written by a single hand. He also uses these tests to identify fragments in the Mixed Chapters that can be used to reconstruct damaged passages in the Inner Chapters and he demonstrates this with a detailed reconstruction of the introductory essay to chapter 3.
Working independently of Graham but using similar kinds of linguistic tests—some more detailed, some less—Liu Xiaogan reached a similar conclusion on Zhuangzi’s authorship of the Inner Chapters and further argued that they are a “mid-Warring States” creation whose contents were written mostly by Zhuangzi but compiled by his disciples.13 One of the strengths of the latter’s much more lengthy work—and a weakness of Graham’s—is that Liu briefly summarizes and then criticizes the work of some other Chinese scholars who did not think that the Inner Chapters were all the creation of the hand of Zhuangzi. While Graham indirectly disproves them, it would have been fascinating if he had directly taken on, for example, the theory of Wang Shumin that the extant Inner Chapters were the creation of Guo Xiang’s revised arrangement and that the true thought of Zhuangzi can be found scattered throughout the collection.14
Graham uses similar but more limited linguistic tests to identify the distinctive thought and style of three other unique philosophical positions in the Outer and Mixed sections of the text. First, we have the “Primitivist” (chapters 8–11/line 28), whom he identifies with some confidence as a single author who takes the view that civilization and its attendant devices and values have destroyed the essentially pure nature of human beings. Thus man’s innate tendency to perceive things clearly and to realize the Power (De 德) that emerges from the spontaneous attainment of the Way is blocked, and disorder and chaos reign. Graham concludes that this individual was an exponent of Laozi’s ideal of a minimalist government and only incidently interested in Zhuangzi, who lived at a particular moment during the Qin-Han interregnum very close to 205 B.C.
While recognizing that the only four chapters with thematic titles outside the Inner Chapters are a group (chapters 28–31) that share a number of important similarities with the Primitivist material (e.g. figure of Robber Zhi 盜蹠, vitriolic criticism of Confucians and Mohists, fondness for a primitive agrarian Utopia, criticism of the damaging influences of culture, the equal harmfulness of moralist and criminal), Graham sides with Guan Feng in concluding that they are attributable to the later followers of the philosopher Yang Zhu. He finds that they contain a number of the key phrases and ideas that other sources attribute to his distinctive philosophy, including: “keeping one’s nature intact” (quan xing 全性), “protecting one’s genuineness” (bao zhen 保眞), not risking life and health for the sake of material possessions. Although he sees a similar, but more pronounced, nonmystical side to these chapters and the Primitivists, he attributes the similarities between these two groups of chapters as their being products of the same general time period.
Liu Xiaogan treats the commonalities between these two groups of chapters not as an indication of temporal proximity but as an indication of a common philosophy. Basing himself on the presence of several similar phrases and narratives between these groups, he links them together under the title of the “Anarchist school,” which he takes from passages with a similar point of view in the much later Baopuzi 抱樸子.15 This is one of Liu’s weaker arguments. He totally fails to examine whether or not these two groups of chapters share the same underlying philosophy and does not seriously examine Guan Feng’s assertion that the second group is Yangist. He also concludes that the second group, despite its close ties with first group, “are not products of the legitimate branch of Chuang Tzu’s later followers” but were influenced by Zhuangzi and his school.16 Yet he fails to tell us why he reached this conclusion. Indeed, the relationship between these two groups is essential to understanding why the latter group—the most anomalous chapters in the entire work—were even included. (I will return below to a more detailed consideration of these two closely related groups of chapters).
Graham applies linguistic criteria to identify the final philosophical position in the text, which he calls “the Syncretists.” This group advocated a comprehensive Daoist social and political philosophy they called “the Way of Heaven and Earth” governed by an enlightened sage-king who embodies the spontaneous workings of the Way commended in the “inner chapters.” He includes whole chapters 15 and 33 in this group but only adds the opening sections of chapters 12–14 and various other fragments. By contrast Guan Feng and Liu Xiaogan see these chapters as solid blocks advocating a similar point of view, one whose central philosophy is similar to that identified by Graham. Guan sees them as the products of the school of Song Xing 宋銒 and Yin Wen 尹文, identified as Huang-Lao 黃老 philosophers in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記;) Liu thinks they represent the ideas of Huang-Lao Daoists.17 Their differences with Graham point to a methodological contrast to which I will return.
One of the main criteria Graham uses for his conclusion that only the introductory sections of chapters 12–14 were written by the Syncretists is the absence of post-verbal use of the particle hu 乎 common in the rest of the Zhuangzi. However this may not be as significant as he suggests. I have checked for the use of post-verbal hu 乎 and post-verbal yu 於 (the preposition it is often seen as synonymous with in these usages) in two clearly datable works of this general time period, the Lüshi chun qiu 呂氏春秋 (ca. 240 B.C.) and Huainanzi 淮南子 (139 B.C.). In both works post-verbal hu and yu seem to be used interchangably, even with the same verb. The ratio of their use seems to shift between these two works. In the former, hu is used after verbs about 27% of the time (yu follows verbs about 73%) and in the latter it is used about 10% of the time (with yu occurring about 90%).18 This could suggest that the distinctions between their useages were becoming blurred by the time of the Lüshi chun qiu as yu was gradually eclipsing hu in these post-verbal positions. Whatever the case, I would conclude that the absence of post-verbal hu is not a reliable indicator of anything more than perhaps the style of a particular Syncretist writer, if that. Using it to determine authentically Syncretist passages, as Graham did, may eliminate some that are.
One final point to note is that Graham says little more in this article about the “school of Chuang Tzu” material. He does not feature it as a subject of any of his linguistic tests beyond the tests for authorship of the Inner Chapters because it seems he has already concluded that its linguistic contrasts with them indicate a later group of followers of “Chuang Tzu’s own branch of Taoism.” By contrast Liu sees these chapters and Graham’s “rag-bag” chapters as the creations of the “Transmitter School” of Zhuangzi’s followers.19 As to this latter group, Liu presents phrases or terms from each of these Mixed Chapters that are similar to or identical with phrases or terms in the “inner chapters.” While these may be true, they cannot be used to establish that the entire chapter shares the same philosophical position. Graham’s work clearly demonstrates that these chapters do contain material related to the Inner Chapters as well as material related to all other philosophical positions found in the Chapter. Now that he has put forth his arguments only a detailed redaction and composition criticism of them will establish their provenance.
