Institute of East Asian Studies

“The Zhuangzi in Han Historiography”
Esther Sunkyung Klein, University of Sydney 

The Shiji’s biographical sketch of Zhuangzi pastes together disparate fragments to create the semblance of a life story. For readers accustomed to the Shiji’s formal conventions for writing lives, the Zhuangzi account can be mistaken for a smooth and reasonably coherent (albeit brief) narrative. And yet these few short lines raise more questions than they answer. This presentation will begin by thoroughly reviewing the Shiji “Traditions of Zhuangzi” (included under the “Arrayed Traditions of Laozi and Han Fei” 老子韓非列傳) with a particular focus on a) its relationship to the Zhuangzi text as we know it and b) the problems of interpretation it has generated, both in traditional and contemporary scholarship. The remainder of the presentation will employ a variety of sources beyond the “Traditions of Zhuangzi” in an effort to gain some traction on these problems. These sources include comparison and contrast with the Shiji treatment of other Warring States “authors”; materials from Han bibliography; and Zhuangzi quotations (implicit and explicit) in the Shiji. A somewhat distinct but equally intriguing question is Jia Yi’s use of Zhuangzi references and implicit quotations in rhapsodies that are anthologised in the Shiji. Jia Yi’s Zhuangzi need not have matched the Shiji’s but it is an interesting exercise to consider whether there are any points of convergence in their respective uses of the text.

“Wang Bi’s ‘Forgetting for Getting’: The Reading of the Zhuangzi’s Fishnet Allegory that Revolutionized ZhouyiExegesis”
Mercedes Valmisa, Gettysburg College

My contribution brings to the spotlight how Wang Bi reinterpreted the Zhuangzi’s fishnet allegory by turning the logical connection between getting 得 and forgetting 忘 into one of simultaneity. While in the Zhuangzipassage forgetting is a recommended practice after the getting has been achieved (however we understand this getting), in Wang Bi’s usage, forgetting the resources that the ancients used to convey their intentions (words and images in the Zhouyi) becomes a condition sine qua non for getting these otherwise evasive intentions. The purposive introduction of this logical difference speaks of Wang Bi’s hermeneutical counter-project for reading the Zhouyi and his quest for comprehending the ancients’ original meaning through what I will call a poetics of actualization.

“The Influence of Zhuangzi on the Thought of Ji Kang”
David Chai, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Although scholars tend to be selective in their examination, the contribution of Daoism to the rise, flourishment, and sustainment of Chinese civilization easily matches, if not surpasses, that of Confucianism. Ji Kang (224–263 CE) exemplifies this better than most. Living in the chaos resulting from the collapse of the Han dynasty, Ji Kang sought solace in Daoism, especially the Zhuangzi. His embracement was multifaceted: he recycled individual terms or metaphors from the text; he directly quoted or summarized its content; and he saw the Zhuangzi as encapsulating his own life. There are two primary reasons for this: first, the Zhuangzi became a critical foil for Ji Kang’s discontent with Confucianism; and second, the text offered him a route to spiritually escape the mayhem around him. In this way, Ji Kang’s reception of the Zhuangzi was both highly personal and hermeneutically illuminating.

“Guo Xiang on Mind-Fasting: Parsing Away a Definition of Qi in the Inner Chapters”
Brook Ziporyn, University of Chicago

By looking closely at Guo Xiang’s commentary on the famous “Mind-Fasting” passage in the “Renjianshi” Chapter (Chapter 4) of the Zhuangzi, and trying to make sense of Guo’s implied parsing as inferred by Cui Dahua, a number of unexpected revisionist readings of the passage become possible, each of which gives a very different picture of this suggested practice which plays so central a role in the Inner Chapters. Moreover, Guo’s parsing removes entirely the seeming definition of Qi found in the passage by most parsings, which, if it is there, is perhaps the first attempt to define or at least describe the character of Qi as such in Chinese tradition. Its absence would change the landscape considerably. By experimenting with Guo’s reading, some other large-impact interpretive changes also suggest themselves, reversing the valences of some of the key lines, suggesting new options for understanding the “oneness of the will” as either positive or negative, as well as the “stopping” 止 alluded to in the passage as either a description of a negative state to be transcended or as a positive recommendation, and as implying either “being limited to” or “coming to rest in”—or both. Lots for us to play with here, and that’s what I hope my presentation will invite us to do.

