Chapter 6
1. A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. 1986 (first paperback edition). Repr. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2001. Please note that we have retained the earlier Wade-Giles romanizations e.g. “Chuang Tzu” instead of the currently accepted pinyin romanizations e.g. “Zhuangzi” if they are used in the Chapters or articles being studied or cited
2. Guan Feng, Zhuangzi zhexue taolun ji 莊子哲學討論集 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1962), pp. 61–98.
3. These three types of literary criticism were developed in New Testament studies and were being propounded and debated during the 1930’s and 40’s while Graham was a college student. Form criticism is an analysis of the standard genres in which the oral and early written tradition is cast in the effort to interpret each in terms of its concrete historical setting. Redaction criticism is an analysis of the philosophical positions of the people who wrote and compiled texts and the application of this analysis to discover their historical circumstances. Composition criticism examines the literary techniques of the early redactors and how they assembled their inherited material to create unified works. All three criticism overlap. For details see Stephen D. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 179–83 and Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 179.
4. A. C. Graham, “Two Notes on the Translation of Taoist Classics,” in A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters. Harold D. Roth (ed.) Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monograph No. 20 (University of Hawaii Press 2003, 130–56).
5. Graham, “Two Notes,” 142.
6. Textual citations from the Zhuangzi are taken from the edition in Zhuangzi yinde 莊子引得. Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series no. 20 (Beijing, 1947). They follow the format “chapter x /line number y.”
7. This reconstruction is explained most completely in A.C. Graham, “How Much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write?” In A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters. Harold D. Roth (ed.) Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monograph No. 20. University of Hawaii Press 2003, 58–103.
8. Ma’s research is published in his collection, Yuhan shan fang ji yishu 玉函山房輯佚書. Changsha, 1883; Tao’s thorough collection of the lost Xu Shen 許慎 commentary to the Huainanzi, Huainanzi Xu zhu yitong gu was first printed in 1881. This genre of reconstituted redactions has largely been overlooked in Western scholarship and merits further examination.
9. See Wang Shu-min 王叔民, Zhuangzi jiaoshi 莊子校釋 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1947), 1383–1414.
10. Liu, like many Chinese scholars whose work he summarized, considers these chapter to be written by later followers of Chuang Tzu and he groups them together with chapters 17–22 as the products of the “Transmitter School” who continued the ideas of their founder. See Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters. Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies no. 65 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994), 83–121.
11. Harold Roth, “Who Compiled the Zhuangzi?” in Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr. (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), pp. 115–18 (chapter 2, pp. 97–100 in the present volume).
12. Brian Hoffert, “Chuang Tzu: The Evolution of a Taoist Classic.” Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 2001.
13. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, pp. 1–45. This is a partial English translation of his 1985 doctoral dissertation at Peking University, Zhuangzi zhexue ji qi yanbian 莊子哲學及其演變: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1988.
14. Wang, Zhuangzi jiaoshi, 1434–38.
15. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, pp. 134–47. Liu, like Guan Feng, omits chapter 30 which he says bears no relationship to anything else in the text. However he fails to explain why it’s there.
16. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 137.
17. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 121–34.
18. D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching (eds.), A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1994, pp. 379–83 and 872–81. Here I found 197 instances of post-verbal hu contrasted with 722 instances of post-verbal yu. In the Huainanzi, by contrast, I found 110 instances of the former and over 1100 instances of the latter. D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching (eds.), A Concordance to the Huai-nan Tzu. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1992, pp. 511–14 and 954–66.
19. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 89–121. 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 correct, they cannot be used to establish that the entire chapter shares the same philosophical position. Graham’s work clearly establishes that these chapters do contain material related to the Inner Chapters as well as material related to all other philosophical positions found in the book.
20. Roth, “Who Compiled the Zhuangzi?” 79–128 (chapter 2 of the present volume).
21. Graham, “Reflections and Replies.” In Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr. (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), 279–83.
22. Andrew Seth Meyer, “Late Warring States Daoism and the Origins of Huang-Lao: The Evidence from the Lüshi chun qiu.” Unpublished manuscript. 1996.
23. For details of this practice see my Original Tao, chapter 4 and my article “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60:2 (June 1997): 295–314 (chapter 4 of the present volume).
24. The Syncretist theory of the hierarchical nature of government patterned after the greater patterns of Heaven and Earth is most clearly presented in Zhuangzi 13/27–36, Graham, pp. 261–62.
25. John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 422. A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu, 17.4/103/19–21.
26. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 50–61.
27. The Robber Zhi story. Graham, Chuang Tzu: the Inner Chapters, 207; Knoblock and Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei, 251. A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu, 11.4/55/25–56/4.
28. Graham, Chuang Tzu: the Inner Chapters, 174; Knoblock and Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei, 515. A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu, 20.2/129/30–130/6. The next two LSCQ references are Knoblock and Riegel, 220, A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu. 9.5/47/1 for Cook Ding; and Knoblock and Riegel, 331–32 and A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu. 14.8/78/14–24.
29. Zhuangzi yinde, 10/6–8.
30. Qian Mu, Xianqin zhuzi xinian 先秦諸子繫年 1st ed. 1935. Rev.ed., 1956; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua, 1985, pp. 524–74. There is some disagreement about what this phrase “twelve generations” refers to. Chen Guying Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi 莊子今注今譯 254–55, identifies Tian Chengzi as Qi Prime Minister Chen Heng 陳恆, who in 481 BCE murdered Duke Jian 簡公 and stole the state. However to do this gives us only nine changes of rule until the fall of Qi. If we identify him instead with Tian Qi, who also murdered a Qi ruler and put a puppet on the throne, then we have an extra three changes of rule. Wang Shumin, (Zhuangzi jiaoshi 348–49), shows that the character shi 世 (generations), is an error for dai 代 (dynasty, change of rule). Thus the passage is talking not about entire generational changes but changes of rule. Wang however, identifies Tian Chengzi with Tian Zhuangzi 田莊子 and argues that we should date these changes of rule from the latter’s death in 411 B.C.E. Part of the problem is how to count twelve of these changes. The Tian family held ministerial posts in Qi for generations before they committed regicide and established a line of puppet rulers in Qi starting in 489 B.C. They did not officially put themselves on the throne until 386 B.C.E. According to Qian Mu’s historical table, we can count twelve changes of rule from 489 B.C., including, of course, the puppet dukes who were the official rulers of Qi while the Tian family really controlled the power. Wang seems to want to begin his count with the official Tian ascent to the throne but then has to go back for two more Tian family ministers in order to reach the proper count. This analogy to a powerful ministerial family controlling a weaker ruler may have been intentionally used by the Primitivist to satirize Lü Buwei’s power over the young Qin king who eventually, after removing Lü from power, became the First Emperor. See below for a further discussion of this.
31. Knoblock and Riegel, 11–13. While Han did not fall until 230 B.C., Zhao not until 228, and Wei not until 225, Qin annexed large amounts of territory during these campaigns and killed many soldiers and civilians, thus seriously undermining the strength of these states and making them ripe for the final conquest.
32. I have examined concordances to the following works and none contain the phrase in question: Lun yu 論語, Mengzi 孟子, Xunzi 荀子, Laozi, Guanzi, and Hanfeizi 韓非子.
33. To be specific, the phrase is found three times in chapter 8 (in lines 8, 12, and 30) and four times in the first part of chapter 11 (in lines 8, 10, 11, and 14). The other two occurrences are in chapter 14 (14/73) and chapter 24 (24/2), both passages that Graham concludes are Primitivist. See his section “Episodes related to the Primitivist”(Chuang Tzu: the Inner Chapters, 214–15).
34. The use in 17.5/104/6 is simply of xing ming but the context implies the full phrase.
35. There are six sporadic references to the term xing in three “school of Zhuangzi chapters:” 17/37, 19/11, 52, 53, 54, and 20/61). The last four are in passages that feature Confucius and seem to be borrowing the idea; the first is about the nature of all things and not human nature; 19/11. None of these even faintly suggest a unique Daoist theory.
36. This summary of Yangist ideas is primarily based on five Lüshi chun qiu essays: 1.2, 1.3, 2.2, 2.3, and 21.4, and also draws on material in Zhuangzi 28 and 30. It is taken from my article “Zhuangzi.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. November 2001.
37. A Concordance to the Lüshi chun qiu. 2.3/8/20–23; the translation is my own.
38. Zhuangzi yinde, 8/26–31, Graham, Chuang Tzu, 202–3. I have modified it slightly.
39. Zhuangzi yinde, 16/4, Graham, Chuang Tzu, 171.
40. Zhuangzi yinde, 9/10–11, Graham, 205. The Simple and Unhewn are defined in Laozi 19 as being selfless and desireless.
41. Zhuangzi yinde, 9/16–19, Graham, 205–6.
42. Knoblock and Riegel, 12–32, cover this in greater detail.
43. Knoblock and Riegel, 67–68.
44. Knoblock and Riegel, 292–93.
45. Knoblock and Riegel, 380–81. I accept their emendation of the graphic error yuan 遠 to da 達.
46. Knoblock and Riegel, 419–21.
47. Knoblock and Riegel, 423–25. The third use of our phrase lacks the final “zhi qing,” but I think it is implied by the context.
48. Knoblock and Riegel, 630–32.
49. Roth, “The Concept of Human Nature in the Huai-nan Tzu. Journal of Chinese Philosophy (1985): 1–26.
50. The concluding paragraph to this narrative in the Lüshi chun qiu takes a Confucian turn towards Rightness that the Primitivist would not approve, but this does not mean that the understanding of “the essentials of nature and destiny” implied here could not have been taken from the Primitivist and then applied to a Confucian argument. This suggests he was part of debates in the Lü Buwei circle but that he did not write anything that was included in the final version of the text.
51. Zhuangzi yinde, 10/19; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 208.
52. Zhuangzi yinde, 11/15–16; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 212.
53. Zhuangzi yinde, 2/55. For an interesting discussion of this phrase see D.C. Lau, “On the Expression Zai You 在宥” In Henry Rosemont (ed.), Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts, 5–20.
54. Andy Meyer first suggested that Zhuangzi 28 is a collection of Yangist stories made by the Primitivist in a paper he gave at a meeting of the Warring States Working Group in the fall of 1998. I do not have the paper but recall talking to Professor Meyer about it at that time.
55. Zhuangzi yinde, 27/1–10; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 106–7. This means taking an intellectual position and using a narrative to demonstrate its veracity. But ultimately abandoning it if the situation changes. This likely derives from the idea of “discarding fixed cognition and finding things their lodging-places in the practical” (為是不用而寓諸庸 …) from Zhuangzi yinde 2/34.