The Problem of Zhuangzi’s Syncretists
One of the distinctive characteristics of Graham’s identification of the philosophical positions in the text in contrast to the scholarship of others such as Guan and Liu is that he makes little attempt to link these positions with other contemporary intellectual lineages and in the questions of how the text came to be constituted with so many differing intellectual positions. What he does say about its textual history is simple and straightforward:
1.Zhuangzi wrote the seven inner chapters and related passages in the late fourth century B.C.;
2.later followers who wrote in his style created chapters 17–22;
3.a single Primitivist author influenced by the Laozi wrote chapters 8–11/28 in about 205 B.C.;
4.the Yangist miscellany is roughly contemporaneous with the Primitivist writings;
5.the Syncretists who wrote parts of chapters 12–14 and all of 15 and 33 also compiled the entire text sometime in the early Han.
In an article in the festschrift for Graham included at chapter 2 in the present volume, I argued that it was possible to link the group he identified as the Syncretists with a series of other works under the rubric of “Huang-Lao” or syncretic Daoism.20 Working with three categories of technical terms, “cosmology, psychology/self-cultivation, and political thought,” I found distinct commonalities between the Zhuangzi’s Syncretists and the authors of three of the “Techniques of the Mind” essays in the Guanzi 管子, the Huainanzi, and in Sima Tan’s 司馬談 definition of the Daoist lineage. I concluded that these commonalities indicated all belonged to the same lineage of practice and thought and that this constituted the sole surviving Daoist lineage in the early Han. In his reflections on this piece Graham largely agreed with these conclusions although he took exception to my identification of this lineage as “Huang-Lao” and to my argument that members of the Huainan circle actually compiled the Zhuangzi.21 Graham’s comments suggest agreement with linking the Syncretists from the Zhuangzi with these other syncretic Daoist works as the lineage that first defined “Daoism.” I think it is possible to extend these links even farther.
Andrew Meyer has argued that there are four chapters in the Lüshi chun qiu—3, 5, 17, and 25—that are largely made up of essays written by members of this Syncretic Daoist tradition.22 Since, as Wang Shumin and Liu have argued, there are a significant number of common passages between the Zhuangzi and this work, it is important to examine its possible relationship to the Zhuangzi and possible role in its transmission. Using the terms identified by Graham and myself as characteristic of Syncretic Daoism I have constructed the following table based on a preliminary investigation:
Table 6.1. Syncretic Daoist Technical Terms in the Lüshi chun qiu
| Categories and Terms | Chapters 3, 5, 17, 25 | Remainder of Text |
| COSMOLOGY | ||
| 天之道 The Way of Heaven | Chapter 3 (3x); Chapter 25 (1x) | Chapter 7 (1x); Chapter 20 (1x) |
| 天地之道 The Way of Heaven and Earth | none | none |
| 無爲 Non-action | Chapter 3 (2x); Chapter 17 (3x) | Chapter 12 (1x) in Postface |
| Chapter 25 (3x) | Chapter 13 (1x) | |
| 無形 Formlessness | Chapter 17 (1x) | Chapter 18 (2x) |
| 理 Natural patterns | Chapter 3 (3x); Chapter 5 (5x) | 43 x |
| Chapter 17 (12x); Chapter 25 (4x) | ||
| PSYCHOLOGY | ||
| 靜 Mental tranquillity | Chapter 3 (2x); Chapter 5 (5x) | none |
| Chapter 17 (13x); Chapter 25 (4x) | ||
| 虛 Mental emptiness | Chapter 17 (3x); Chapter 25 (3x) | none |
| 去智與故 Eschew wisdom and precedent | Chapter 3.4 去巧故 | none |
| Chapter 17.5 去想去意 | ||
| Chapter 17.3 棄智 | ||
| 去欲 Eschew desire | Chapter 17.5 去愛悪之心 | none |
| 心術 Techniques of the mind | none | none |
| 精 ┌ 氣 ┌ Vital essence | Chapter 3 (9x) | 9x |
| 精神 Quintessential spirit | Chapter 3 (2x) | Chapter 8 (1x) |
| 性 Innate nature | Chapter 3 (3x); | 48x (including 15x in Chapter 1) |
| Chapter 5 (2x) | ||
| Chapter 17 (10x); Chapter 25 (3x) | ||
| 壽 Longevity: desire for/techniques of | Chapter 3 (2x); Chapter 5 (2x); | Chapter 1 (3x); Chapter 2 (1x); |
| Chapter 17 (1x); Chapter 25 (1x) | Chapter 4 (1x) | |
| 神明 Spirit-like clarity | none | none |
| POLITICAL THOUGHT | ||
| 因 Adaptation | Chapter 17 (4x) | none |
| 應 Responsiveness | Chapter 3 (3x); Chapter 17 (7x) | 59x |
| Chapter 25 (3x) | ||
| 循 Compliance | Chapter 25 (2x) 理 | Chapter 12 (1x) in Postface |
| Chapter 3 (2x) 順性 | ||
| Chapter 17 (1x) 順天 | ||
| 宜 Suitability | Chapter 17 (1x) | none |
| 育萬物 Nurturing the myriads things | none | Chapter 21 (1x) |
| 畜下 Tend the people | Chapter 17 (1x) 畜人 | |
| 王天下 Rule the state | none | Chapter 2 (1x); Chapter 8 (1x) |
| (五)帝(三)王 The Five Thearchs and/Three Kings | Chapter 17 (1x) | Chapter 2 (2x); Chapters 6, 17, and 17 (1x each) |
| ADDITIONAL | ||
| 黃帝 The Yellow | Chapters 3 and 5 (1x each) | 15x |
| Thearch (favorable) |
NB: In the table “x” stands for “times.”
