The “Contemplative Hermeneutic” and the
Problem of Zhuangzi’s Inner Chapters
I would like to end this collection with a few words about the vast temporal-spatial jigsaw puzzle of the early history and philosophy of the tradition of practice and theory that came to be called “Daoism.” I stand in awe of the challenge of filling in the missing pieces of this puzzle, most of which we may never know. At the same time I want to also recognize that we must approach this difficult task with as many of the tools from the toolkit of the cultural historian as we can.
The first of these is surely archaeology. Because of the archaeological discoveries of the past half century we are starting to locate and circumscribe (in the apt phrase of the title of chapter 11 of the Zhuangzi “Zai you” 在宥) more of these missing pieces. The manuscripts excavated from tombs that can reliably be dated from the fourth to the second centuries BCE have filled in some of these missing pieces but also extended the boundaries of the puzzle to previously unknown locations. Texts like the Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水 (Grand Unity Generates Water) from Guodian (ca. 310 BCE), the Shiwen 十聞 (Ten Questions) from Mawangdui and the Wuxing 五行 (Five Conducts) from both tombs have enriched our understanding of the philosophical tradition via works previously unknown. These works and others like them as well as the parallel passages to extant works from the received tradition like the Laozi 老子 also found in both these sites have increased the challenges to certain cherished historical beliefs that have been transmitted for millennia in China.
The second of these tools is historical criticism. The post-modernist intellectual revolution has led to the serious questioning of many of the accepted historical shibboleths that have dominated Chinese historiography for centuries. I have identified a number of these in the introduction to this book as they pertain to the study of classical Daoism. I have also mentioned the importance of the challenges to the classification of the Six “Schools” of Chinese philosophy raised by Sarah Queen and by Michael Nylan and Mark Csíkszentmíhalyi that have helped us to think more critically about such traditional systems of organization.1
The third of these tools is textual criticism in its varied forms including textual analysis, philology, and bibliography. It is to this tool that I would like to turn my attention, especially as it pertains to the study of one of the foundational works of the classical Daoist tradition, and one to which I have devoted a significant amount of writing over the course of my academic career, as reflected in this collection. This is, of course, the Zhuangzi.
While this collection of published articles contains its fair share of textual criticism, there is a fourth tool with which I have combined it: something I would like to call a “contemplative hermeneutic.” What this means is that in examining the creation and transmission of the textual record of the pre-Han and early Han traditions it is important that we always bear in mind that these texts emerge from specific social contexts that involved not just philosophy but also practices. This is particularly relevant in two recent and excellent articles on the text of the Zhuangzi by Esther Klein, and Stefan Peter Bumbacher.2 The work of these two scholars seriously calls into question much of what we have come to believe about the nature of this collection. Their conclusions have done much to influence the scholarly consideration of this important question and as I conclude this collection I feel it is important to place their insightful textual critical work into this somewhat broader context.
As I have argued throughout the chapters of this collection, the surviving texts of the tradition later called “Daojia” 道家 (the family or lineage of the Way) by Sima Tan 司馬談 show a significant pattern of shared ideas in the categories of cosmology, self-cultivation, and political thought. These ideas constitute a kind of philosophical “fingerprint” with a unique and readily identifiable set of distinctive meanings and relationships with one another. While it is unlikely that these fingerprints indicate the existence of anything as organized as what would be called a “philosophical school” in the style of Greek Sophists or Epicureans, the commonalities in thought and practice presented in the pages of this book indicate that the people who created and transmitted these texts shared a worldview in which the contemplative practices of inner cultivation were central. Whether it be the apophatic meditative practices of emptying out the normal contents of consciousness called “cleaning out the lodging place of the spirit,” “wiping clear the profound mirror,” “the fasting of the mind or “sitting and forgetting,” all practices that focus the attention and lead to the flowing cognition of “cognitive attunement,” the evidence for contemplative practices in our textual sources can no longer be doubted. Or, at least, it is now incumbent on those who doubt this to argue how to interpret these sources in a different way.