56. Like most scholars I am still not sure what to make of chapter 30, “The Discourse on Swords.”
57. Zhuangzi yinde, 29/71–74; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 240–41. The term xing is extremely rare outside the Primitivist chapters but it occurs thrice in “Robber Zhi:” 29/86, 89, 98.
58. Zhuangzi yinde, 31/31, 37, 49; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 251–53.
59. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 138–39.
60. Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, 125, 128, 133. Liu’s links between “Menders of Nature” and the Inner Chapters are much more persuasive than his two extremely weak links between it and the “Huang-Lao” material.
61.Zhuangzi yinde, 16/3–4; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 171.
62. Chen Guying 陳鼓應 Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi. 莊子今註今譯 (Taipei: Zhonghua, 1983), 403.
63. This translation is based on Graham’s but I have edited it to make it consistent with other translations of mine throughout this essay. The italicized text constitutes 37 characters; Chen would expand this to 54 by adding the sentence immediately before and the one immediately after this section but I see no reason to do this. He would also excise the passage as not the words of Zhuangzi. See Chen, Zhuangzi jinzhu jinyi, 403.
64. “Menders of Nature” 16/17 uses the partial phrase xing ming, rare outside the Primitivist essays and passages related to them.
65. For details on this theory, see Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?” (chapter 2 in the present volume).
66. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism, 198–203.
Chapter 7
1. For a thorough summary of these debates about affiliation, see John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew S. Meyer, and Harold D. Roth (Translators, Editors, Annotators), The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 27–32.
2. For details of text creation and writing during this period, see the classic work, Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
3. The surviving evidence for the social organization of the early Confucian tradition has been thoroughly analyzed in E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects (Columbia, 2001).
4. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 5.
5. Fukui Fumimasa, “The History of Taoist Studies in Japan and Some Related Issues,” Acta Asiatica 68 (1995): 12–13.
6. Shiji 史記, Bona edition, ch. 130, 3a–6b. For a translation and analysis of Sima Tan’s “On the Six Intellectual Traditions,” see Sarah A. Queen and Harold D. Roth, “A Syncretist Perspective on the Six Schools,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition (rev. edition), ed. William Theodore deBary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 278–82.
7. The three major recent articles on this topic are Sarah A. Queen, “Inventories of the Past: Rethinking the “School” Affiliation of the Huainanzi. Asia Major, Third Series (14.1) 2001; Mark Csíkszentmihályi and Michael Nylan, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China,” T’oung Pao LXXXIX, 2003; Kidder Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, ‘Legalism,’ et cetera,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003): 129–56. For an analysis of how Sima Tan’s ideas about the “Daoist tradition” are derived from the pre-Han sources of “inner cultivation,” see my article “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought,” HJAS 51, no. 2 (1991), especially 604–6.
8. For a synthetic overview of this research, see Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 173–203. The “Techniques of the Mind” is the title of two short texts in the seventy-six-text Guanzi compendium. Together with “Inward Training” and “The Purified Mind,” they constitute a group that in modern scholarship is referred to as the four “Techniques of Mind” works. The relevant chapters of the Lüshi chunqiu are 3, 5, 17, and 25.
9. These categories are initially presented in Harold D. Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?,” in Henry Rosemont Jr., ed., Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, 78–128 (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991) (chapter 2 in the present volume).
10. Zhuangzi 6/19/20–1. All Zhuangzi references are to D. C. Lau, ed., Zhuangzi zhuzi suoyin 莊子逐字索引. The Institute for Chinese Studies Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 2000). In these ICS critical texts, emendations are given in the following format: (a) [x]: “character a is emended to character x.” The translation is modified from A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu, the “Inner Chapters” (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 92.
11. References to chapters of “Inward Training” (Neiye) are from Roth, Original Tao, which contains both a critical Chinese edition and facing translation. Here, Roth, 94–97.
12. See, for example, Zhuangzi 9/23/29; 12/29/16; 20/53/24+25; 23/65/6; 25/76/17.
13. Such phrases are widespread in early Inner Cultivation texts. See, for example Lüshi chunqiu 3.4/15/1; 25.3/162/20–21; Zhuangzi 15/41/27, and my analysis in Roth, “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295–314 (chapter 4 in the present volume). Lüshi chunqiu references are to D. C. Lau, ed., Lüshi chunqiu zhuzi suoyin 呂氏春秋逐字索引, The Institute for Chinese Studies Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1994).
14. Guanzi 13.1/95/29l; Laozi chapter 10; Zhuangzi 5/13/18, 27. Guanzi references are to D. C. Lau, ed., Guanzi zhuzi suoyin 管子逐字索引, The Institute for Chinese Studies Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 2001).
15. See, for example, Cahn and Polich, “Meditation States and Traits: EEG, ERP, and Neuroimaging Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 2 (2006): 180–211.
16. Zhuangzi 6/19/21.
17. Zhuangzi 2/5/1.
18. See H. D. Roth, “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 (December 1991): 599–650 (chapter 1 in the present volume).
19. Zhuangzi 18/48/7, 22/60/14, 25/76/6; Lüshi chunqiu 25.3/162/23.
20. Paraphrased from Zhuangzi 9/23/27.
21. In an earlier work, I have presented evidence for a remarkable consistency across texts as early as the Huang Lao boshu (ca. 300 BCE) and as late as the Huainanzi (139 BCE) in terms used for stages of meditation. See H. D. Roth, “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295–314 (chapter 4 in the present volume).
22. Guanzi, 13.1/96/14; Zhuangzi 13/34/22, and 33/98/1.
23. Totals and all subsequent references to the Huainanzi are taken from D. C. Lau, ed., Huainanzi zhuzi suoyin 淮南 子逐字索引, The Institute for Chinese Studies Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992). Totals for the character “Dao” are from 345–50; for the character “ren” are from 764–65. This sentence quoted is from Huainanzi 11/93/20.
24. For this theory, see Major, Queen, Meyer, and Roth, The Huainanzi, 14–20. The twenty-first and final chapter, “A Overview of the Essentials” (“Yao lüe” 要略), is a summary of the rest of the book. My reflections about the structure of the Huainanzi chapters do not include this final summary, which has its own purpose and structure.
25. HNZSY 21/223/21ff. All references are to the edition of the Huainanzi in D. C. Lau, ed., Huainanzi zhuzi suoyin 淮南子逐字索引, The Institute for Chinese Studies Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992). I largely follow this text and its emendations, which are given in the framework (character X is emended to) [character Y]. The translations are from Major, Queen, Meyer, and Roth, The Huainanzi (HNZ). For this passage, see 848–49.
26. Charles Leblanc, “Huainanzi,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1993), 189–95.
27. Martin Kern, “Language, Argument, and Southern Culture in the Huainanzi: A Look at the ‘Yaolue,’ ” in The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China, ed. Sarah A. Queen and Michael Puett (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 124–50.
28. In his Harvard Workshop presentation, Meyer argues that Huainanzi 1 is therefore more foundational than Huainanzi 2, and I do not fundamentally disagree with this. However, I think that Huainanzi 2 is also an important part of the foundation for the rest of the text and must be considered together with Huainanzi 1 when detailing the basic ideas that provide the foundational philosophy that appears in most of the “Root Passages” of the entire text. Especially important from Huainanzi 2 is the idea of historical devolution.
29. HNZSY 1/1/3–8; HNZ, 48–49.
30. The “Techniques of the Mind” is the title of two short texts in the seventy-six-text Guanzi compendium. Together with “Inward Training” and “The Purified Mind,” they constitute a group that in modern scholarship is referred to as the four “Techniques of Mind” works. By the time of the Huainanzi, this phrase was probably used as a general term for what I have called “inner cultivation” practice. For further information, see Roth, Original Tao, 15–30.
31. HNZSY 1/4/22–5. HNZ, 59.
32. HNZSY 1/8/14. HNZ, 71.
33. For a detailed argument on this point, see Harold D. Roth, “Nature and Self-Cultivation in Huainanzi’s ‘Original Way,’ ” in Polishing the Chinese Mirror: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosemont Jr., ed. Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2007), 270–92 (chapter 10 in the present volume).
34. See Harold D. Roth, “An Appraisal of Angus Graham’s Textual Scholarship on the Chuang Tzu,” in A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, ed. Harold D. Roth, Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monograph No. 20. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 198–207 (chapter 6 in the present volume); and A. C. Graham, “How Much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang-tzu Write?,” reprinted in Roth, Companion, 58–103.
35. HNZSY, 1/8/15–17. HNZ, 71.
36. Mawangdui Hanmu boshu 馬王堆漢墓帛書 (Peking: Wen-wu Press), 1980, 53, lines 12–13.
37. HNZSY, 1/7/9–10. HNZ, 67.
38. This line occurs in the famous “fasting of the mind” passage in ZZ 4/10/7.
39. HNZSY, 2/14/6–11. HNZ, 101.
40. HNZSY, 7/54/24–55/5, HNZ, 241.
41. HNZSY, 14/132/15–16. HNZ, 537. See also extensive references to “The Genuine” (zhen ren 真人) in Zhuangzi, especially in chapters 6 and 24.
42. HNZSY, 6/50/4–5. HNZ, 215. The Ancestor (zong 宗) is a metaphor for the Dao.
43. This claim is paralleled in HNZ 2 (87–88; HNZSY, 2/11/16) where it argues similarly: “Sages, in the use of their mind, lean on their natures and rely on their spirits. They [nature and spirit] sustain one another and [so sages] attain their ends and beginnings. Thus when they sleep they do not dream and when they awaken they are not sad.”
44. HNZSY, 10/82/15–17; HNZ, 349. Chapter 14 (HNZSY, 14/138/17–18; HNZ, 559) states similarly: “When affairs arise the sage regulates them, When things appear the sage responds to them.”
45. HNZSY, 8/61/6–7; HNZ, 267.
46. HNZSY, 11/93/20; HNZ, 397.
47. HNZSY, 12/105/3–7; HNZ, 439–40.
48. HNZSY, 15/142/2122; HNZ, 580.
49. HNZSY, 15/144/1; HNZ, 584.
50. HNZSY 16/154/3–8; HNZ, 625.
51. HNZSY, 17/168/9–12; HNZ, 665. To roam (you) in accord with the greater patterns of the cosmos perfectly expresses early Daoist ideal from Zhuangzi 1 and the later Daoist idea of adaptation with these patterns (yin tiandi zhi li). See Harold D. Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang-tzu?,” in Rosemont Jr., Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts (Open Court: 1991), 79–128, especially the table on 96–98 (in the present volume, chapter 2, Table 2.1).
52. HNZSY, 18/185/23–4; HNZ, 720.
53. HNZSY, 19/203/13–15; HNZ, 770.
54. HNZSY, 20/210/5–6; HNZ, 796–97.
55. As noted above, chapters 4 and 5, because they are similar to chapter 3 in their quasi-technical vocabulary and literary style, may be thought of as forming a sub-unit with chapter 3; thus the cosmogonic “Root Passage” that begins 3 may be intended to cover 4 and 5 as well. Chapter 9 is discussed below.
