The Huainanzi

by An Liu

  One such illustrative historiographical narrative found in “Surveying Obscurities” (chapter 6) attributes the sociopolitical and cosmic degeneration of the world from the Three Dynasties period to late Warring States and Qin times to the disruption of blood ties (that is, kinship relations) between the “Son of Heaven” and his “flesh and bone” residing in the feudatories. The author blames the multitude of meddling, conniving, and obsequious scholar-officials, who had interposed themselves between the ruler and his royal relatives, for this estrangement between them and, ultimately, for the decline of the world. Not surprisingly, scholar-officials like the infamous Qin statesman Li Si and key Former Han figures such as Gongsun Hong, Zhang Tang, and Dong Zhongshu all viewed the deterioration from Western Zhou to Warring States times as having been caused by the disenchantment and disloyalty of the royal relatives to their own family members, most notably the ruler, or the “Son of Heaven.” The authors of the Huainanzi obviously view the problem from the other direction, and in “Surveying Obscurities” they praise the Han emperorship for reestablishing kinship relations and thereby reuniting the world as one family. This emphasis on the importance of kinship relations and the contributions of the emperor’s own “flesh and bone” to the cause of empire appears repeatedly throughout the text.

  Whereas some scholars have seen the decentralized form of governance praised throughout the Huainanzi as reflecting an eclectic acceptance of diverse perspectives in the text,38 we dissent from this interpretation. Rather than seeing the Huainanzi as arguing that a multiperspectival view is a requisite for successful rule, we observe that the text argues consistently that its own perspective is correct, precisely because its root–branch configuration contains the key to reconciling all the seemingly multifarious forms of knowledge and practice that human civilization had heretofore generated. The text that the Huainanzi claims is “sacrosanct for all time” is itself, because it alone demonstrates how every text that has ever been generated may be made to work as part of an integral unity. This is different from a “multiperspectival view.” The Huainanzi does not claim that every viewpoint is right but that a person’s or a text’s perspective (and the action that follows from it) becomes right when it is correctly placed within the Huainanzi’s developmental rubric. Advocates of ritual, for example, have a place in the empire, but their concerns have a lower priority than the study of the fundamental patterns of Heaven or the apophatic self-cultivation of the ruler. The message of the Huainanzi is not one of open-ended pluralism but of the integration of ramified elements within an intrinsically hierarchical structure.

  By providing this forceful and empirically plausible structure within which the interrelationship of all realms of human knowledge and endeavor could be understood, the Huainanzi demonstrates how seemingly irreconcilable diversity can be made to work as part of an integral unity, a problem that neatly mirrored the fundamental challenge of governing the Han Empire.

  This posed a clear threat to many firmly entrenched interests at the Han court, because the Huainanzi authors had accomplished (or could plausibly claim to have done so) that for which many others had striven without success. For example, the Confucians39 at the imperial court had reached a rough consensus on which ancient texts should be accorded canonical status40 but still disagreed over how they should be interpreted (which explains the development of several different exegetical traditions per classic) and ranked in order of importance. The Huainanzi schematic demonstrates how the five basic realms represented by the five classics may be both ordered relative to one another and fit into a larger context incorporating endeavors and forms of knowledge exterior to the Confucian canon:

  The Changes (chapter 6, “Surveying Obscurities”)

  The Spring and Autumn Annals (chapter 8, “The Basic Warp”)

  The Rites (chapter 11, “Integrating Customs”)

  The Odes (chapter 12, “Responses of the Way”)

  The Documents (chapter 14, “Sayings Explained”)

  The reasoning underlying these correlations41 is too lengthy and complex to be explained in detail here, but the gist of the argument is as follows:

  1. The Changes links to “Surveying Obscurities” because both deal with correlative connections between seemingly unconnected phenomena, connections that are dark, mysterious, and difficult to explain.

  2. The Spring and Autumn Annals corresponds to “The Basic Warp” because both examine the moral dimensions of human history and ascribe “praise and blame” to events in the past.

  3. The Rites corresponds to “Integrating Customs” because both deal with the theory and practice of ritual in all its forms, including not only such matters as religious observances and mourning customs but also clothing, food, music, and other manifestations of culture.

