INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK is the first complete English translation of the Huainanzi, a work from the early Han dynasty that is of fundamental importance to the intellectual history of early China. With this translation, we hope to acquaint specialists and general readers alike, to a degree that heretofore was not possible, with the philosophical richness of the text, its careful and deliberate organization and presentation of a great range of material, and the sophistication of its literary style and rhetorical techniques.

In 139 B.C.E., the imperial kinsman Liu An, king of Huainan, presented to the young Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty a book in twenty-one chapters, today known as the Huainanzi (Master of Huainan). Concise but encyclopedic and drawing on a wide range of sources, this book was designed to survey the entire body of knowledge required for a contemporary monarch to rule successfully and well. Organized in a “root and branch” structure, the work’s early chapters set out the fundamental nature of the world and of human society, while the later chapters deal with the application of that knowledge to various practical concerns. Taken as a whole, the work is in effect a model curriculum for a monarch-in-training.

In this introduction, we give an overview of the Huainanzi, its historical context, and our principles and methods of translation. We also discuss the Huainanzi’s content, organization, and sources; the place of the text in early Han history; and the various ways in which the Huainanzi has been viewed by scholars. In addition, we also provide a substantial introduction to each chapter.¹ The translated chapters themselves are the heart of the book.

We believe that most of the Huainanzi was written during the reign of Emperor Jing (157–141 B.C.E.), several decades and three imperial generations into the Han era. During those decades, a controversy raged over the proper organization and structure of the imperial realm: Was it to be centralized, decentralized, or a mixture of the two? Although the Huainanzi deals much more with fundamental philosophical issues and their application than it does with nuts-and-bolts questions of state organization and administration, this controversy is an essential part of the background for understanding the work as a whole. Indeed, this controversy bore directly on the hopes and aspirations of the work’s patron, editor, and coauthor, Liu An. Accordingly, it is with this background that we begin.

The Early Han Background to the Huainanzi:
The History, Politics, and Competing Images of Empire

When the rebel leader Liu Bang proclaimed himself the king of Han in 206 B.C.E., he had to confront the causes of the Qin dynasty’s collapse and its mixed legacy. Although the Qin had succeeded in unifying the empire by defeating or forcing the capitulation of the independent polities of the late Warring States period, the Qin Empire had proved ephemeral, dissolving in rebellion after the death of the First Emperor. As Liu Bang triumphed over his rival Xiang Yu in the post-Qin struggle, taking the title of emperor in 202, he was perhaps already thinking about how to perpetuate the unification of the empire while avoiding the causes of Qin’s rapid collapse. What vision of empire, form of governance, and techniques of statecraft would be most efficacious in the quest to establish a more enduring dynasty? How would the newly founded Han dynasty build on the administrative successes of the Qin but at the same time avoid its catastrophic policy failures?

The answers to these questions were not at all clear. Indeed, they were to be worked out only slowly in the ensuing decades, during the reigns of Liu Bang himself (Emperor Gaozu) and his successors Liu Ying (Emperor Hui), the Empress Dowager Lü Zhi (whose disputed reign lasted from 188 to 180 B.C.E.), Liu Heng (Emperor Wen), Liu Qi (Emperor Jing), and Liu Che (Emperor Wu). During that period, lasting slightly more than a century, numerous scholars, officials, and members of the imperial household made competing claims and offered various responses concerning these vital questions.

The founder of the Han and his immediate successors did not lack for advice. Liu Bang himself was an unlettered man of action, scornful of scholarly long-windedness, but he was willing to listen to the advice of Lu Jia (ca. 228–140 B.C.E.) on the merits of (possibly imagined) Zhou-style court rituals, as well as the maintenance in milder form of many Qin administrative policies and on techniques for recruiting able officials. Shusun Tong (d. after 188 B.C.E.) played a central role in designing Liu Bang’s imperial rituals.² Emperors Hui and Wen benefited from the advice of the courtier Jia Yi (201–169 B.C.E.), whose literary works are seen as being in the tradition of Confucius and who attacked the statist policies of Qin (associated with such thinkers as Lord Shang and Li Si) as excessively zealous. Chao Cuo (d. 154 B.C.E.) grounded much of his political advice in his understanding of the classic Documents (Shang shu) but nevertheless was a proponent of increasing the power of the central government against that of the neofeudal kingdoms. During the reign of Emperors Wen and Jing, and especially under the influence of their mother, Empress Dowager Dou, prominence was given to the advice of a number of scholars who proposed an ideal of state policies based on the model of the sage-emperor embodied in the Laozi and the centralizing tendencies and cosmological empowerment associated with the supposed teachings of the Yellow Emperor. (As we note later, all these advisers seem to have based their arguments on their interpretations of specific texts, and all drew on diverse traditions. Thus subsequent efforts to assign these early Han figures to “schools” are, in our view, anachronistic and unhelpful.)

Despite six decades’ worth of conflicting advice, what was true for Liu Bang, the founding father of the Han, remained true for his great-grandson and successor Liu Che. Various models of how to organize and govern an empire, drawn from the collective experience of China’s past with their attendant forms of governance and policies, contended for supremacy. At one extreme was the highly centralized model of the Qin, which, as the Qin implemented it, must have seemed to many Han observers to have been a serious mistake. At the other extreme was, reaching back further to the Western Zhou era, the decentralized model of the preimperial age sanctified by its association with the sage-rulers Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou. Liu Bang’s reign, as Michael Puett has argued, reflects an ambivalence toward these competing models of empire,³ and this ambivalence gave rise to a third model that contained both centralized and decentralized elements and was the de facto sociopolitical arrangement of the Han Empire at the time of Liu Che’s accession. On the one hand, in adopting the Qin title of emperor and instituting the commandery system of the Qin in about one-third of the empire, Liu Bang demonstrated his inclinations toward a highly centralized vision of empire. On the other hand, he also engaged in a number of acts expressly meant to distance himself from the Qin. He lowered taxes, a measure that proved to be immediately popular; however, proposals to reduce the strictness of the Qin legal code were made but not implemented. To administer the remaining two-thirds of his empire, he revived the traditional practice of establishing regional kingdoms, parceling out large tracts of land, first to the military allies who aided him in his victory over Xiang Yu and later to his own kinsmen. Both groups were awarded the title of king, and they were granted extensive autonomy and authority in their respective local kingdoms. During the early decades of the Han period, Gaozu’s integrative approach was debated among scholars and statesmen, especially given its association with the dynasty’s founder and because it was the sociopolitical status quo at the start of Liu Che’s reign.

Emperor Gaozu’s commitment to Western Zhou ideals of governance also is apparent in the court rituals he chose to follow and his choice to rule with the Potency of Water (in the political application of the Five Phases theory, according to which each dynasty was believed to rule, in succession, through the Potency of Earth, Wood, Metal, Fire, or Water). Those symbolic acts marked the Han as the legitimate successor to the Western Zhou.⁴ But the dangers of enfeoffment became increasingly clear to the emperor as a number of his regional kings revolted against the central court. In an effort to stave off the crisis, the emperor replaced the renegade rulers with members of his own family, but the potential danger was only diminished, not avoided entirely, as the history of the following decades would prove. Gaozu himself is said to have died from a wound received while fighting against Liu An’s earliest predecessor, Ying Bu, the first king of Huainan, who had revolted against the emperor.⁵

Following Gaozu’s death, the dynasty was plagued by a number of problems concerning dynastic succession. These included an attempted coup by Empress Dowager Lü, who seized power on the death of Emperor Hui in 188 B.C.E. and wielded de facto control during a confused interregnum until her own death in 180. As central power waned in the years after Gaozu’s death, the power of the kingdoms grew proportionately. By the time of Emperor Wen’s reign (180–157 B.C.E.), the kingdoms had become so powerful that a number of ministers began to advocate increased centralization to remedy the challenges posed by the fiefs. Thus began the policy of gradually reducing the size of the largest kingdoms.

The history of Huainan is an instructive example. The fief was first granted to Ying Bu (who was not a blood relative of the Liu clan) in 203 B.C.E. It was bestowed on Liu Chang, the seventh son of Emperor Gaozu (and, later, Liu An’s father), in 196, after Ying Bu’s rebellion and death; Liu Chang was still an infant when he became king of Huainan. Liu Chang’s brother Liu Ying (Emperor Hui) ascended the throne in 193 and ruled until 188. He was succeeded (after the Empress Dowager Lü’s interregnum) in 180 by another brother, Liu Heng (Emperor Wen). Unwilling to accept that he had been passed over as a potential heir of the throne and apparently dissatisfied with being only a territorial king, Liu Chang rebelled against Emperor Wen in 174, soon after reaching his majority. When the plot failed, Liu Chang was indicted and died on the road to exile. Many of his co-conspirators were executed, and the kingdom of Huainan was temporarily abolished, replaced by centrally administered commanderies. In 172, perhaps remorseful about the miserable death of his brother, Emperor Wen conferred fiefs on four of Liu Chang’s sons, with Liu An, then about seven years old, becoming lord of Fuling. In 164, the emperor reestablished kingdoms in what had been Liu Chang’s kingdom of Huainan but reduced their power by dividing the formerly massive realm into three: a smaller kingdom of Huainan plus the kingdoms of Hengshan and Lujiang. Liu An was then named the king of Huainan, succeeding at last to his father’s title. This development must have been bittersweet: on the one hand, Liu An was elevated to the status of king, but on the other hand, the territory over which he ruled was drastically reduced from what his father had administered in the heyday of his career.

The settlement of 164 B.C.E., moreover, seemed to stem only temporarily the tide of unrest within the imperial clan, and the situation of the unruly kingdoms grew to crisis proportions during the reign of Emperor Jing. Seven of the enfeoffed kings launched a revolt against the central court in 154. Significantly, Liu An did not join the revolt, opting instead to demonstrate his support of and loyalty toward the central court. Emperor Jing was successful in quelling the revolt and further reduced the power of the kingdoms by expanding the commandery system. Nevertheless, the tensions between the two most polarized competing visions of empire—the exclusively centralized and the largely decentralized models—were anything but resolved, leaving some room for the development of a third model that negotiated a middle ground. Liu An’s interest in making his influence felt at court during the reign of Emperor Jing was no doubt shaped by the complicated court politics and policies of that era. The Huainanzi, embodying Liu An’s own understanding of how an empire should be organized and ruled, was most likely written during those years and probably in response to current affairs.

When Liu Che (Emperor Wu) assumed the throne at about fifteen years of age (sixteen sui, in Chinese reckoning) in 141 B.C.E., much of the empire remained under the control of the enfeoffed kings, and it was not clear whether the young emperor (still dominated by his grandmother, Empress Dowager Dou) would continue the centralizing efforts of his predecessor or resort to the earlier policies of Emperor Gaozu. Liu An, by then known as both a patron of learning and an imperial kinsman, presented a book—the work in twenty-one chapters that we now know as the Huainanzi —to Liu Che shortly after he ascended the throne. The gift apparently was intended to impress the young emperor with Liu An’s particular vision of empire. The work reflects the interests of a royal relative whose primary concern was to preserve both the independence of his kingdom and his authority as its lord. The ideal empire was imagined in the Huainanzi as consisting of, first and foremost, a Zhoustyle realm in which royal relatives administered semiautonomous local kingdoms while giving their ultimate allegiance to the benevolent rule of an enlightened sage-emperor. Using the model of Emperor Gaozu’s integrative approach, Liu An and the authors of the Huainanzi also incorporated, on a more limited basis, different policies, techniques, and institutions characteristic of centralized as well as decentralized rule.