56. This sentence breaks the parallelism of the whole passage; we suspect that the text might have originally read “his officials receive the admonitions [of others].”
57. HNZSY, 9/67/3–6; HNZ, 295–96.
58. This line echoes the famous opening lines of the Zhongyong (“Doctrine of the Mean”).
59. Like 8.3 above, which this passage closely resembles, these lines paraphrase Laozi 38.
60. HNZSY, 11/93/20–22; HNZ, 397.
61. This refers to two forms of ancient ritual practice. Straw dogs were made to carry the transgressions of the community; earthen dragons were fashioned to pray for rain.
62. HNZSY, 11/98/25–56 and 11/99/15–17; HNZ, 412, 414.
63. The xiang 象 and diti 狄騠 were interpreters employed to facilitate interactions between the Chinese Central States and their “barbarian” neighbors. See the similar phrasing that appears in the Lüshi chunqiu: “[All states] that do not use the xiang and di interpreters” (LSCQ 17.6/105/16). Their exact functions are unknown. See Chen Qiyou 陳奇猷, Lüshi chunqiu jiaoshi 呂氏春秋校釋, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1984), 2:1108, 1112n. 7; Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 2:1134n. 8; and 20.8.
64. HNZSY, 11/95/24–96/1; HNZ, 403–4.
65. Lee Yearley, “Idea of Human Excellence,” in William Schweiker, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 45–52.
66. HNZSY, 11/96/1–3; HNZ, 404.
67. Here I follow the semantic emendation of Qing textual critic Yuyue as listed on 96, n. 5 in HNZSY.
68. HNZSY, 11/96–7–16; HNZ, 405.
69. For these arguments, see Griet Vankeerberghen. The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 2–5; Sarah A. Queen, “Inventories of the Past: Re-Thinking the ‘School’ Affiliation of the Huainanzi,” Asia Major, Third Series, 14, no. 1 (2001): 51–72; and Judson Murray, “A Study of ‘Yaolüe’ 要略, ‘A Summary of the Essentials’: Understanding the Huainanzi through the Point of View of the Author of the Postface,” Early China 29 (2004): 45–110.
70. HNZSY, 21/228/30–31; HNZ, 867.
71. Harold D. Roth, “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2: 599–650 (chapter 1 in the present volume).
72. See for example, Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (Routledge, 2001), 31–65. Kirkland emphasizes the differences between these early Daoist sources, implies that they therefore could not be part of a distinct “Daoist tradition,” but cannot help but use that exact phrase in quotation marks when talking about this distinctive intellectual viewpoint in the pre-Han period. For a discussion of the Huainanzi as an “eclectic work,” see Griet Vankeerbergen, The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 4–5. By “eclectic,” she avers that the Huainanzi embraces many intellectual traditions but prefers none. My argument is that it is “syncretic” precisely because it synthesizes ideas from many traditions within a Daoist inner cultivation framework.
73. Alistair McIntyre, After Virtue, 221.
74. Volcker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 9.
1. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985); Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan Press, 1960; reprint, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987); Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Specific references are given as the ideas in these works are discussed below.
2. D. C. Lau, trans., Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982), xxv–xxvii; Chad Hansen, “Linguistic Skepticism in the Lao Tzu,” Philosophy East and West 31, no. 3 (July 1981): 321–36.
3. Chan, Sourcebook, 137.
4. Stace, Mysticism, 168, 255.
5. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 126–29.
6. Livia Kohn, Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 34.
7. Kohn, Early Chinese Mysticism, 45–52. For a critical assessment of this work, see my review article “Some Issues in the Study of Chinese Mysticism: A Review Essay,” China Review International 2, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 154–73.
8. Schwartz, World of Thought, 192–201.
9. Harold D. Roth, “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 (1991): 599–650 (chapter 1 of this book); and “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?,” in Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1991), 79–128 (chapter 2 of this book).
10. Harold D. Roth, “Redaction Criticism and the Early History of Taoism,” Early China 19 (1994): 1–46 (chapter 3 of this book).
11. See the first traditional occurrence of this term in Zhuangzi, 6/73. Zhuangzi yinde 莊子引得. Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series no. 20 (Peking, 1947). All references to the Zhuangzi are from this edition. In this passage, in a dialogue between Confucius and Zigong in which the former explains to the latter how the Daoist sage Sanghu and his friends “are at the stage of being fellow men with the maker of things, and go roaming in the single breath that breathes through heaven and earth,” we read that it is through the techniques of the Way that such men can forget themselves. A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 89–90. The only other use of this term in the Zhuangzi is also significant. It occurs in the thirty-third and final chapter, “Below in the Empire” (Tianxia 天下), in which the comprehensive Way of Heaven and Earth advocated by the Syncretist author is contrasted with the “techniques of one-corner” (fang shu 方術) found in other, less complete teachings, such as those of Zhuang Zhou himself (Zhuangzi 33/1ff; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 274ff). These two occurrences, separated by a century and a half and found in both the “Individualist” and “Syncretist” sections, serve as bookends to indicate an important continuity in this tradition’s self-understanding and demonstrate how the “techniques of the Way” developed beyond breathing methods to include methods of political and social organization.
12. My hypothesis on the origins of Daoism is that it began as a lineage of masters and disciples who practiced and transmitted a unique form of guided breathing meditation involving this regular circulation of vital breath. Political and social concerns and naturalist techniques and philosophy represented later developments. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for this is presented in my article “Redaction Criticism and the Early History of Daoism”(see chapter 3), in which I demonstrate that “Inward Training,” a collection of verses on this practice of guiding the vital breath that dates from the origins of Daoism, was deliberately summarized and restated in the much later work, “Techniques of the Mind II.” This deliberate abridgment and restatement was done for the purposes of commending this practice of inner cultivation to rulers as one of the principal arcana of governing.
13. For the former, see Catherine Despeux, “Gymnastics: The Ancient Tradition,” in Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, ed. Livia Kohn, vol. 61, Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1989), 225–62. The precise relationships between these two techniques and their practitioners is still unclear. However, by the time of Zhuangzi 15, which criticizes the practitioners of “gymnastic” exercises, the groups who advocated these two techniques seem to be clearly differentiated (Zhuangzi yinde 15/5–6).
14. I use the term “apophatic” in its more general and original sense of “(of knowledge of God) obtained by negation,” Concise Oxford Dictionary Sixth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). It has come to be associated with a particular mode of approach to the nature of God in the writings of Christian mystics, the so-called “via negativa,” in which God is described using negative language. I consider this a subset of “apophasis,” and I wish to clarify that I use the term more broadly to indicate a method of negating the self in order to facilitate an experience of the Absolute, however that is conceived. While more culturally specific than my own use, A. H. Armstrong argues for this kind of more general meaning of apophasis in Plotinian and Christian Studies (London: Variorum, 1979), especially in essays XXIV and XXIII. I wish to thank Janet Williams of the University of Bath for this reference.
“Inner cultivation” (neixiu 內修) refers to the apophatic methods of emptying the mind practiced by the various master-disciple lineages of early Daoism. Its locus classicus is in the “Inward Training” text of the Guanzi, which is discussed below. “Self-cultivation” (zixiu 自修) is a more general term that I take to refer to all methods of practical discipline aimed at improving oneself and realizing one’s innate nature and potential to the fullest. Self-cultivation was practiced by Confucians and Yangists as well as Daoists. Daoist self-cultivation is what I call “inner cultivation.”
15. Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). The former book is an abbreviated version of the latter. Both contain the same translation of the Laozi.
16. The Individualist aspect is the earliest. It advocates a cosmology of the Way and the inner cultivation practices that I adumbrate in the present chapter. Its representative extant texts are Guanzi’s “Inward Training” and the “Inner Chapters” of the Zhuangzi. The Primitivist contains the same cosmology of the Way and inner cultivation practices as the former but to these adds a political philosophy that rejects social conventions (especially Confucian and Mohist) and recommends returning to a political and social organization based on small agrarian communities. Its representative works are the Laozi and chapters 8–11 (1–57) and 16 of the Zhuangzi. The Syncretist embraces the same cosmology and inner cultivation practices as the other two aspects but in its political thought conceives of a complex, hierarchically organized society whose customs and laws are modeled on the overarching patterns of heaven and earth and that freely uses relevant techniques and ideas from other intellectual lineages. Representative texts include the “Huang-Lao silk manuscripts” from Mawangdui 馬王堆, chapters 12–15 and 33 of the Zhuangzi and the Huainanzi. For further details, see my “Psychology and Self-Cultivation,” especially 599–608 (chapter 1, pp. 21–27 in the present volume); “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?,” especially 80–88 and 95–113 (chapter 2, pp. 63–71 and 77–95 in the present volume). See also A. C. Graham, “How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write?,” in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283–321; and Liu Xiaogan, Zhuangzi zhexue ji qi yanbian 莊子哲學及其演變 (Peking: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1987).
17. This presentation is not intended to be comprehensive but deals principally with the theoretical role of mystical praxis and its relationship to mystical experience. I differ from Kohn by focusing more on the phenomenological and typological studies of William James and Walter Stace and “anti-constructivists” such as Donald Rothberg, which seriously entertain the possible veridicality of the epistemological claims of the mystics, rather than on the “constructivist” theories of Steven Katz, Wayne Proudfoot, et al., which reject the veridicality of such claims. For details, see my “Some Issues,” 161–68.
18. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 380–81.
19. This fifth characteristic is implicit. James uses the transforming influence of mystical experience as a means of clarifying where they differ from religious experiences in general, but he does not include it in his list of characteristics. See 381–82, 400–1, 413–15.
20. Peter Moore, “Mystical Experience, Mystical Doctrine, Mystical Technique,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven Katz (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 101.
21. Stace, Mysticism, 67–87.
22. See Robert K. C. Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
23. The two modes correspond well with Stace’s introvertive and extrovertive mystical experiences. Where I would differ from him is in his devaluing the latter (Stace, Mysticism, 132); I see no evidence of this in early Daoist sources. See “Some Issues,” 160–62.
24. These concepts are discussed throughout Stace’s third chapter, “The Problem of Objective Reference.” Note that at the time Stace was writing, the term “Hinayana” (Lesser Vehicle) was thought to be appropriate. Today, appreciating that this term is a polemical and deprecatory label, we would likely substitute the terms “Theravada.”
25. The foremost champion of the latter position is Steven Katz. See his “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–74, especially 26.