It is important to remember that the transmission of texts and of practices does not occur in a vacuum; it is the result of the life activity of the people who created them and the social organizations of those people who transmitted them. The creation, preservation, and transmission of texts during the Warring States and early Han were not easy due to the immense challenges of life in those several centuries before the Han unification. This included the scarcity of writing materials and of literate people to use them. Textual creation and transmission also had to be fairly localized at least at first, because of the many state borders and relentless warfare that took place within and between them during this period. Because of this, most of the traditions for which we have evidence must have begun locally within certain states. Further, they very likely began with the direct teaching of distinctive practices to students that included texts related to practices and the insights derived from them that began with oral transmission.3 Thus when written texts emerge, two of the most common literary genres are rhymed tetra syllabic verse—what I have called “early Daoist wisdom poetry”—and didactic narratives, both of which are easier to remember than logically argued essays.4 Because of this, Sima Tan must have known at least representative texts and the practices they transmitted when he put together his classification of the “Six Traditions.” Even though this scheme may have had bibliographical value it is unlikely that he created these categories completely out of his imagination. Much more likely is that he was creating these categories based on his understanding of the transmission of distinctive patterns of thought and practice via master-student lineages.
The point I would like to make here is that we have not yet sufficiently taken into account the implications of the distinctive practices that Sima Tan associates with each of his “traditions” for the creation and transmission of the texts that have survived from the Warring States period. We have seen that for each of the traditions he identified, he lists a specific practice (shu 術): ritual performance for the Rujia (the tradition of scholarship, popularly called the “Confucians”); bureaucratic management for the Fajia (the tradition of legal organization, popularly called the “Legalists”), apophatic inner cultivation and its application for the Daojia (the tradition of the Way, popularly called “Daoists”), and so on.5 The very creation and transmission of texts that are grounded in the mastery of a foundational practice requires a social context in which organizations of people are involved, even if these organizations are as minimal as the basic structure of the teacher-student relationship. Volker Scheid, in his groundbreaking history of a 400 year old tradition of classical Chinese medicine aptly states:
… a practice relies on the transmission of skills and expertise between masters and novices. As novices develop into masters themselves, they change who they are but also earn a say in defining the goods that the practice embodies and seeks to realize. To accomplish these tasks human beings need narratives: stories about who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Traditions provide these narratives. They allow people to discover problems and methods for their solution, frame questions and possible answers, and develop institutions that facilitate cooperative action. But because people occupy changing positions vis-à-vis these narratives, traditions are also always open to change. …6
Hence it is not surprising that the tradition of Inner Cultivation practice and thought that Sima Tan called “Daoism” is neither fabricated for bibliographical reasons nor homogenous. It was created and transmitted via a variety of different literary forms (narratives, rhymed verse, didactic prose, argumentative essays) and interpreted in different ways by each of the groups of authors who composed its surviving texts: those I have heuristically placed into the categories of “Individualist,” “Primitivist,” and “Syncretist,” following the lead of A. C. Graham. However, while Graham limited these categories to sections of the Zhuangzi, my analysis is actually closer to that of Liu Xiaogan, who places the various sections of the book he identifies into broader historical categories that relate to other extant texts, as I have done.7
One of the cherished assumptions of classical Chinese literature to which Graham and Liu, and most other scholars all subscribe, is that the core of the Zhuangzi is the “Inner Chapters,” and it is very likely written by the historical figure of Zhuang Zhou. I think the patchwork nature of most of the chapters and the variety of literary styles within them makes this a questionable hypothesis but I really don’t think this is the key relevant issue. These Inner Chapters need not have been written by a single hand to constitute the core of the text. Rather, their most important quality is that they represent a consistent position with regard to certain key philosophical ideas and the contemplative practices that underlie them: the cosmology of the Way, the relativity of exclusively dualistic intellectual positions, the acceptance of change and death as a natural transformation, apophatic meditation practice, the importance of developing consummate skills in living that manifest a direct grounding in the Way and, most importantly, the emphasis on “flowing cognition” and “cognitive attunement” as essential to those consummate skills. This then links these Inner Chapters to practices and ideas also found in other early texts, as I have argued in the pages of the present volume: the four “Techniques of the Mind” (xinshu 心術) texts from the Guanzi 管子, the Laozi, the Huang-Lao bo shu 黃老帛書, and four chapters of the Lüshi chun qiu 呂氏春秋 (3, 5, 17, and 25). All these texts unarguably precede the Han dynasty and contain evidence for the tradition of practice and thought I have called Inner Cultivation to which the above 13 chapters in the present volume, I think, amply attest. This is not a monolithic tradition: as Scheid so aptly states. Traditions of practice change over time and we should not expect nor insist on total consistency. What we should look for, instead, is whether or not there is sufficient evidence of the sharing of practices—contemplative practices in this case—and a sufficient evidence of a common vocabulary for contextualizing these practices and understanding their results, even if the precise meaning of this vocabulary changes as the tradition evolves. So whether or not the historical Zhuangzi authored the Inner Chapters of his eponymous text is much less important than the shared understanding of apophatic inner cultivation practice that its author or authors shared with this larger pre-Han practice tradition. The recent challenges to the single authorship theory and the primacy of the Inner Chapters by Klein and Bumbacher that are otherwise quite astute have unfortunately not taken this perspective into account.
