ft , I ' * * < The B 2 I it* o f Lieh- i - I /\ Classic of Tao i > *• A Translated by A. C. GRAHAM . t The Book o f Lieh-tzu A Classic o f the Tao translated by A. C. GRAHAM Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Morningside Edition 1990 Columbia University Press New York Copyright © 1960, 1990 by A. C. Graham Preface to the Morningside Edition copyright © 1990 by Columbia University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lieh-tzu, 4th cent. B.C. [Lieh-tzu. English] The book of Lieh-tzu / translated by A. C. Graham, p cm.—(Translations from the Oriental classics) Translation of: Lieh-tzu. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-231-07236-8 ISBN 0-231-07237-6 (pbk.) I Graham, A. C. (Angus Charles) II. Title. III. Series. BL1900.L482E5 1990 181'.114-dc2o 89-24°35 CIP All rights reserved Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 Translations from the Asian Classics EDITORIAL BOARD Wm. Theodore de Bury, Chair Paul Anderer Irene Bloom Donald Keene George A. Saliba Haruo Shirane David D. W. Wang Burton Watson Contents Preface to the Morningside Edition xi Preface xvii Dramatis Personae xviii—xix Introduction i HEAVEN'S GIFTS 14 2 THE YELLOW EMPEROR 32 3 KING MU OF CHOU 58 4 CONFUCIUS 74 5 THE QUESTIONS OF T'ANG 92 6 ENDEAVOUR AND DESTINY 118 7 YANG CHU 135 8 EXPLAINING CONJUNCTIONS t58 Short Reading List 182 Textual Notes 183 i x Preface to the Morningside Edition A significant change since this book was first published in 196o is that we have learned to see philosophical Taoism in a new historical perspective. At that time it was already recog­ nised that Lao-tzu, traditional founder of the School of the Tao (Way') and supposed contemporary of Confucius (551—479 B.C.), is probably legendary, and that the Tao-te-ching ascribed to him may be as late as 250 B.C., later than the authentic writings of the other great Taoist, Chuang-tzu (c. 320 B.C.). But it was still taken for granted that the Hundred Schools competing during this period did include the one called Taoist, the only one of them to survive throughout Chinese history side by side with the Confucian. Its doctrine was assumed to be the philosophy o f the Tao-te-ching and Chuang-tzu, a philosophy which rejects the competing ways' formulated as ethical and political princi­ ples by other schools for an ineffable Way on which the sage finds himself in ceasing to judge between alternatives and in returning to the spontaneity of the non-human to unite with heaven and earth. On this assumption it was puzzling that what has generally passed as Taoism for the last two thousand years is a mixture in varying proportions of Yin-Yang cosmology, rit­ ual, meditation, magic, sexology, and alchemy, and that it still has an organised church with Lao-tzu as its central deity, tradi­ tionally said to have been founded by Chang Tao-ling in AM. 142. How is one to reconcile its cult of physical immortality with the ecstatic welcoming of death as one of the inevitable transformations of nature which startles us in the writings of Chuang-tzu? No doubt one may think of this church like others as debasing the pure doctrine of its founder, but the Christian churches never departed quite as far from the gospel as this. xi Preface to the Morningside Edition We were forgetting what inside our own ttadition we know very well, that labels such as idealist' and materialist', ration­ alist' and ' empiricist’, are applied retrospectively, and reshuffled as the focus of philosophical interest shifts elsewhere. The think­ ers of ancient China came to be grouped as Taoists, Legalists, Sophists, Yin-Yang, but only the Confucians and Mohists are known to have been organised schools. Down to the 2nd cen­ tury B.C. Lao-tzu, with his art of ruling by Doing Nothing, and Chuang-tzu, for whom rulership and office are burdens to be cast off, are never classed together; this attracts attention espe­ cially in the last chapter of Chuang-tzii itself, which sketches the oldest surviving history of the early thinkers. At the end of the classical age of Chinese philosophy, about 200 B.C., various eclectic movements were emerging, one of them centered on meditative and physical exercises to develop both daimonic powers and bodily health and longevity; it claimed the authority of Lao- tzu. When Ssu-ma T'an (died Ito B.C.) retrospectively classified the thinkers in Six Schools, it was this contemporary movement that he named Tao chia, ' School of the Way', as Hal Roth shows in Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts, ed. by Henry Rosemont, Jr. (La Salle, 111., 1990). The tradition of