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At the beginning of the Han era, the eastern half of the empire was divided into semiautonomous kingdoms ruled by members of the Liu clan; the western half of the empire was under the direct rule of the emperor. At the time the Huainanzi was written (during the reign of Emperor Jing), many of the kingdoms had been extinguished and their territory converted into commanderies, governed by appointed officials who reported to the imperial administration. The kingdom of Huainan was abolished in 122 B.C.E. By the end of the second century B.C.E., the kingdoms had almost entirely disappeared; the most prominent exceptions were Changsha, south of the middle reaches of the Yangzi River; Guangling, in the lower Yangzi valley; and Yan, in the eastern Yellow River Plain. (Map by Sara Hodges, with data from the China Historical Geographic Information service [CHGIS], version 4, Harvard Yenching Institute, Cambridge, Mass., January 2007)

 

How to get the ruler to act on the vigorous arguments that the book made in defense of that vision, and the implicit and explicit claims concerning Liu An and his kingdom in this imagined realm, must have been Liu An’s most pressing concern during his time in Chang’an. As the emperor (relying, Liu An must have hoped, on his avuncular advice) struggled to find a secure footing from which to challenge and eclipse the power and influence of Empress Dowager Dou, it was unclear what the future would hold, which court factions would emerge victorious, and in what policy direction the central court would head. The time was ripe for Liu An to stake his claim to political and intellectual authority.

Liu An and the Huainanzi

When Liu An succeeded to his father’s throne in the kingdom of Huainan, he would have had two overriding policy goals and perhaps one covert ambition. The first goal would have been to remain in the good graces of his uncle Emperor Wen and later his cousin Emperor Jing, along with the latter’s mother, Empress Dowager Dou. (A formidable figure, she had become a junior consort of Liu Heng, the future Emperor Wen, in 188 B.C.E. and was a dominant presence behind the throne from the time of her husband’s accession in 180. She continued to wield power through the reign of her son Emperor Jing and into the reign of her grandson Emperor Wu, until her own death in 135.) The second goal would have been to promote policies, in whatever way Liu An could, that would preserve and expand the power of the Han kingdoms against the centralizing tendencies of the imperial throne. A possible covert ambition—one he could neither express nor pursue openly for fear of being accused of treason—might have been to position and promote himself as a possible heir to the throne during the reign of Emperor Jing. It would not have been implausible for another member of that generation (the grandsons of the founder, Liu Bang) to be considered in line for the throne.

Pursuing the first objective (and the third, if Liu An did indeed see himself as a potential heir to Emperor Jing) was in large part a matter of lying low and biding his time and of not risking all on desperate adventures. Thus we see Liu An declining to be a part of the Revolt of the Seven Kings in 154 B.C.E. The second objective would have demanded the use of the arts of political persuasion, an area in which Liu An proved to be adept as he grew into manhood.

Liu An was an enthusiastic man of letters, whose interests ranged from administrative matters to cosmology, from rhetoric to poetry, from natural philosophy to the occult. He was a great patron of scholarship, and he attracted to his court and lent support to a large number of men of learning. He was known as a quick, adept, and prolific writer and is credited with having produced many original works, including more than eighty fu (poetic expressions); treatises on alchemy, music, and natural philosophy; and a commentary on the Chuci poem “Li sao” (Encountering Sorrow). He is also known as the author of the work that bears the name Huainanzi (Master of Huainan),⁶ although nowadays we would be more likely to use the term “general editor.”

The earliest description of the Huainanzi, from the “Biography of Liu An” in Ban Gu’s (32–92 C.E.) Han shu (History of the [Former] Han Dynasty), indicates that the work was the product of many hands. According to Ban Gu, Liu An summoned no fewer than “several thousand guests and visitors” to his court, including a group of men called “masters of esoteric techniques” (fangshushi), presumably to contribute to the work. Ban Gu also describes the work as having a tripartite organization: an “inner book” consisting of twenty-one chapters; an “outer book” with more chapters than the inner book but an unspecified total number; and a “middle book” consisting of eight sections (zhuan) comprising an unknown number of chapters. This last book, said to consist of more than 200,000 words, discussed alchemical techniques relating to the quest to become a spirit immortal (shen xian).⁷ Fragments of this lost work were compiled into reconstituted redactions by a number of Qing-dynasty scholars and show it to have been filled with the lore and recipes of the esoteric masters.⁸

In his preface to the Huainanzi (ca. 212 C.E.), the early commentator Gao You provides more detail:

Many of the empire’s masters of esoteric techniques journeyed [to Huainan] and made their home [at Liu An’s court]. Subsequently [Liu An], with the following eight men, Su Fei, Li Shang, Zuo Wu, Tian You, Lei Bei, Mao Bei, Wu Bei, and Jin Chang, and various Confucians [ru]⁹ who were disciples of the Greater and Lesser Mountain [traditions], together discoursed upon the Way and its Potency and synthesized and unified Humaneness and Rightness to compose this work.¹⁰

Ban Gu emphasizes the rich discussions and debates that animated Liu An’s court and likely engendered the content of some of the Huainanzi’s chapters. Chapter 13, “Fan lun” (Boundless Discourses), is an apt description of the essays that probably emerged from court discussions moderated by Liu An. On the basis of its content and formal characteristics, chapter 19, “Xiu wu” (Cultivating Effort), might be construed as a model of how to construct a successful debate or disputation. Still other chapters (for example, chapters 14, 16, and 17) appear to be collections of various types of performative literature and gnomic verse. Progress reports and chapter summaries also may have been presented orally and debated at court from time to time. The literary content and form of the majority of chapters, however, strongly suggest that the Huainanzi is predominantly the product of extensive compilation and composition from written sources. This observation tallies with Liu An’s reputation, as he is said to have had a splendid library at his palace.

Regardless of exactly how the chapters were written, it is impossible to say whether or not the men named by Gao You were really the authors of any of them. Likewise, Liu An’s exact role in compiling the book is unclear; it is possible that he was the author of some of the essays. Benjamin Wallacker suggests that he may have posed topics or prepared outlines on the basis of which his scholars studied, debated, and composed essays.¹¹ It is at least probable that Liu An exercised some sort of editorial supervision and approved the essays in their final form. Even a casual reading of several chapters is enough to indicate that not all the essays were written by the same hand, although the book as a whole does have thematic coherence (as we discuss more fully later).

In the end, any discussion of authorship of the Huainanzi is necessarily inconclusive, so we are left with the already well-known fact that the Huainanzi as a whole is the product of a group of scholars working under the supervision and the patronage of Liu An. Nonetheless, what is clear from Ban Gu’s statements is that the text is a collaborative work that included Liu An in some manner and a number of men who were identified with differing areas of expertise and diverse specialties. Even though they drew on a wide range of sources and represented disparate points of view, the authors were chiefly concerned with forging a synthesis between the paired concepts of Way and Potency, on the one hand, and Humaneness and Rightness, on the other.

As noted previously, Liu An paid his respects at the court of Emperor Wu in 139 B.C.E., in the second year after the latter’s enthronement. On that occasion, he presented a book to the emperor, described in the History of the [Former] Han Dynasty¹² as a work in twenty-one chapters (pian) entitled the Nei shu (Inner Book), which was duly added to the imperial library. Although some scholars have raised questions about exactly what Liu An presented to the emperor during his visit, most accept that it was something substantially identical to, or at least closely resembling, the work we now know as the Huainanzi.

That being so, we must ask again: For whom was the Huainanzi written? Many scholars have made the natural assumption that because the Huainanzi (or some version thereof) was presented to Emperor Wu, it must have been written for him. But on reflection, that seems improbable. First, before the year 141 B.C.E., there was no reason for anyone to think that Liu Che would succeed to the throne. His accession was a result of a complicated and bloody struggle at court waged on his behalf by his mother and Empress Dowager Dou, and no one could have seen it coming a long way off. But with that in mind, it also seems improbable that a work as long, complicated, and sophisticated as the Huainanzi could have been written and edited by Liu An and his court scholars between the time the news of Liu Che’s enthronement reached Huainan in 141 and the time Liu An left to make his respectful visit to the imperial court at Chang’an in 139. (It is possible that some of the work’s chapters were written earlier by the Huainan scholars as independent texts; if many chapters were already to hand, it might have been possible to compile what we know as the Huainanzi on a tight schedule between 141 and 139. But even if that were so, it would not contradict our view that most of the content of the Huainanzi predates 141. It also seems to us unlikely that a work as organizationally coherent as the Huainanzi could have been assembled quickly from preexisting components.)

We believe it is much more likely that the Huainanzi was written during the reign of Emperor Jing, when Liu An was a talented and ambitious young man with a case to make for his own importance as a member of the imperial family and the ruler of a territorial kingdom. The strong indebtedness to the Laozi that characterizes parts of the work, including very conspicuously chapter 1, supports this interpretation, as the Laozi enjoyed substantial imperial patronage at the time. If that is so, who was the intended audience? Perhaps Emperor Jing, Liu An’s cousin, in whose hands Liu An’s future as a potential heir to the throne principally rested. Perhaps the intellectual world of the Han imperial court, broadly conceived. Perhaps Liu An himself, who could have used the work as a manual for his own ambitions. Perhaps Liu An’s sons, who could inherit their father’s imperial ambitions if circumstances proved propitious.

We will return to the question of the Huainanzi’s intended audience. For the moment, we rest our discussion by noting that it seems most unlikely that the work was written specifically for Emperor Wu. Rather, we think that in presenting his work to the imperial throne, Liu An was responding to changed circumstances and making the best of things. The young Liu Che had become emperor; Liu An had not. It therefore was in Liu An’s interest to try to cultivate political and family influence over his young nephew¹³ and to persuade him, if possible, of the importance of governing an empire composed in large part of feudal kingdoms such as Huainan, rather than of bureaucratic commanderies. The presentation of the Huainanzi to Emperor Wu was an important event, and it is easy to surmise why Han historians and bibliographers would make a special effort to record, retrospectively, the circumstances of that event. That is all the more true given the pivotal role of this emperor and his reign not only in the changing relationship between the emperor and his royal relatives in the remaining local kingdoms but also in the related debates about centralized, decentralized, and mixed models of empire and competing theories of rulership.

A second question of interest is: Was the work presented to Emperor Wu the same as the received version of the Huainanzi? We agree with most scholars in believing that it was, although absolute proof is lacking. Records indicate that the work presented to Emperor Wu was a book in twenty-one chapters, and the present Huainanzi has exactly that number. The fact that the Huainanzi has been preserved (when all other works of Liu An have been lost except for scattered quotations in other texts) may be because it was added to the Han imperial library after Liu An’s visit in 139 B.C.E. As we argue at greater length later, chapter 21, which serves as a post-face summarizing and integrating the content of the first twenty chapters,¹⁴ may well have been written especially for the occasion of presenting the text to Emperor Wu, to explain clearly to him what he was getting. The literary form of that chapter suggests that it was written for oral performance at the imperial court, as a poetic oration delivered, presumably, by Liu An himself. The reference in chapter 21 to “this book of the Liu clan” reinforces this view. It is also quite possible that the specific content of the work’s chapters was modified for the purpose of making a presentation to the emperor—for example, adding material showing the benefits of relying on loyal and talented subordinates, or warning against the perils of centralized despotism. Our view, then, is that the work presented to Emperor Wu was substantially the same as the Huainanzi as we know it.

