Profound Learning and the rise of principle (li) (supplement to chapter 6)

Table of contents

1. Additional text 2. Additional images 3. Notes

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1. Additional text

In chapter 6, I provided only a very brief summary of events between the end of the Han and the beginning of the . As Ru tradition certainly endured throughout these four centuries, this cursory treatment perhaps requires some comment. My decision to skim over this period was largely pragmatic. To keep the book to a length deemed appropriate for an introduction, some things had to go. To make space for further discussion of the Period of Disunion, I would have had to compress material in other sections. An introduction to the massive history of Chinese Ruism can easily fall into the trap of listing endless inventories of names with insufficient information on anyone. This would not be helpful to readers trying to grasp the primary contours of a tradition. Some very important intellectual developments nonetheless did occur during the Period of Division, although they were not subsequently acknowledged as being integral to the ongoing transmission in the Way the Ru. As my concern has been to develop a history which especially allows readers to understand the modern vicissitudes of Ruism, I was willing to allow the traditional prejudice that this was something of a ‘dark age’. Revivalists of the Song-Ming sought to forge a link back to the sages of the late Zhou (Kongzi, Zengzi, Zisi, Mengzi), some of the Qing instead strived to reconnect with the Han (especially Dong Zhongshu), and both of these eras are being reclaimed by modern revivalist trying to resuscitate Ruism. But no-one identifies Ru from the Period of Disunion (or, for that matter, from most of the Tang) as being worth salvaging. In this supplement, I will look at some vital philosophical innovations that, nonetheless, occurred during the Period of Disunion. In particular, this was a time when the concept of li or principle was promoted to become a crucial philosophical concept. This, needless to say, was a very important prelude to the Ru school of Principle Learning, the main subject of chapter 6. Although the events I am about to relate would chronologically appear at the beginning of the chapter, you might find it more beneficial to wait until you have competed chapter 6 before reading this supplement. In that way, you will be better able to recognize the potential in ideas that are here still in a germinal phase. The reason the thinkers we are about to meet were traditionally overlooked quickly becomes apparent: they were not actually presenting their ideas within the confines of Ru

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tradition. This is another occasion when ‘Confucianism’ can cause problems, for while they were definitely distancing themselves from the Ru, they were simultaneously trying to reclaim Kongzi as their own. They were not espousing the Way of the Ru, but they were, after a fashion, ‘Confucian’. To add to the terminological tangle, these individuals have in English been branded ‘Neo-Daoists’. They indeed were drawn to texts that are fundamental to Daoist philosophy and some were even interested in the quest for longevity and immortality. But they did not think of themselves as Daoists and nor should we. Rather they were exponents of . This literally means Dark Learning but ‘dark’ here connotes things which are difficult to perceive and hence ‘mysterious’. Abstruse Learning is one common translation. As this alludes to the abstruse metaphysical foundations of existence, however, it also suggest ‘profound’ and so I will follow those who translate Xuanxue as Profound Learning, that is, the study of and inquiry into the Profound. Bi, who we will meet in a moment, explained it thus: “The term ‘mysterious’ (xuan) is derived from the fact that it is that which emerges from the secret and the dark. The term ‘profound’ (shen) is derived from the fact that you might try to plumb to the bottom of it but can never reach that far.”i Perhaps, after all, we should consider this the “dark age” of Ruism; not an eclipse, but rather a era when the transformations were shadowy, abstruse, yet for all that profoundly important. Profound Learning emerged from the events leading up to and following the collapse of the . These were trouble times of political crisis and foreign invasion, constant warfare, epidemics, and famine; life expectancy was short and there was massive population decline (official sources suggest by 70 percent, although this is probably and exaggeration).ii In the late Han, the court had been controlled by corrupt and powerful eunuchs and some literati had engaged in ‘pure criticism’ (qingyi) to challenge this situation. They were harshly suppressed. Thereafter, thoughtful individuals withdrew and instead channeled their energy into safer and more private varieties of dialogue known as ‘pure talk’ or ‘pure conversation’ (qingtan). This was a kind of intellectual sparing in which debaters would display their intellectual prowess. These were privileged men (and in some cases women) who would assemble to socialize, discuss fashionable philosophical topics, enjoy music, dine and drink excessively. Profound Learning emerged in this context and it became the dominant orientation of Pure Talk.