26. Moore, “Mystical Experience,” 113.
27. Moore, “Mystical Experience,” 113.
28. Robert Forman, “Mysticism, Constructivism, and Forgetting,” in Forman, Problem, 3–49, especially 3–9, and 30–43.
29. Donald Rothberg, “Contemporary Epistemology and the Study of Mysticism,” in Forman, Problem, 184.
30. Rothberg, “Contemporary,” 186.
31. Daniel Brown, “The Stages of Meditation in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Transformations of Consciousness and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, ed. Ken Wilber, Jack Engler, and Daniel Brown (Boston: Shambala, 1986), 263–64. In his analysis of the results of this study, Brown states that he has discovered “a clear underlying structure to meditation stages, a structure highly consistent across traditions …” which, despite the “vastly different ways they are conceptualized,” “is believed to represent natural human development available to anyone who practices” (223).
32. Rothberg, “Contemporary,” 186.
33. Forman, Problem, 8. This is a deliberate strategy on the part of Forman, who recognizes that this extrovertive form can be a more permanent mystical state that is typically thought of as a more advanced stage in the mystical journey. He omits it, not out of disregard, but in order to limit the focus of his collection of essays.
34. Roth, “Some Issues.”
35. Roth, “Some Issues,” 159–61. See also n. 14, which calls for further research to clarify various types in a continuum of extrovertive mystical experience.
36. Roth, “Some Issues,” 167–68.
37. Brown, “Stages of Meditation,” 221–22.
38. LaFargue, The Dao, 61.
39. Zhuangzi yinde, 6/92–93.
40. In this chapter, I most often use the text of the received recension of the Laozi as found in the edition of D. C. Lau, Tao Te Ching. However, whenever I find their readings preferable, I also make use of the Mawangdui manuscript redactions as found in the edition of Robert Henricks, Lao-Tzu Te-Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. I explain the unique elements of it when I fully analyze this passage below.
41. Lau, Tao Te Ching, xxxvii.
42. Chan, Sourcebook, 144.
43. Zhuangzi yinde, 6/92–93; Graham, Chuang Tzu, 92. I deviate only in translating tong 同 as “merge” instead of “go along.”
44. I follow Graham in understanding zhiti as the four limbs or members and the five orbs or visceral organs that are the physical manifestations of the five basic systems of vital energy in the human body. This is preferable to the alternative “drop off limbs and body” because two lines later the text refers to parting from the body (lixing), which would be redundant if the second interpretation were taken. For the associations of the emotions with the various internal organs or “orbs,” see Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 115–46.
45. On the imagery of the character “Dao” in Zhuangzi, see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Dao (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1989), 188: “Chuang-tzu … sees man as coinciding with the Way by ceasing to draw distinctions. To be on the unformulable path is to merge into the unnameable whole, so that what we are trying to pin down by the name ‘Way’ is revealed as nothing less than the universe flowing from its ultimate source …”
46. For the link between psychological states and physiological substrates, see Roth, “Psychology and Self-Cultivation,” 599–603 (chapter 1, pp. 21–23 in the present volume).
47. Guanzi, Sibu congkan edition, 16.2a5, 2b6, 3b6. All textual citations for the Guanzi are to this edition. For translations, see Roth, “The Inner Cultivation Tradition of Early Daoism,” 131–32.
48. Guanzi, 16.5a4, 5a5, 1h10, and 4a2. For translations, see Roth, “Inner Cultivation,” 133–34, 130, and 133.
49. Guanzi, 16.3b6.
50. See, for example, the other famous passage on meditation, the “fasting of the mind” dialogue, also between Confucius and Yan Hui (wherein Confucius is now the teacher): Zhuangzi yinde, 4/24–34: Graham, Chuang Tzu, 68–69.
51. Harold D. Roth, “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Daoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (1997): 295–314 (included as chapter 4 in this book). These important sources for early Daoist mystical praxis include the “HuangLao boshu,” chapters 3, 5, 17, and 25 of the Lüshi chunqiu, chapters 15 and 23 of the Zhuangzi, and the “Inward Training” and two “Techniques of the Mind” works from the Guanzi.
52. Brown, “Stages of Meditation,” 230–45 and 272–76.
53. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 77.
54. The restriction of the senses through focusing on the breathing is discussed in Brown, “Stages of Meditation,” 232–24. As a result, the meditator becomes “less sensitized to external events and more to internal events” (233).
55. Brown, “Stages of Meditation,” 232–33.
56. Brown, “Stages of Meditation,” 233.
57. According to the Baopuzi 抱朴子 (ca. 300 CE), the “lower cinnabar field” is located 2.4 inches below the navel. It is one of the major locations of the One in the human being. In the later Huangting jing 黃庭經, the Daoist adept makes the vital breath circulate through the lower cinnabar field, where it helps to nourish and retain the vital essence. In the Tang dynasty meditation texts of Sima Chengzhen 司馬承禛, fixing the attention on the lower cinnabar field is a technique used to control the desires and emotions. See Livia Kohn, “Guarding the One: Concentrative Meditation in Taoism,” and “Taoist Insight Meditation: The Tang Practice of Neiguan,” in Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, ed. Livia Kohn, 135 and 194–95, respectively; and Henri Maspero, “An Essay on Taoism in the First Centuries A.D.,” in Henri Maspero, Daoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank Kierman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 339–45.
58. Huainanzi, Sibu congkan edition, 8.8al–3. All references to the text of the Huainanzi are to this edition.
59. Roth, “Who Compiled,” 96 (chapter 2, Table 2.1, p. 79 in the present volume), finds this phrase in “Techniques of the Mind I,” chapters 13 and 15 of the Zhuangzi, and chapters 1, 6, and 7 of the Huainanzi. I can add Lüshi chunqiu 3.4 to this list (see “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” 302) (chapter 4, Table 4.1, pp. 170–71 in the present volume).
60. I follow Henricks, 234, in moving the first line of chapter 20 to the last line of chapter 19, where it constitutes the third of the three statements indicated above in the text of chapter 19.
61. Here I follow the Mawangdui B manuscript reading from Henricks, 219: zhi xu ji ye; shou jing du ye 至虛極也守靜督也.
62. Zhuangzi yinde, 4/28.
63. I follow Lau in emending the negative bu 不 (“not”) to er 而 (“and”), based on semantic considerations. Lau, Tao te Ching, 23.
64. LaFargue, The Dao, 245.
65. For the purposes of this chapter, I have taken the concept of the One to be the functional equivalent of the Way as it is manifested within the phenomenal world. This certainly seems to be the implication of chapter 39 in which the most important phenomena (Heaven, Earth, numen, the valley, the myriad things, sage rulers) each attain their essential defining characteristics as the result of the One. Chapter 42, in which we read that the “Way generated the One,” indicates that there is some difference between them. This could simply mean that there is a certain aspect of the Way that transcends its manifestation as the solitary unifying power within the phenomenal world. For a fuller discussion of the polysemy of the concept of the One in the Daoist tradition, see Livia Kohn, “Guarding,” 127–37.
66. Here I follow the Mawangdui variant jin zhi Dao 今之道 (not gu zhi Dao 古之道; Henricks, 215), because it better fits the phenomenological interpretation I have been developing in this chapter. The Way, as both the source merged with in introvertive mystical experience and the constant source of the universe from before its beginnings, is directly experienced in the present (not past, as in the received versions). Because it has existed from antiquity, if one knows it in the present, one can know it in the past and, through it, “know the ancient beginnings.”
67. Lau, Tao te Ching, 33–34.
68. Zhuangzi yinde, 2/38–40.
69. The phrase dai ying po 戴營魄 is extremely problematic and has puzzled commentators since Heshanggong 河上公. The po is the “bodily soul,” associated with yin, and the counterpart of the “spiritual soul” (hun 魂) associated with yang. The former governs the body; the latter governs the mind. They work harmoniously together during life, but separate after death, the po returning to Earth and the hun to Heaven. According to Yu Yingshi 余英時, the former concept developed first; there are a few references in the oracle bones. The concept of hun seems to have been derived from it and is intended to represent the locus of daily conscious activities, somewhat akin to our modern notion of the conscious mind, in my interpretation. Along these lines, I would suggest that we might think of the po as rather like our modern notion of the unconscious mind. That is, the mental phenomena we now associate with the conscious and unconscious minds were explained in early China by the concepts of the hun and po. Eduard Erkes follows the Heshanggong commentary by taking the term ying as the functional equivalent of hun; he suggests it was a variant of ling 靈 in Chu dialect. Thus, a literal translation of this phrase would be “to sustain the conscious and unconscious souls.” I have rendered it more freely because the constant activity of these two aspects of the mind does constitute “the daily activity of the psyche.” For more information, see Yu Yingshi, “O Soul, Come Back!’ A Study of the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre Buddhist China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (December 1987): 363–95; and Eduard Erkes, trans., Ho-Shang-Kung’s Commentary on Lao-Tse (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1950), 141–42.
70. Guanzi, 16.2bl–3. Translated in Roth, “Inner Cultivation,” 133.
71. Guanzi, 16.5a2–4.
72. Kohn, “Guarding,” especially 154–56.
73. Guanzi, 16.4a2–7. Close parallels of this passage are found in “Techniques of the Mind II” from Guanzi (13.5a2) and in the “Gengsang Chu” chapter of Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi yinde, 23/34–35).
74. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 15. The mirror is one of the most important metaphors in Chinese religious thought. The mirror is often seen to symbolize the clarified mind of the sage, which reflects things exactly as they are without even an iota of personal bias. For further details, see the pioneering study by Paul Demieville, “Le miroir spirituel,” Sinologica 1, no. 2 (1948): 112–37.
75. Guanzi, 16.2b9–3a1.
76. Guanzi, 13.1a11.
Chapter 9
1. Victor Mair, Experimental Essays on the Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983); and Paul Kjellberg and P. J. Ivanhoe, Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). I share the same assumptions as the scholars included in these two volumes that there is one author of the “Inner Chapters,” and I follow existing conventions in referring to him as Zhuangzi.
2. I am fully aware that the text of the Zhuangzi contains a number of distinct authorial voices, and I accept Angus Graham’s identification of them in his seminal study, “How Much of Chuang Tzu.” The present study is principally concerned with the “Inner Chapters” (ch. 1–7), which most concur are the product of a single hand, usually thought to be the man after whom the collection was named. While I am not convinced that all the passages collected in these chapters are by a single author, I do maintain that they express a sufficiently consistent vision. For convenience, and in the absence of a viable alternative, I adopt the traditional practice and identify this author as “Zhuangzi.”
3. Harold D. Roth, “Redaction Criticism and the Early History of Taoism,” Early China 19 (1994): 1–46 (chapter 3 in this book); “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 1 (June 1997) (chapter 4 in this book); and Roth, “Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. P. J. Ivanhoe and M. Csikszentmihalyi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) (chapter 8 in this book).