Other scholars, however, Michael Loewe prominent among them,¹⁵ contend that while portions of the work as it now exists date from the period between 164 and 139 B.C.E., work on the compendium continued until Liu An’s death seventeen years later.¹⁶ Liu An’s books and papers were confiscated by Emperor Wu’s officials after his suicide, so any works written by Liu An or at his direction between the years 139 and 122 could easily have been incorporated into (or used to replace) the copy of the Huainanzi already in the imperial library. We have not encountered convincing arguments in favor of this position, however, which seems to rest primarily on the fact that it could have been so. But the notion that chapters may have been added to the text after it was presented to the throne in 139 requires rejecting the idea that chapter 21 was written exactly for that occasion. This argument also implicitly endorses the idea that the Huainanzi is at best a minimally organized text to which material could be added indiscriminately from time to time. In contrast, in our view, the chapters of the Huainanzi correspond to the Nei shu as described by Ban Gu¹⁷ and were arranged in a deliberate and conscious order, all of a piece. This sense of conscious order is powerfully reinforced by the fact that the chapter titles themselves form a rhymed set.¹⁸ As we will see, the text’s structure and organization are purposeful and coherent, and the author’s viewpoints on the key issues of the day are informed, reasoned, and readily discernable through careful consideration of its contents. Moreover, the work’s systematic arrangement and the rhetorical and polemical arguments are summarized and described by the person most intimately associated with the text, Liu An, the putative author of chapter 21.

Of course, when the Huainanzi was entered into the imperial library collection in the late second century B.C.E., it embarked on a journey of its own. The text as we now know it undoubtedly reflects the work of later redactors and editors. One of us has written extensively on the textual history of the Huainanzi,¹⁹ and the complex evolution of the text in the centuries after it was written is summarized in appendix C.

Having considered the questions of when and by whom the Huainanzi was written and what the original content of the work may have been, we will return to the questions of the book’s intended audience and its intended effect on that audience. First, however, we need to say more about the life of Liu An.

During the early years of Emperor Wu’s reign, Liu An’s political ambitions did not meet with much success. Despite the cordial reception given him by the emperor in 139 B.C.E., he seems to have acquired little actual influence at court. In 139 and on subsequent visits, he apparently tried to win (or buy) the favor of influential court figures but never gained entry into the emperor’s inner circle. Then with the death of Empress Dowager Dou in 135, Liu An’s ambitions suffered a serious setback. Emperor Wu, now a strong-minded young man, set about purging the court of figures favored by the late Empress Dowager and her son Emperor Jing, men whose views, like Liu An’s Huainanzi, privileged the canonical status of the Laozi. Liu An now found his position shifting from that of a would-be uncle/adviser to the emperor, to the compiler of a potentially seditious political work informed by a disfavored point of view. His gamble in presenting the Huainanzi to the throne had not succeeded, and he himself was in a dangerous position.

Back in Huainan, Liu An may have occupied his time by working with his court scholars on the middle book and the outer book of the Huainanzi; we do not know when those now-lost portions of the work were written.²⁰ But literary and scholarly efforts were not enough for him. Perhaps feeling frustrated and resentful, he was accused (how justly, it is now difficult to say) of harboring imperial ambitions and having engaged in treasonous plotting. If he was a conspirator, he was an inept one. Even as he was said to have plotted, reports of his growing disloyalty reached the imperial court. In 123 B.C.E., an imperial commission concluded that Liu An was guilty of gross impropriety. Some later scholars have questioned that verdict, in part because the principal testimony against him came from an accused co-conspirator, Wu Bei (one of the scholars identified by Gao You as having shared in the writing of the Huainanzi), who was trying to save his own neck. But some of the evidence was damning; for example, Liu An had ordered an imperial seal carved for his own use. As officials made their way to Huainan to arrest Liu An and bring him to Chang’an, the last king of Huainan committed suicide in 122. His principal wife and his heir were executed, along with some other family members; his goods (including his extensive library) were confiscated by the throne; and the kingdom of Huainan was once again, and permanently, abolished. According to a later legend, recorded in the Tang Daoist hagiographical collection called the Shenxianzhuan (Accounts of Spirit Immortals), at the moment of his death Liu An and the members of his household, including even his domestic animals, were transformed into immortals and rose bodily into the heavens in broad daylight. Thus while Liu An might be accounted a political failure in his own era, he was not only esteemed as a thinker and a writer but also revered as an actual immortal, by at least some people in later times.

The Content and Organization of the Huainanzi

The Organization of the Text

In seeking to understand the principles that guided Liu An and his court scholars in arranging the twenty-one chapters of the text, we relied first on the Huainanzi’s chapter 21, “An Overview of the Essentials” (Yao lüe). Such an approach assumes that the postface was likely written by Liu An himself when the text was nearing completion or had just been completed, but before its presentation to Emperor Wu in 139 B.C.E. Most probably the postface, which has the literary form of a fu (poetic expression), was recited orally by Liu An when he presented the Huainanzi to the throne. We believe this to be a plausible assumption based on both internal and external evidence: the form and content of the postface itself, the biographical details of Liu An, and the bibliographical descriptions of the Huainanzi. As the preceding discussion indicates, “An Overview of the Essentials” is invaluable in providing an emic or internal understanding of the content, organization, and aims of the text. This chapter claims that the Huainanzi is (1) a comprehensive text containing all the theoretical knowledge a ruler needs to govern his empire successfully; (2) an eminently practical text, chiefly concerned with elucidating the interconnections between the Way as an abstract entity and its manifestations in concrete affairs; (3) a programmatic text providing the ruler with the requisite techniques to act efficaciously in any circumstance he might confront, whether looking outward to the world at large or focusing inward on the self; and (4) an unprecedented landmark text that both continues the pioneering work of the ancient sages and sage-kings of China’s antiquity and, more important, innovatively expands on the legacy of the sages. The intended result was an unparalleled synthesis of early Chinese thought and political philosophy that subsumed and surpassed all that had come before it.

To appreciate these and other features of the work, a good procedure is for readers to read chapter 21 first, to familiarize themselves with the content, organization, and aims of both the text as a whole and its individual chapters, treating the postface as a preface written to help them navigate this long and complex compendium. There, readers will see that they are intended to proceed from the beginning of the work to its end, reading its chapters successively and reaping the benefits that each offers. Thus the Huainanzi constitutes a coherent work, following a purposeful organization that is anything but haphazard. The authors’ vision of the text is one of interlinked and overarching coherence built on a cumulative reading of its individual chapters.

Looking across the twenty chapters that constitute the work, excluding the concluding postface, the text appears to fall into two parts that correspond roughly to the first and the second half of the text. Charles Le Blanc has argued that the first part of the text is devoted to “Basic Principles” (chapters 1–8) and that the second half is concerned with “Applications and Illustrations” (chapters 9–20).²¹ We agree with Le Blanc’s description of the structure of the text and his argument that the text shifts from basic principles to applications and illustrations. It is supported by a consideration of the chapter titles. The titles of the first twenty chapters of the text rhyme; the first rhyme sequence ends with the title of chapter 8, and the title of chapter 9 begins a new rhyme sequence.²² It is further supported by the explicit language of the postface, which characterizes the change in emphasis in accordance with two complementary claims: that the work moves from explicating principles of the Way (dao ) to illustrating its various applications in affairs (shi ; that is, the ordinary tasks and concerns of humans), and from roots (ben ) to branches (mo ). Such a reading of the text also is supported by the summary of chapter 9 found in chapter 21, which equates “techniques” (shu) and “affairs” (shi): “‘The Ruler’s Techniques’ [addresses] the affairs [shi] of the ruler of humankind.”

The Structure of the Work: Roots and Branches

Roots: Theoretical Principles of the Way

We propose that this two-part division has even more profound significance than has heretofore been realized. The division between the Way and affairs, its content understood as signifying principles and applications, is a powerful guide to understanding the overall meaning of the text as well as a manifestation of the still more fundamental metaphor of “roots and branches” that operates on many levels throughout the entire work. Perhaps the author of the postface puts it best in his attempt to give an overview:

 

Thus,

numerous are the words we have composed

and extensive are the illustrations we have provided,

yet we still fear that people will depart from the root and follow the branches.

Thus,

if we speak of the Way but do not speak of affairs,

there would be no means to shift with²³ the times.

[Conversely,]

if we speak of affairs but do not speak of the Way,

there would be no means to move with [the processes of] transformation. (21.1)

 

And furthermore,

 

. . . if we spoke exclusively of the Way, there would be nothing that is not contained in it. Nevertheless, only sages are capable of grasping its root and thereby knowing its branches. At this time, scholars lack the capabilities of sages, and if we do not provide them with detailed explanations,

then to the end of their days they will flounder in the midst of darkness and obscurity

without knowing the great awakening brought about by these writings’ luminous and brilliant techniques. (21.3)

For the author of the postface, the text was composed to incorporate both the root of the Way and the branches as expressed in human affairs. Moreover, the text is organized in close accordance with the root–branch metaphor that structures its discussion of cosmology, cosmogony, human history, and self-development at many points. Chapter 1, “Originating in the Way,” is the root of the entire text, and the text moves through increasingly ramified and posterior realms until it lands in the “current day” of the Han in chapter 20.

The theoretical coherence of the text is most obvious in the first eight chapters, which can be seen as providing the foundational principles or “root” of the entire work. Chapter 1 is the root of these chapters and these chapters are the roots of the work, and within each chapter is found the same “root–branch” structure. We propose that this root–branch principle is operative at many ontological and existential levels throughout the Huainanzi. At the cosmic level, it may be perceived in the process of cosmogenesis: the universe began as a unitary, undifferentiated mass of energy that then coalesced by stages into yin and yang, the Five Phases, and the increasingly complex and differentiated world of space-time and matter (see the various cosmogonies laid out in 2.1).²⁴ At the level of human development, the root– branch process can be seen in the progress of the prenascent human being from “corporeal mass” to embryo to the progressive incorporation of distinct elements such as flesh, muscle, and bone (see 7.2). At the historical level, the principle is evident in the evolution of human society from the totally unstructured spontaneity of the age of Fuxi and Nüwa²⁵ through the ever-increasingly diversified and sophisticated forms of social and political organization in subsequent eras (this process is laid out at many points in the text, especially 6.7, 8.1, and 9.3).

The many levels (cosmic, personal, historicopolitical) at which the root–branch structure is conceptualized operate both synchronically and diachronically throughout the Huainanzi. An excellent example of this is found in 8.7:

The thearch embodies the Grand One;

the king emulates yin and yang;

the hegemon follows the four seasons;

the prince uses the six pitch pipes.²⁶

The succession from thearchs to kings, hegemons, and princes is on one level a historical one: earlier rulers such as the Yellow Emperor were traditionally accorded the title di (emperor or thearch), while later rulers like the Zhou dynasts went by the title wang (king). During the Spring and Autumn period, some powerful aristocrats are said to have served as “hegemons,” exercising authority over other rulers of territorial states; during the Warring States period, some rulers reigned as princes essentially independently of the Zhou monarchy. Thus in historical terms, each of these types of rulers modeled themselves on the cosmic principle most suited to the time in which each lived. Because the di lived in a simpler time, they embodied the cosmogonically prior and monistic Grand One; because the kings lived in a later and more complex era, they modeled themselves on the cosmogonically “younger” and structurally dualistic yin and yang; and so on. This digression may also be read synchronically. Han elites lived in an era that simultaneously possessed both emperors (for example, Emperor Wu, the ruler to whom the Huainanzi was presented) and kings (for example, Liu An, the patron of the text itself). The cosmogonic root– branch model provides not only a structural map of earlier eras in human history but also a normative guide to the prioritized stations of the “present-day” political matrix. Emperors must continue to embody the superior Grand One (which persists in and pervades the ramified reality of latter days), and kings must continue to model themselves on the subordinate phenomenon of yin and yang.²⁷ These simultaneous synchronic and diachronic valences are operative throughout the text of the Huainanzi and are key to understanding its overall structure.