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On the whole, exponents of Profound Learning simply sidestepped Ru Learning. Both Xuanxue and Ruxue (along with literature and history) were part of the curriculum of the Imperial Academy at this time and exponents of Profound Learning were themselves quite conversant with the Classics. Most were not overtly criticizing Ruism so much as brushing it aside as incidental. The real wisdom of the sages, they believed, went much deeper. The three texts at the core of Profound Learning were the Daodejing (Classic of the Way and Virtue), and Yijing (Classic of Changes), known as the ‘Three Profound [Classics]’ or sanxuan. They were valued as the premier texts for probing the metaphysical foundation of the Way (dao). This was something Ru Learning had failed to elucidate, which explained why it had been impotent in solving the problems of the late Han. The unexpected twist was, these philosophers claimed Kongzi as their supreme champion. The alleged authors of the Three Profound Classics were , Zhuangzi and Kongzi (to whom the ‘Wings’ to the Changes were attributed). The fact that Kongzi of the Analects seemed totally adverse to metaphysical speculation was taken to signify that he alone fully appreciated that the Way is ultimately beyond words. Laozi and Zhuangzi approached very close to the Way, but only Kongzi had completely grasped it. As far as we know, it was Wang Bi who first turned the tables to make Kongzi a sage embodying unspeakable truth,iii although it was reiterated by many others. Why did they feel the need to reinvent the Master? The obvious answer is that by so doing they could maintain they were not presenting a school of thought directly rivaling Ruism so much as subsuming the Way of the Ru under a more comprehensive philosophical horizon. The socio- political ramifications of this shift were, nonetheless, radically innovative. Wang Bi was the most important exponent of Profound Learning and his thought must be understood in terms of the political transitions unfolding in the wake of the Han. After the collapse of that dynasty, the most powerful kingdom was the Wei, centered in the Yellow River region of the north of China and founded by general (155-220), although it was his son who actually assumed the throne. The Cao rulers patronized philosophers to bolster their new regime. (c.195-249) was the son of one of Cao Cao’s concubines who gained a reputation for feigning the beauty of a ‘floating flower’ and pursuing the life of a libertine. He wrote a commentary on the Daodejing, now lost, and another on the Analects which remained authoritative until Zhu Xi’s commentary eventually

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took take pride of place.iv He saw no tension between these books and maintained Laozi was “in agreement with the sages”.v He Yan was eventually given an official position at the court and in that capacity he recommended his friends for appointment. Amongst them was Wang Bi, the most precocious and abrasive genius of the day. As He Yan himself admitted the superiority of Wang’s philosophy, I will here skip over He’s thought.vi Wang Bi’s philosophy was formed in the brief window of time during which Cao rulers were struggling to consolidate their regime. For them, orthodox Ru were of little use. They were seen as pedestrian bureaucrats who wrote endless commentaries and sought to save the world by squabbling over linguistic minutiae. Even mid-Han, Liu Xin had quipped that Ru could write thirty thousand words explaining just five words in a Classic and a little later Ban Gu mentioned there were over a thousand scholars writing commentaries each capable of exceeding a million words.vii The Caos did not require the services of Ru struggling to match ‘name and actuality’; they were instead desperate for raw talent and inspired genius. Gatherings of Pure Conversation could be a better place to spot brilliance than an Imperial Academy. To further harness creative capacity, they needed philosophers who could help them tap the very source of being. Enter Wang Bi (226-249).viii Wang’s commentary on the Analects has not survived, but we have his commentaries on the Daodejing and Yijing where he pursues this ‘mysterious’ source of existence. When Wang enquired into the origin of the “ten thousand things” (ie. everything) he insisted it could not be any one thing. Could not all being perhaps derive from a single Supreme Being? This, of course, is the foundation of monotheistic faiths and it is quite possible Ru of the Han were increasingly drawn to recast Heaven (tian) as an all- powerful God. Wang Bi rejected this solution, however. Every something, even an Ultimate Something, is defined by what it is, and this automatically limits it. If something is red it cannot be green; solid and it isn’t fluid; B flat and it isn’t F sharp, and so on. Even a Supreme Something cannot be the source of every thing, the obvious theological example being: if God is good, whence evil? The endless verbiage of the Ru was useless here, for words are tied to things and something cannot be an ultimate source. Hence the famous opening lines of the Daodejing: “The Dao that can be described in language is not the constant Dao; the name that can be given names is not its constant name”. When Wang Bi came to the next words, however, his

