Legal Philosophy of the Classic Chinese Thinkers. by Wejen Chang
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International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie T’oung Pao 103-4-5 (2017) 494-497 494 Book Reviews In Search of the Way: Legal Philosophy of the Classic Chinese Thinkers. By Wejen Chang. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. xvi + 550 pp. This lengthy volume by Wejen Chang 張偉仁, a leading Taiwanese legal historian, is difficult to describe. Despite the title and subtitle, the book does not focus on either “the Way” (dao 道) or “legal philosophy,” because these concepts have little bearing on several of the texts that he discusses (such as Mengzi 孟子). (About two- thirds of the way through, he concedes: “Law was not much discussed by the think- ers studied above,” p. 278.) Nor does it focus on “thinkers,” again despite the subtitle, because the subjects of the author’s analysis are texts rather than individuals. In effect, In Search of the Way is a collection of translations and analyses of ex- cerpts from eight classical Chinese philosophical texts (Lunyu 論語, Laozi 老子, Mozi 墨子, Zhuangzi 莊子, Mengzi, Shangjun shu 商君書, Xunzi 荀子, and Han Feizi 韓非子), with an emphasis on law and politics (bespeaking the author’s interests),1 bookended by a tendentious “Prologue” and “Epilogue”—and all vitiated by inad- equate engagement with relevant scholarship. The bibliography consists almost entirely of famous books in Chinese, with a minuscule number of works in English, and absolutely nothing in any other language. At a minimum, the University of Edinburgh Press should have demanded a more robust scholarly apparatus. Although Chang’s texts are as good as any, he should have explained how he selected them, because the rationale is not self-evident. If he was interested in writing a book about pre-imperial Chinese legal philosophy, surely he would have wanted to include the Shènzi 慎子 and Shēnzi 申子 fragments, which remain two of the richest sources.2 Other lesser-known texts, such as Heguanzi 鶡冠子, would have offered fertile (and still largely untapped) material relating to law and statecraft.3 Even the legal texts from Shuihudi 睡虎地,4 though naturally oriented 1) Chang’s legal terminology is idiosyncratic, incidentally. For example, he repeatedly refers to the concept of law in Shangjun shu as “artificial” (e.g., p. 298), which he contrasts with “natural law.” The term that most specialists would expect in this context is “positive” (from ius positum, or law that derives its authority from a human legislator or legislative body rather than from nature). 2) See Eirik Lang Harris, The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016); and Herrlee G. Creel, Shen Pu-hai: A Chinese Political Philosopher of the Fourth Century BC (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974). 3) See, e.g., Carine Defoort, The Pheasant Cap Master (He guan zi): A Rhetorical Reading (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997); and R.P. Peerenboom, “Heguanzi and Huang- Lao Thought,” Early China 16 (1991): 169-86; as well as three studies by A.C. Graham: “A Neglected Pre-Han Philosophical Text: Ho-kuan-tzu,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 52 (1989), 497-532; Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Ratio- nality (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1992), 121-35; and “The Way and the One in Ho-kuan-tzu,” in Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, ed. Hans Lenk and Gregor Paul (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), 31-43. 4) Translated by A.F.P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law: An Annotated Translation of the Ch’in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd century BC. Discovered in Yün-meng Prefecture, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 T’oungDOI: Pao 10.1163/15685322-10345P10 103-4-5 (2017) 494-497 ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) ISSN 1568-5322 (online version)Downloaded TPAO from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:11:25PM via free access Book Reviews 495 toward practice, indirectly shed greater light on pre-imperial legal thinking than, say, Zhuangzi. Thus the book is not really about early Chinese legal philosophy; it is essentially a survey of eight celebrated examples of the “pre-Qin masters” (xian- Qin zhuzi 先秦諸子) genre—and covers correspondingly familiar ground. Special- ists will not find much in it that is new, and instructors are unlikely to adopt it in the classroom. Chang’s translations are generally accurate,5 and though his analysis is by and large conventional, it is often insightful. (My one formatting complaint is that pas- sages in the translations are carefully assigned unique numbers, but the subse- quent analysis, strangely, never refers to them. Consequently, the numbers end up serving no purpose, and one often has to go back and hunt through the translations