Branches: Applications and Illustrations of the Way in Human Affairs

The coherence of the second half of the text is somewhat less obvious. This has led some scholars to conclude that the organization and coherence of the text tend to break down after chapter 9.²⁸ In this regard, we would confirm with some qualifications the position of Charles Le Blanc, who has argued that the later chapters are chiefly concerned with illustrations and applications and that such concern is borne out by their literary form, content, and titles. These chapters are generally compilations of materials from different literary genres meant to illustrate broader principles of the Way introduced in chapters 1 through 8 as specific kinds of human affairs, often accompanied by editorializing comments provided by the Huainanzi compilers.²⁹ Accordingly, chapters in this half of the text carry titles containing terms such as “precepts” (cheng ), “responses” (ying ), “overviews” (lüe ), “discourses” (lun ), “sayings” (yan ), and “persuasions” (shui ).³⁰

Thus we would argue that there is a purposeful shift in focus between the first and second parts of the text that corresponds to the claims of the Huainanzi postface that the text aims to clarify the relationship between the Way and its affairs. So conceived, the relationship between the first and the second half of the text becomes eminently transparent; it is one of roots and branches. It also explains why the coherence and logical progression of the text might appear to break down. In the second half of the text, the reader encounters a bewildering stream of illustrations and applications. Such a panoply bespeaks the authors’ stated intent to present a comprehensive account of the root that is the Way and its branches that are the applications to human affairs, an account that will stand the test of time and bring honor and glory to the Liu clan and prosperity and longevity to its reigning dynasty.

 

Both the Way-and-affairs and the roots-and-branches approaches to the text can be summarized in table 1, in which we hope to demonstrate that content and form are inextricably linked. In both the Way-and-affairs and the roots-and-branches perspectives, chapter 9 serves as the fulcrum linking and balancing the two parts of the work. Each of chapters 9 to 19 deals with an affair (shi) and how it naturally gives rise to a genre form of literature (wen), with the chapter itself illustrating the genre it surveys.

TABLE 1 Structure of the Huainanzi

Chapter Title	Dao : The Way	Ben : Roots
1. Originating in the Way	The principle of universality: the Way as the origin of all things and the source of comprehensiveness	The Way (dao )
2. Activating the Genuine	Cosmogonic principles of nondifferentiation, differentiation, division, transformation, and change	Potency (de )
3. Celestial Patterns	Principles of astronomy, astrology, and mathematical harmonics	Heaven (tian )
4. Terrestrial Forms	Principles of geography, topography, and ecology	Earth (di )
5. Seasonal Rules	Integration of time and space: annual cycles of yin and yang and the Five Phases	Cyclical time (shi )
6. Surveying Obscurities	Things respond resonantly to one another: a great mystery	Resonance (ganying )
7. Quintessential Spirit	The origins and nature of human consciousness and physiology, principles of self-cultivation, and characteristics of the sage	Humankind (ren )
8. The Basic Warp	The distinguishing principles of sagely virtue, the authority of the ancient Five Emperors and Three Kings	Morality (renyi )
	Shi: Affairs	Mo: Branches
9. The Ruler’s Techniques	The distinguishing techniques of the sagely ruler	Techniques (shu )
10. Profound Precepts	Illustrations of correct deportment toward the populace by means of Quintessential Sincerity	Precepts (cheng )
11. Integrating Customs	Illustrations of how to integrate diverse customs and ritual practices broadly conceived	Records (ji )
12. Responses of the Way	Illustrations of how to respond to diverse circumstances by means of the Way, as the Laozi does	Exegesis (jie )
13. Boundless Discourses	Illustrations of how to assess and adjust to change as a sage does	Discourses (lun )
14. Sayings Explained	Demonstrations of how to compare by means of analogies and to elucidate the main tenets of human affairs through illustrations from gnomic verse	Sayings (yan )
15. An Overview of the Military	Explanations of which military methods should be employed and under what circumstances	Overview (lüe )
16. A Mountain of Persuasions	Demonstrations of how to construct persuasive arguments through the use of talking points	Persuasions (shui )
17. A Forest of Persuasions	Demonstrations of how to construct persuasive arguments through the use of talking points	Persuasions (shui )
18. Among Others	Explications of paradoxes to illustrate the workings of the Way in various life situations	Dialectics (bian )
19. Cultivating Effort	Illustrations of why a ruler must devote effort to the task of rulership and how to assert or refute a particular proposition in the course of oral debate or discussion	Refutations (nan )
20. The Exalted Lineage	Demonstrations of how the current ruler can continue the illustrious “lineage” of the Five Emperors and Three Kings and bring honor and prosperity to the Liu clan	Genealogy (zong )
21. An Overview of the Essentials	Explanations of why the Huainanzi was written and how it is intended to be understood	Overview (lüe ) and poetic exposition (fu )

Table 1 dramatically validates the claim made in chapter 21 that the work should be read sequentially, from beginning to end; to that extent, the Huainanzi can be seen to constitute a carefully constructed curriculum for a would-be sage-ruler. We stress that this root–branch structure may be (indeed, must be) read both diachronically and synchronically. While progressing from chapter 1 through chapter 20, the reader moves through ever-later realms in the progressive history of cosmogenesis and human society, beginning with the origins of the universe in the undifferentiated Way and ending in the diverse and complex world of the Han dynasty. At the same time, the reader moves normatively through realms of descending priority toward the endeavor of universal rule: from the Way that pervades and directs all things to the minute contingencies of interpersonal politics and individual duty. Using this method, the Huainanzi proposes to present a structure within which all human knowledge and effort may be prioritized and integrated.

The Claims the Huainanzi Makes for Itself

In formal terms, chapter 21, “An Overview of the Essentials,” is the final chapter of the Huainanzi, but as noted previously, it effectively serves as an introduction to the work as a whole.³¹ It orients the reader and provides a navigational guide for the long and complex journey through the text. It is particularly noteworthy that through the “Overview” the reader is introduced to the rhetorical strategy of the text and comes to appreciate the grand design extending to each successive chapter. The “Overview” itself, written in a combination of prose and tetrasyllabic verse in the fu style, is organized into four parts that introduce the text in a progressive and ever-widening purview. It elucidates the theoretical goals of the work, the content of its individual chapters, the progressive organizational flow of the chapters from one to the next, and the contributions of the work within a comparative and historical framework.

In the first paragraph of chapter 21, the author lays out his broad philosophical claims about the text and introduces the chapter titles that identify the content of each chapter. The opening lines explain that the Huainanzi is an account of the Way and its Potency, clarifies their relationship to human beings and their affairs, and encompasses all the knowledge one needs to govern successfully. Implying that previous and contemporaneous works have failed to make these connections adequately, the author defines his task as explicating the critical link between cosmic and political order. The introduction emphasizes the interrelationship between the Way and human affairs and asserts that such knowledge will empower the ruler to be both efficacious and adaptable to the times. At the end of this section, the twenty chapter titles are named in rhymed verse that serves to emphasize the careful and deliberate ordering of the book’s contents.

The second section of chapter 21, summaries of the previous twenty chapters with their respective titles, introduces the main topics of each chapter and familiarizes the reader with the categories, concepts, and vocabulary pertinent to each of them. Most important, it outlines the different practical applications and benefits of the knowledge derived from each chapter. This link between the theoretical and practical or the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the chapters is evident in both the semantic and the syntactic structure of the chapter summaries. Whereas the first section of the “Overview” discusses the relationship between the Way and human affairs, this second section is a concerted effort to harmonize the theoretical and the practical, the cosmological and the political—a process that the author claims to be a distinctive contribution of the twenty chapters of this text.

The third section takes a different look at the chapters. Rather than describing them one by one in sequence, this section shows how the chapters relate to and build on one another, implying that they have been arranged in a deliberate and coherent fashion. The text, we are shown, is to be read and studied from beginning to end and demonstrates how comprehending the content of any one chapter is predicated on successfully mastering the principles presented in the preceding one. Reflecting the text itself, this section moves from cosmogony to cosmology to ontology; from the meta-phenomenal Way as utter nondifferentiation to the phenomenal world of differentiated things that it generates; from the Way’s macrocosmic aspects visible in Heaven, Earth, and the four seasons to its microcosmic manifestations in human beings; from cosmogony to human genesis; from the motions of the celestial bodies to the movements of human history; and from the cultivation of oneself to the governance of the world. This section thus outlines the text’s demonstration of its authority as a compendium encapsulating everything worth knowing and utilizing in governing the world.

The fourth and final section of chapter 21 deepens the author’s claim for uniquely valid comprehensiveness, by situating the Huainanzi within a (partly legendary) evolution of practices and texts stretching from the exemplary King Wen of the Zhou, through innovations in the Warring States era, to the Qin dynasty, and beyond to Liu An’s time. This taxonomy or inventory of the past summarizes the noteworthy events of nearly a thousand years by recounting both their particular historical circumstances and the specific contributions made by key people and texts that figured prominently in each era. The high points mentioned include the strategies of the Grand Duke in advancing the affairs of King Wen, the teachings of the Confucians, the writings of Master Guan, the admonitions of Master Yan, the reliance on Vertical and Horizontal Alliances and Long- and Short-Term Coalitions, writings on performance and title, and the laws devised by Shang Yang. The creation of the Huainanzi is contrasted with the time- and context-bound nature of all those policies and teachings. The Huainanzi itself is presented as being both timeless and utterly comprehensive, because it is said to have both subsumed and surpassed all these important historical innovations. This claim is reinforced in the concluding passage of this section, which speaks of “the book of the Liu clan” itself in terms quite unlike those used in describing all the earlier developments and characterizes the work as an exhaustive repository of theoretical and practical knowledge.

One of the main rhetorical purposes of the final section’s historical digression is showing how in each era, some figures stood apart from the throne or even from the royal court itself. Such personages as Guan Zhong, Confucius, and the Grand Duke were not rulers themselves, but they laid down the basic principles by which kingship was conducted in their era. This embodies a special plea by Liu An and his court: although their presentation of a comprehensive summa that could (and should, according to the text’s own claims) serve as the ideological blueprint of the Han Empire may seem like an unforgivable act of lèse majesté, there is in fact ample historical precedent for it. Note that this claim somewhat attenuates the “threat” posed by the Huainanzi but is still quite audacious; Liu An is claiming for himself and his court a role of “partnership in rule” comparable to that perceived to have been played by Guan Zhong, Confucius, and other towering figures of the past. To use a classical allusion that would have been clear to his contemporaries, Liu An is setting up Huainan to be the “Zou and Lu ” —the home of high-minded sage advisers—of the Han era.

The Place of the Huainanzi in Early Han History

We return to the questions posed earlier: For whom was the Huainanzi written, and with what intended effect?

After years of relative neglect by Western scholars, there was an upsurge of interest in the Huainanzi beginning with the publication in 1962 of Benjamin Wallacker’s translation of chapter 11.³² A main strategy for trying to understand the Huainanzi was trying to locate the text in one or another “school” of early Chinese thought, and over a period of many years, the intellectual affiliation of the Huainanzi became the topic of considerable debate and disputation. During that time, almost every major Huainanzi scholar (including some of us) weighed in with views on whether the Huainanzi was a “miscellaneous” or an “eclectic” work, a Daoist or a Huang-Lao text, or an example of syncretism. We do not propose to prolong that debate in these pages. We take note of the voluminous literature on the subject,³³ but even more of the consensus that has begun to emerge in very recent years that the whole question is neither as unproblematical nor as useful as was once thought. Many scholars now feel that there may be little to be gained from arguments that “the Huainanzi is a text of the ‘X’ (or ‘Y’ or ‘Z’) school.”

The essence of this position can perhaps be summed up in this way: writers of the Warring States and early Han periods spoke often of the bai jia, the “Hundred Traditions” (or “Hundred [Intellectual] Lineages” or “Hundred Specialists”).³⁴ The term appears three times (in this sense) in the Huainanzi itself. Even granted that in this context, “hundred” just means “many,” the implication of the term is great variety, fluidity, and diversity of thought. But that means that in writing his famous essay on Han intellectual life,³⁵ the “Liu jia yao zhi” (Essential Tenets of the Six Lineages), Sima Tan at the very least conflated a great deal.