“Poetic Uses of the Zhuangzi in Early Medieval China” 
Wendy Swartz, Rutgers University 

In early medieval China, the cultural currency of the elite class was to a great extent based on fluency in xuanxue 玄學 (“learning of the Mysterious [Dao]”), with its expanding repertoire of arguments, notions, and values. During the third and fourth centuries, poets made copious use of philosophical classics, such as the Zhuangzi 莊子, and its commentaries, to express their positions in conversation or in writing on major issues ranging from human behavior, death to transcendence. When the occasion demanded it, this currency entailed a fluidity in writing texts that crossed easily between different sets of sources, daojia 道家 texts (e.g., the Zhuangzi) and rujia 儒家 texts (e.g., the Analects). With access to a growing web of diverse resources that extended beyond the standard literary heritage, poets capitalized on this new potential by drawing extensively from philosophical texts. Their poetic use of philosophical classics and their early medieval commentaries illustrates the fluid, composite nature of early medieval poetry and thought. This presentation will examine how poets such as Sun Chuo 孫綽 (314–371) and Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (365?–427) used and adapted the Zhuangzi for their own poetic purposes.

“Digital Methods for Understanding Exegetical Concerns: Comparing Guo Xiang and Cheng Xuanying”
Jesse Chapman, UC Berkeley

Digital tools make it possible to break down complex texts into their component parts. A simple regular expression can separate an individual commentary from a collection of exegetical works. Character counts and ngrams reveal which words and phrases appear most often in the work of a given exegete. Analysis of word and phrase frequency, a practice sometimes identified as “distance reading,” provides an alternate way into texts that supplements close readings of individual passages. Automated searches, however, carry their own pitfalls and limitations. Word and phrase frequency alone provide only a superficial sense of a text’s themes, and automated searches in the absence of close analysis can produce erroneous results. Distance reading is a useful tool, but only insofar as it is used in conjunction with close reading. Perhaps the most valuable feature of distance reading is that can lead scholars to discover passages they might otherwise overlook. This paper will provide a practical introduction to regular expression and frequency analysis, including an example of their application to themes surrounding the body, embodiment, and the body-politic in Guo Xiang and Cheng Xuanying’s commentaries on the Zhuangzi.

“Whose Zhuangzi 莊子? Master Zhuang’s, Guo Xiang’s 郭象, or Cheng Xuanying’s 成玄英? Who Says What in the Commentary Tradition”
Richard John Lynn, University of Toronto

The complete manuscript of my Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang As Interpreted by Guo Xiang will go to Columbia University Press by the end of March. Here are some essential features: Despite occasional explicit differences in interpretation of the text of the Zhuangzi, Cheng’s commentary is definitely a sub-commentary to Guo’s. Cheng’s remarks are more wordy and, usually close to the standard guwen of the Tang era, easier to understand than Guo’s elliptical, ambiguous and cryptic, often totally opaque, prose. As a commentary on Guo’s commentary, it has proved very helpful in several ways: By providing (1) factual information such as the identification of persons and places mentioned in the Zhuangzi text, something that Guo almost never does. (2) relating single characters in the text of the Zhuangzi or Guo’s commentary to binomial expressions, most of which seem (at least to me) appropriate to narrowing down the range of meaning involved to fit the contexts. (3) As Guo brightens the opaque passages in the Zhuangzi, so Cheng further brightens the opaque ambiguities of Guo’s commentary—with the proviso that the Daoist priest Cheng’s two-fold arcane learning重玄學 forays into Buddhist terminology and concepts are not allowed to add dimensions of meaning that cannot have been present in Guo’s thought. However, having read so much of it I tend to think that most of Cheng’s supposedly two-fold arcane thought is actually one-fold, and thus very close to Guo’s. (4) Cheng rarely explicitly disagrees with Guo, but when he does, that is helpful too. As for Guo, whereas the interpretation of the text in some passages seem either off the mark or beside the point, the overwhelming majority enhance rather than distort the meaning of the “original” Zhuangzi—such is my opinion after having translated both all of it and all of Guo’s commentary. Some things about Guo’s commentary continue to puzzle, for example, his obsession with denying a place for causality in both the physical and human realms, as well as his equally obsessive insistence on independent selfhood for all things, including the human (about fifty terms beginning with zi 自 are now collected in the book’s glossary). While it should go without saying for it should be manifestly obvious, that “as interpreted by Guo Xiang” means that the entire text of the Zhuangzi must be re-translated. Simply to tack on Guo’s commentary to some earlier translation, leading the pack Watson’s or Mair’s, is out of the question. My work integrates the commentary with the Zhuangzi benwen 本文. This takes much time and effort, for one must go back and forth between the two, fitting one with the other, but the results are often strikingly different from Watson’s and Mair’s, which should make for an interesting read. However, do I claim that this results in the “true” meaning of the “original” Zhuangzi? Not at all, for the benwenis so ambiguous and opaque in places that there, at least, no such claim can ever be made. Peipei Qiu (Vassar) has been working for years on a similar book: a Lin Xiyi林希逸 (1193–1271) interpretation of the Zhuangzi. Peipei’s book, like mine, has suffered many delays over the years, but will be most welcome when it appears. The more such interpretations we have, the more the meaning of the benwen will become apparent. Presentation here is a large excerpt from Chapter 25 of the book.