in order to find what the author is talking about.) I appreciated Chang’s dark read- ing of Laozi (he calls it “Orwellian,” p. 93—perhaps that is going too far), as well as his schematic list of differences between Laozi and Zhuangzi (pp. 189-90), which are too often conflated. In his discussion of Han Feizi, I naturally applauded the emphasis on self-interest (pp. 417-19), since I believe this is the conceptual bedrock of the text.6 But Chang’s exposition is continually undermined by his failure (A) to distin- guish between “thinkers” and texts attributed to them, and (B) to cite (let alone respond to) secondary sources. (A) Chang usually accepts that the eight classical texts were written by their putative authors (e.g.: “Mencius’s own work, Mengzi, was apparently written by him,” p. 222)—a problematic supposition for all of the texts under discussion, and certainly not workable for the first six. Occasionally, he recognizes the complexi- ties, as when he says that Zhuangzi “probably wrote down his own thoughts in a volume, Zhuangzi, though some parts of it were obviously written by others” (p. 173). Similarly, he notes that “quite probably, Laozi was not authored by a single person” (p. 79)—but then blithely refers to Laozi as “he” throughout his analysis.7 Despite his various disclaimers, therefore, Chang does not seriously confront the Hu-pei Province, in 1975 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). 5) I do have one major objection: Chang’s translation of the phrase dao fa ziran 道法自然 (Laozi 25) as “The Way took its law from nature” (p. 80) is exceedingly anachronistic and misleading. Ziran did not mean “nature” in Chinese until the late nineteenth century, when it was repurposed as a translation of that Western concept. See, e.g., Lin Shujuan 林淑娟, “Xin ‘ziran’ kao” 新「自然」考, in Ziran gainian shi lun 自然概念史論, ed. Yang Rubin 楊儒賓 (Taipei: National Taiwan Univ. Press, 2014), 301-44; and Yanabu Akira 柳父章, Hon’yaku no shisō: “Shizen” to Nature 翻譯の思想:「自然」と NATURE (Tokyo, 1977). 6) See my “Introduction” to Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei (Dordrecht, Neth- erlands: Springer, 2012), 9f.; and After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Hono- lulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2005), 58-65. 7) Another recent book that falls into a similar trap is Eske Møllgaard, An Introduction to Daoist Thought: Action, Language, and Ethics in Zhuangzi (London: Routledge, 2007). Møll- gaard begins by referring to “the Zhuangzi,” but eventually starts writing simply “Zhuangzi.” See my review in Journal of Chinese Religions 35 (2007): 178. T’oung Pao 103-4-5 (2017) 494-497 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:11:25PM via free access 496 Book Reviews interpretive difficulties posed by anonymous and potentially multi-authored texts. Fundamentally, he wants to treat the eight texts as the work of eight “thinkers,” and accordingly reverts to this mode in the thick of his exposition, even though he is aware that the truth is not so simple. Thus when Chang says that Zhuangzi called Mozi “truly one of the best men in the world who never abandoned his principles while living in extreme poverty” (p. 121), he can do so only by reading the “Tianxia” 天下 chapter as the words of Zhuangzi himself—a position that virtually no modern scholar would endorse.8 Another consequence of treating such texts as though they were the work of single authors is to project ideological consistency onto them, where more nuanced in- terpretations have revealed subtle internal distinctions.9 (B) I cannot tell whether Chang is simply unaware of the reasons why the “Tianxia” chapter cannot be taken as the words of Zhuangzi because, as mentioned above, he cites very little relevant scholarship. This is his pattern in chapter after chapter. While it would be impossible to point out every error and missing refer- ence in this review, several particularly embarrassing blunders in the Prologue need to be exhibited. In the first six pages of the book, we are told: – that Huangdi 黃帝 was recognized as the leader of a “tribe later known as the Hans” 漢族 (p. 1), though Han is the name of a dynasty, not a tribe (and is not associated with Huangdi in any text known to me); – that Qi 啓 (the son of Yu 禹) was “a historical figure” (p. 2); – that the Shang 商 dynasty changed its name to Yin 殷 (p. 2), though Yin is, in fact, unattested in Shang sources (it is evidently a Zhou 周 exonym);10 – that the concept of “Heaven’s Mandate” (tianming 天命) goes back to the Shang dynasty (p. 4), though it is likewise unattested in Shang sources and is common- ly understood as a Zhou innovation;11 8) This review is not the place to rehearse all the hypotheses regarding the composition of Zhuangzi; suffice to say that none of the following treats “Tianxia” as the work of Zhuangzi himself: Guan Feng 關鋒, Zhuangzi zhexue lunwenji 莊子哲學論文集 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1962); A.C.