From this perspective, another problem is that while Sima Tan was writing as a historian with the aim of giving a schematic account of the major intellectual traditions up to his time, his essay seems to prefigure the work of the bibliographers Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin in classifying and cataloging the Han imperial library. Their scheme, in turn, was incorporated by Ban Gu into the “Monograph on Arts and Literature” of the Han shu (History of the [Former] Han Dynasty),³⁶ a source on which so much of the debate on texts and their filiation turns. In the view of some scholars, the categories thus created are basically designed to answer the question of where any given book should be placed on the shelves of a library rather than being attempts to comprehend and analyze the complexities of contemporary intellectual life. Applied retrospectively to the thinkers of the Warring States and early Han periods, these “school” categories can be seen as true Procrustean beds; within each school, one size fits all. From this perspective, therefore, the classification of Warring States and Han texts on the basis of what are essentially mid-Han bibliographical categories obscures as much as it clarifies. Early Chinese intellectual life was more dynamic than the classificatory rubrics would imply. Intellectuals created texts not only as contributions to and within particular lineage traditions but also in response to new, complex, and shifting social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances.

A narrow reliance on bibliographic categories also obscures the role of praxis in constructing intellectuals’ group identity during the Warring States and early Han. To early thinkers, the shared performance of common rituals or methods of personal cultivation was ample cause for affinity. Furthermore, it is clear that Sima Tan was aware of the importance of praxis in the intellectual lineages he identifies. For example, he mentions the Confucian emphasis on ritual and hierarchy, and the Daoist practices of self-cultivation. Hence his categories were neither arbitrary nor unprecedented. They bear a direct relationship not only to the content of the texts from which he drew to develop his classifications but also to the distinctive practices associated with them. Thus, used judiciously, Sima Tan’s classificatory scheme is one source of useful insights into Han and pre-Han intellectual life. It becomes problematic when developed into—and applied as—“one size fits all” bibliographical categories, as did the later Han bibliographers and those who rely on their scheme. In our analytical comments on the Huainanzi in the chapters’ introductions and footnotes, we have taken pains to identify links between the text and both written sources and specific techniques, and to point out their intellectual affiliation where appropriate. At the same time, we have been mindful of the Huainanzi’s own claim that it draws on a great number of traditions but transcends all of them.

From this perspective, the starting point for any discussion of the place of the Huainanzi in the intellectual history of the Han should be to remember that the Huainanzi was the product of a particular group of intellectuals clustered in a particular place in a singular geopolitical context. Accordingly, we begin with the text itself, asking what explicit and implicit claims this particular group of intellectuals is articulating. In this regard, chapter 21 is germane, as it describes the specific concerns that inspired the production of this text, its goals, and its structure and organization. It also situates the Huainanzi in a long history of textual production beginning with the Strategies of the Grand Duke attributed to King Wen.

Our discussion thus turns on the issue of what messages the text may be perceived to encode, how those messages would be understood by a Han readership, and what pragmatic effects would have been if the program of the text had been adopted.

The immediate milieu within which the Huainanzi was created was one of political turmoil over whether the empire was to be a centralized bureaucratic state or a relatively decentralized neofeudal one. This explains why the Huainanzi is best understood as the conceptual blueprint for a vision of a decentralized empire that aspired to a diffuse or shared form of governance in which the central court worked out an accommodation with local sources of power and authority, particularly the royal relatives enfeoffed as kings throughout much of the empire. The numerous references to the seemingly historical narratives of the Three Kings and the Three Dynasties³⁷ are a thinly veiled commentary on the contemporary scene and call on the imperial regime to reinstitute the decentralized governance that the Three Kings represent.

One such illustrative historiographical narrative found in “Surveying Obscurities” (chapter 6) attributes the sociopolitical and cosmic degeneration of the world from the Three Dynasties period to late Warring States and Qin times to the disruption of blood ties (that is, kinship relations) between the “Son of Heaven” and his “flesh and bone” residing in the feudatories. The author blames the multitude of meddling, conniving, and obsequious scholar-officials, who had interposed themselves between the ruler and his royal relatives, for this estrangement between them and, ultimately, for the decline of the world. Not surprisingly, scholar-officials like the infamous Qin statesman Li Si and key Former Han figures such as Gongsun Hong, Zhang Tang, and Dong Zhongshu all viewed the deterioration from Western Zhou to Warring States times as having been caused by the disenchantment and disloyalty of the royal relatives to their own family members, most notably the ruler, or the “Son of Heaven.” The authors of the Huainanzi obviously view the problem from the other direction, and in “Surveying Obscurities” they praise the Han emperorship for reestablishing kinship relations and thereby reuniting the world as one family. This emphasis on the importance of kinship relations and the contributions of the emperor’s own “flesh and bone” to the cause of empire appears repeatedly throughout the text.

Whereas some scholars have seen the decentralized form of governance praised throughout the Huainanzi as reflecting an eclectic acceptance of diverse perspectives in the text,³⁸ we dissent from this interpretation. Rather than seeing the Huainanzi as arguing that a multiperspectival view is a requisite for successful rule, we observe that the text argues consistently that its own perspective is correct, precisely because its root–branch configuration contains the key to reconciling all the seemingly multifarious forms of knowledge and practice that human civilization had heretofore generated. The text that the Huainanzi claims is “sacrosanct for all time” is itself, because it alone demonstrates how every text that has ever been generated may be made to work as part of an integral unity. This is different from a “multiperspectival view.” The Huainanzi does not claim that every viewpoint is right but that a person’s or a text’s perspective (and the action that follows from it) becomes right when it is correctly placed within the Huainanzi’s developmental rubric. Advocates of ritual, for example, have a place in the empire, but their concerns have a lower priority than the study of the fundamental patterns of Heaven or the apophatic self-cultivation of the ruler. The message of the Huainanzi is not one of open-ended pluralism but of the integration of ramified elements within an intrinsically hierarchical structure.

By providing this forceful and empirically plausible structure within which the interrelationship of all realms of human knowledge and endeavor could be understood, the Huainanzi demonstrates how seemingly irreconcilable diversity can be made to work as part of an integral unity, a problem that neatly mirrored the fundamental challenge of governing the Han Empire.

This posed a clear threat to many firmly entrenched interests at the Han court, because the Huainanzi authors had accomplished (or could plausibly claim to have done so) that for which many others had striven without success. For example, the Confucians³⁹ at the imperial court had reached a rough consensus on which ancient texts should be accorded canonical status⁴⁰ but still disagreed over how they should be interpreted (which explains the development of several different exegetical traditions per classic) and ranked in order of importance. The Huainanzi schematic demonstrates how the five basic realms represented by the five classics may be both ordered relative to one another and fit into a larger context incorporating endeavors and forms of knowledge exterior to the Confucian canon:

1. The Changes (chapter 6, “Surveying Obscurities”)
2. The Spring and Autumn Annals (chapter 8, “The Basic Warp”)
3. The Rites (chapter 11, “Integrating Customs”)
4. The Odes (chapter 12, “Responses of the Way”)
5. The Documents (chapter 14, “Sayings Explained”)

The reasoning underlying these correlations⁴¹ is too lengthy and complex to be explained in detail here, but the gist of the argument is as follows:

 

1. The Changes links to “Surveying Obscurities” because both deal with correlative connections between seemingly unconnected phenomena, connections that are dark, mysterious, and difficult to explain.

2. The Spring and Autumn Annals corresponds to “The Basic Warp” because both examine the moral dimensions of human history and ascribe “praise and blame” to events in the past.

3. The Rites corresponds to “Integrating Customs” because both deal with the theory and practice of ritual in all its forms, including not only such matters as religious observances and mourning customs but also clothing, food, music, and other manifestations of culture.

4. The Odes corresponds to “Responses of the Way” because the latter employs the Laozi as a source of exegetical and explanatory authority in exactly the same way as the Odes was used in such texts as the Hanshi waizhuan (Master Han’s Supplementary Disquisitions on the Book of Odes).

5. The Documents links with “Sayings Explained” because the latter uses brief apothegms and their exegeses to understand the norms of human behavior, in ways analogous to how the former uses historical documents to illuminate successful and unsuccessful actions of past rulers.

 

This “hijacking” (as so it would have seemed) of the classics would have made intellectuals like Dong Zhongshu furious. It achieves what Confucians could not accomplish among themselves (show how the five classics relate to one another in a coherent order) and implies that the entire Confucian canon accounts for only a quarter of a truly comprehensive enumeration of the fundaments of rulership. (This in turn evokes the image of “one corner of a square,” a term that occurs several times in the Huainanzi as a metaphor for limited learning.) Perhaps this was an additional element that led to the decision of Han court scholars, deeply invested in politics, that Liu An and his entire intellectual enterprise were too dangerous a threat to be allowed to survive.

Sources of the Huainanzi

Our present understanding of the place of the Huainanzi in Han intellectual life rests on a number of important points. First, the Huainanzi draws on the foundational classic of Daoism, the Laozi; borrows extensively from the Zhuangzi; and urges on the would-be sage-ruler techniques of self-cultivation closely associated with the Daoist tradition. It is equally true that the text draws heavily on non-Daoist works, including the Odes, the Changes, and the Documents; the Hanfeizi, the Guanzi, and the Lüshi chunqiu; the Chuci and the Shanhaijing; the Zisizi and the Mozi; and undoubtedly other texts that have not been transmitted as part of the received corpus of early literature. The text contains much material from a body of historical, quasi-historical, and legendary anecdotal lore and gnomic verse that was widely known from oral and written transmissions in the Warring States, Qin, and Han times. Despite such a disparity of sources, however, the Huainanzi is much more than just a collection of unconnected chapters; rather, it is a work characterized by a strong degree of organizational and philosophical coherence that reflects the intentions of its authors and editors.

As we argued earlier, although the Huainanzi’s overall structure and content is coherent and consciously organized, it is easy to demonstrate that a great deal of its content was quoted or paraphrased directly from preexisting sources. It is equally easy, and more pertinent to an understanding of the work, to show that often the original quotation is subtly changed or placed in a new context, altering the original meaning to advance the new arguments made by the Huainan masters.⁴² (We return to this point in several of the individual chapter introductions.) Scholars have identified more than eight hundred direct quotations or close paraphrases of Zhou and very early Han works in the Huainanzi. Of those, by far the largest number are from four sources: Zhuangzi (269 references in Charles Le Blanc’s tabulation), Lüshi chunqiu (190 references), Laozi (99 references), and Hanfeizi (72 references). Chapter 1 of the Huainanzi is based heavily on the Laozi, and chapter 2, equally heavily on the Zhuangzi. While quotations from the Lüshi chunqiu can be found throughout the Huainanzi (in twenty of its twenty-one chapters), they are particularly prominent in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Indeed, much of chapter 5 is directly quoted from the first sections of each of the first twelve chapters of the Lüshi chunqiu (and thus also parallels the “Yueling” chapter of Liji, related to the same source). Chapter 10 develops concepts and terms that appear in a group of early texts typically associated with Confucius and his early followers, such as the Lunyu, Mengzi, Xunzi, and Zisizi. Chapter 12 draws extensively from the Laozi, effectively using it to ratify the analysis presented in the chapter itself of the meaning of various anecdotes.

Beyond these general remarks on sources, we refer readers to the discussion of the pertinent sources in the twenty-one separate chapter introductions.