Both authors argue that there is a lack of evidence that the Inner Chapters or, indeed, the entire Zhuangzi (contra Liu and many others) existed as a text before the Western Han. They not only agree with most scholars that the traditional single author theory for the whole text is not viable, but also maintain that this is true of the authorship of the Inner Chapters, long thought to be the foundational core of the text. They further aver that there is no evidence that the Inner Chapters should even be regarded as that foundational core. Their arguments are essentially textual and bibliographical: because there are no citations of the Inner Chapters before the Han, no references to even their titles, and no excavated textual testimony to them, that the these seven chapters cannot be the core of the work. Both also express the opinion that Guo Xiang 郭象 (252–312 CE) completed such an extensive revision of the text when he redacted it to the 33-chapter received text from an original recension of 52 chapters that it is extremely difficult to know exactly what was in this larger, complete version and even how it was organized. This includes whether or not the received Inner Chapters were in the location in which we now find them.
Bumbacher further contends that this 52-chapter recension was likely not even the original version of the Zhuangzi, and that it was created out of a disordered collection of materials by the famed Han bibliographer, Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE).8 He is carefully trying to reconstruct both the pre-Guo Xiang and even pre-Liu Xiang version of the Zhuangzi and has developed a very sophisticated system of textual analysis in order to attempt this. This is an admirable project as is Klein’s brilliant historicist challenge to the authority of the Inner Chapters as representing the original thought of the entire text.
I find much to agree with in their research. It is not difficult to agree that the Inner Chapters could have been either a collection of teachings of an original thinker redacted unevenly by disciples or the writings of several different thinkers who shared a common set of insights into the nature of mind and cosmos. Furthermore, it is true that we do not know the extent to which Guo Xiang expurgated the original Zhuangzi. However, we do know that there were seven chapters in three of the six redactions listed by Lu Deming 陸德明 (c. 606) in his Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 and these seven chapters were in a section called “the inner chapters”(neipian 內篇) just as they are in the received text.9 There seems little reason to doubt they were all based on the original complete 52-chapter recension. That’s an important piece of evidence to which neither gives sufficient weight.
Of course one cannot know the influence that Liu Xiang had on most of the recensions of philosophical works in the Han Imperial Library that he collated as part of a major project of cleaning up the disordered collection of manuscripts it had become. However, I would ask how is Bumbacher’s contention that he created his own organization for the new recensions he established any more likely than the contention that he attempted to remain true to the compositional structures of his sources? Certainly this was the case for the Huainanzi, which must have passed through his editorial hands.10 Finally, since we do know that there are roughly 270 parallel passages between the received Zhuangzi and the Huainanzi, including materials from the Inner Chapters, this constitutes substantial evidence for the presence of an early recension in the court of Liu An, as I have argued in chapter 2 of the present volume.11 Klein concurs with this. Bumbacher does not, but perhaps it is because he incorrectly asserts that I have argued that the Huainanzi versions of these Zhuangzi passages were the source for the 52 chapter recension.12 Actually, I have contended in chapter 2 just the opposite: that the Huainanzi authors drew on inchoate Zhuangzi textual materials that had already been transmitted to them and created the 52 chapter recension of the text from these materials, not vice versa. Given their familiarity with so many passages that are now in the received Zhuangzi and the fact that despite this familiarity only once do they ever cite it as a source—in stark contrast to the way in which they treat their formal citations of other works like the Laozi—it is likely that the complete recension of the Zhuangzi was compiled at Huainan after the completion of the Huainanzi in 139 BCE. Therefore the Huainanzi passages that parallel the Zhuangzi are the closest versions we have of what Bumbacher is attempting to reconstruct: a pre-Liu Xiang recension. They cannot be ignored.