4. Donald Harper has accomplished seminal work in translating the texts of this tradition: Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1998). He has also begun an important analysis of how this tradition relates to the early texts of Daoism in this book and in an article “The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Macrobiotic Hygiene,” Early China 20 (1995): 381–92.
5. Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan Press, 1960; reprint, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1987), 111, 131.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. Harold D. Roth, “Some Issues in the Study of Chinese Mysticism: A Review Essay,” China Review International 2, no. 1 (1995): 154–72.
8. Stace, 9, 132.
9. Lee Yearley, “The Perfected Person in the Radical Chuang-tzu,” in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983), 125–48.
10. Ibid., 131.
11. Chad Hansen, “A Tao of Tao in Chuang-tzu,” in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983), 24–55.
12. All references to the text of the Zhuangzi are to the following edition: Chuang-tzu yin te, Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series no. 20 (Peking, 1947).
13. See Roth, “Evidence” and Roth, “Lao Tzu in the Context” (chapters 4 and 8 in the present volume).
14. I deviate from Graham’s translation only in translating tong 通 as “merge” instead of “go along,” and datong 大通 as the “Great Pervader.” References to the Chinese text are to the Chuang tzu yin te, Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series no. 20 (Beijing, 1947).
15. I follow Graham in understanding zhi ti as the four limbs or members and the five orbs or visceral organs that are the physical manifestations of the five basic systems of vital energy in the human body. This is preferable to the alternative “drop off limbs and body” because two lines later the text refers to parting from the body (li xing 離形), which would be redundant if the second interpretation were taken. For the associations of the emotions with the various internal organs or “orbs,” see Porkert, 1974, 115–46.
16. Hansen, in Mair, 45.
17. Lisa Raphals, “Skeptical Strategies in Zhuangzi and Theaetetus,” in Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, ed. Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 26–49.
18. Ibid., 30.
19. Ibid., 30–31.
20. P. J. Ivanhoe, “Zhuangzi on Skepticism, Skill, and the Ineffable Dao,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1993): 639–54.
21. Ibid., 641.
22. Ibid., 642–43, 648–49.
23. Ibid., 645.
24. Ibid., 653.
25. A. C. Graham, “Chuang Tzu’s Essay on Seeing All Things As Equal,” History of Religions 9 (October 1969–February 1970): 137–59.
26. Hansen, in Mair, 34.
27. The two pairs of Graham’s English translations of shi and fei are from his book Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters and from the History of Religions article, respectively.
28. My translation departs from Graham’s (CT: Inner Chapters, 53–54). The key departure is my rendering of the verbal phrase tong weiyi as “to pervade and unify” rather than Graham’s “interchange and deem to be one.” I feel this better captures the activity of the Way and of the sages who identify completely with it: the Way pervades everything and in pervading them unifies them. They are unified to the extent that each and every thing contains the Way within it; and they are unified in that, from the perspective of the Way within, each thing is seen to be equal. Because they attain this Way, sages can have the exact same perspective.
29. Raphals, in Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 33, and 46 n. 34, respectively.
30. I take the title of the waterfall from Victor Mair 1994, 182. Mair’s consistent translation of such names in order to give the reader a sense of their implications in Chinese is one of the strengths of his translation.
31. The bell-carver (19/54–57) and Yan Hui (4/29–32) both practice a fasting of the mind in order to cultivate stillness and emptiness. This is another indication of the importance of inner cultivation practice in developing the yinshi mode of extrovertive mystical consciousness.
Chapter 10
1. “Inner cultivation” is the term I use to refer to the apophatic practices of emptying the mind in order to realize the Way that are found in all early Daoist works. For details, see Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 7–9 and passim. This activist Daoist position belongs to the Syncretist phase of the early Daoist tradition that is sometimes identified with the “Huang-Lao” intellectual position. For a good overview, see Sarah Queen and Harold D. Roth, “The Huang-Lao Silk Manuscripts,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Irene Bloom and Wm. Th. De Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 241–43; John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought: Chapters Three, Four, and Five of the Huainanzi (Albany: State University of New York Press 1993), 8–14.
2. For a classical formulation, see Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925). For the effects on the laws of nature, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 533–39.
3. In his analysis of the presence of laws of nature that serve as the foundation for human natural laws in the Huang-Lao boshu, Randall Peerenboom has made a similar argument. See R. P. Peerenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China: The Silk Manuscripts of Huang-Lao (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 19–29.
4. D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Huainanzi (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, 1992); and D. C. Lau and Roger T. Ames, trans., Yuan Dao: Tracing Dao to Its Source (New York: Ballantine: 1998).
5. Kusuyama, Haruki 楠山春樹, Enanji 淮南子, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji shôin, 1979, 1982, 1988). Zhang Shuangdi 張雙棣, Huainanzi jishi 淮南 自校釋, 2 vols. (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997).
6. References to the Chinese text of the Huainanzi are to the edition in D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Huainanzi (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, 1992). They follow the format: chapter/page/line. In the following translations from “Yuan Dao,” block prose is continuous, parallel prose is laid out line by line from the left margin of the quotation, and true verse is indented. All translations are my own.
7. Roger Ames identifies this principle as one of the fundamental ideas in Huainanzi 9. See Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983).
8. Peerenboom 1992, 42–45, discusses the range of meaning of tian in early Chinese philosophical literature and decides upon “nature” as the best translation in his sources.
9. Chen Guying 陳古應, Huangdi sijing jinszhu jinyi 黃帝四經今注今意 (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1995), 155–56.
10. Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); and Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds., The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May 1998 (Berkeley: University of California, Institute for East Asian Studies, 2000).
11. The concept of realizing the deepest aspects of your own innermost being is a constant in the early Daoist “inner cultivation” tradition harkening back to its oldest extant source, the “Inward Training” (Neiye 內業) chapter of the Guanzi 管子. I have discussed this at great length (see Roth 1999, and in chapters 1–4, 7 and 9 in the present volume). Early Daoists conceived of a number of closely related aspects at the core of your innermost being including the spirit and its vital essence and ultimately the Way itself.
12. The “Techniques of the Mind” is the title of two short texts in the seventy-six-text Guanzi compendium. Together with “Inward Training” and “The Purified Mind,” they constitute a group that in modern scholarship if referred to as the four “Techniques of Mind” works. By the time of the Huainanzi, this phrase was probably used as a general term for what I have called “inner cultivation” practice. For details, see Roth, 1999, 15–30.
13. For Graham, chapters 8 through the first part of 11 of the Zhuangzi were written by a single author whose literary style and intellectual viewpoint are unique in the work. He deemed this author the “Primitivist.” See A. C. Graham, “How Much of Chuang-tzu did Chuang-tzu Write?,” in A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283–321.
14. Michael Saso, Taoism and the Rite of Cosmic Renewal (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1972), 45–51, presents a series of translations from the opening sections of Huainanzi 1, 3, and 7 that he argues contain many of the fundamental ideas of religious Daoism.
15. Roth in Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies Monograph No. 46. 1992), 144–47, notes the existence of Northern Song taboos in the Huainanzi redaction in the Zhengtong 正統 Daoist Canon of 1445, thus indicating that it was based on an edition from this earlier recension.
Chapter 11
1. Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
2. An excellent example of this can be found in the writings of Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1: 689–91.
3. Mengzi 孟子 10.1 (Wan zhang xia 萬章下)Ancient Texts Database [CHANT), Chinese University of Hong Kong Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, supervising eds., D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching. All Chinese texts are taken from this Database, unless otherwise noted.
4. Mencius 5B.1. Irene Bloom, Mencius (New York: Columbia University Press), 111. Most English translations of Mencius, such as those of Bloom and D. C. Lau, follow a different numbering scheme than the CHANT edition.
5. Stephen Little, Daoism and the Arts of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 170–71; Phillip Clart, “The Jade Emperor,” in The Encyclopedia of Daoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 1:1197–98.
6. Shuowen definition and commentary taken from citation in Zhongwen dacidian 中文大辭典 (Taibei: Guanghua Publishing, 1973), 6: 455.
7. Mengzi 11.7 (Gaozi xia 告子下) (CHANT).
8. Modified from Bloom, Mencius, 126. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.
9. Mengzi 14.19 (“Jinxin xia” 盡心下) (CHANT).
10. Xunzi 23 (“Xing e pian” 性惡篇), para. 1 (CHANT).
11. Guanzi, juan 卷 18.2(九守, pian 55), para. 9 (CHANT). The received text of the Guanzi follows a distinctive arrangement in which 76 pian are arranged in 24 juan. I have provided paragraph numbers for the CHANT editions here and elsewhere to facilitate the location of specific passages in this electronic database that contains no numbered pages.
12. Lüshi chunqiu, juan 3.3 (“Xian ji” 先己), para. 1 (CHANT).
13. Cou li (腠 理) are the lines in the inner layer of connective tissue that cover muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints. (Grand Dictionnaire Ricci de la Langue Chinoise [Paris: Association Ricci, 2001], entry 11436, vol. VI, 131.) Vital energy circulates through this system of veins and animates these structures and the skin above them. This is a term found in the Chinese medical traditions.
14. Translation modified from John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 102.
15. Lüshi chunqiu, juan 5.4 (“Shiyin” 適音), para. 2 (CHANT).
16. Translation is the author’s. See Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 143 for a different interpretation.
17. Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
18. See Harold D. Roth, “Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 (December 1991): 599–650 and “Redaction Criticism and the Early History of Taoism,” Early China 19 (1994): 1–46 (chapters 1 and 3 in the present volume). See also Russell Kirkland, Daoism: The Enduring Tradition. Routledge, 2004) and Ronnie L. Littlejohn, Daoism: An Introduction (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2009).
19. Roth, “Psychology” and “Redaction Criticism” (chapters 1 and 3 in the present volume).
20. Louis Komjathy, The Daoist Tradition: An Introduction, chapter 2 (London: Continuum, 2013) provides a spirited defense of this terminology.
21. These phrases are found, respectively in Guanzi, juan 13.1 (“Xinshu shang” 心術上, pian 36), para. 2; Laozi, zhang 章 10; Zhuangzi, juan 4 (“Renjian shi” 人間世), para. 5, and juan 6 (“Dazong shi” 大宗師), para. 18 (CHANT).
22. For details on these states, see Harold D. Roth, “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295–314 (chapter 4 in the present volume).
23. For this latter phrase, see Zhuangzi, juan 6 (“Dazong shi” 大宗師), para. 18 (CHANT).
24. For details, see Harold D. Roth, “Lao Tzu in the Context of Early Taoist Mystical Praxis,” in Essays on Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Lao Tzu, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 59–96 (chapter 8 in the present volume).