This table shows that there are a significant amount of shared technical terms between the Syncretic tradition of the Zhuangzi, the “Techniques of the Mind” texts in the Guanzi, the later Huainanzi, and now these four chapters of the Lüshi chun qiu. Of particular importance are the psychological terms from the Inner Cultivation tradition that advocates a meditation practice that involves the removal of thoughts, desires, and prior intellectual committments of all kinds, in an attempt to create a condition of tranquillity and emptiness needed to act selflessly and successfully in the world as characterized by phrases such as wuwei er wu buwei 無爲而無不爲 (take no action yet nothing is left undone). Such terms as jing 靜 and xu 虛 (tranquillity and emptiness) and phrases such as qu qiaogu 去巧故 casting off cleverness and precedent—or casting off thoughts and ideas//wisdom//and the mind of love and hate) are definitely part of the technical vocabulary of those who followed this practice.23 It is clearly commended to the ruler in essays from these four chapters such as 17.2, 17.8, and 25.3. A further similarity with Zhuangzi’s Syncretists is that inner cultivation is first and foremost to be practiced by the ruler, who maintains a similar hierchical structure to that found in, for example, Zhuangzi 13:24
凡君也者, 處平靜、任德化以聽其要, 若此則形性彌 (羸) 〔贏〕, 而耳目愈精; 百官慎職, 而莫敢愉 (綖) 〔綎〕; 人事其事, 以充其名。名實相保, 之謂知道。
As a general principle, a lord should dwell in tranquillity and quiescence and depend on the transforming influence of his Power in order to hear what is essential. In this way his bodily frame and inborn nature will gather an ever-greater harvest and his ears and eyes will have ever more energy. The hundred officials will all be careful in their duties, and none will dare be lax or remiss. It is by doing his job a man satisfies the meaning of his title.
When title and reality match,
This is called “knowing the Dao.” (Lüshi Chun qiu 17.4, “Not Personally”)25
These chapters also show a degree of use of other philosophical concepts such as the matching of name and reality here taken from the Legalists that is another hallmark of the Syncretic Daoist tradition. Other important Syncretist ideas such as “adaptation” (yin 因) and “compliance with natural patterns” (xun li 循理), and “spontaneous responsiveness (ying 應) are also found here. To be sure, such terms as “formlessness” (wuxing 無形), “The Way of Heaven and Earth” (tiandi zhi Dao 天地之道), “nurturing the myriad things” (yu wanwu 育萬物) and several others do not have the same importance in these Lüshi chun qiu writings as in other Syncretist works. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence in these tables to support further research on the theory that Syncretic Daoists wrote these chapters and that they were part of a larger intellectual tradition that not only included the Syncretists who wrote the material Graham identified in the Zhuangzi but also led directly to them.
The Problem of Zhuangzi’s Primitivist
There is considerable evidence from the Primitivist and Yangist sections of the Zhuangzi of certain intriguing parallels with the Lüshi chun qiu that warrant further examination and that could present a challenge to Graham’s conclusions that these two sections were written at a moment during the Qin-Han interregnum. Indeed, Liu Xiaogan lists a total of twenty-six parallel passages between the two texts, eleven of which come from chapter 28, “Yielding the Throne.”26 He uses them as evidence that the entire Zhuangzi was already extant and served as the source for the Lüshi chun qiu parallels, yet his logic is flawed. He assumes without question and without establishing criteria for directionality of borrowing that the Zhuangzi is always the source. He never considers the possibility that both texts were drawing on common oral or written sources or that the Lüshi chun qiu might have been the source for the Zhuangzi. Indeed, Graham concludes that the only parallel with the Primitivist chapters (10/10 and LSCQ 11.4) is from a common source.27 Furthermore, the only parallel with the Syncretist chapters is a narrative at Zhuangzi 12/33–37 and Lüshi chun qiu 20.2 in which the latter’s version is almost twice as long, thus making it more likely that it was the source and not vice versa.28 Nonetheless, the fact that Lüshi chun qiu 9.5 shows an awareness of the Cook Ding 庖丁 narrative (which itself is much too specific to the Zhuangzi to have come from a common source) and the fact that Lüshi chun qiu 14.8 contains almost verbatim the narrative about Zhuangzi and the mountain tree that begins chapter 20, indicates that some version of the Zhuangzi text was present at the court of Lü Buwei 呂不韋 and that it probably contained material from Zhuangzi and his immediate disciples. If an early recension of the Zhuangzi were present at the Qin 秦 court circa 240 B.C. and if it contained writings of Zhuangzi and his disciples, then what of the other three sections of the text that Graham has identified and how might that affect his dating of them?
After dispensing with the possibility that Lüshi chun qiu 11.4 took its version of the Robber Zhi narrative from Zhuangzi 10, Graham provides two pieces of evidence to support his concusion that the Primitivist wrote during the Qin-Han interregnum. The first is the following phrase from the Primitivist chapter 10, “Rifling Trunks (Qu qie 胠篋):”29
然而田成子一旦殺齊君而盜其國 … 十二世有其國。
However Tian Chengzi 田成子 in one morning murdered the lord of Qi and stole his state … and (his family) possessed the state of Qi for twelve generations.
The Tian family ruled Qi until it fell to Qin in 221 B.C. Thus, Graham reasons, the Primitivist author must have written these words after the Qin unification. However since no tense for the verb you 有 is indicated, another possible reading is that “(his family) has possessed the state of Qi for twelve generations.” Qian Mu 錢穆 lists twelve formal changes of rulership in Qi, where the Tian family effectively governed the state, beginning with Tian Qi’s 田乞 murder of the Yan family heir on the death of Duke Jing 景公 in 489 B.C. and continuing until the last Qi ruler, Wang Jian 王建, who ruled from 264 B.C. until the Qin conquest.30 Thus the Primitivist could have been writing at any point after 264 B.C., when the last Tian family member ascended the throne of Qi.
Additional evidence Graham provides for the interregnum date are several Primitivist references to a present age of death and destruction amidst which Confucians and Mohists “start putting on airs and flipping back their sleeves among the fettered and manacled.” He argues that this must be a reference to the revival of philosophical schools during the period following the death of the First Emperor but there is another intriguing possibility that takes us to the decade during which the Lüshi chun qiu was written and compiled. According to historical sources, at the same period Lü Buwei was inviting scholars to come to the Qin court to write a philosophical blueprint for governing the empire to be, he was undertaking several campaigns against rival states. Between 249 and 243 B.C. he directed three successful campaigns against the states of Zhao 趙, Han 韓, and Wei 衛 and effectively destroyed them as independent entities.31 It is possible that the turmoil the Primitivist writes about is what he has seen in one of these three states, ironically victimized by armies directed by the man who at the same time was opening his court to scholars of all intellectual persuasions, including of course the Confucians, Mohists, and the Yangists who the Primitivist also detests. Indeed, the courts of Zhao and Wei entertained numerous scholars of various schools before this time and some of the retainers who went to Qin could have easily come from one or both of these intellectual centers.