“The Great and Venerable Teacher: Zhuangzi’s Zhenren, Laozi’s Sage, and their “Traces.”
Cheng Xuanying’s Reading of the First Passage of Zhuangzi, Chapter 6”
Friederike Assandri, University of Leipzig

Cheng Xuanying (7th century CE), author of the sub-commentary to Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi commentary, was active in Chang’an in an environment where the three teachings were engaged in lively exchange and competition. He is known as a prominent representative of Chongxuanxue, a Daoist philosophy, which employed Madhyamika style logic, and integrated Buddhist notions of universal salvation and a compassionate savior deity into the conceptual frame of the Daode jing. The passage on “the True men of old” from his commentary to Chapter 6 presents a complex argument about the nature and characteristics of the sage, the values associated with sage hood, and the values and exigencies of governing. The passage is of interest because it shows complex and multilayered interaction with, and usage of, different conceptions of the sage. I will discuss formal aspects of Cheng’s commentary, including his techniques of creating structure in the texts he is interpreting, and his technique of creating a dense web of intertextual relations, substantially enhancing the intertextual relations present in the original text. I will further discuss Cheng’s conceptualization of the sage in the context of intellectual and political interaction between the three teachings. Whereas Cheng’s Laozi commentary discussion of the sage engages predominantly with Buddhist theories of cultivation, mind, and cognition, in this passage of the Zhuangzi commentary the main argument engages with Confucian ideas of sage hood and kingship and the associated values. Buddhist notions here serve mainly as an implicit background explaining the nature of the sage.

“The Relationship between Mind and Body in Sima Chengzhen’s Zuowanglun 坐忘论” 
Jiang Limei, Beijing Normal University 

This essay argues that Sima Chengzhen’s Zuowanglun is a systematic reconstruction of Taoist classics on meditation and a religious reading of the Zhuangzi that responds to and emulates Buddhist’s sitting meditation (zuochan 坐禪). Based on a comparative analysis of Sima Chengzhen, Guo Xiang, Cui Zhao, and Cheng Xuanying’s interpretations of the practice/concept of “Sitting and Forgetting” (zuowang 坐忘), the paper tries to demonstrate how changes of seating postures, from “comfortable sitting” to “serious sitting,” reflect Sima’s idea of a gradual practice of the Dao. The essay points out that there are two kinds of discourse in Sima’s discussion on body-mind: a religious (physical/mental) and a philosophical one (body/heart-mind). By integrating these two aspects, Sima Chengzhen turns the Zhuangzi’s negative reading of the mind-body dichotomy into a positive and integrating one, creating a practical theory of meditation. In addition, the essay criticizes Cheng Yi’s interpretation of Sima’s concept of “sitting [yet] galloping afar” (zuochi 坐驰) and reflects on the problem of Sima’s theory of the “Way of Transcendence” (xiandao 仙道).