New Research on the ZHUANGZI

Zhuangzi: Thinking Through the Inner Chapters By Bo Wang Translated by Livia Kohn Contemporary Chinese Scholarship in Daoist Studies St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2014 Pp. x + 221. Paper, $34.95. Zhuangzi: Text And Context By Livia Kohn St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2014. Pp. vi + 330. Paper, $35.95. Zhuangzi And The Happy Fish Edited by Roger T. Ames and Takahiro Nakajima University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. Pp. vi + 303. Hardcover, $29.00. NEW VISIONS OF THE ZHUANGZI Edited by Livia Kohn St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2015. Pp. x + 218. Paper, $34.95. The Zhuangzi is one of ancient China's most attractive texts. This holds true for East Asia as well as for the West. One of its attractions is that it is a Great Book without being canonical. It is not well suited to be placed at the centre of a religious, social or political movement. Instead, in content and language it is characterized by a persisting otherness that continues to present a challenge to interpretative attempts. This may have been so since its origin. Few traces of the text have been found in the collections of written materials that archaeologists have discovered in the last decades. This, however, cannot isolate Zhuangzi studies from the study of other fields of early philosophy. With the large amount of newly excavated materials, perceptions of early intellectual history are in flux. So an important and large set of early materials like the Zhuangzi needs to be relocated in a newly understood intellectual environment. This starts with the need to rethink textual issues. The study of excavated materials has shown that the distance between a text that we have received from Chinese antiquity and its original state proves to be wider than scholars had imagined. For some texts, for instance the Laozi, recently discovered materials allow glimpses into the slow process of their creation. For the Zhuangzi this is not the case, but the problems of its origin need to be re-addressed, as Ames and Nakajima point out in the introduction to Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish (hereafter Happy Fish). In an authoritative study, Liu Xiaogan (2014a) lists the main positions on this issue and in the end maintains the traditional opinions in slightly modified form: by the outgoing third century BCE the text was in the main finalized, the next major editorial impact coming from Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE), who was an official in charge of collecting and editing texts, or from the commentator Guo Xiang (252?–312); the tripartite division into Inner (Chapters 1–7), Outer (Chapters 8–22) and Miscellaneous (Chapters 23–33) chapters was established before Guo Xiang; and Zhuangzi (c. 370–301 BCE) himself was author of the Inner chapters that comprise the philosophical axis of the received text. Klein (2011) documents how hard it is to maintain this position, if it can be put forward at all. She argues that textual evidence from the third and second centuries BCE agrees largely with the historian Sima Qian's (145–86 BCE) biographical account of Zhuangzi and that the historian's focus is not the Inner chapters but other sections of the received text. Liu (2014a, 131) retorts with good reason that the lack of archaeological evidence or roughly contemporary references to a text does not prove its nonexistence. However, it seems difficult to exempt the Inner chapters from Fraser's (1997, 157) general statement: “Since in ancient China an anthology like the Zhuangzi consisted of a collection of scrolls to which new components could be added at any time, we need not assume the existence of a finished ‘book’,” or at least not in pre-Han dynasty times, before the second century BCE. Klein takes her argument one step further and suggests that the scholars assembled at the court of Liu An (197–122) in Huainan may have worked on the Zhuangzi and in particular the Inner chapters, since the received text of the Huainanzi that stems from this court shares vocabulary and interests with the received text of the Zhuangzi. Considering the striking contrast in philosophical methodology and worldview (Puett 2000) between the two texts, this suggestion is daring. At the present stage of research it is safer to admit that our knowledge of the text's authors and the process of its composition is necessarily meager. So what are we to rely on when reading the Zhuangzi? Here Klein refers to Foucault's concept of “author-function,” according to which envisaging an author is nothing but a projection of our way of handling a text. This is useful when reading the Zhuangzi and similar texts, since “almost everything we know about Master Zhuang comes from the Zhuangzi text” (Klein 2011, 307). Zhuangzi and Hui Shi in their carefree ramblings found themselves on the bridge over the river Hao. Zhuangzi observed, “The fish swim out and about and ‘ramble’ as carefree as they please—this is fish happiness.” Huizi replied, “You're not a fish—how do you know fish happiness?” Zhuangzi returned, “You're not me—how do you know that I don't know fish happiness?” Huizi said, “I am not you and certainly don't know what you know. But you are certainly not a fish. The argument that you do not know fish happiness is thus made QED.” Zhuangzi said, “Let's get back to your original question. When you said ‘How (and whence) do you know fish happiness?’ you asked me because you already knew that I know fish happiness. I know it here, on the bridge, over the river Hao.” An ideal response to the challenge posed by this passage comes from the physicist and Nobel laureate Hideki Yukawa. His comments pay homage to the text's timeless charms: “The exchange between Zhuangzi and Huizi can be seen as an indirect comment on the question of rationalism and empiricism in science” (quoted in Happy Fish, 28; originally published in 1983). Yukawa sees Huizi as his colleague but admits that his sympathies lie with Zhuangzi. Chad Hansen (quoted in Happy Fish, 149; the paper was originally published in 2003) observes that “this passage is one of a small cluster of examples of reasoning in ancient Chinese texts that Sinologists recognize as having a surface resemblance to Western philosophy more than to the manifest image of Chinese thought.” In the footsteps of A. C. Graham (1981), he reads the short dialogue as a logical debate on epistemological issues, with a stress on perspectivism. He argues that Huizi's position is contradictory: “Hui Shi [is] trapped by his persistent tendency of slipping from relativistic premises to absolutist conclusions that conflict with his relativism” (Happy Fish, 63). Hansen proposes that Zhuangzi in his final statement follows a pragmatic line when he argues that “what is appropriate to say depends on a perspective” (Happy Fish, 68). Other contributors to Happy Fish pursue similar lines of interpretation. Norman Teng shows in detail how the two dialogue partners stick to logical rules that were established in the Mohist canon (Graham 1978). Han Xiaoqiang reminds readers of the playful and ironic mood of the scene that has often been of great interest to interpreters. In the tradition of Taiwanese scholarship, Sham Yat Shing persists with the question of which of the two thinkers has won the argument (see also Hoffmann in Happy Fish, 36). Roger Ames's public interest in the dialogue reaches back to the 1990s (published in Ames 1998) when he and Hansen, as if in mimicry of the two ancient thinkers, were frequently invited to conduct controversial discussions on “happy fish” in front of an interested audience. In the volume at hand Ames reads the short dialogue from the perspective of the wider Zhuangzi and the framework of argument of the late Warring States period of the fourth and third centuries BCE. His preparatory sketch of what he terms a “Daoist cosmology” contains striking insights into the terminological and conceptual characteristics of the Chinese discourse. The paper is entitled “‘Knowing’ as the ‘Realizing of Happiness’. Here on the Bridge, over the River Hao.” Ames reminds us that the use of written characters for “knowing” “collaps[es] any severe distinction among who knows, what is known and the use of what is known efficaciously in acting wisely” and that definition is “through association” (Happy Fish, 273). Both points are essential for reading the dialogue. Ames proceeds to point out that “Daoist texts give us a situational rather than a causal cosmology, seeking to understand the whole range of relevant conditions and the relations that obtain among them as they come to sponsor any given occurrence” (Happy Fish, 280). As opposed to this, later Mohist realists argued for the independent certainty of knowledge (Hansen 2012). Ames concludes: “The philosophical issues that Zhuangzi and Huizi are engaging at this level fit this dialectical framework as a debate over the Mohist claim for the possibility of certain, universal knowledge, which is unconditioned in the sense that it need not take account of context” (Happy Fish, 284; compare Teng's contribution, as above). So for Zhuangzi “knowing belongs to a world of shared experience, in which the knower and the known are both implicated.” At face value, the short dialogue depicts two of ancient China's foremost logicians discussing the sentiments of fish. So the dialogue can be read as pointing to difficulties in “communication across perspectives or worlds,” with Hui Shi seeming to affirm a position of incommensurability and Zhuangzi relying on his understanding of “rambling,” enhanced by the obvious similarity between the characters for you “wandering” and you “swimming” (Perkins in Happy Fish, 195). This may be seen as hinting at the topic of species