Furthermore there is intriguing textual evidence that places Graham’s Primitivist at the court of Lü Bu-wei during this period. The one phrase that Graham demonstrates is the most characteristic of the Primitivist’s writing—“the essentials of our nature and destiny” (xingming zhi qing 性命之情)—is found excusively in only one other Warring States philosophical work: the Lüshi chun qiu.32 This distinctive phrase occurs nine times in the Zhuangzi, all of which are in the Primitivist chapters or related passages.33 In the Lüshi chun qiu there are twelve uses in six passages and they are distributed in an interesting fashion across the entire work:
1.3: twice in same passage (p. 3/lines 12,13);
13.5: twice in same passage (67/5);
16.2: once (92/5);
17.4: once (103/6);
17.5: thrice in same passage (104/3,4);
25.3: thrice in same passage (162/9,17).34
It is important to note that the essay 1.3, “Giving Weight to the Self” (Zhong ji 重己) is one of the five essays in the Lüshi chun qiu that Graham follows Feng Yulan 馮玉蘭 in identifying as Yangist. And that essays 17.4 “Not Personally” (Wugong 勿躬), 17.5 “Knowing the Measure” (Zhi du 知度), and 25.3 “Having the Measure” (You du 有度) are in the group that I have earlier linked with Syncretic Daoism. These form an interesting pattern that we need to contextualize.
A distinctive theory of the inborn nature of human beings is completely absent from Daoist works written prior to 240 B.C. This includes Guanzi’s “Inward Training” (“Neiye” 內業), Zhuangzi’s Inner Chapters and most of the “school of Chuang Tzu” material identified by Graham, and the Laozi.35 The first enunciation of such a theory is in the Primitivist chapters of the Zhuangzi and I have argued that it emerged from dialogue with the Yangists rather than the Confucians because it shares a similar—but not identical—vision of human nature. For the Yangists, the single most important of the spontaneous tendencies of human nature is longevity.36 They argued that human beings tend to live long if they keep themselves from being disturbed by the “external things” of this world such as fame and profit. The second important aspect of human nature is the desire of the five sense faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin) for sense-objects. It is the senses’ desire for their objects that in a fundamental way helps to maintain the health and the development of the organism, thus enabling it to realize its inherent tendency for longevity. However the senses themselves need to be regulated and limited to only the “suitable” amount of stimulation. Over-stimulation causes the senses to be impaired and eventually damaged. Thus there is a suitable amount of stimulation that is conducive to the health and development of the human organism and that suitable amount must be determined by Sages; the senses on their own do not have the ability to do this. Self-cultivation for the Yangists therefore consists of nourishing one’s inherent nature by strictly limiting sense stimulation to the appropriate degree needed to maintain health and vitality. One of their principal practices was to prevent the loss of one’s finite supply of “essential vital energy”(jing 精), which is lost due to over-stimulation of the senses. The Yangists shared an understanding of how the human organism functioned with the thinkers of the Inner Cultivation tradition and with early Chinese medical philosophers and practitioners who envisioned a body-mind complex made up of various systems of qi 氣 (vital energy).
The Primitivist understanding of “the essentials of our nature and destiny” seems to be an expansion of the Yangist position from within the Yangist model of human nature. Just like the Yangists, in their theory of human nature the Primitivists chose to focus on the senses. They argue that it is not merely the desire of our senses for sense-objects that constitutes our inborn nature, but, rather, their spontaneous tendency to perceive clearly and accurately that does. Furthermore, contra the other traditions that focus on human nature, the Primitivist argues that this spontaneous tendency can only be realized if the senses are unimpaired by either the Yangist rational attempt to limit their stimulation or the Confucian attempt to circumscribe them by the moral dictates of humanity and rightness or by cultural standards of beauty and taste. Thus, the Primitivist theory of human nature is based on a sense perception model just as is the Yangist and both differ distinctly from Confucian virtue models that entail the conquering of the senses because they easily lead to self indulgence.
An excellent contrast between Yangist and Primitivist theories can be seen in the following two passages:
Lüshi chun qiu 2.3, “The Essential Desires” (Qingyu 情欲)
天生人而使有貪有欲。欲有情, 情有節。聖人修節以止欲, 故不過行其情也。故耳之欲五聲, 目之欲五色, 口之欲五味, 情也。此三者, 貴賤愚智賢不肖欲之若一, 雖神農、黃帝, 其與桀、紂同。聖人之所以異者, 得其情也
Heaven generates human beings and causes them to have lusts and desires. Desires have essential aspects. These essential aspects have limits. The Sage cultivates these limits in order to regulate his desires. Thus they do not exceed what is essential to them. Therefore the ear’s desire for the Five Tones, eye’s desires for the Five Colors, the mouth’s desire for the Five Flavors: these are the essentials. The noble and base, the foolish and the wise are not alike, but in desiring these they are as one. Even Shen Nong 神農 and the Yellow Emperor are the same as (the tyrants) Jie 桀 and Zhou 紂 when it comes to these. The reason that the sage is different is because he attains the essentials …37
Zhuangzi 8, “Webbed Toes” (Pianmu 駢拇)
且夫屬其性乎仁義者, 雖通如曾史, 非吾所謂臧也; 屬其性於五味, 雖通如俞兒, 非吾所謂臧也; 屬其性乎五聲, 雖通如師曠, 非吾所謂聰也; 屬其性乎五色, 雖通如離朱, 非吾所謂明也。吾所謂臧, 非仁義之謂也, 臧於其德而已矣; 吾所謂臧者, 非所謂仁義之謂也, 任其性命之情而已矣; 吾所謂聰者, 非謂其聞彼也, 自聞而已矣; 吾所謂明者, 非謂其見彼也, 自見而已矣。
Moreover whomever keeps his nature subordinate to Humanity and Rightness, though as intelligent as Zeng 曾 and Shi 史, is not what I would call a fine man; and whomever keeps his nature subordinate to the Five Tastes, though as intelligent as Yu Er 俞兒, is not what I would call a fine man either. Whomever keeps his nature subordinate to the Five Tones, though as intelligent as Music-Master Kuang 師曠, does not have what I would call good hearing; and whomever keeps his nature subordinate to the Five Colors, though as intelligent as Li Zhu 離朱, does not have what I would call good eyesight. When I call someone a fine man, it is not Humanity and Rightness that I am talking about, but simply the fineness in his Power; nor when I call someone a fine man is it the Five Tastes I am talking about, but simply a trust in the essentials of our nature and destiny. When I say someone has good hearing, I mean not that he hears something, but simply that he hears with his own ears; and when I say someone has good eyesight, I mean not that he sees something, but simply that he sees with his own eyes.38