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commentary turned revolutionary. It is usually read to mean the “nameless” (lit. no wu name ming) is the origin of everything, but Wang interpreted it as saying that “nothingness” (wu) names (ming) the origin of everything and so comments: “Anything that exists originates in nothingness (wu)”.ix Everything derives from the Dao but the Way is not something or being (you) but nothingness or non-being (wu). This was not just an account of the remote origin of the cosmos. Rather, nothingness is the perennial source in which all being is grounded, its infinite potentiality residing in its complete absence of specificity. Wu is the hub centering the spokes of all existent things: “That the hub can unite and control the thirty spokes depends on the nothingness there. Because it consists of nothingness, it can accommodate anything. This is how the solitary can unite and control the many.”x If for the moment we allow Wang Bi’s claim that the myriad things ultimately depend upon no-thing, how do things emerge? It is at this point that Wang introduces li or principle into his philosophy. In his commentary to chapter 42 of the Daodejing he says: “Although the myriad things exist in myriad form, they all revert to the One. What is it due to that they all ultimately become One? It is due to nothingness. Because it is from nothingness that One comes, One can be called ‘nothingness’.”xi Elsewhere he adds that “for all the many to manage to exist, their controlling principle (li) must reach back to the One, and for all activities to manage to function, their source must be the One. No thing behaves haphazardly but necessarily follows its own principle. To unite things, there is a fundamental regulator; to integrate them, there is a primordial generator.”xii Principle is that by which the nothingness of the Dao becomes the manifest world and as such, comments Wing-tsit Chan, for Wang Bi “li became more important than Dao”xiii Historically, this was momentous as it marks the birth of principle as a pivotal cosmological concept. Li does not appear in the Analects or Daodejing. Nor is it used in a good number of the Classics, and in the others where it is used it lacks any real philosophical magnitude. It was certainly more developed in the Mengzi, and Zhuangzi, but it was only with Wang Bi that it took centre place, as it again would in the Song Ru school of Principle Learning. When we also observe that Wang Bi’s idea of the Dao as nothingness resonates with one possible reading of the opening words of the Diagram of the Supreme

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Ultimate Explained (wuji er taiji read as “ultimate nothingness yet supreme ultimate”), Wang Bi’s influence, no matter how indirect, unacknowledged and reworked, is undeniable. In his own day, Wang Bi’s notion of principle delivered the socio-political message of nothingness. The path to sagacious living was not based upon the analysis of the manifest world, the study of Classics or conformity to preordained virtues, but rather it was a return to the nothingness which was the source of all being and from there to naturally (ziran, literally “self-so”) become attuned to the inherent principle which underlies existence. In Wang Bi’s words: “My teaching of others does not consist of forcing them to follow what I teach but of helping them make use of the Natural [ziran], which I cite as the perfect principle [zhili], compliance with which means good fortune and opposition to which means misfortune”.xiv Although this approach most definitely undermined traditional Ru cultivation through Classical study and conformity to the canons of ritual, it was not an open invitation to anarchy. True, it rejected the notion that all people could be forced to conform to rigid prescriptions of human nature, but there was nonetheless a more fluid ordering principle to the world. A true king was someone with sage-like attunement to the principle radiating from the Dao that is nothingness; “the sage grasps the principle of all things perfectly,” Wang Bi said. And the result of this sagacious perception of principle was dominion: “Each of the common folk has his own heart-mind, and customs differ from state to state, yet any lord or prince who attains to the One becomes master over them all.”xv If you ignore all the , it reads like this: the old Han apparatus of state based on study and codes of ritual were destined to fail. Wipe away these old structures and start afresh with an elite who apprehend the ultimate, evinced by their displays of talent and genius, and place them under the supreme command of a sagely king.xvi This was, of course, a perfect recipe for runaway autocracy and the individuals who congregated to the Cao court were willing to share in the spoils. A little later Ge Hong (283- 343) described Pure Talk participants as “high-class idlers who disregard the rules of decorum and moral behavior and who waste their time in noisy gatherings ‘falsely quoting Laozi and Zhuangzi’.”xvii Another critic said that with a load of “pretentious prattle, they confused and cheated the ignorant people” and furthermore “they extolled their own names and [even] tricked each other”.xviii