25. Harold D. Roth, “Bimodal Mystical Experience in the Qiwulun of Zhuangzi,” Journal of Chinese Religions 28 (2000): 1–20 (chapter 9 in the present volume). “Flowing cognition” is my interpretation of Graham’s very literal translation of yinshi 因是 as “the That’s It that goes by circumstance.” As explained in this chapter, this refers to cognizing a situation from attachment to any one fixed way of seeing it.
26. Laozi, zhang 65 (CHANT).
27. Laozi zhuzi suoyin 老子遂 字索引 Chinese University of Hong Kong Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series number 24. Supervising eds., D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching (Chinese University Press, 1996), chapter 65, line 20, p. 140. The CHANT Database does not include the commentaries of Wang Bi 王弼 and Heshang Gong.
28. Zhuangzi, juan 3 (“Yangsheng zhu” 養生主), para. 3 (CHANT).
29. Zhuangzi, juan 15 (“Keyi” 刻意), para. 2 (CHANT).
30. For this dating, see Roth, Original Tao, 23–27.
31. Guanzi, juan 16.1 (pian 49, “Neiye”), para. 3 (CHANT).
32. Roth, Original Tao, 54. Verse numbers are taken from this source.
33. Guanzi, juan 16.1 (pian 49, “Neiye”), para. 18 (CHANT).
35. Roth, Original Tao, 96.
36. Guanzi, juan 16.1 (pian 49, “Neiye”), para. 5 (CHANT).
37. Roth, Original Tao, 62. The “patterns of the One” are the various natural guidelines through which the Way penetrates the universe. They serve to structure the natural development of all phenomena and form a normative substructure for their interactions with one another.
38. For tentative dating, see Roth, Original Tao, 23–37. Textual emendations are all taken from Xu Weiyu 許維遹, Wen Yiduo 文一多, and Guo Moruo 郭沫若, Guanzi jijiao 管子集校 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1955), 633–49.
39. Guanzi, juan 13.1 (pian 36, “Xinshu shang”), para. 1 (CHANT).
40. The division of “Xinshu shang” into verses is my own; the later commentary to each verse occurs within the undivided original text, but is obvious with careful analysis. These translations are from my unpublished manuscript translation of all four “Techniques of the Mind” chapters from the Guanzi: “The Resonant Way: Daoist Texts from the Guanzi.”
41. Deleting guyue 故曰 (therefore it says) at the start of the sentence, following many scholars.
42. Moving this sentence here from a position in the comment section (just before the final line) to which it was erroneously displaced, following Guo Moruo, Guanzi jijiao.
43. Guanzi, juan 13.1 (pian 36, “Xinshu, shang”), para. 12 (CHANT).
44. Guanzi, juan 13.1 (pian 36, “Xinshu, shang”), para. 5 (CHANT).
45. Emending zhi 執 (grasp) to shi 势 (condition), the reading in other major editions (Guo Moruo, Guanzi jijiao).
46. Huainanzi, juan 21 (“Yao lüe” 要略), para. 21 (CHANT).
47. John S. Major, Sarah Queen, Andrew S. Meyer, and Harold D. Roth. The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China, by Liu An, King of Huainan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 860.
48. Huainanzi, juan 1 (“Yuan Dao xun” 原道訓), para. 5 (CHANT). The suffix xun 訓 (“explicated”) is added in the CHANT edition to the first 20 chapters titles. It is superfluous for chapter 21, which is a summary of the previous twenty chapters. However, if one is to be precise, this suffix was originally only found in the editions of the Gao Yu recension, and it should not be added to the chapters titles for the extant recension, which is a conflation of thirteen chapters from the Gao recension and eight from the recension of latter Han grammarian, Xu Shen. For details, see Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1992, 43, 79–112.
49. Major, et al., The Huainanzi, 53.
50. Huainanzi, juan 14 (“Quanyan xun” 詮言訓), para. 8 (CHANT).
51. Major et al., Huainanzi, 539–40.
52. Huainanzi, juan 11 (“Qi su xun” 齊俗訓), para. 13 (CHANT).
53. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 405–6.
54. Huainanzi, juan 11 (“Qi su xun”), para. 16 (CHANT).
55. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 408.
56. Huainanzi, juan 14 (“Quanyan xun”), para. 18 (CHANT).
57. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 547 (modified).
58. Huainanzi, juan 1 (“Yuan Dao xun”), para. 7–8 (CHANT).
59. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 55.
60. Huainanzi, juan 9 (“Zhu shu xun” 主術訓), para. 14 (CHANT).
61. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 304.
62. Huainanzi, juan 11 (“Qi su xun”), para. 24 (CHANT).
63. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 417.
64. Huainanzi, juan 14 (“Quanyan xun”), para. 20 (CHANT).
65. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 548–49.
66. For a fuller argument about this “normative natural order,” see Harold D. Roth, “Nature and Self-Cultivation in Huainanzi’s ‘Original Way,’ ” in Polishing the Chinese Mirror: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosemont Jr., ed. Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2010), 270–92 (chapter 10 in the present volume).
67. Huainanzi, juan 1 (“Yuan Dao xun”), para. 26 (CHANT).
68. Major et al., The Huainanzi, 71.
Chapter 12
1. A. C. Graham, “Mysticism and the Question of Private Access,” in Reason within Unreason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality, ed. David Lynn Hall (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1992), 281–82.
2. The series of four radio programs for Ideas was broadcast on the CBC in February 1982 when I was in Sendai, Japan. I still use copies of them today in my teaching.
3. Harold D. Roth, “Contemplative Studies: Prospects for a New Field,” Teachers College Record 108:9 (2006) (Columbia University), 1787–1815; “Against Cognitive Imperialism,” Religion East and West 8 (2008): 1–23 (chapter 13 in the present volume); “A Pedagogy for the New Field of Contemplative Studies,” in Contemplative Approaches to Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines, ed. Olen Gunnlaugson and Heeson Bai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 97–118.
4. A. C. Graham, “Mysticism and the Question of Private Access,” in Reason within Unreason, 265–82.
5. Graham, “Mysticism,” 265.
6. Graham, “Mysticism,” 277.
7. I have borrowed this idea of “attunement” from Jung Lee, The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014). Lee speaks of “ethical attunement” as a result of practices advocated in the Zhuangzi.
8. Roth, “A Pedagogy for the New Field of Contemplative Studies,” 98–99.
9. The former have been studied extensively as examples of the “optimal experience” he calls “flow” by psychologist Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi. See Flow: Towards a Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). The latter have been studied during the past century under the general category of “mysticism or “mystical experience.” For a superb overview article, see Jerome I. Gellman, “Mysticism and Religious Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Religion, ed. William Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138–52.
10. See, for example, the collection of scientific research in Brian Bruya, ed., Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). See also two books by Edward Slingerland: Effortless Action: Wu-wei As Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity (Crown, 2014).
11. Francisco J. Varela and Jonathan Shear, “First-Person Methodologies: What, Why, How?,” in The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness. Published as a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 2–3 (1999) (Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic), 1.
12. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 1991).
13. Evan Thompson, “Empathy and Consciousness,” in Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, ed. Evan Thompson. Published as a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–7 (2001) (Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic), 1.
14. Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” in Between Ourselves, ed. Evan Thompson, 166.
15. Evan Thompson, “Empathy and Consciousness,” 1.
16. For an excellent recent summary of a plethora of this research, see Richard Davidson, The Emotional Life of the Brain (New York and London: Plume, 2012).
17. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe (New York: Peter Smith, 1967; first edition 1929), 74.
18. Yoko Arisaka, “The Ontological Co-Emergence of ‘Self and Other’ in Japanese Philosophy,” in Between Ourselves, 202.
19. Arisaka, 202.
20. Arisaka, 203.
21. Nishida, Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyu 善の研究), trans. Christopher Ives and Masao Abe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Author’s preface, xxx
22. The ultimate ground of consciousness and the world in the foundational Yogācāra work, The Laňkāvatāra Sutra, is “mind only” or the ultimate Storehouse Consciousness (Pāramālaya vijñāna). For an excellent summary of this complex work, see Mark A. Ehman, “The Laňkāvatāra Sutra,” in Buddhism: A Modern Perspective, ed. Charles S. Prebish (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 112–17.
23. The “brain sciences” include psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and various overlapping fields of research such as “cognitive neuroscience.”
24. Aaron Seitz and Takeo Watanabe, “The Phenomenon of Task-Irrelevant Perceptual Learning,” Vision Research 49, no. 21 (October 2009): 2604–10.
25. Aaron Seitz, “Task Irrelevant Perceptual Learning,” in Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, ed. Norman M. Seel (New York: Springer, 2012); 3270–72.
26. Paul Hager, “Tacit Knowledge,” in Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, ed. Norman M. Seel (New York: Springer, 2012): 3259–61.
27. Brian Bruya, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Attention That Includes Effortless Attention and Action,” in Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1.
28. Rael B. Cahn and John Polich, “Meditation States and Traits: EEG, ERP and Neuroimaging Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 2 (2006): 180–211. The information about neuroscientific studies of meditation presented here is taken from this excellent overview article.
29. Cahn and Polich, 181.
30. Cahn and Polich, 181. I have replaced their category of “mindfulness” with that of “receptive meditation,” as in the following source: James Austin, “The Thalamic Gateway: How Meditative Training of Attention Evolves toward Selfless Transformations of Consciousness,” in Bruya, ed., Effortless Attention, 375–77. “Mindfulness” is a technique and result that can be used for either concentrative or receptive meditation.
31. Austin, 377.
32. Britta K. Hölzel, Sara Lazar, Tim Gard, Zev Schuman-Olivier, David R. Vago, and Ulrich Ott, “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 6 (2011): 537–59.
33. Francisco Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 330–50.
34. Angus C. Graham, “How much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write?,” in A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Harold D. Roth, “An Appraisal of Angus Graham’s Textual Scholarship on the Chuang Tzu,” in A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, ed. Harold D. Roth (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). The Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monograph 20, 181–220 (chapter 6 in the present volume).
35. Three recent works address many issues surrounding the text and composition of the Zhuangzi. Most relevant for our concerns is the issue of whether or not the first seven “Inner Chapters” of the Zhuangzi contain the original core around which the text formed and whether or not they can be attributed to the historical figure of Zhuang Zhou, as maintained by Graham and myself. Liu Xiaogan’s 劉笑敢 newest work on this topic examines a wide range of opinions and concludes that the inner chapters should be taken as the core of the text and represent the work of the historical figure; and that the outer and miscellaneous chapters can be roughly attributed to the followers of Zhuang Zhou. See Liu Xiaogan, “Textual Issues in the Zhuangzi,” in Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, ed. Xiaogan Liu (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 129–57.