The arguments Klein and Bumbacher make against the Inner Chapters being the oldest stratum of the text also rely on citations of chapter titles of the received recension of the Zhuangzi that do not include chapters 1–7. Klein cites the important fact that the Shiji biography of the historical Zhuangzi mentions the titles for received chapter 10, “Rifling Coffers” (Qu qie 胠篋), chapter 29, “Robber Zhi” (Dao Zhi盜跖), chapter 31, “The Old Fisherman” (Yu fu 漁父), and (as Klein perceptively points out) chapter 23 “Gengsang Chu 庚桑楚 of Weileixu 畏累虛.13 Both scholars present details of the textual fragments now in the received Zhuangzi from early Western Han tombs at Zhangjia shan 張家山 (circa 170 BCE) and Fuyang 阜陽 (circa 165 BCE) that parallel passages now included in a number of chapters: an almost complete version of “Robber Zhi” (unfortunately only fragments of which have published to this point) in the former and three more chapters in the latter: 25 “Sunnyside” (Zeyang 則陽), 26, “External Things” (Waiwu 外物), and 28, “Abdicating the Throne” (Rang wang 讓王).14 These are all from the section of the text now called “Miscellaneous Chapters” (zapian雜篇), generally thought to be the final section of the book. They argue that if the Inner Chapters was the core and hence oldest stratum of the Zhuangzi, then why would virtually the only evidence to them before the Huainanzi be from the sections supposedly compiled last?
Let us set aside for the moment the fact that the excavated fragments do not explicitly say they are from the Zhuangzi and assume that these fragments from both tombs and the chapter titles listed by them are from an early version of the Zhuangzi. Following the line of argument I took in chapter 2, let’s say that this version was likely not complete. Let’s call it the “proto-Zhuangzi.” Of course this could testify to the absence of the Inner Chapters in that partial version, which is what Klein and Bumbacher assume. However, another viable interpretation of this data could simply be that these particular chapters were included in this “proto-Zhuangzi” but were simply not physically placed at the beginning of this text. Or that they were, but the tomb occupants were not as interested in the Inner Chapters. As almost all of these references are from what many think is the final stratum of the Zhuangzi, this last stratum could simply have come first in the “proto-Zhuangzi” the tomb occupants possessed. We see an example of this kind of altered textual composition in the Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts, in which the second half of the text, chapters 38–81, precede the first half, chapters 1–37 in all directly transmitted recensions. This kind of compositional fluidity may have been more the rule than the exception, as Sarah Allan has insightfully noted.15 She argues that the rolled up bamboo strips that transmitted the early recensions of many philosophical classics from the pre-Han era could not contain large texts because of the physical limitations of this textual medium.16 As a result, the received recensions transmitted to the present may very well have been constructed in the Western Han when silk scrolls dramatically increased as the medium of textual creation and transmission. These scrolls allowed longer texts to be constructed from the shorter ones. The archaeological evidence from excavated manuscripts lends support to the hypothesis in chapter 2 of the present volume that the complete 52-chapter recension of the Zhuangzi was created at Huainan.