  4. The Odes corresponds to “Responses of the Way” because the latter employs the Laozi as a source of exegetical and explanatory authority in exactly the same way as the Odes was used in such texts as the Hanshi waizhuan (Master Han’s Supplementary Disquisitions on the Book of Odes).

  5. The Documents links with “Sayings Explained” because the latter uses brief apothegms and their exegeses to understand the norms of human behavior, in ways analogous to how the former uses historical documents to illuminate successful and unsuccessful actions of past rulers.

  This “hijacking” (as so it would have seemed) of the classics would have made intellectuals like Dong Zhongshu furious. It achieves what Confucians could not accomplish among themselves (show how the five classics relate to one another in a coherent order) and implies that the entire Confucian canon accounts for only a quarter of a truly comprehensive enumeration of the fundaments of rulership. (This in turn evokes the image of “one corner of a square,” a term that occurs several times in the Huainanzi as a metaphor for limited learning.) Perhaps this was an additional element that led to the decision of Han court scholars, deeply invested in politics, that Liu An and his entire intellectual enterprise were too dangerous a threat to be allowed to survive.

  Sources of the Huainanzi

  Our present understanding of the place of the Huainanzi in Han intellectual life rests on a number of important points. First, the Huainanzi draws on the foundational classic of Daoism, the Laozi; borrows extensively from the Zhuangzi; and urges on the would-be sage-ruler techniques of self-cultivation closely associated with the Daoist tradition. It is equally true that the text draws heavily on non-Daoist works, including the Odes, the Changes, and the Documents; the Hanfeizi, the Guanzi, and the Lüshi chunqiu; the Chuci and the Shanhaijing; the Zisizi and the Mozi; and undoubtedly other texts that have not been transmitted as part of the received corpus of early literature. The text contains much material from a body of historical, quasi-historical, and legendary anecdotal lore and gnomic verse that was widely known from oral and written transmissions in the Warring States, Qin, and Han times. Despite such a disparity of sources, however, the Huainanzi is much more than just a collection of unconnected chapters; rather, it is a work characterized by a strong degree of organizational and philosophical coherence that reflects the intentions of its authors and editors.

  As we argued earlier, although the Huainanzi’s overall structure and content is coherent and consciously organized, it is easy to demonstrate that a great deal of its content was quoted or paraphrased directly from preexisting sources. It is equally easy, and more pertinent to an understanding of the work, to show that often the original quotation is subtly changed or placed in a new context, altering the original meaning to advance the new arguments made by the Huainan masters.42 (We return to this point in several of the individual chapter introductions.) Scholars have identified more than eight hundred direct quotations or close paraphrases of Zhou and very early Han works in the Huainanzi. Of those, by far the largest number are from four sources: Zhuangzi (269 references in Charles Le Blanc’s tabulation), Lüshi chunqiu (190 references), Laozi (99 references), and Hanfeizi (72 references). Chapter 1 of the Huainanzi is
based heavily on the Laozi, and chapter 2, equally heavily on the Zhuangzi. While quotations from the Lüshi chunqiu can be found throughout the Huainanzi (in twenty of its twenty-one chapters), they are particularly prominent in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Indeed, much of chapter 5 is directly quoted from the first sections of each of the first twelve chapters of the Lüshi chunqiu (and thus also parallels the “Yueling” chapter of Liji, related to the same source). Chapter 10 develops concepts and terms that appear in a group of early texts typically associated with Confucius and his early followers, such as the Lunyu, Mengzi, Xunzi, and Zisizi. Chapter 12 draws extensively from the Laozi, effectively using it to ratify the analysis presented in the chapter itself of the meaning of various anecdotes.

  Beyond these general remarks on sources, we refer readers to the discussion of the pertinent sources in the twenty-one separate chapter introductions.

  The Debate over the Intellectual Affiliation of the Huainanzi

  For many years, the intellectual affiliation of the Huainanzi has been the topic of much debate and dispute. But recently the affiliation debate has changed as a consensus has begun to emerge that perhaps all along trying to assign the text to one “school” or another was asking the wrong question. Nonetheless, a brief historical survey of these debates is useful in trying to understand the state of the field of Huainanzi studies today and to assess where matters now stand.