David McCraw, in Stratifying Zhuangzi: Rhyme and Other Quantitative Evidence, Language and Linguistics Monograph Series, vol. 41 (Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2010), uses his own system of rhyming patterns in the Zhuangzi to argue that the presence of many “non-canonical cross-rhymes” in the Inner Chapters proves that they could not have been written by a single author. Reviewers have commented on the confusing presentation of his methodology and results, calling this “opaque to the point of incomprehensibility” (Richard Lynn, Journal of Chinese Studies no. 54 [January 2012]: 335–59). Linguist David Branner (Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 4 [2010]: 653–54), further questions both McCraw’s methodology and conclusions: “In the case of the Zhuāngzĭ, the fact that there are a great many noncanonical “cross-rhymes” could indeed point to multiple authorship, with each hand characterized by a different cross-rhyming pattern. Could it also point to a single author writing in a style that allows for non-canonical rhyming, or even simply trying to sound non-canonical?” He concludes: “In short, this book should not have been published in its present form. It deals with an important question but is confusing and awkwardly composed. … its rambling and hesitant presentation makes me wonder about the soundness of its findings.”
In “Were There Inner Chapters in the Warring States?: A New Examination of Evidence About the Zhuangzi,” T’oung Pao 96 (2011): 299–369, Esther Klein has put forth a well-researched and well-argued analysis of the composition of the Zhuangzi. In it, she theorizes that while there must have been a pre-Han version of the text that contained most of the materials that are in the work today, the compilation of the original fifty-two-chapter recension, later excised to thirty-three by Guoxiang, is likely a Western Han event, possibly—as I hypothesized in the original festschrift for Angus Graham—at the Huainan court of Liu An. (See Harold D. Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?,” in Chinese Texts and Contexts: Essays in Honor of Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr. [Lasalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991], 79–128 [chapter 2 of the present volume].) She contends further, contrary to accepted opinion, that the Inner Chapters are likely to have been the last section of the text compiled, put together because of—or to form—a coherent philosophy. She concludes that the time has come to stop thinking of there being one author of the Inner Chapters and most certainly to stop thinking of this author as the reputed historical personage of Zhuang Zhou.
While there is something to commend in each of these sources, all fail to seriously consider the experiential dimension to which many passages in the text attest. (To be more precise, McCraw summarily dispenses with this in a comment on 48–49.) If, as I am arguing, a contemplative practice and its results are attested throughout the text, the reliance on a historical tradition in which this practice was handed down from teacher to students is a necessity. Then as now, it is clear that one cannot derive an effective contemplative practice from reading about it in a book. As I have argued in the first Graham festschrift, there is reason to theorize that this tradition continued into the Han and was present at the Huainan court. While it is not possible here to fully assess the impact this argument has on the evidence for the compilation of the text, it is possible to take something from each of their works: 1. With Liu, I think that the material now in the Inner Chapters was part of the original stratum of the book; 2. With McCraw, I think that it is possible that not all the Inner Chapters were written by one person; I do think that there is a consistency in literary styles and in philosophy that makes these chapters the core of the text; 3. With Klein, I think that the work was likely compiled at the court of Liu An from materials that existed in the late Warring States.
36. Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?”
37. I am using “cognitive” to encompass the entire range of responses of consciousness to its environment, including intellectual, emotional, intuitive, aesthetic, and even “spiritual.” All these aspects of consciousness contribute to the total apprehension or cognition of the whole from moment to moment throughout the full range of third-, second-, first-, and no-person experience. This full range is included in classical Daoist ideas about the activity of consciousness or of the “heart” or “mind.”
38. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 43–44. All references to the text are from the edition in D. C. Lau et al., eds., Zhuangzi suizi suoyin (ZZSY). Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Philosophical works no. 43 (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 2000), 1/1/15–21 (chapter 1/page 1/ lines 15–21.).
39. Graham, CT, 45 (modified). ZZSY 1/2/2–3.
40. Graham, CT, 95. ZZSY 7/20/16.
41. Graham, CT, 150. ZZSY 11/28/31–32.
42. Graham, CT, 131–32; ZZSY 12/31/19.
43. Graham CT, 69. ZZSY 4/10/5–6.
44. Graham, CT, 84–85 (modified). ZZSY 6/15/29–16/9.
45. Graham, CT, 82. ZZSY 5/15/20–25. I have emended Graham’s translation to be gender neutral whenever possible.
46. Graham, CT, 150. ZZSY 11/28/31–32.
47. Graham, CT, 81.
48. Graham, CT, 202–03. ZZSY 8/23/9–10.
49. Graham, CT, 205. ZZSY 9/24/1.
50. Graham, CT, 205. ZZSY 9/24/10.
51. Graham, CT, 212. ZZSY 11/26/25–27.
52. See, for example, Brian Bruya, “The Rehabilitation of Spontaneity: A New Approach in the Philosophy of Action,” Philosophy East and West 50, no. 2. And Edward Slingerland, “Towards an Empirically Responsible Ethics: Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Effortless Attention in Early Chinese Thought,” in Bruya, Effortless Attention, 248–86.
53. Graham, CT, 186–87. ZZSY 12/32/22–24.
54. So common, in fact, that Graham has put together a section of these passages, seven in all. They come from chapters 12–14 and 21–22. Graham, CT, 126–34.
55. Graham, CT, 129–30. ZZSY 14/39/27–28.
56. See, for example, the second chapter of the Huainanzi titled “Activating the Genuine,” in The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China, translated, annotated, and introduced by John S. Major, Sarah Queen, Andrew S. Meyer, and Harold D. Roth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
57. Graham, CT, 130–31. ZZSY 21/57/20–25.
58. Graham, CT, 259–60. ZZSY, 13/34/16–22.
59. Graham, CT, 65. ZZSY, 15/41/24–28.
60. For an analysis of this important concept of Li (patterns), see Harold D. Roth, “The Classical Daoist Concept of Li and Early Chinese Cosmology,” in Studies in Honor of Li Xueqin, ed. Wen Xing, Early China 35–36 (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China, 2012–2013), 157–84 (chapter 11 in the present volume).
61. Graham, CT, 68–69. ZZSY 4/10/1–4 (modified).
62. Graham, CT, 92. ZZSY 6/19/17–22.
63. For details, see Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 108–52.
64. ZZSY: 2/3/15; 19/50/14; 20/55/12; 21/57/21; 22/61/1; 23/65/23; 24/70/19.
65. Graham, CT, 138. ZZSY 19/50/12–16.
66. Graham, CT, 77. ZZSY 5/13/18–21.
67. Graham, CT, ZZSY, 7/21/21 (modified).
68. Graham, CT 359–60. ZZSY, 13/34/1–24.
69. Graham, CT, 281. ZZSY 33/99/29–30.
70. Graham, CT, 178. ZZSY 11/27/23–28.
71. Concentrative meditation is one of the techniques included in the toolbox of the practice of “Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.” See Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (New York: Delta, 1990).
72. ZZSY 23/67/8–11. For an alternate translation, see Victor Mair, Wandering on the Way (New York: Bantam, 1994), 234.
73. Graham, CT 132–33. ZZSY, 22/61/16, 21–23.
74. Graham, CT, 69. ZZSY 4/10/5.
75. Graham, CT, 51 (modified). ZZSY 2/4/9–10.
76. Graham, CT, 53. ZZSY 2/4/18–19.
77. Graham, CT, 53. ZZSY 2/4/19–20.
78. Graham, CT, 52. ZZSY 2/4/16.
79. He first cracked this in the following article: A. C. Graham, “Chuang Tzu’s Essay on Seeing All Things as Equal,” History of Religions 9 (October 1969–February 1970).
80. Graham, CT, 52. ZZSY 2/4/16.
81. Graham, CT, 53–54. ZZSY 2/4/26–5/3.
82. ZZSY 22/62/14–15.
83. ZZSY5/13/13; 7/21/15; 13/34/22; 22/61/20; 33/97/15.
84. ZZSY 6/17/14; 7/21/19; 11/27, 28; 20/54/3; 33/99/27.
85. ZZSY 6/17/25,27; 6/18/19; 7/20/14; 19/50/1,3; 32/95/19; 33/100/10.
86. ZZSY6/19/21; 17/46/27.
87. Graham, CT, 76–77. ZZSY 5/13/11–15.
88. Graham, CT, 135. ZZSY 19/52/4–8.
Chapter 13
1. Robin Marantz Henig, “Darwin’s God,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 4, 2007, 39.
2. Ibid.
3. Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1958, paperback edition, 1961), 37.
4. Boyer’s use of the term supernatural notions can only be described as deriving from common parlance. Neither in this article nor in his larger study, Religion Explained, does he attempt to provide a clear definition of this term. Of course, to a great extent it depends on how one defines what it means to be “natural.” This has varied considerably in European religious and scientific thought, to say nothing of non-European philosophies. For the purposes of this study, we also use supernatural as Boyer seems to: to refer to experiences, events, forces, or beings that operate beyond what a society defines as “natural,” that is, subject to the laws of nature. For the history of how such concepts led to the rise of scientific materialism in Europe, see B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41–56. For a study of these concepts in Christian theology, see Paul Draper, “God, Science, and Naturalism,” in William Wainwright, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 272–303.
5. Pascal Boyer, “Gods and the Mental Instincts that Create Them,” in James Proctor, ed., Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 240.
6. Ibid., 244.
7. Ibid., 247.
8. There are, of course, important contemplative traditions in Christianity that Boyer ignores; whether or not they hold supernatural beliefs is a contentious issue beyond the scope of this chapter.
9. Over the years there has been a lively debate on whether or not this key Confucian concept can be understood within the confines of Abrahamic notions of natural/supernatural or transcendent/immanent. This debate is resumed in the pages of the superb festschrift, Polishing the Chinese Mirror: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosemont Jr., ed. Ronnie Littlejohn and Marthe Chandler (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008). See, in particular, Littlejohn’s “Did Kongzi Teach Us How to Become Gods?,” 188–211 and Rosemont’s response, 382–88.
10. Henry Rosemont Jr., Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 2001), 43.
11. Steven Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 26. The emphases are mine.
12. For James’s classic identification of the basic phenomenological elements of mystical experience, see his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 380–81. This apophatic process of deepening insight through removing the basic categories of everyday cognition is perhaps best seen in the early Daoist tradition, where the progressive emptying out of the contents of consciousness results first in a state alternately described as being completely empty, attaining the One, or merging with the Dao. This is then followed by the arising of a attachment-free cognition that spontaneously perceives, knows, and acts in complete harmony with the greater forces of the cosmos. For details on these processes, see two articles of mine: “Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295–314, and “Bimodal Mystical Experience in the ‘Qiwulun’ of Chuang Tzu,” Journal of Chinese Religions 28 (2000): 1–20.
13. Sumner B. Twiss, “Shaping the Curriculum: The Emergence of Religious Studies,” in Mark Hadley and Mark Unno, eds., Counterpoints: Issues in Teaching Religious Studies (Providence, RI: Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, 1995), 33. Although written as a study of a particular department, it is a case study for the entire field.