supposedly degenerate Taoism has had first right to the name from the very beginning. In the retrospective apportioning of thinkers between schools, Chuang-tzu was classified with Lao-tzu as Taoist, but being irrelevant to the serious business of government, he was long neglected. It was from about A.D. 200, when the ancient books were being viewed in a changed perspective, that the distinctive attitude to spontaneity and the Way common to the Tao-to-ching and Chuang-tzii attracted the attention of literati disillusioned with politics. It became known as Lao-Chuang, the teaching of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The accepted modem label for it is philosophical Taoism'; but as a way of life for the unworldly or xii Preface to the Morningside Edition the tired of office it remained largely dissociated from Taoist alchemy and magic, and had an offshoot in Chinese Buddhism as Ch'an or Zen. Its third great document, Lieh-tzu, although written in the name of an ancient sage mentioned by Chuang- tzu, is now generally dated to this period, not much earlier than its commentary by Chang Chan (c. A.D. 370). We may see it as the only one of the three books whose author would actually be thinking of himself as a philosophical Taoist. Although in 196o most scholars in China already recognised the late date of Lieh-tzu, most Westerners were still discinclined to question its antiquity. My own textual studies, not yet com­ pleted when this translation first appeared, supported the Chinese dating, which by now prevails also in the West. The 'evidence for my opinions on the still controversial question of the date of L ie h - tz u mentioned in the original preface as unpublished, ap­ peared in ' The Date and Composition of Liehtzyy', Asia Major vol. 8/2 (1961). This, as well as the ' Being in Western Phi­ losophy Compared with shih/jei and yu/wu in Chinese Phil­ osophy’ also mentioned, re-appeared in my Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Institute of East Asian Philosophies, National University of Singapore, 1986). One result of the textual investigation came as a surprise to me. The present book describes the hedonist' Yang Chu’ chap­ ter as ' so unlike the rest of Lieh-tzu' that it must be from another hand (p. 135 below). The thought is certainly very different, and it does show the signs of editing and interpolation by the Taoist author which are noticed on p. 136 below. But although close scrutiny generally reveals marked differences in style be­ tween the body of the book and passages borrowed from earlier sources, I could find none to distinguish the hedonist chapter from the rest. It seems likely that the Taoist is incorporating an earlier writing by himself, from a hedonist phase in his own thought. From the contrasting episodes which introduce the xiii Preface to the Morningside Edition 'Yellow Emperor’ and 'King Mu’ chapters (cf. pp. 6of below), one is tempted to guess that the author, like the Yellow Emperor, had a hedonistic youth and then a Confucian career in govern­ ment, before finally settling for Lao-Chuang. But to read auto­ biography into these episodes cannot of course be more than an attractive conjecture. There also turned out to be internal evidence (and external evidence as well; see Studies, p. 271—an addition to the original paper) that the discussion of the finite and the infinite in the first three exchanges of the 'Questions of T’ang’ comes from a lost part o f Chuang-tzu. This adds greatly to the importance of a fascinating but obscure passage my treatment of which has left me with an uneasy conscience. The interpretation, and to some extent therefore the choice of words in translation, depended on the assumption that Chang Chan's commentary implies some­ thing missing in the text, which now seems to me very doubtful; in the neighbourhood of the supposed lacuna I was fooling myself when I claimed to be translating very literally' (p. 96 below). In more recent work I have translated it more conserva­ tively, substantially as follows. As for nothing it is limitless, as for something it is inexhaustible: how would I know it? [i.e., know of their limitedness and ex- haustibility, referring back to the preceding question and answer.] But outside the limitless there is nothing else that is limitless, inside the inexhaustible there is nothing else that is inexhaustible. There is no limit but also nothing else that is limitless, no exhaus­ tion but also nothing else that is inexhaustible. This is why I know of their limitlessness and inexhaustibility, and do not know of their limitedness and exhaustibility.