The Debate over the Intellectual Affiliation of the Huainanzi

For many years, the intellectual affiliation of the Huainanzi has been the topic of much debate and dispute. But recently the affiliation debate has changed as a consensus has begun to emerge that perhaps all along trying to assign the text to one “school” or another was asking the wrong question. Nonetheless, a brief historical survey of these debates is useful in trying to understand the state of the field of Huainanzi studies today and to assess where matters now stand.

The spectrum of opinion about “school” affiliation has produced many positions that differ in their subtle nuances, but generally, three broad approaches have dominated the field.

Over the long term, probably the most deeply entrenched approach has been to identify the Huainanzi as an “eclectic” or a “miscellaneous” (za ) text following Liu Xiang’s classification of the Huainanzi in the “Monograph on Arts and Literature” chapter of Ban Gu’s Han shu. The term za itself has been a source of confusion and often has been interpreted as pejorative. The traditional Chinese scholarly attitude toward the Huainanzi is exemplified by Feng Youlan: “This book, like the Lü-shih Ch’un Ch ’iu, is a miscellaneous compilation of all schools of thought, and lacks unity.”⁴³ The views of several influential French sinologists in the early twentieth century did much to bolster the tendency of Western scholarship before the 1960s to regard the Huainanzi as generally unworthy of notice.⁴⁴

Recent scholarship on the Huainanzi and related texts has had the effect of refuting this older view, or at least of modifying it substantially. As John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel pointed out in their study of the Lüshi chunqiu, the classification za is in fact not pejorative in intent and does not denote a kind of miscellaneous intellectual chop suey (zacai ). In their words,

The works of the “Mixed School” thus were not “miscellaneous,” “eclectic,” or “syncretic”; they were not ill-considered mish-mashes of extracts culled from other works and displaying little originality of thought. Rather, they belonged to a class of philosophical speculation that dealt especially with the relation of the human realm to the cosmos, governance to cosmology, the ruler to Heaven and Earth. We can see this directly in the two most important works of the “Mixed School,” the Lüshi chunqiu and the Huainanzi.⁴⁵

In another attempt to sort out the meaning of za with respect to the Huainanzi and the Lushi chunqiu, Mark Edward Lewis stated, “The syncretic nature of the two compendia was indicated by their classification as works that ‘mixed’ or ‘combined’ (za ) the schools.”⁴⁶ In recent years, the eclectic position (variously understood) has been particularly popular among Chinese scholars. Chen Yiping and Hou Wailu, for example, support this position.⁴⁷ The eclectic position also has attracted some Western scholars, notably Griet Vankeerberghen,⁴⁸ whose views will be discussed more fully later.

A second and very influential approach has been to identify the Huainanzi with the Daoist tradition, although with different understandings of what Daoism means and which understanding of Daoism the text represents. The case for Huainanzi as a Daoist work has been articulated by such scholars as Wing-tsit Chan, Kanaya Osamu, Benjamin Wallacker, Charles Le Blanc, Wolfgang Bauer, and Harold Roth. Some, like Chan and Kanaya, emphasize the text’s conceptual links to ideas associated with the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.⁴⁹ Wallacker puts this argument in rather modest terms: “In referring to the general ideas of the eleventh chapter as ‘Taoist’ I mean that they can be derived from the classic Taoist texts, the Lao-tzu Tao-te ching and the Chuang-tzu.”⁵⁰ Others, such as Hsiao Kung-ch’uan, Harold Roth, John Major, and Charles Le Blanc, have argued that the text is best understood as an exemplar of “Huang-Lao,” a particular strain of Daoist syncretism popular among the elite during the early years of the Western Han.⁵¹

The view that the Huainanzi is a Huang-Lao text can be seen as perhaps a subset of the “Daoist” position; indeed some scholars who defend the Huang-Lao view regard the terms “Huang-Lao” and “early Han Daoism” as virtual synonyms.⁵² The Huang-Lao view was strongly bolstered in the 1970s and 1980s by the gradual publication and analysis of works from the Mawangdui funerary library of silk manuscripts. The presence in that library of works ascribed to, or alleged to be based on the teachings of, the Yellow Emperor, in conjunction with the many obvious similarities between the four so-called Yellow Emperor silk manuscripts from Mawangdui⁵³ and the Huainanzi taken as a whole (for example, between the short text Daoyuan and Huainanzi’s chapter 1, “Yuan dao” ), led to a minor boom of scholarly interest in Huang-Lao as a new subject for investigation.⁵⁴ A number of scholars, including Major,⁵⁵ then argued strongly that the Huainanzi should be seen as a work, or perhaps as the exemplary work, in the Huang-Lao tradition. Robin Yates took the cautious position that “Huang-Lao was one of the three traditions of ancient Daoism . . . it was the philosophy or technique of greatest interest to the early Han emperors Wen and Jing, the powerful Empress Dowager Dou, [and] Liu An.”⁵⁶

Soon, however, a reaction set in. Angus Graham questioned how the Huainanzi could be a Huang-Lao work if in chapter 9 it privileges Shen Nong rather than the Yellow Emperor. Mark Csikszentmihalyi began to argue the case against Huainanzi as a Huang-Lao work and for caution in applying the label “Huang-Lao” to any work of the Warring States and Han periods without a clearer understanding of what Huang-Lao was and was not.⁵⁷ In the end, this debate was inconclusive; when everyone had had his or her say in the matter, it was, as Aihe Wang put it, “still open to question whether or not Huang-Lao was a single ideology and what its tenets were.”⁵⁸ Pending further discoveries bearing on the nature and scope of Huang-Lao, the identification of the Huainanzi as a Huang-Lao text remains an intriguing possibility but not something that has been (or can be) established beyond dispute.

Most recently, Griet Vankeerberghen voiced support for the venerable view of the Huananzi as an “eclectic” work in her monograph The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority. Vankeerberghen took issue with two assumptions informing the dominant view that the Huainanzi is a Daoist work. First, she maintains that scholars who hold to this position claim that the Huainanzi was written with the intention of defending a Daoist or Huang-Lao school or tradition. (Many scholars who hold to the “Daoist” or “Huang-Lao” position would reject this characterization of their views, however.) Second, although they recognized that the text draws on a variety of sources, not all of which can be classified as Daoist, they wish to privilege the sources—and the chapters of the Huainanzi that draw most heavily and explicitly on them—that can be easily identified with the Daoist tradition, as exemplified by texts such as the Zhuangzi or the Laozi.⁵⁹ In contrast, Vankeerberghen argues, “the Huainanzi turns to texts or ideas of the past not to defend a single strand of thought against rival theories but to pick out of the large repertoire of statements, ideas, and stories available those that best represented its vision of the Way, and in the process establish the king of Huainan as one who possesses the authority needed for rulership.”⁶⁰ Vankeerberghen concludes that if we are to apply a label to the text, Liu Xiang’s “eclectic” rubric is most suitable because it underscores the text’s “preference for drawing widely on disparate sources.”⁶¹

Vankeerberghen’s approach (in its arguments, if not in its conclusion) is not very different from that of a number of recent scholars who prefer to eschew altogether the assignment of a particular intellectual label to the text. This is a position supported by Roger Ames, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Paul Goldin, Mark Edward Lewis, Michael Loewe, Judson Murray, Michael Puett, and Sarah Queen.⁶² Scholars in this group have rejected the “Daoist” or “eclectic” affiliation for a variety of reasons, based largely on internal features of the text itself. Thus this group of scholars tends to underscore the text’s “syncretic,” “synthetic,” and “comprehensive” aspects, and they generally liken it to a “compendium,” an “anthology,” or an “encyclopedia.” For example, based on a close reading of chapter 21 of the Huainanzi, “An Overview of the Essentials,” Queen contended that associating the text with a single tradition contradicts the author’s self-proclaimed vision of the text articulated in this chapter.⁶³ Adopting a rather dark view of the text, Goldin argued that the Huainanzi is marked by an “insidious syncretism” that aims to justify a political state that would subdue philosophical disputation altogether.⁶⁴ Ames used the word syncretic to describe the Huainanzi and also implied that he regards it as an encyclopedic work that defies classification: “The contents of the Huai Nan Tzu’s twenty books and postface are broad and varied, probably following the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu in attempting to provide a compendium of existing knowledge. It is a syncretic text which borrows widely and heavily from pre-Ch’in sources and adapts earlier contributions to its own ends.”⁶⁵ Csikszentmihalyi similarly argues: “The Masters of Huainan shows the influence of almost every philosophical or religious current, often filtered through a synthetic worldview that attempts to unify them under a broader conceptual scheme.”⁶⁶ Lewis identifies the Huainanzi as one of several important works that “claimed to be [a] universal encyclopedia containing everything worth knowing.” This is further borne out by the collective nature of the work, which involved a large number of scholars assembled at Liu An’s court. Lewis further maintains, “This insistence on the large number of people who participated in the writing of the text is part of the program of comprehensiveness that defined the project of composing such an encyclopedia.”⁶⁷ And again, “As comprehensive treatises produced by large numbers of scholars under the aegis of a leading political figure who aspired to guide a young ruler, both texts [Lüshi chunqiu and Huainanzi] aimed to bring together all the competing doctrines of the period.”

After several years of close collaboration on this translation, our own views remain far from uniform. Roth continues to be a stout defender of the position that the Huainanzi is a Daoist work. He argues that despite the broad array of pre-Han sources from which it draws, in its cosmology and methods of self-cultivation, it remains squarely within a tradition of both philosophy and practice that borrows from earlier Daoist sources, including the four “Xinshu” texts of the Guanzi, the Laozi, and the Zhuangzi. In his view, these sources and the cosmology and techniques of apophatic inner cultivation that they profess are treated by the Huainanzi authors as the “root” or foundation of the entire work. This can be seen in the way the Huainanzi privileges Daoist cosmology in chapters 1 and 2 and the many and various ways in which it privileges a cosmology of the Way and the practice of inner cultivation as the root in many other chapters. While acknowledging with his colleagues that the Huainanzi regards itself as a work beyond comparison, Roth sees it as being in a tradition of Daoist syncretism that includes the three later Guanzi “Xinshu” chapters; the “Syncretist” chapters of the Zhuangzi (as identified by Graham and Liu Xiaogan); chapters 3, 5, 17, and 25 of the Lüshi chunqiu (as identified by Meyer); and the so-called Mawangdui Huang-Lao silk manuscripts, whether or not we call it—or this tradition—“Huang-Lao.”

In contrast, Meyer and Queen emphasize the Huainanzi’s own claim to be above and beyond classification. Having proposed in 1993 that the Huainanzi could be regarded as a paradigmatic work of the Huang-Lao tradition,⁶⁸ Major now has adopted a more agnostic position toward the whole Huang-Lao question. With specific reference to the Huainanzi, he ultimately agrees with the internalist approach favored by Meyer and Queen.

After several decades of heated discussion, the debate over the “school” affiliation of the text by now may have played itself out. In any case, in this translation we have opted to adopt an emic view of the text; that is, we seek to understand the problem of the place of the Huainanzi in Han intellectual life in terms of what the authors of the Huainanzi themselves chose to say on this matter rather than to perpetuate further the “affiliation debate.” We believe this approach to be the best way both of analyzing the text and presenting it to our readers.

A Brief Account of This Translation Project

This project had its genesis in the early 1990s when, amid an upsurge of interest in late Warring States and early Han intellectual history, the thought occurred to a number of scholars that the time was right to attempt a complete English translation of the Huainanzi. (At about the same time, another team began work on a full French translation, which was published in 2003.)⁶⁹ After a series of preliminary discussions, a collaborative project took shape, leading (with some changes of personnel) to the current team and this translation. Work on rough chapter drafts began in 1995. At that early stage, the team members agreed on principles that have guided the project throughout its course:

1. The translation would be complete and as accurate as it was possible to make it, with all Chinese words accounted for and nothing added or paraphrased.
2. The translation would use standard, highly readable English, with no jargon or esoteric vocabulary and no resort to contrived syntax.
3. The translation would preserve vital features of the Chinese original, such as parallel prose, verse, and aphoristic sayings.⁷⁰

As our work progressed, two more principles were added to this list:

 

4. We would identify and pay special attention to the formal characteristics (precepts, sayings, persuasions, and so on) that distinguished some chapters and use them for guidance in assessing both the text’s rhetorical strategies and its philosophical meaning.