Another interpretation of this historical data derives from the hypothesis in chapter 6 of the present volume that there was a copy of an early recension, the “proto-Zhuangzi” at the Qin court where the Lüshi chunqiu was being written and compiled circa 250–240 BCE. It is here, I argued, that the author whom Graham identifies at the “Primitivist,” engaging in arguments with “Confucians,” Mohists,” and particularly “Yangists,” became the first thinker in the Inner Cultivation “traditions of the Way” to present a theory of the innate natures of humans and animals (xing 性). Contained in the “Outer Chapters” (Waipian 外篇), chapters 8, “Webbed Toes” (Pianmu 駢拇), 9 “Horses Hooves” (Mati 馬蹄), 10 “Rifling Coffers,” and the first part of 11, “Locating and Circumscribing,” this theory would have perhaps been of considerable interest to literati for whom, at that time, issues of human nature were most pressing, given their direct relationship to the very pressing concern of which form of governing philosophy would be most effective in a united empire. These chapters are also famous, as are chapter 29, “Robber Zhi” and, to a lesser extent, chapter 31, “The Old Fisherman,” for satirical and biting criticisms of Confucians and Mohists, particularly the figure of Confucius himself. These criticisms could possibly have been appealing to the tomb occupants, but even more so to Sima Qian who, as someone trained in the Daoist traditions of “Huang-Lao,” would have been irritated to see the ascendency of Confucian ideas and bureaucrats during the latter part of the reign of Emperor Wu.
Furthermore, the fact that Sima Qian lists chapter 23 as belonging to the version of the text attributed to Zhuangzi that he reports in the Historical Records juan 63 is important and deserves further exploration. Most of this chapter, “Gengsang Chu,” consists of a narrative that begins with this protagonist, an adept who has received only a partial understanding of the Way of his teacher, Lao Dan (by then the accepted author of the Laozi) teaching a student named Nanrong Chu 南榮趎. He advises him in words that could have come from foundational Inner Cultivation texts like “Inward Training:”
全汝形
抱汝生
无使思慮營營. (23/65/14–16)
Keep your body intact
Preserve your vitality
Do not be agitated by anxieties.
Unclear about what this means, Nanrong then journeys to see the old master, himself, Laozi. The instructions on inner cultivation practice then given to him by the Old Master as “The basic rules for guarding vitality” (weisheng zhi jing 衛生之經) include many important elements that can be clearly linked to the text of the Laozi 55 (to be like a child, preserving potency despite crying all day without getting hoarse) and almost verbatim to the text of “Inward Training”:
能抱一乎?
能勿失乎?
能无卜筮
知吉凶乎?
能止乎?
能已乎?
能舍諸人
而求諸己乎?
(In concentrating your vital energy)
Can you embrace and unite with it?
Can you not lose it?
Can you not resort to divining by shell or stalk
And still know fortune and misfortune?
Can you stop (thoughts)?
Can you cease?
Can you not search for it in others
But, instead, find it in yourself?17
In addition to these strong textual parallels to these two Inner Cultivation texts, there are at least nine clear parallels to the Inner Chapters, five of which come from the most important of them, chapter 2, the “Essay on Seeing Things as Equal” (Qi wu lun 齊物論), about which I have written extensively in the present volume. In the first of these, Laozi here continues advising Nanrong to have a childlike mind
ZZ 23/65/2418: … 能兒子乎? 兒子動不知所為, 行不知所之 …
Can you be like a child? A child when moving doesn’t have a purpose to what it is doing; when walking doesn’t have a destination where it is going.
This parallels phrasing and the context of purposeless activity in this passage from the Primitivist Outer Chapter 9:
ZZ 9/24/10: 夫赫胥氏之時, 民居不知所為, 行不知所之 …
In the age of the clan of the Hexu, when at home the people did not have a purpose to what they their doing. When on the road, did not have a destination where they were going …
Laozi continues with the following unlikely but deliberately chosen description of a child:
身槁木之枝而心若死灰 …
Its body is like a branch of withered wood; its mind is like dead ashes
This famous description of meditative trance is found at the beginning of Inner Chapter 2, in which the adept Nanguo Ziqi 南郭子綦 is just emerging from a deep state of meditative concentration “in which his self had lost its other” (sang qi ou 喪其耦) and is asked
ZZ 2/3/14–15: 何居乎? 形固可使如槁木, 而心固可使如死灰乎?
Where were you? Can you really make your body like withered wood and your mind like dead ashes?