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* The talent was very real, nonetheless. Wang Bi had produced China’s most influential commentary on the Chinese book that has most influenced the world (only the Bible has been translated more often than the Daodejing). tells us the Old Master (Laozi) lived 160 years to work out his ideas but Wang Bi became sick and died when he was just 23. Had he recovered he would probably have been executed, age 23. This was 249, the year in which He Yan and many others in the Cao court were put to their death. The trouble had been brewing since the outset of the Wei dynasty. The Cao rulers were being challenged by the Sima clan and in 249 there was a coup d’état. The Caos were reduced to puppet rulers until the Sima (265-420) formally replaced the Wei. Political factionalism tends to polarize political philosophies and the Sima clan were loyal upholders of Classical education and traditional Ru morality. When they came to power, those who might previously have paraded their intellectual prowess in high society now withdrew to more secluded gatherings. In later popular imagination, these reclusive individuals were seen as carefree spirits indifferent to wealth, fame and political power. The most famous were a group known as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove (Zhulin qixian) whose withdrawn lifestyle became a favorite theme for Chinese and Japanese artists (figure 1). In reality, they were not at all opposed to holding office but were merely opposed to the Sima usurpers. Significantly, their leader, Kang (223-262), was married to a Cao princess. These men were biding their time awaiting more suitable political circumstances. When this never eventuated, most of them capitulated and accepted Sima appointment. During their short-lived bamboo-cloistered protest, we can see a distinct spike in the antagonism between Profound Learning and Ru Learning. declared the Classics were ‘overgrown weeds’, that ritual just made people ‘hunched over and crooked’ and that humaneness (ren) and righteousness (yi) were ‘stinking, rotten flesh’.xix Stories about Ji (201-263) dwelt upon his scandalous disregard for ritual. ‘Were these rites established for people like me?’ he rhetorically asked.xx Their naturalness (ziran) skirted close to debauchery. Yet Ji Kang and had both been quite sympathetic to Ru values earlier in their careers. With the rise of the Simas however, they came to regard Ru as opportunists hungry for power, wealth and status and their retreat was a quest to reconnect with

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authentic human nature which they saw as the only foundation for genuine morality. I will not go into the details of what we can reconstruct of their philosophies – they were best remembered for their skill in poetry, music and drinking.xxi But one of them, , had written a commentary on the Zhuangzi, now lost, which was very influential on a subsequent philosopher named Guo Xiang (252- 312). Some believed Guo had actually plagiarized Xiang’s work, but it was probably just a case of very liberal borrowing. Be that as it may, the text now attributed to Guo Xiang would become indisputably the greatest of all Zhuangzi commentaries and it most definitely does deserve our attention.xxii * When the Simas asserted their authority, the choice was clear: compromise or die. Ji Kang stuck to his principles and paid the price. Most opted to bow to the new regime. They did not abandon Profound Learning and the quest for a life of authentic naturalness (ziran), however. What we now witness is the search for rapprochement between Xuanxue and the more traditional socio-political order promoted by Ru Learning. This becomes very evident in Guo Xiang’s commentary on the Zhuangzi. Wang Bi’s philosophy of naturalness, based on the Dao of nothingness (wu), had been thoroughly amorphous. His claim that wu emanated a principle which imbued the manifest world offered little more guidance for governing a country than the promise that a sagacious ruler would spontaneously intuit what was called for in each and every situation. Sima rulers expected more. It seems they were appreciative of Guo Xiang’s contribution in this regard, for he enjoyed a long career as a high ranking official in the Jin government. Guo Xiang challenged Wang Bi’s fundamental premise that the source of all being was nothingness. He was as dissatisfied as King Lear: “Nothing can come of nothing: speak again”. Wang Bi had upheld nothingness because no something, even a Supreme Something, could be the origin of what it itself is not. By the same logic, however, nothing could not be the origin of not-nothing. “Since nothingness is nothingness, it cannot produce something” Guo rejoindered.xxiii Had God been the right answer all along? No, in this respect Guo Xiang agreed with Wang Bi: “If there is [a Creator], he is incapable of materializing all the forms.”xxiv Having rejected both ultimate being and ultimate non-being, Guo concluded that it is a waste of time searching for a cause external to things themselves. Thing just are and “everything