5. We would try to understand the text as much as possible on its own terms, as laid out in the chapter summaries and other features of the book’s postface (chapter 21, “An Overview of the Essentials”).

 

When the translation work was well under way, we applied for a two-year fellowship for the academic years 1996 to 1998, which was granted by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. The Huainanzi Translation Project was then officially headquartered at Roth’s home institution, Brown University. Thereafter the team met at Brown three to five times each year to read and discuss drafts, work toward a common understanding of numerous Chinese terms, resolve inconsistencies, and assign tasks to move the project forward.

By early 2007, revised drafts of all the chapters were complete, and the work of writing the chapter introductions and a general introduction and of preparing the manuscript for publication continued, with the completed manuscript being delivered to Columbia University Press at the end of that year.

The principal translator or translators of each chapter are indicated, showing who did the initial draft of a particular chapter, shepherded it through the revision process, and assumed final responsibility for the finished version. Similarly, appendix A was drafted by Meyer, appendix B by Major, and appendix C by Roth with the assistance of Matthew Duperon. Notwithstanding this assignment of responsibility (and credit), we have emphasized throughout the project the collaborative nature of our work. Every draft, at the initial stage and at every round of revision, was read and critiqued by every member of the team. In that sense, each chapter, as well as this introduction, the chapter introductions, and the appendices, is the work of the entire team, and we have tried hard to ensure that the work overall reads as a uniform and seamless whole.

Conventions Used in This Work

Chapters and Chapter Sections

The earliest references to the Huainanzi indicate that the work, as submitted to Emperor Wu of the Han in 139 B.C.E., was divided into twenty-one chapters, the same arrangement as in the extant work. The original manuscript copy would have had either no punctuation or only minimal punctuation, with little or no indication of sentence and paragraph breaks, no differentiation of prose and verse, and no sections or other subdivisions within chapters. We have provided all these in our English translation.

In general, we have followed the suggested punctuation and, less often, the paragraph breaks suggested by D. C. Lau, editor of the standard edition on which we have based our translation.⁷¹ We note our departures from Lau’s punctuation and paragraph division only when they have a significant effect on how the meaning is construed.

We also have divided each chapter into sections. Although, as noted, these are not present in the original text, we believe they provide an important tool to enhance the reader’s understanding of the text and also are useful in facilitating cross-references. As we have defined them, the chapter sections are by no means arbitrary; instead, we have tried with great care to follow natural breaks in the material itself. So, for example, the topic word jin (now) might begin a section, and the conclusion-drawing word gu (therefore) might end one. In some cases, several “now–therefore” passages that are similar in theme have been grouped to form a single section. In other cases (for example, chapter 12), section breaks appear naturally in the text because passages are “capped” by a quotation from an authoritative classic. Some chapters have many sections (especially chapters 16 and 17 and also chapters 12 and 14), while others have relatively few (for example, chapters 8 and 19).

Chapter sections are numbered in the translated text in the form “8.3,” meaning “chapter 8, section 3.” We use this numbering system in the notes for cross-references (for example, to important parallel passages) within or among chapters (for example, “see 8.3”).

Format and Typography

Because parallel prose, especially, and verse are important components of the Huainanzi’s rhetorical structure, we have been careful to translate parallel prose lines and verse into parallel lines of English, indented and set line-for-line.

Words that do not appear in the Chinese text but are implied by the wording of the original or, in our judgment, are required to complete the sense of a phrase or sentence (taking care not to add anything that is not clearly implied by the text itself) are enclosed in square brackets.

Arrangement of Chapters and Appendices

Each of the twenty-one translated chapters is preceded by an introduction, except for chapters 16 and 17, which are very much alike in structure and content and so share an introduction.

Notes have been kept to a necessary minimum and generally cover such matters as textual emendations, such as when we disagree with D. C. Lau’s proposed changes or propose emendations of our own; explanations of terms, such as obscure words or characters that are used in unusual ways; people and places mentioned in the text, whose importance can be better appreciated through a brief identification;⁷² cross-references within the text and references to comparable passages in early texts; and explanations of obscure passages such as historical anecdotes that cannot readily be understood without information that supplements the original text. One way of keeping the number of notes under control was to use appendices, and the book has three. Appendix A, “Key Terms and Their Translations,” comments on and explicates a number of words, compounds, and phrases that are of special importance to the text and, in many cases, present special challenges to translators. Appendix B, “Categorical Terms,” lists and explicates terms that naturally group into categories such as “Astronomical Terms” and “Weights and Measures.” Appendix C, “A Textual History of the Huainanzi,” gives a brief account of the history and current status of Huainanzi studies in the form of a bibliographical essay.

Nonstandard Romanizations

In order to avoid the ambiguity caused by words that have different Chinese characters but are spelled identically in romanization, we used the following nonstandard romanizations:

The state of Wei ; the state of Wey

The state of Han ;the state of Hann

The Di “barbarians,” the Dii “barbarians,” and the Dee “barbarians”

The Zhou dynasty, but Djou , last king of the Shang dynasty

Terms Not Translated

While we have made every effort to avoid cluttering our pages with untranslated Chinese terms, we inevitably had to leave untranslated a number of words that simply have no good English equivalent. These include some words pertaining to measurement, such as

li, a linear distance equal to about one-third of a mile or about 500 meters

mu (or mou), a measure of area equal to about one-sixth of an acre or about 0.067 hectare

Other words of linear measure, such as ren, zhang, and pi

Words for units of weight, such as jun and dan (for all these, see “Weights and Measures” in appendix B)

The names of the five notes of the pentatonic scale, gong, shang, jue, zhi, and yu

The names of some musical instruments, such as the se and the qin, often but, in our view, inappropriately translated as “lute” or “zither”

The names of the ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches and their sexagenary combinations

Some technical terms, notably qi, which we sometimes translate as “vital energy” when it is clearly used in a context of Daoist self-cultivation or related topics but which we more often leave untranslated

Citations

Editions

We take as our standard edition the work of D. C. Lau, Huainanzi zhuzi suoyin (A Concordance to the Huainanzi), Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992), cited as HNZ. When we accept Lau’s emendations, we do so without comment, but when we depart from his text, we explain why in the notes. Our standard form of reference to all the concordances in the ICS Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series is to chapter/page/line in the form 10/83/19. Our standard reference text of the Huainanzi for collected commentaries is by Zhang Shuangdi , Huainanzi jiaoshi , 2 vols. (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1997), cited as Zhang Shuangdi 1997.

 

References to Other Works

Classical works are usually referred to by standard divisions of chapter and verse, without reference to any particular edition—for example, Odes 96, stanza 2; Laozi 55; and Zuozhuan, Duke Cheng, year 18. Where an exact page and line reference is called for, unless otherwise indicated, we cite editions of pre-Han and Han works in the ICS Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series (all edited by D. C. Lau and published in Hong Kong by the Commercial Press [Shangwu yinshuguan]) whenever they are available. Citations take the form of the abbreviated title plus chapter/page/ line—for example, LieZ 2/6/20. Cited works (with publication dates) include

BSSZ	Bing shu si zhong zhuzi suoyin (1992)
CC	Chuci zhuzi suoyin (2000)
GZ	Guanzi zhuzi suoyin (2001)
HFZ	Hanfeizi zhuzi suoyin (2000)
SWZ	Hanshi waizhuan zhuzi suoyin (1992)
LieZ	Liezi zhuzi suoyin (1996)
LH	Lunheng zhuzi suoyin (2008)
LSCQ	Lüshi chunqiu zhuzi suoyin (1994)
LY	Lunyu zhuzi suoyin (1995)
LZ	Laozi zhuzi suoyin (1996)
MoZ	Mozi zhuzi suoyin (2001)
MZ	Mengzi zhuzi suoyin (1995)
SY	Shuo yuan zhuzi suoyin (1992)
WZ	Wenzi zhuzi suoyin (1992)
XZ	Xunzi zhuzi suoyin (1996)
YZ	Yanzi chunqiu zhuzi suoyin (1993)
ZGC	Zhanguoce zhuzi suoyin (1992)
ZZ	Zhuangzi zhuzi suoyin (2000)

 

Encyclopedia and Standard Histories

The Huainanzi is frequently quoted in the Taiping yulan (Imperially Reviewed Encyclopedia of the Taiping Era, 984 C.E.), cited as TPYL (in any standard edition; it is not included in the ICS Concordance Series).

For the standard histories of the Former Han period, we cite the following editions:

Han shu	Han shu buzhu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983)
Shiji	Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959)

 

Frequently Cited Works

The following works are cited frequently and therefore always in abbreviated form.

Ames 1994	Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983; repr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994)
Csikszentmihalyi 2004	Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 2004)
Graham 1982	A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982)
Hawkes 1985	David Hawkes, The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
Knoblock 1988	John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988)
Knoblock and Riegel 2000	John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000)
Le Blanc 1985	Charles Le Blanc, Huai-nan Tzu: Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought: The Idea of Resonance (Kan-ying) with a Translation and Analysis of Chapter Six (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985)
Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003	Charles Le Blanc and Rémi Mathieu, eds., Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2, Huainan zi: Texte traduit, présenté et annoté, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003)
Legge 1895	James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, 2nd rev. ed. (1895; repr., 5 vols. in 4, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960)
Mair 1997	Victor Mair, Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, new ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997)
Major 1993	John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought: Chapters Three, Four and Five of the Huainanzi, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993)
Rickett 1985	W. Allyn Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985)
Rickett 1998	W. Allyn Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Roth 1992	Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-Nan Tzu, Monographs of the Association for Asian Studies, no. 46 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies, 1992)
Roth 1999	Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
Vankeerberghen 2001	Griet Vankeerberghen, The Huainanzi and Liu An ’s Claim to Moral Authority (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001)
Waley/Allen 1996	Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, new ed., edited with additional translations by Joseph R. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937; New York: Grove Press, 1996)
Wallacker 1962	Benjamin E. Wallacker, The Huai-nan-tzu, Book Eleven: Behavior, Culture and the Cosmos, American Oriental Series, vol. 48 (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1962)

 

We, the members of the Huainanzi translation project team, and our associates in this work, hope that we have been able to carry out this project in conformity with the preceding principles. Above all, we hope that this translation will have the effect of stimulating further new scholarship on the fascinating and rich book of Liu An, the Master of Huainan.

 

1. These introductory materials in themselves amount to a “book-within-a-book” about the Huainanzi, and some readers might find it helpful to read them consecutively as a way of gaining an overview of the entire text before reading the translated chapters themselves.

2. Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation, American Oriental Series, vol. 85 (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 2000), 170, 172–73, 176–79, 184–87.

3. Michael J. Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 150–52.

4. Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, 151.

5. Ying Bu (also known as Qing Bu) was an ally of Xiang Yu in the wars of the Qin downfall; he later came over to the side of Liu Bang and was enfeoffed in 203 B.C.E. as the king of Huainan. After the failure of his revolt in 196 B.C.E., Ying was executed and his family exterminated. See Michael Loewe, A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Han, and Xin Periods (221 BC–AD 24) (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 651–52.