The point being made here is further clarified in Zhuangzi 16,“Menders of Nature:” “If someone else lays down the direction for you, you blinker your own Power.”39 The Power is what develops from the spontaneous manifestation of our inborn nature to perceive things clearly. To do so spontaneously and harmoniously and completely without self-consciousness is what constitutes our innate nature. Perhaps borrowing images from Laozi, the Primitivist argues in chapter 9, “Horses Hooves (Mati 馬蹄):” “In the Simple (su 素) and Unhewn (pu 撲) the nature of the people is found.”40 The Confucians with their pre-established categories of morality and the Yangists with their rational determination of stimulation into such categories as Five Tones, and so forth, introduce a strong element of self-consciousness into the human psyche and destroy our innate ability to function spontaneously and harmoniously. And so the Primitivist laments in “Horses Hooves:”
夫赫胥氏之時, 民居不知所為, 行不知所之 … 及至聖人, 屈折禮樂 … , 縣跂仁義 … 而民乃始踶跂好知, 爭歸於利 … 此亦聖人之過也。
In the time of the House of Hexu 赫胥氏 (when Power was at its utmost), the people when at home were unaware of what they were doing, when travelling did not know where they were going. … Then came the sages, bowing and crouching to Rites and Music … groping in the air for Humanity and Rightness … and for the first time the people were on tiptoes in their eagerness for knowledge. Their competition became centered on profit. … This too is the error of the sages.41
If we return to examine the six passages in which the dozen occurences of the phrase, “the essentials of our nature and destiny” are found in the Lüshi chun qiu, an interesting pattern emerges. The initial use is in Chapter 1 and this is the only occurrence of this phrase in the first twelve chapters of the work (the “Almanacs”), the only ones that conform completely to Lü Buwei’s original plan. The Postface to this first major division is dated August 11, 239 B.C., but then Lü’s political difficulties grew as he became increasingly compromised by his involvement in the so-called “Lao Ai 嫪毐 Affair.” He was removed from the office of Prime Minister in 237 B.C. and committed suicide two years later when the future First Emperor exiled him to Shu 蜀 (Sichuan). During this difficult period Lü must have had to increasingly concentrate on political affairs instead of his book, which seems to have been hastily finalized and could not follow his original plan for it.42 Thus the initial use of our phrase is Yangist; both it and the theory of inborn human nature that includes it, seems to have been topics for debate and discussion in Lü’s intellectual circle. The five remaining uses of the phrase “the essentials of our nature and destiny” seem to either extend it or challenge it. Let us examine all these uses in their contexts:
1.3, “Giving Weight to the Self” argues that our individual life is our most precious possession that must be attentively guarded by the reasoned and moderate fulfillment of the senses and that whomever injures it “does not fathom the “essentials of our nature and destiny.” As we have seen, these essentials are the desire of the senses for sense objects and the need to rationally regulate them.43
13.5, “Carefully Listening” (Jinting 謹聽) argues that Yao 堯 found Shun 舜 worthy and Shun found Yu 禹 worthy because “They listened with their own ears” and thus relied upon “the essentials of nature and destiny.” Thus this phrase must refer to the senses’ tendency to perceive clearly and accurately.44
In 16.2, “Observing the Age” (Guan shi 觀世), Liezi 列子 refuses the gift of grain from Prince Yang of Zheng 鄭子陽 even though he is starving because the prince was only offering it based on someone else’s recommendation and did not directly know of Liezi’s abilities on his own: “Would he also kill me based on someone elses’ recommendation?” he reasons. Later Prince Yang was killed in a rebellion and Liezi, not being associated with him, survived. Because he declined after seeing how things might change, he “was well-versed in the essentials of our nature and destiny” states the author. Here it seems to entail using our inborn tendency to perceive and know things clearly rather than to rely on others as a basis for making decisions and is thus a similar use to that of 13.5.45
17.4, “Not Personally, (Wugong 勿躬)” argues that sage-kings, by nourishing their spirit and cultivating their Power, govern effectively because their inner cultivation prevents them from interfering with the work of their officials and meddling in the lives of the people. Thus “good rulers take care to preserve the essentials of nature and destiny,” which here seems to refer to the inherent tendency for their spirits to be united with the Grand Unity (Taiyi 太一) a synonym for the Dao, and to thereby attain the Power. This implies that it is a natural human tendency for the mind to be tranquil and unbiased because at our deepest levels humans are grounded in the Dao.46
In 17.5, “Knowing the Measure (Zhi du 知度),” the essentials of according with the Dao are to be found in knowing the essentials of nature and destiny to which the superior ruler submits by relinquishing love and hatred and using emptiness and nonaction as his foundation for governing others. This use seems consistent with the prior one.47
25.3, “Having the Measure (You du 有度),” quotes the teaching of Jizi 季子 that all those who are able to penetrate (tong 通) “essentials of our nature and destiny” are able to govern effectively because they have controlled their selfish impulses and become impartial and selfless. Confucian and Mohist dicta of humaneness and morality are alien to nature: only by penetrating the essentials of nature and destiny will people become spontaneously humane and moral. Realizing these essentials involves holding fast to the One by an apophatic practice of emptying the mind. Again here the spontaneous tendency to become tranquil and realize our innate union with the Dao is meant by this phrase.48
It looks like the understanding of our phrase in the Syncretic Daoist essays in chapters 17 (“Not Personally” and “Knowing the Measure”) and 25 (“Having the Measure”), directly contradicts that in the Yangist “Giving Weight to the Self.” In the latter, the individual self is the focus of cultivation; it is the self that rationally regulates the natural desires of the senses for sense objects. In the former three essays the focus of self cultivation is on the ontological basis to human nature in the Dao that can only be attained when these selfish concerns can be set aside. Indeed, their position is similar to what emerged in the Huainanzi a century later but which the Syncretist authors in the Zhuangzi were completely silent about.49 Indeed, the concept of human nature is totally absent from their writings.