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creates itself”. For Guo, all things are in a constant process of self-production and self-transformation and it is essential we respond to this flux in a natural or spontaneous (ziran) way. But this is not a random or chaotic universe. Like Wang Bi, Guo Xiang stressed the importance of principle (li), but whereas Wang saw principle as a singular aspect of the One, Guo avowed as many principles as there were individual things. Each and every thing is determined by its principle: “Everything has its principle and every affair has its proper condition,” he said.xxv Guo Xiang’s prescription for life looks simple enough. Everyone should live naturally according to their inherent principle. Fame and fortune, gain and loss, can make us lose sight of who we intrinsically are, and so “the cultivation of life is not to exceed one’s lot but to preserve the principle of things and to live out one’s allotted span of life.”xxvi This seems to suggest a world where each person lives happily in self-contained contentment, but Guo Xiang’s world is more multifaceted and coordinated than this. First, not everyone is identical. Some are born to become sages although (contra Mengzi and Xunzi) very few have this innate capacity. Some are destined to develop exceptional talent. Most have a principle that will result in more modest achievement. But all are “equal” to the extent that a person’s worth is measured not by status markers but by the degree to which they have naturally conformed to their own principle. Next, although each thing has its own principle every thing has a place in the whole. Guo Xiang frequently appeals to the human body to illustrate this. Every part of a body has its own principle but serving the body as a whole is fundamental to that principle. This was the juncture at which Guo could reinsert the traditional social and moral values upheld by Ru Learning. It is the principle of things that kings rule and the people loyally serve, that fathers head households and children are filial and obedient. Likewise, virtues such as “humaneness (ren) and righteousness (yi) are principles of human nature”xxvii Guo Xiang was really just saying that rulers should remain attuned to, and nurturing of, the principle inherent in all things. If they did so, society was destined to work in harmonious accord. A sagacious king would thus rule by not-doing (wuwei), which he understood to mean not inactivity but rather doing nothing that ran against the grain of principle. This, said Guo, “is the perfect reality of the universe. When everything attains this reality, why should it take any action? Everything will be contented and at ease.”xxviii

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Had Guo Xiang’s commentary on the Analects survived we might be in a better position to more fully appreciate how he saw principle complimenting Ru values. From what we do know, he clearly anticipated the Ru claim that traditional virtues were intrinsic to the principle of human nature. And like Zhu Xi, he insisted that every thing that existed had its own principle. Where Song Ru differed, of course, was in uniting the myriad individual principles with one supreme Principle so as to arrive at their maxim “Principle is one but its manifestations are many.” The claim that Principle is both the one and the many was, to some extent, a latter-day reconciliation of ideas that can be traced back respectively to the theories of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang * Clearly, Profound Learning contributed significantly to the development of the ideas that were central to the Ru school of Principle Learning. But the influence was very indirect. When Ru of the Song sought precedent for their ideas, they claimed the Five Classics and Four Books as their authority, even though these works were not particularly forthcoming in this regard. When they surreptitiously borrowing from outside their own tradition, furthermore, it was not from “Neo-Daoists” but from Buddhists. What I have presented in this supplement is just one important link in a long chain of philosophical development. In the wake of the Wei and early Jin, Daoist philosophy virtually came to an end while Ru showed no real interest in principle for the best part of a millennium. Here is a brief overture to what happened next: By 316, the north-western half of the Sima Jin kingdom had been overrun by invading peoples. The Jin capital now moved to a site in the Yangtze delta region near present day Nanjing. In this new home, the gentry became great patrons of religious Daoism, but not of Daoist philosophy. Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, began to truly flourish. In the context of ongoing barbarian invasion, however, Buddhism had to be made to look and feel authentically Chinese. Monks were often very familiar with, and drew heavily upon, the “Three Profound Classics” that were paramount to Profound Learning, and they were quick to emphasize the congruence between nothingness (wu) and the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (kong).xxix This is exemplified by the highly esteemed and notoriously ugly monk Zhi Dun (314- 366) of whom Ruan Ji’s cousin once said: ‘I should like to hear his words, but I hate to see his