6. An alternative rendering of this title popularized by Mark Csikszentmihalyi is Masters of Huainan. Such a translation underscores the fact of multiple authorship. See Csikszentmihalyi, Readings in Han Chinese Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 63. However, we adhere to the traditional understanding of the titles of Chinese classics, which typically took the name of their putative author or patron (even when that author [e.g., Laozi] may have been a mythical figure). We believe that “Huainanzi” refers specifically to Liu An as the “Master of Huainan.”

7. Han shu 44/2145. For a list of works attributed to Liu An and his retainers, see Le Blanc 1985, 41–52. (For these and other abbreviated citations, see the section “Conventions Used in This Work” near the end of this introduction.)

8. Roth 1992, 432–34, lists eight such works.

9. In recent years, the word ru has occasioned a certain amount of scholarly controversy. It is often translated as “Confucian,” and we follow that practice. Some scholars prefer to leave the term untranslated, pointing out that “Confucianism” as a coherent doctrine did not take shape until late in the Western Han period. We are not satisfied with that practice, as the actual meaning of ru is obscure, and the term as such is unfamiliar and potentially confusing or simply not informative to English-language readers except for specialists in early Chinese studies. Some other scholars have begun to translate ru as “classicists,” but in our view that term is too broad. Many Han intellectuals who were not ru (such as Daoists and Mohists) appealed to the texts of their own traditions for classical authority; indeed, the Huainanzi itself takes the Laozi to be a canonical work. In our view, the most important feature of the early ru is that they invested canonical authority in texts (the Odes, the Documents, the Spring and Autumn Annals, etc.) that were closely associated with the tradition of Confucius. Thus we translate ru as “Confucian” or “Confucians.”

For discussions of the word ru, see Nicolas Zufferey, To the Origins of Confucianism: The Ru in Pre-Qin Times and During the Early Han Dynasty (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003); Michael Nylan, “Han Classicists Writing in Dialogue About Their Own Tradition,” Philosophy East and West 47, no. 2 (1997): 133–88; and Anne Cheng, “What Did It Mean to Be a Ru in Han Times?” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 14, no. 2 (2001): 101–18.

10. Gao You’s preface in Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 1:1–2. For a discussion of key terms such as the Way, Potency, Humaneness, and Rightness, see app. A.

11. Benjamin Wallacker, “Liu An, Second King of Huai-nan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 92 (1973): 36–49.

12. Han shu 44/2146.

13. Liu An’s father and Emperor Jing’s father were brothers; Liu An and Emperor Jing were thus cousins, and Emperor Wu, Emperor Jing’s son, was (in modern genealogical terms) Liu An’s first cousin once removed. But as a member of Emperor Wu’s father’s generation, Liu An’s effective status with respect to the young emperor would have been that of an uncle.

14. In this way Huainanzi, chap. 21, resembles the final chapter (chap. 33) of the Zhuangzi, which similarly serves as a postface to and summary of the entire work.

15. Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, 244; Loewe’s views in private correspondence with Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112.

16. These issues are explored in Roth 1992, 55–58.

17. Han shu 44/2145.

18. We are indebted to Martin Kern for calling this important fact to our attention. See his “Language, Argument, and Southern Culture in the Huainanzi: A Look at the ‘Yaolüe’” (paper presented at the conference “Liu An’s Vision of Empire: New Perspectives on the Huainanzi,” Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., May 31, 2008), and “Western Han Aesthetics and the Genesis of the Fu,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63 (2003): 383–437.

19. Roth 1992.

20. Almost the entire middle book (also known as Huainan zhongpian ) has been lost, although some fragments have been preserved. The Tang- and Song-dynasty encyclopedias and commentaries often quote it, and these passages were collected by a number of Ming and Qing scholars under the title Huainan wanbi shu . See also Roth 1992, 432–34.

21. Charles Le Blanc, “Huai nan tzu,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, Early China Special Monograph, no. 2 (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 189.

22. Kern, “Language, Argument, and Southern Culture in the Huainanzi.”

23. Literally, “float and sink.”

24. See “Chapters and Chapter Sections” near the end of this introduction.

25. Serpent-bodied brother and sister deities portrayed in some Chinese myths both as fashioners of Heaven and Earth and as early rulers.

26. Liu lü () means both “six pitch pipes” and “six standards.”

27. “Hegemon” and “prince” would obviously have been anachronisms in the Han but would have had structural analogues in the officials and magistrates of the Han state bureaucracy.

28. For example, Mark Edward Lewis argues,

Having ascended the primal unity, through first divisions, the structure of space and time, and the origins of man, to the highest forms of men in the sage and the ruler, the text, like the Lü shi chun qiu, loses a clear sense of structure. Nevertheless, the passage in the early chapters from primal unity to the sage provides a natural model for the ideal of an all-encompassing textual unity incorporating all philosophical and technical traditions. (Writing and Authority in Early China [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999], 307)

29. A very good example of this approach is Huainanzi, chap. 14, “Sayings Explained” (Quan yan ). Although not usually recognized as such, the chapter is a collection of nearly seventy maxims or brief sayings (yan ) whose illustrative points are typically unpacked and explicated by the Huainanzi compilers at the end of each saying.

30. See, for example, chap. 10, “Profound Precepts” (Mou cheng ); chap. 13, “Boundless Discourses” (Fan lun ); chap. 14, “Sayings Explained” (Quan yan ); chap. 15, “An Overview of the Military” (Bing lue ); and chaps. 16 and 17, “A Mountain of Persuasions” and “A Forest of Persuasions” (Shui shan and Shui lin ).

31. For two studies conducted by team members on the important topic of the claims that the Huainanzi makes for itself, see Sarah A. Queen, “Inventories of the Past: Rethinking the ‘School’ Affiliation of the Huainanzi,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 14, no. 1 (2001): 51–72; and Judson Murray, “A Study of ‘Yao lue’ , ‘A Summary of the Essentials’: Understanding the Huainanzi Through the Point of View of the Author of the Postface,” Early China 29 (2004): 45–108.

32. Wallacker 1962.

33. See “The Debate over the Intellectual Affiliation of the Huainanzi.”

34. The translation “hundred schools” for bai jia is sanctified by long usage, but we associate ourselves with scholars who have argued that the term school implies more organizational structure and more doctrinal unity and discipline than was true of the era, and therefore we avoid that term.

35. Shiji, chap. 130.

36. Han shu, chap. 30.

37. For these terms, see app. A.

38. Vankeerberghen 2001, 4.

39. For the term ru as “Confucians,” see n. 9.

40. This is true even though some of the Confucian classics did not assume their final form and content until later in the Western Han period. For a discussion of the formation of the classical canon, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

41. In saying that these chapters “correspond” to the Confucian classics, we are not implying that they parallel those classics or duplicate their content but simply that they play roles in the organizational and intellectual scheme of the Huainanzi analogous to the roles played by the classics for the ru Confucians.

42. This process has been brilliantly demonstrated by Le Blanc 1985, 86–98, in side-by-side readings of passages quoted from the Lüshi chunqiu and other sources and their Huainanzi adaptations. See also Sarah A. Queen, “The Creation and Domestication of the Techniques of Lao-Zhuang: Anecdotal Narrative and Philosophical Argumentation in Huainanzi Chapter 12,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 21, no. 1 (2008): 201–47.

43. Feng Yu-lan (Feng Youlan), A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952, 1953), 1:395. Feng Youlan subsequently adopted a more favorable view of the Huainanzi. For a summary of the evolution of Feng’s thinking, see Le Blanc 1985, 34n.45.

44. See the views of Leon Wieger, Henri Maspero, and Rolf Stein, as summarized by Le Blanc 1985, 32–33.

45. Knoblock and Riegel 2000, 46.

46. Lewis, Writing and Authority, 304.

47. See, for example, Chen Yiping , Huainanzi xiaozhuyi (Guangdong: Renmin Press, 1994), 5–7; and Hou Wailu , Zhongguo sixiang tongshi (Beijing: Renmin Press 1957), 2:78–83.

48. Vankeerberghen 2001.

49. See, example, Wing-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 305.

50. Wallacker 1962, 11.

51. Hsiao Kungch’uan, A History of Chinese Political Thought, trans. F. W. Mote (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 570–82; Le Blanc 1985, 4–8; Major 1993, 8–14; Roth 1992, 13–19.

52. See, for example, Harold D. Roth, “Who Compiled the Chuang Tzu?” in Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont Jr. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1991), 79–128.

53. These four texts are “Jingfa,” “Jing,” “Cheng,” and “Daoyuan.” To these, Robin Yates adds a fifth, “Yiyin jiuzhu.” See Robin D. S. Yates, Five Lost Classics: Tao, Huang-Lao, and Yin-Yang in Han China (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997). For a translation of “Daoyuan,” see 172–77.

54. Among the pioneering works in this field were Tu Wei-ming, “The Thought of Huang-Lao: A Reflection on the Lao Tzu and Huang Ti Texts in the Silk Manuscripts of Ma-wang-tui,” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1979): 95–100; and Randall Peerenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China: The Silk Manuscripts of Huang-Lao (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

55. Major 1993, 8–14.

56. Yates, Five Lost Classics, 42–43.

57. Angus C. Graham, quoted in Major 1993, 10; Yates, Five Lost Classics; Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “Emulating the Yellow Emperor: The Theory and Practice of Huang-Lao, 180–141 b.c.” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994).

58. Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China, 185.

59. Vankeerberghen 2001, 4.

60. Vankeerberghen 2001, 4.

61. Vankeerberghen 2001, 4.

62. Ames 1994; Paul R. Goldin, “Insidious Syncretism in the Political Philosophy of Huai-nan-tzu,” Asian Philosophy 9, no. 3 (1999): 165–91; Michael Loewe, “Huang Lao Thought and the Huainanzi,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 4, no. 3 (1994): 377–95; Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, 260–61n.72; Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 57 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 269; Lewis, Writing and Authority; Judson Murray, “The Consummate Dao: The ‘Way’ (Dao) and ‘Human Affairs’ (shi) in the Huainanzi ” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2007); Murray, “Study of ‘Yao lüe.’”

63. Queen, “Inventories of the Past.”

64. Goldin, “Insidious Syncretism.”

65. Ames 1994, xxii.

66. Csikszentmihalyi, Readings in Han Chinese Thought, 63.

67. Lewis, Writing and Authority, 303.

68. Major 1993, 8–14. Major still stands by many of the points made in those pages, including the key statement that for the Huainan masters, “knowledge of the natural world translates into political power” (13). But the question of how to understand Huang-Lao doctrine is, for him, now less clear.

69. Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003.

70. In this connection, we are deeply indebted to our colleague William Boltz, who kindly identified for us the Han rhymes that characterize the verse passages in the text.

71. Huainanzi zhuzi suoyin; see section “Editions.”

72. We identify persons and places only when, in our judgment, such identification would add significantly to the reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the work. Figures are identified when they first are mentioned in the text. We do not identify famous historical figures like Confucius and Qin Shihuangdi who already will be familiar to most of the readers of this book. Nor do we always identify minor mythical or imaginary personages, especially when the context is sufficient to explain their presence in the text. For those wishing more information, we suggest the following: The recent French translation of the Huainanzi has a useful index of proper names, both personal and geographical (Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003, 1017–1140). Many but not all the people (both mythological and historical) mentioned in the Huainanzi can be found in the excellent “Glossary of Names” in David Hawkes’s translation of the Chuci (Hawkes 1985, 322–45) and in the glossary in John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel’s translation of the Lüshi chunqiu (Knoblock and Riegel 2000, 763–813). The standard Chinese reference work for biographical names is Huang Huixian , ed., Ershiwushi renming da cidian (Dictionary of Personal Names in the Twenty-five Histories) (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1997). The most convenient reference work for historical place-names is Wei Songshan , ed., Zhongguo lishi diming da cidian (Dictionary of Chinese Historical Place-Names) (Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995).