The uses of our phrase in the essays chapters 13, “Carefully Listening,” and 16, “Observing the Age,” seem to be working within the same model we find in the Yangist understanding of human nature in “Giving Weight to the Self” and the three other early Yangist essays, 1.2, “Making Life the Foundation” (Ben sheng 本生), 2.2, “Valuing Life” (Gui sheng 貴生), and 2.3, “The Essential Desires” (Qingyu). In these instances the model is that of sense perception. For the Yangists it is the desire of the senses for sense objects that is the inborn tendency of human nature and in these two other passages it is the tendency of the senses to perceive clearly that is this basis. In fact the understanding of human nature in 13.5 and 16.2 seems strikingly close to that in Zhuangzi’s Primitivist in its assumption that this inborn nature consists of the spontaneous tendency of the senses to perceive clearly and accurately and that this must be the basis of an enlightened awareness.50
Given this theoretical similarity with the Primitivist and given the earlier argument that the Primitivist developed his theory of human nature by extending a Yangist model, I think it likely that the Primitivist developed his own unique theory in response to the four early Yangist essays of the Lüshi chun qiu. There are two possible scenarios for how this happened:
• He read the text at some later point in time (as Graham would have it);
• He was present at the court of Lü Buwei and either participated in the disputations that led to the writing of the text or read the text perhaps when the initial twelve chapters were completed in 239 B.C.
As for the former scenario, we have already noted the problems with Graham’s justification for his late date of authorship. Furthermore, given the vagaries of textual transmission, especially during the latter half of the third century B.C., it is much more likely that the Primitivist formed his ideas in dialogue with the Yangists at the court of Lü Buwei than that he came across them in written form forty years later in some other place. Moreover, if the Primitivist had read the entire Lüshi chun qiu text he would have seen that the Syncretic Daoist authors of 17 and 25 had already given a Daoist response to the Yangist misunderstanding of “the essentials of our nature and destiny.” And if he had read the entire text and then disagreed with the authors of 17 and 25, he would have been prompted to include a criticism of them in his attack. Yet this is not the case.
Therefore, I think it likely that the Primitivist wrote his essays in direct response to the early Yangist essays of the Lüshi chun qiu and before others authored the Syncretic Daoist challenges to the Yangist theory of human nature now found in chapters 17 and 25. This places him in Qin after Lü Buwei’s last military campaign in 243 B.C., the devastation from which he seems to have witnessed, and before Lü was removed from office in 237. Furthermore, given what Graham describes as his “pugnacious attitude” in these writings, it would seem that he became disaffected with the entire enterprise and with its director. Indeed, if we look carefully at his representation of Robber Zhi in “Rifling Trunks,” one can almost see Lü Buwei: “The man who steals a buckle is put to death; the man who steals a state becomes a lord, and at the gates of a lord you’ll see the humane and righteous.”51
For a number of reasons I think that the Primitivist was also a follower of the Zhuangzi of the “Inner Chapters. First, his essays were included in the book; I think with further study we will find that all of the thirty-three chapters had some relationship to the first seven. Second, while social criticism predominates in these chapters, they are not totally without mystical concerns. For example, the exemplary person when forced to rule does so through nonaction (wuwei 無為) and “… sitting still as a corpse he will look majestic as a dragon; from the silence of the abyss he will speak with a voice of thunder … He will move with the numinous and proceed with the Heavenly, will be relaxed and nonacting. …”52 Third, as Graham notes in “How Much of Chuang Tzu …” the phrase zai you 在宥 (“to locate and circumscribe [one’s nature]”) found in Zhuangzi 11 is also present in the Inner Chapters53 Finally, the Primitivist shares the same essential concern of the Inner Chapters: the most important thing one can engage in in this life is the cultivation of the numinous and spontaneous qualities of one’s being and the concomitant development of Inner Power and manifestation of the Way. The Primitivist embeds these qualities in human nature and argues that to first realize them and then fulfill them constitute “the essentials of our nature and destiny.”
Therefore, I conclude that these Primitivist chapters were written during the debates that presumably occurred at the Qin court of Lü Buwei before and during the writing of the Lüshi chun qiu by a lineal descendant of the historical Zhuang Zhou 莊周 who is also likely to have brought the extant writings of his teacher and his tradition to the court. This person responded particularly to the Yangists and from them adapted a number of unique concepts into early Daoist thought including the notion of inborn nature. However, due to the excessively combative and polemical nature of his writings, the Primitivist chapters were not included in the Lüshi chun qiu, if, indeed, they were ever even submitted for inclusion.