The directionality of borrowing between parallel passages is notoriously complex. Nonetheless, in this instance there is strong evidence for a direction. This narrative in Zhuangzi 23 already borrows from two Inner Cultivation sources that are clearly chronologically earlier, the Laozi and “Inward Training.” This narrative continues immediately to these two other textual parallels with Zhuangzi 10 and 2. This strongly suggests these two sources were also earlier; in this case earlier parts of an established textual tradition.
There is additional evidence that the author of Zhuangzi 23 continued to borrow extensively from the Inner Chapters perhaps in an effort to synthesize received inner cultivation practices. There are five other significant examples, the first of which is this:
ZZ 23/66/3–4: 知止乎其所不能知, 至矣; 若有不即是者, 天鈞敗之。
When knowing stops at what it is not able to understand, this is perfection. Those who cannot attain this will be worn down by the whetstone of the heavens. …
The first two sentences echo phrases in two separate sections of Zhuangzi 2:
ZZ 2/6/2: 故知止其所不知, 至矣 … 若有能知, 此之謂天府
Thus when knowing stops at what it does not understand, this is perfection. If you are able to understand this this is called the storehouse of the heavens …
ZZ 2/5/5: 是以聖人和之以是非而休乎天鈞.
Therefore the sage harmonizes them with his affirming and denying and rests them on the whetstone of the heavens …
The narrative in chapter 23 continues:
ZZ 23/66/4: 備物以將形, 藏不虞以生心 … 若是而萬惡至者 … 不足以滑成, 不可內於靈臺 …
Provide sustenance for your body; remain unperturbed to nurture your mind. … If you do this and difficulties still arrive … They will not be enough to disturb your development and the effect of this will not be felt in your Numinous Terrace.
This clearly parallels a different passage from the Inner Chapters:
ZZ 5/15/5 故不足以滑和, 不可入於靈府。
Thus it is not enough to disturb your harmony and cannot enter into your Numinous Storehouse …
This is exactly the kind of “cut and paste” borrowing that we see in the many passages of the received text of the Wenzi that are almost exclusively taken from the Huainanzi and the Laozi.19 It is a clear determinant of the directionality of textual borrowing.
This next passage in chapter 23 weaves together two disparate stories from different passages in the Inner Chapters to form one complete narrative:
ZZ 23/66/23–25: 古之人, 其知有所至矣。惡乎至? 有以為未始有物者, 至矣, 盡矣, 弗可以加矣。其次以為有物矣, 將以生為喪也, 以死為反也, 是以分已。其次曰始无有, 既而有生, 生俄而死; 以无有為首, 以生為體, 以死為尻; 孰知有无死生之一守者, 吾與之為友。
The people of ancient times, their knowledge contained perfection within it. There were those who thought that there has not yet begun to be things. Perfect! Exhaustive! I can add nothing to it. The next thought that there were things and they took living to be sorrow and dying to be a return. They therefore made this distinction. The next said that in the beginning when there was nothing, then there was living, and once there was living, suddenly there was dying. To take nothingness as your head, to take living as your body; to take dying as your rump: Anyone who knows how to unify something and nothing, living and dying: I will make them my friend …
This is a pastiche of the following two passages:
ZZ 2/5/8 古之人, 其知有所至矣。惡乎至? 有以為未始有物者, 至矣, 盡矣, 不可以加矣。其次以為有物矣, 而未始有封也。其次以為有封焉, 而未始有是非也
The people of ancient times, their knowledge contained perfection within it. In what way was it perfect? There were those who thought there had not yet begun to be things. Perfect! Exhaustive! I can add nothing to it. The next thought there were things but there had not yet begun to have borders around them. The next thought there were borders but there had not yet begun to be affirmation and negation …20
And
ZZ: 6/17/22: 子祀、子輿、子犁、子來四人相與語曰：「孰能以无為首, 以生為脊, 以死為尻, 孰知死生存亡之一體者, 吾與之友矣。」四人相視而笑, 莫逆於心, 遂相與為友。
Four masters Si, Yü, Li, and Lai were talking to one another and said: “Anyone who knows how to take nothingness as your head, to take living as your spine, take dying as your rump and understand how to unify living and dying, persisting and disappearing into a single body, I will make them my friends.” The four mean looked at one another and smiled; there was no reluctance in their minds and so they befriend one another …21
There are a number of other textual parallels between chapter 23 and several of the Inner Chapters:
—23/66/14parallels 2/4/24+2/5/1
—23/67/7–8parallels 5/15/15
Furthermore, chapter 23 contains well-known images from the Inner Chapters:
—23/67/21Choptoes (wuzhe 兀者22) found in 5/13/6, 23; and 5/14/7
—23/67/4Cicada (tiao 蜩) found in 1/1/15
—23/67/5Turtle dove (xue jiu 學鳩) found in 1/1/15