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face.’xxx Zhi Dun would divide his time between secluded life in the mountains and bouts of Pure Talk in the new Jin capital. He was very adept at introducing Buddhist sutras by revealing their compatibility with Chinese texts and his interpretation of the Zhuangzi was said to have surpassed even that of Guo Xiang.xxxi Zhi rejected Guo’s claim that everyone should follow the principle of their individual nature (if such a principle made sages, then surely it made tyrants and robbers as well) and his alternate views came very close to those of Wang Bi, with whom he was frequently compared. Most significantly, he interchangeably referred to the absolute nature of Reality as emptiness (kong), nothingness (wu) and absolute principle (li). Li thereafter remained a pivotal Buddhist concept and it proved crucial to the development of distinctly Chinese Buddhist philosophies. Fazang (643-712), who I briefly allude to in chapter 6, was exceptionally important in this regard, but the discussion thrived and continued down through the centuries until the Song dynasty when Ru, at last, took up the mantle of principle.

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2. Additional images

Figure 1. This is the oldest depiction we have of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. The images are fired into bricks that lined the walls of a tomb that dates from the late fourth to early fifth century. It was discovered near Nanjing in 1960. Modern scholarship is divided as to whether the Seven Worthies did in fact form an association that met in a bamboo grove or whether this was a story the grew during the following century. In this case there are eight figures and not a bamboo in sight (the trees are mainly ginkgos, willows and pines). From the top left, they are: Rong Qiqi (the odd member), a legendary recluse who had impressed Kongzi with his skill in playing the qin, as he is depicted doing here; , playing a ruan, an instrument he was said to have invented; , a prodigious drinker, nodding over a generous cup of wine; Xiang Xiu, a noted philosopher, perhaps meditating; Ji Kang playing his qin, for which he was famous, Ruan Ji whistling, as he was wont to do; and Shan Tao and seemingly in conversation over wine.

Source: “unknown” Wikimedia File:Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seven_Sages_of_the_Bamboo_Grove.jpg

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3. Notes

i Richard John Lynn (trans.), The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as Interpreted By Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 32. ii Charles Holocombe, In the Shadow of the Han: Literati Thought and Society at the Beginning of the Southern Dynasties. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994, p. 85-6. iii Richard B. Mather (trans.), Shih-shuo hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1976, p. 96. iv Daniel K. Gardner, Zhu Xi’s Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Classical tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 9-17. v Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yü, p. 97. vi Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yü, p. 95. vii John Makeham, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought. Albany: Sate University of New York Press, 1994, p. 115. viii On Wang Bi see Alan K. L. Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. ix Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, p. 51. x Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, p. 69. xi Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, p. 135. xii Richard John Lynn (trans.), The Classic of Changes: A new Interpretation of the as Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York:

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Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 25. xiii Wing-tsit Chan, “The Evolution of the Neo-Confucian Concept Li as Principle.’ Tsing Hua Journal. n.s 4 (1964): 123-38, p.130. xiv Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, 135-6. xv Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, p. 142 and 135. xvi Richard B. Mather, “The Controversy Over Conformity and Naturalness During the Six Dynasties.” History of Religions. 9 (1969): 160-80, p. 164-5. xvii Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaption of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: Brill, 1974, p. 348, n. 11. xviii Nanxiu Qian, Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin- yü and Its Legacy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001, p. 58. xix Robert G. Henricks (trans), Philosophy and Argumentation in Third- Century China: The Essays of Hsi K’ang. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 142. xx Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yü, p. 374. xxi See Yuet Keung Lo, “The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.” In Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, edited by Xiaogan Liu, 425-447. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. xxii On Guo Xiang see Brook Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo- of Guo Xiang. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. xxiii Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 330. xxiv Chan, A Source Book, p. 330.

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xxv Chan, A Source Book, p. 330. xxvi Chan, A Source Book, p. 331. xxvii Chan, A Source Book, p. 335. xxviii Chan, A Source Book, p. 327. xxix Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy: Vol. II: The Period of Classical Learning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, pp.240- 3. xxx Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, p. 118. xxxi Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yü, p. 109-11.

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