The Problem of Zhuangzi’s Yangists
This then brings us to a reconsideration of the four Yangist chapters and why they are included in the Zhuangzi. Graham identifies them as Yangist because they contain many of the technical terms that independent sources say characterized their philosophy, terms such as “honoring life” (guisheng 貴生), “giving weight to life” (zhongsheng 重生), and “keeping life (or nature) intact” (quansheng/xing 全生/性). To be sure these terms also abound in the five Yangist essays in the Lüshi chun qiu. However if these Zhuangzi chapters really are Yangist, as Graham would have it, then how did they find their way into the Zhuangzi? If they are not Yangist, as Liu Xiaogan would have it, then why do they contain so many Yangist ideas? Part of the explanation may be found in the eleven shared narratives between Zhuangzi 28 and the Lüshi chun qiu:
Table 6.2. Shared Narratives in Zhuangzi 28 and the Lüshi chun qiu
| Narrative in Zhuangzi 28 | HYZZ Loc.+ Graham trans | Location in Lüshi chun qiu | Knoblock/Riegel |
| 1. Yao 堯 and Xu You 許由 | 28/1–3; ACG 224 | 2.2 | 80 |
| 4. Shun 舜 and farmer | 28/8–9; ACG 225 | 19.1 longer | 475 |
| 5. King Danfu 大王亶父 | 28/9–15; ACG 225 | 21.4 | 557–58 |
| 6. Prince Sou flees | 28/15–18; ACG 226 | 2.2 | 81 |
| 7. Master Hua 子華子 | 28/18–23; ACG 226 | 21.4 | 558 |
| 8. Lu 魯君 and Yan He 顏闔 | 28/23–31; ACG226–27 | 2.2 slightly fuller | 81–82 |
| 9. Master Lie 子列子 | 28/31–35; ACG 227 | 16.2 has conclusion | 380–81 |
| 14. Master Zhan 瞻子 | 28/56–59; ACG229–30 | 21.4 omits conclusion honoring Mou of Wei | 558–59 |
| 15. Confucius trapped | 28/59–68; ACG230–31 | 14.6 | 325–26 |
| 16. Shun and Wuze 無擇 | 28/68–70; ACG 231 | 19.1 longer; has key | 475–78 |
| 17. Tang 湯 and Jie 桀 | 28/70–78; ACG 231–32 | variants and conclusion | |
| 18. Bo Yi 伯夷 and Shu Qi 叔齊 | 28/78–87; ACG 232–33 | 12.4 longer; many variants; approving | 266–68 |
To begin with, six of the eleven shared narratives are found in Yangist essays of the Lüshi chun qiu. All of these are fairly close textually with only a handful of variants among them. Four of the remaining five vary rather more extensively from their Zhuangzi counterparts and three of those have different conclusions. While Graham thinks that the Lüshi chun qiu was the source and Liu would have it the other way round, I find it difficult to determine a clear direction of borrowing between them. I would hypothesize that both texts draw on a common source, perhaps a Yangist collection of tales for use in disputation that could be used for different ends, depending upon one’s ideological persuasion. Graham argues that the Zhuangzi collection of these passages is Yangist but perhaps there is another explanation.
The last three narratives in “Yielding the Throne” are different from the rest, as Graham has noted. To him they they are examples of the wasting of life that the Yangists so detested but if we look to their Lüshi chun qiu parallels we see that they were put to different uses. Lüshi chun qiu 19.1, “Departing from the Conventional” (Li su 離俗) argues for an extreme Confucian position that we can track back to Mencius 6A10, that if one keeps life at the expense of what is Right one is not an ethical person. Here these men who killed themselves rather than dishonor their sense of “Reason and Rightness” (yi li 義理) are honored; the Zhuangzi parallel omits this conclusion. In Lüshi chun qiu 12.4, “Sincerity and Purity” (Cheng lian 誠廉), the story of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves to death rather than serve a corrupt (Confucian) Zhou conquest, looks every bit a Mohist attack against the Yangists in its conclusion that it is more important to keep intact one’s principles of benefit for all, rather than selfish gain even at the cost of one’s life. Of course “Yielding the Throne” excoriates these men for their “lofty punctiliousness and harsh code of conduct.”
Now while these narratives could have been collected by the Yangists, their use by Confucian and Mohist extremists in the Lüshi chun qiu suggests that such views were being argued in the Lü Buwei circle. The Primitivist is particularly harsh in his denunciation of both these groups and if, indeed, he was present there he could have also been interested in collecting these passages for use in arguing for a different vision.
One possibility not envisioned by Graham and Liu is that Zhuangzi 28, rather than being a Yangist compilation or the writings of a disciple of Zhuangzi, is a collection of narratives for use in disputation against the Yangists, Confucians, and Mohists—but drawn from them—that was created by the Primitivist.54 Indeed, this could have been inspired by the idea of practicing “saying from a lodging-place (Yuyan 寓言),” which is advocated in a brief essay in chapter 27 Graham links to the Inner Chapters.55 On this theory then, the Primitivist would be the author of Zhuangzi 29 and 31.56 This would explain the commonality of the figure of Robber Zhi to both chapters 29 and 10, and many other shared technical terms and metaphors such as their interest in inborn nature, their strong anti-Confucianism, their promoting of a primitive agrarian Utopia, the touches that Graham recognizes as “mystical” in “Robber Zhi” such as the advice: “Return and seek what is from Heaven in you … Take your course from Heaven’s pattern. … and … In accord with the Way walk your meandering path.”57 It would also explain some of the Taoist sounding phrases in chapter 31, “The Old Fisherman, (Yufu 漁父)” such as “Carefully guard the Genuine in you” and “The Genuine is the means by which we draw upon Heaven, it is spontaneous and irreplaceable” and “… it is from the Way that the myriad things take their course.”58 And it would also explain the six examples of shared narratives between the Primitivist essays and these “Yangist” chapters enumerated by Liu Xiaogan.59
If these four “Yangist” chapters were actually created by the Primitivist, they would have entered the Zhuangzi along with his essays now found in chapters 8–11 and would have been included because the Primitivist was himself a follower of Zhuangzi and was the person who brought what existed of the Zhuangzi text to Lü Buwei’s court. However if the Primitivist left the court in a huff, how then did his text get transmitted from there? Perhaps the anwer is to be found in the resolution of another problem: the classification of chapter 16, “Menders of Nature.”
The Problem of Chuang Tzu 16, “Menders of Nature” (Shanxing 繕性)
The classification of Chapter 16 “Menders of Nature” has been problematic. Liu Xiaogan links it to the “Huang-Lao” chapters of the text but Graham finds it unlike anything else in the entire work and refuses to classify it.60 In my opinion this chapter is very close to the Primitivist material.
There are two principal reasons why Graham fails to link “Menders of Nature” to the Primitivist writings, although he does see some strong parallels. The first is that this chapter contains a series of Confucian definitions derived from Daoist concepts. These are found in the thirty-seven graphs found at 16/3–4.61 The second is that chapter 16 does not have any of the expressions characteristic of the Primitivist’s very distinctive style.