—23/66/11Moye sword (moye 鏌鋣) found in 6/18/6
Thus, the very significant evidence from the nine parallel passages and four common images that chapter 23 shares with the Inner Chapters supports the idea that its authors drew on most of the Inner Chapters as well as two earlier Inner Cultivation textual sources to construct its constituent narratives and short essays. I have not have had the time or space here to complete as thorough an investigation of these textual materials as is needed and I hope that further research will follow on this foundation. Nonetheless I hope the data I have presented here are sufficient to show that the Inner Chapter sources had to have been chronologically earlier and already in existence when chapter 23 was created. When seen in light of the evidence provided throughout the many chapters of the present volume, chapter 23 of the Zhuangzi appears to be an attempt at creating a short compendium of teachings about contemplative practice and its results. Given the testimony to the existence of this chapter that Klein cites, that it existed when Sima Qian wrote the biography of the historical Zhuangzi circa 130 BCE, this suggests that we need further and more extensive research before we can accept the conclusions of Klein and Bumbacher that there is no testimony to the Inner Chapters constituting the original core around which the Zhuangzi collection was formed.
There is as yet no compelling reason to doubt that the text of the original 52 chapter recension of the Zhuangzi was compiled at the court of Liu An from a “proto-Zhuangzi”—textual materials already in existence that had been transmitted there. Despite the lack of concrete textual testimony to the Inner Chapters before they appear in the pages of the Huainanzi, the internal evidence to the extensive textual borrowing in chapter 23 supports the idea that the Inner Chapters were chronologically earlier than this chapter and were very likely a part of the “proto-Zhuangzi.”
Furthermore, as I argued in chapter 6 above, the received chapters 8–11.5 were created as part of the debates that occurred at the Qin court of Lü Buwei in the decade leading up to the creation of the Lüshi chunqiu. I argue further there that chapters 28 and perhaps 29–31 are Primitivist materials that were also already present in the “proto-Zhuangzi” that was present there as well. These chapters are well attested prior to the gathering of the Huainan circle circa 150 BCE. From the perspective of what I am calling a “contemplative hermeneutic,” all of these chapters depend on the transmission not just of textual materials but of apophatic inner cultivation practice. Furthermore, the evidence about the chronological priority of the Inner Chapters to the materials in chapter 23 further questions the conclusion that these seven chapters were not the original core of the collection. This does not, by any means, as I have written in chapter 6 above, prove that there was a complete original recension of the text already being transmitted by the middle of the third century BCE, as Liu Xiaogan has contended. It simply means that there was a lineage of teachers and students, all of whom shared a common set of apophatic meditation practices, who created and transmitted the textual materials that were redacted into the 52 chapter text of the Zhuangzi at Huainan circa 130 BCE.
Texts do not occur in a vacuum. They are the products of human beings who form social organizations, often traditions of teachers and students. Often, these traditions do not just derive their authority from textual sources, they derive their authority from the transmission and mastery of specific practices that lead to the insights embodied in these texts. The very fact that today we have transmitted versions of any of these pre-Han texts implies the existence of generations of authors and transmitters, copyists and bibliographers, redactors and librarians. Despite the very compelling textual scholarship of Queen, Nylan and Csikszentmihalyi, Klein, and Bumbacher, we cannot dispense with the idea that these texts were products of traditions of teachers and students who created and transmitted them and the practices that were foundational to them. Thus it is important to add a “contemplative hermeneutic” to the other tools of the cultural historian as we continue the “long game” of putting together the many pieces of the vast jigsaw puzzle of the history of the various early traditions of Chinese philosophy and religion. It is my hope that this collection will make a small contribution towards this worthy goal.