difference, which has repercussions in many sections of the Zhuangzi. Franklin Perkins (Happy Fish, 185) argues that “the Zhuangzi is one of the earliest and most thorough attempts to think through human beings as just another of the ten thousand things,” This attempt ends in an emergence of human uniqueness that is far from flattering: “For Zhuangzi, what makes human beings exceptional is that we can recognize that our knowledge and ethics have no more validity than those of any other species” (Happy Fish, 199). Other contributors (Takahiro Nakajima; Kuwako Toshio) contrast the Zhuangzi's position with that of Thomas Nagel and with Peter Singer, who takes an active interest in animal rights. Eske Møllgaard takes up the concept of “rambling” or “wandering” (you). He argues that the Zhuangzi makes a crucial distinction between human life and the life of heaven, or “transcendental life” as Møllgaard puts it. “In the moment of ‘wandering’ we experience ourselves as generated by transcendental life” and Zhuangzi's expression of joy “is not a reference to something in the outer world but to the ‘self-so’ (ziran) of life itself as it affects our being” (Happy Fish, 94 and 97). Møllgaard refers to Isabel Robinet for his reading of the Zhuangzi and takes a stand against François Jullien's argument that there is no ontological difference in Chinese thought. Most of the contributors approach the dialogue equipped with the tools that have opened to them an academic career in fields of philosophy and its history. So when Nakajima and, in particular, Peng Feng discuss the issue of personal experience as the basis of knowing (how does the dialogue's Zhuangzi know?), Buddhist terms as well as Derrida lurk in the background. Hans-Georg Moeller quotes Wittgenstein in order to throw light on Zhuangzi's “rambling without destination.” Zhang Longxi takes the problems with knowing that both dialogue partners seem to share as the starting point for an excursion into the depth of problems in the dialogue between “East and West” and quotes Richard Bernstein and Peter Winch. Ames quotes Dewey and Whitehead. Thereby scholars let a wide spectrum of contemporary and traditional philosophy surround the Zhuangzi passage as if giving it a halo. The more pedestrian question of how to handle the relationship between the brief passage under discussion and the text as a whole, and in particular the Inner chapters to which the passage does not belong, remains in the shadows, and rightfully so, in line with the volume's broad hermeneutic aim. What also remain in the background, for very good reasons, are attempts to equip the text's philosophical orientations with well-defined labels (Coutinho 2014). Livia Kohn's edited volume New Visions of the Zhuangzi contains some work that concurs with Happy Fish and centers on methods of thinking and expressing thought. Robert Allinson's paper on the Zhuangzi's frequent reliance on cripples as the conveyors of truth belongs here. Returning to previous work (1989) he touches on the text's never-ending magic: “Zhuangzi's use of metaphor possesses cognitive significance, dual significance. The unlikely messenger, the message bearer, breaks down our automatic negative response through humour, eccentricity, improbability, and a rhythmic succession of literary images, whose brilliance has awakened our aesthetic sensibilities” (New Visions of the Zhuangzi [hereafter New Visions], 115). Jung Lee deals with rhetorical strategies that he sees at play in the Zhuangzi's dialogues and considers important philosophical and literary tools. He distinguishes contextual authority or “weighted words,” as Zhuangzi puts it, that rely on the personal authority of the speaker, “Socratic influence” that leads the dialogue partner to contradict himself and “epiphanic pointing” as documented in the monkey keeper's performance also to the of and Hansen It is as an of the Zhuangzi that it is a hard text from which to (New His however, is not on the Zhuangzi's use of language but on its of language As he puts “The author of the that language is not a to the true of but one to it. In other language of the reason we cannot as it (New In the New Visions deals with social and philosophy. Here Fraser's concept of the of a point of Fraser's from of the text and he is to of rather than of He shows how they against an distinction between and Instead, they that life is characterized by a “The approach to the of and the of in life” (New In the Zhuangzi, in to thinking to the between life and on this topic have since antiquity of the The between and takes this up and on the with those that at his to life and not a and universal or any at Zhuangzi a major for of in and in life when seen from the of the (New She argues that from a relativistic or from a or Zhuangzi maintains the to In of a proposes that “the essential of everything in and thus the between life and (New This for attempts to and for