14. See, for example, Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1992).
15. This quote is taken from an interview I did in 1981 with Needham that was incorporated into the radio program “Divination and Cosmology in Ancient China,” on Ideas (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 9, 16, 23 and March 2, 1982). This particular broadcast was the first, on February 9.
16. The search for the historical Jesus is a topic that has roiled Christian theology for more than four centuries; however, no era has been so engaged in this topic as that of the past half-century, when the theological quest to establish the historicity of Jesus as an example of the working of the Divine in the world has been challenged by the critical techniques of historical scholars who have attempted to differentiate reliable data from myth and pious elaboration. Representative writings in this massive corpus include Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1909; reprint, New York: Dover, 2005); Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: Harper and Row, 1993); E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993); Robert Funk et al., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993).
17. Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) is probably the most direct statement of this thesis; his Manufacturing Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) argues this critique in terms of the presumed clash between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives in the study of religion. His critique of the study of religion as a special sui generis phenomenon in the latter volume is not without merit, but he doesn’t go far enough to break away from the European cultural presuppositions that support objectivist historicism and social-scientific reductionism to attain a truly unbiased perspective.
18. James, Varieties, 42.
19. B. Alan Wallace, “The Intersubjective Worlds of Science and Religion,” in Proctor, Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, 309.
20. B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41–56.
21. Mulāmadhyamika kārikās 24.11.
22. I use the names Laozi and Zhuangzi as conventions to refer to the philosophical arguments made within those works; I do not intend to imply that there was a real historical person named Laozi who authored this work (there was not). The historical Zhuangzi, or Zhuang Zhou 莊周, was author of perhaps chapters 1 to 7 (the “Inner Chapters”) of the Zhuangzi text. For the former, see A. C. Graham, “The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,” in Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 23–40. For the latter, see Graham, “How Much of Chuang Tzu did Chuang Tzu Write?,” in Harold Roth, ed., A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 58–103; and Harold Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?,” in Henry Rosemont Jr., ed., Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays in Honor of Angus C. Graham (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991), 79–128 (chapter 2 in the present volume).
23. Angus C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Seven “Inner Chapters” and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 51 (modified).
24. Ibid., 53 (modified).
25. Ibid., 51 (modified).
26. Ibid., 52 (modified).
27. Ibid., 53. My translation departs from Graham’s in rendering shi 是 and fei 非 as “true” and “false” rather than Graham’s insightful but idiosyncratic translations of “that’s it” and “that’s not.”
28. My translation departs from Graham’s on 53–54. The key departure is my rendering of the verbal phrase tong wei yi 通為一 as “to pervade and unify” rather than Graham’s “interchange and deem to be one.” I feel this better captures the activity of the Way and of the sages who identify completely with it: the Way pervades everything and in pervading them unifies them. They are unified to the extent that each and every thing contains the Way within it; and they are unified in that, from the perspective of the Way within, each thing is seen to be equal. Because they attain this Way, sages can have the exact same perspective. I have also provided a different and I hope clearer translation of two important compounds, weishi 為是 and yinshi. Graham’s extremely precise translations of these terms as “the That’s It which Deems” and “the That’s It which goes by circumstance” are insightful but overly technical for the educated reader. I have chosen to translate these compounds in a way that incorporates my interpretation of their meaning as “fixated cognition” and “flowing cognition.”
29. Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
30. For information on Zhuangzi’s inner cultivation practices, see Roth, Original Tao, 153–61. For a study devoted to this subject, see “Bimodal Mystical Experience in the Qiwulun of Chuang Tzu,” Journal of Chinese Religions 28 (2000): 1–20 (chapter 9 in the present volume).
31. Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9.
32. Varela et al., Embodied Mind, 150.
33. Evan Thompson, “Empathy and Human Experience,” in Proctor, Science, Religion and the Human Experience, 273.
34. B. Alan Wallace, “Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 5–7 (2001): 209–10.
35. Graham, Chuang-tzu, 53 (modified).
36. Ibid., 54 (modified).
37. Varela et al., Embodied Mind, 217–54.
38. B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 15–16.
39. Thompson, “Empathy and Human Experience,” in Proctor, Science, Religion and the Human Experience, 261–62.
40. Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 123–24.
41. Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
42. The pioneering works in these areas are Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (New York: Delta, 1990) and Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response (New York: Harper, 1975). See also Ruth A. Baer, “Mindfulness Training as a Clinical Intervention: A Conceptual Review,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 10, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 125–43; and Scott Bishop et al., “Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 230–41.
43. Jha’s Lab at the University of Pennsylvania is doing cutting-edge research on the cognitive impact of contemplative practices. See, for example, her article A. P. Jha, J. Krompinger, and M. J. Baime, “Mindfulness Training Modifies Subsystems of Attention,” Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (2007): 109–19.
44. The basic scientific research in these areas is voluminous. I refer the reader to the excellent summary article of research through the year 2000: Jensine Andresen, “Meditation Meets Behavioural Medicine,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7:11–12 (2000), reprinted in Jensine Andresen and Robert K. C. Forman, eds., Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2000), 17–73. Another more recent summary of research that focuses on Tibetan Buddhist Meditation is Antoine Lutz, John D. Dunne, and Richard J. Davidson, “Meditation and Neuroscience: An Introduction,” in Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 499–555. There are two works by James Austin that present the neuroscience of Japanese Zen Buddhist contemplative experience: Zen and the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) and Zen-Brain Reflections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
45. Two leading works in this very new area are Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: The Free Press, 2004) and Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
46. Wallace, Contemplative Science.
47. For a discussion of the pedagogical theory surrounding this, see my article “Contemplative Studies: Prospects for a New Field,” Columbia Teacher’s College Record Special Issue on Contemplative Education, vol. 108, no. 9 (September 2006): 1787–1816.
48. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), vol. 1, 424.
Afterword
1. Sarah A. Queen, “Inventories of the Past: Rethinking the “School” Affiliation of the Huainanzi. Asia Major, Third Series (14.1) 2001; Mark Csíkszentmihályi and Michael Nylan, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China,” T’oung Pao LXXXIX, 2003.
2. Esther Klein, “Were There Inner Chapters in the Warring States?: A New Examination of Evidence About the Zhuangzi,” T’oung Pao 96 (2011): 299–369; For a critique see Liu Xiaogan, “Textual Issues in the Zhuangzi,” in Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, ed. Xiaogan Liu (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 129–57; Stephan Peter Bumbacher, “Reconstructing the Zhuangzi: Preliminary Considerations.” Asia (2016) (70:3) 611–74.
3. For more detailed arguments see above chapters 1, 2, and 7. See also, Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 5 ff. See also Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 173–203.
4. See Roth, Original Tao, 190–93. Dirk Meyer, Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and Production of Meaning in Early China (Leiden: Brill 2012) has made a perceptive distinction between two types of early Chinese texts. “Context-dependent” texts rely on “outside information for getting their concerns across, such as oral instructions from a teacher. “Argument-dependent” texts are self-contained and rely on logical argumentation and internally consistent terminology to convey meaning. See, in particular, 227–29. I would disagree with Meyer, however, in his contention that the former group depend on such specific situational contextualization that they become impossible to fully understand once they have been transmitted out of their initial setting or location. At least in the Inner Cultivation tradition, it is possible by inference from contemplative hermeneutic, to reconstruct some of that original setting and hence some of the original meaning. Finally, of course, actual philosophical works are sometimes cross-overs between these two categories and thus provide interesting possible combination.
5. Shiji 史記, Bona edition, ch. 130, 3a–6b. For a translation and analysis of Sima Tan’s “On the Six Intellectual Traditions,” see Sarah A. Queen and Harold D. Roth, “A Syncretist Perspective on the Six Schools,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition (rev. edition), ed. William Theodore deBary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 278–82.
6. Volcker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine: 1626–2006 (Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007), 9.
7. For his most recent thinking on this topic see See Liu Xiaogan, 劉笑敢 “Textual Issues in the Zhuangzi,” in Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, ed. Xiaogan Liu (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 129–57.
8. Bumbacher, 643–50.
9. Klein, 302.
10. Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu. Association for Asian Studies Monograph #20 (Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992), 55–58. Despite the evidence that Liu Xiang established the received recension of the Huainanzi, there is absolutely no evidence—either internal to the text or external to it—that he altered the structure or contents of the original work.
11. Wang Shumin 王叔民. “Huainanzi yu Zhuangzi 淮南子與莊子.” In Wang Shumin, Zhuzi jiaozheng 諸子斠證 (Taibei: World Publishing, 1964), 573–86. For a tabulation of the numbers of these Zhuangzi parallels in the Huainanzi, see Charles LeBlanc, Huainanzi: Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han thought: The Idea of Resonance (Gan-ying 感應 with a Translation and Analysis of Chapter Six (Hong: Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985), 83.
12. Bumbacher, 636–39. He uses four examples of passages in which the received Zhuangzi and the Lüshi chun qiu agree against Huainanzi parallels that are in all these cases shorter. However he assumes incorrectly I think that the Huainanzi version of the Zhuangzi text was already fixed at the time the Huainanzi was created and there is every reason to believe it was not. Further, he assumes that the Huainanzi is always attempting to be faithful to its source in what I am herein calling the “proto-Zhuangzi” materials it received and there is no reason to assume that either.
13. Klein, 318–19, n. 53.
14. Klein, 349–51; Bumbacher, 631.
15. Sarah Allan, Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 27–37.
16. Bamboo strips or “slips” (Allan) were held together with leather or silk chords passed through holes in the tops and bottoms of the strips. They were then were rolled up like a much more flexible version of snow fence. These rolled up scrolls of bamboo strips (pian 篇) took up much more space then silk scrolls (juan 卷) and could thus hold fewer texts. Allan, 27–30.
17. Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 82–83. Verse XIX, lines. 3–8.
18. All references to the text are from the edition in D. C. Lau et al., eds., Zhuangzi suizi suoyin (ZZSY). Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Philosophical works no. 43 (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 2000), 23/65/24 (chapter 23/page 65/ line 24.). The translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
19. Charles Le Blanc, Le Wenzi À La Lumière de L’Histoire et de L’Archéologie (Montreal: Les Presses de L’Université de Montréal, 2000). See, in particular, ix–xiii, 1–10, and 43–45.
20. A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 54.
21. Graham, Chuang Tzu, 87–88.
22. Here I follow the variant 兀 wu “footless” instead of 介 jie “armored” from the third century CE redaction of Cui Zhuan 崔 譔 cited in Lu Deming’s Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 (circa 606) in Wang Shumin 王叔民, Zhuangzi jiaoquan 莊子校詮. 2nd ed. (Taibei: Commercial Press, 1994), 913–14.