However, scholars since the Song dynasty have questioned the authenticity of the Confucian definitions in these two lines. Recently they include Qian Mu, Guan Feng, and Chen Guying 陳鼓應.62 Since, as Graham has pointed out, there are a number of other places in the text that appear to be glosses inserted by a compiler (see for example four quotations from the Laozi he feels were inserted into the Primitivist essays), there is every reason to believe that these sentences were written by a Syncretist editor who was contending that Daoists and Confucians weren’t that different after all. This will be clearer if we examine the disputed passage (which contains 37 graphs whose translation I have italicized) in context:
古之治道者, 以恬養知; 生而无以知為也, 謂之以知養恬。知與恬交相養, 而和理出其性。夫德, 和也; 道, 理也。德无不容, 仁也; 道无不理, 義也; 義明而物親, 忠也; 中純實而反乎情, 樂也; 信行容體而順乎文, 禮也。禮樂徧行, 則天下亂矣。彼正而蒙己德, 德則不冒, 冒則物必失其性也。
The men of old who cultivated the Way used calm to nurture knowing. They knew how to live but did not use knowing to do anything; one may say that they used knowing to nurture calm. When knowing and calm nurture each other harmony and pattern issue from our nature. The Power is the harmony, the Way is the Pattern. The Power harmonizing everything is Humaneness; the Way patterning everything is Rightness; when Rightness is clarified and we feel close to other things, this is Loyalty; … when something pure and real from within you gets expressed, there is Music; when trustworthy conduct has a harmonious embodiment that conforms to elegant patterns, there are Rites. When Rites or Music are universally practiced, the world falls into disorder. If something else lays down the direction for you, you blinker your own power. As for the Power, it will not venture blindly; and things that do venture blindly are sure to lose their own natures.”63
The most striking thing about this passage is the contrast between the problematic sentences and the two that immediately follow them. How can the author be advocating Rites and Music and other Confucian virtues in one breath and then criticizing them in the next? Criticism of the deleterious effects of culture, which would include such virtues, is the norm in this essay rather than the anomaly. Furthermore there are no absolutely no places in the entire essay in which Confucian values are advocated. If we take these thirty-seven graphs as an editor’s gloss and remove them, then the essay can be definitively linked with the Primitivist chapters.
In addition to sharing the Primitivist interest in the Way and its Inner Power as we see in the above passage, the author of “Menders of Nature” shares the following themes with the Primitivist:
1.Both advocate and defend the life of the hermit.
2.Both criticize cultural institutions for meddling with inborn nature:
a.Confucian practices and ideas
b.“wisdom”
c.cultural norms of taste, beauty, etc.
3.Both harken back to primitive Utopias and use very similar descriptions.
4.Both detail the decline from this and see it as a loss of Power, which they concur in defining as the ability to act and live spontaneously in accord with the Way;
5.Both are unique in the text for their being pivotally concerned with inborn nature and “nature and destiny.”64
However there are a few differences. First, as Graham points out, the author of “Menders of Nature” does not use any of the distinctive expressions of the Primitivist author. Second, he is more positive about the possibility that certain kinds of knowledge (properly harmonized with quiescence; not used to do anything) can be beneficial. Third, he criticizes the Confucians and Yangists, as does the Primitivist, but not the Mohists, perhaps indicating he wrote at a slightly later time when they were no longer a viable intellectual rival. Finally he talks positively about Pattern (li 理), an idea much further developed by the Syncretic lineages of early Daoism and, by the way, a particular concern of the authors of the Lüshi chun qiu.
For all these reasons I conclude that the author of “Menders of Nature” was a different person than the author of the Primitivist essays, but because of their shared perspective and opinions, this author was likely a disciple who wrote at a slightly later time. Like the Primitivist, he is a believer in the type of minimalistic government found in Laozi and he uses technical terms from the latter, most importantly Dao, De, the Unhewn (pu 樸), and spontaneity (ziran 自然). On the theory that his teacher, the Primitivist author, left the Qin court a bitter man, he could very well have left his student in charge of his writings and of a copy of the extant Zhuangzi text. This author of “Menders of Nature” might have found a home with the Syncretist Daoist authors of Lüshi chun qiu 17 and 25 and it was this group that continued to transmit the Zhuangzi text, now expanded by the addition of the Primitivist essays in chapters 8–11 and his disciple’s essay in chapter 16. On this theory, later members of this Syncretist tradition added the remainder of the Zhuangzi text and transmitted all this material into the Han where it eventually ended up in Liu An’s court in Huainan.65 This theory, while admittedly tentative and in need of further corroboration, has the benefit of explaining how the different strata of the text that Graham accurately identified all came to be part of it.
Conclusion
Angus Graham’s groundbreaking research on the different authorial voices in the Zhuangzi stopped short of answering a number of key questions about the history of the text, the most important of which is how the diverse positions he correctly identified came to be considered part of the text. I have tried to answer some of these questions by focussing on the relationship of the Syncretist, Primitivist, and Yangist sections to material in the Lüshi chun qiu. Based upon the evidence and arguments evinced above, I would present the following theory of the early textual history of the Zhuangzi:
By the time Lü Buwei announced the establishment of an intellectual center at the Qin court in about 250 B.C., the text consisted of the material now found in the Inner Chapters and most—if not all—of the “school of Chuang Tzu” material now found in chapters 17–22. In addition much of the material in chapters 23–27 and 32 could also have been written by this time. Future composition criticism of these conflated chapters will hopefully establish all the different viewpoints contained within them and how they were compiled.
This early recension was brought to the Qin court by a follower of the historical Zhuangzi who later penned the chapters Graham calls “Primitivist.” He wrote them in response to Yangist ideas now found in the Lüshi chun qiu but left the court in disgust over the prevalence of Yangist, Confucian, and Mohist ideas there and over his contempt for Lü Buwei himself, whom he may have satirized through the figure of Robber Zhi. Before leaving, the Primitivist compiled the collection of narratives in “Yielding the Throne” and tried his hand at using some of them in “Robber Zhi” and “The Old Fisherman.” After he left, his writings were added to the text, perhaps by his disciple, who penned “Menders of Nature.” As the Lü Buwei circle collapsed after 235 B.C., this disciple may have left Qin with the Syncretic Daoist group that authored many of the essays in Lüshi chun qiu 3, 5, 17, and 25. I have elsewhere argued that this group was the first to attempt to self-consciously build something that could be called a Daoist “school” and that they transmitted Daoist practices and texts into the Han dynasty.66 At some point this group added their own ideas to the text of the Zhuangzi and decades later brought it to the court of Liu An at Huainan (a theory Graham took to be “an attractive conjecture”). Thus the original recension of the Zhuangzi was finally established.
Of course much of this is hypothetical and awaits further research. It is difficult to say how much the textual interference of Guo Xiang has altered the materials on which we may base our final conclusions. But there is no doubt that we would be much farther from a resolution of the many questions that have surrounded the text of the Zhuangzi for over a millenium without the innovative scholarship of Angus Graham.
This chapter has been edited from its original source to better fit the current volume.