the concept of life” that agrees with in the and since the second century had an impact on Daoist It is the main topic of a paper by Thomas who the Zhuangzi's about who to they a carefree life and of the Zhuangzi's on the of The concept of belongs here. shows how this is set up as the for an in way of knowing that sees through the that and through is to (New on that we at the between are with of the Zhuangzi's (New 63). The attempt to of or as Hans-Georg Moeller puts it of also Moeller proposes that in this “the Zhuangzi a philosophical for the in an at and (New The of an important in the and of the Daoist When the authors of of or they this as Zhuangzi's philosophical and many good for the need to do However, the text also contains that are by its history than by an the perspective of a as is this it be to to the of but and of the text in the attempt to and strategies of argument and philosophical Liu of the Outer and Miscellaneous with in this It be with more since archaeological have more on the way ancient texts were In the materials at attempts a between of Zhuangzi and the text and a of that present to The Zhuangzi suggests and and suggests to also of and positions on this topic that are put in other of the Zhuangzi. is well known but as the basis of the Zhuangzi thus contains materials and intellectual and philosophical (New The main of New Visions is to the Zhuangzi's way of to a range of issues and it relevant to the world of traces of the Zhuangzi in a of the that in and as Livia Kohn points to the use of to a of proposes that glimpses at the ideal world of the Zhuangzi with the world of small Eske Møllgaard a need to a by Zhuangzi's philosophy of we the in which we (New Livia Kohn's Zhuangzi: Text and Context (hereafter Text and is without a useful to the of Zhuangzi It as puts it, more an of what has been than an excursion into new “I have largely in the background, the of previous The is for an with some knowledge and interest in the of ancient Chinese and Daoist but not for the academic and not for who is new to the Zhuangzi. of its chapters focus on of what is said in the text the other deals with the text's history. for the and that in some of the for this of Zhuangzi Kohn lists and the text's and and, quotes a crucial of by the text's and and and Zhuangzi interpretative is entitled and a on and is the of the process of in an of and to with the rather than the the rather than the to to the great world process as a whole rather than the of and Chapters on the text's history and the history of its impact for the commentator Guo and “the Buddhist and thought.” It be that the often be if the author had into the chapters a of on of intellectual history but more could have been to and to the Zhuangzi. for what is known of Guo philosophical from those of the Zhuangzi (see also Guo is by far the most and important there This seems to problems for reading the Zhuangzi. In any case, it So remain but Kohn's materials allow the history of how and by the text was read to be This to the text and also some light on the it was The text's history makes it that to read it a level of Daoist and had any use for it, at least not the in the is more to the of Zhuangzi as an than to of the text. When the text comes to the interest in the methods and ends of As opposed to this, and had a on Chinese and East as was the for Chinese and East and This found the on hard to The remain and Kohn does not discuss The to be to Zhuangzi are and The is by a very of Bo Zhuangzi: Thinking Through the Inner Chapters (hereafter Inner come to life in Kohn's but is one of the most of the Zhuangzi. author and the of a Chinese who intellectual and to a of and does so in a original and attractive Wang the that discussions have put in the way of the Zhuangzi: “I to main on the rather than the His account of the is on the Inner chapters, which have been to Zhuangzi, and he sees in the in their content and in their is at He quotes Chinese scholars from the to the centuries in of this He also to and to literary on other as if to his by them with an He the Western with a to take in the Chinese tradition of reading the Zhuangzi. from this tradition was and remains He we have given up on the world was our focus of how to in it, on the process of life” In reading life a of knowledge, the world of In a to Text and Context the author the in the of and at the world from the perspective of and Zhuangzi's may some readers of the text. It is also Zhuangzi a contrast to and and if for any of the text's authors pursue to the life of the of the animal of human and the and useful of well it In reading the Zhuangzi a of that it of some of its philosophical It is to two of the that Liu sees in the with insights being the The useful and as they share a do not to be the last on the Zhuangzi and the text does more dialogues and other that the that from

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