  The spectrum of opinion about “school” affiliation has produced many positions that differ in their subtle nuances, but generally, three broad approaches have dominated the field.

  Over the long term, probably the most deeply entrenched approach has been to identify the Huainanzi as an “eclectic” or a “miscellaneous” (za ) text following Liu Xiang’s classification of the Huainanzi in the “Monograph on Arts and Literature” chapter of Ban Gu’s Han shu. The term za itself has been a source of confusion and often has been interpreted as pejorative. The traditional Chinese scholarly attitude toward the Huainanzi is exemplified by Feng Youlan: “This book, like the Lü-shih Ch’un Ch ’iu, is a miscellaneous compilation of all schools of thought, and lacks unity.”43 The views of several influential French sinologists in the early twentieth century did much to bolster the tendency of Western scholarship before the 1960s to regard the Huainanzi as generally unworthy of notice.44

  Recent scholarship on the Huainanzi and related texts has had the effect of refuting this older view, or at least of modifying it substantially. As John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel pointed out in their study of the Lüshi chunqiu, the classification za is in fact not pejorative in intent and does not denote a kind of miscellaneous intellectual chop suey (zacai ). In their words,

  The works of the “Mixed School” thus were not “miscellaneous,” “eclectic,” or “syncretic”; they were not ill-considered mish-mashes of extracts culled from other works and displaying little originality of thought. Rather, they belonged to a class of philosophical speculation that dealt especially with the relation of the human realm to the cosmos, governance to cosmology, the ruler to Heaven and Earth. We can see this directly in the two most important works of the “Mixed School,” the Lüshi chunqiu and the Huainanzi.45

  In another attempt to sort out the meaning of za with respect to the Huainanzi and the Lushi chunqiu, Mark Edward Lewis stated, “The syncretic nature of the two compendia was indicated by their classification as works that ‘mixed’ or ‘combined’ (za ) the schools.”46 In recent years, the eclectic position (variously understood) has been particularly popular among Chinese scholars. Chen Yiping and Hou Wailu, for example, support this position.47 The eclectic position also has attracted some Western scholars, notably Griet Vankeerberghen,48 whose views will be discussed more fully later.

  A second and very influential approach has been to identify the Huainanzi with the Daoist tradition, although with different understandings of what Daoism means and which understanding of Daoism the text represents. The case for Huainanzi as a Daoist work has been articulated by such scholars as Wing-tsit Chan, Kanaya Osamu, Benjamin Wallacker, Charles Le Blanc, Wolfgang Bauer, and Harold Roth. Some, like Chan and Kanaya, emphasize the text’s conceptual links to ideas associated with the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.49 Wallacker puts this argument in rather modest terms: “In referring to the general ideas of the eleventh chapter as ‘Taoist’ I mean that they can be derived from the classic Taoist texts, the Lao-tzu Tao-te ching and the Chuang-tzu.”50 Others, such as Hsiao Kung-ch’uan, Harold Roth, John Major, and Charles Le Blanc, have argued that the text is best understood as an exemplar of “Huang-Lao,” a particular strain of Daoist syncretism popular among the elite during the early years of the Western Han.51

  The view that the Huainanzi is a Huang-Lao text can be seen as perhaps a subset of the “Daoist” position; indeed some scholars who defend the Huang-Lao view regard the terms “Huang-Lao” and “early Han Daoism” as virtual synonyms.52 The Huang-Lao view was strongly bolstered in the 1970s and 1980s by the gradual publication and analysis of works from the Mawangdui funerary library of silk manuscripts. The presence in that library of works ascribed to, or alleged to be based on the teachings of, the Yellow Emperor, in conjunction with the many obvious similarities between the four so-called Yellow Emperor silk manuscripts from Mawangdui53 and the Huainanzi taken as a whole (for example, between the short text Daoyuan and Huainanzi’s chapter 1, “Yuan dao” ), led to a minor boom of scholarly interest in Huang-Lao as a new subject for investigation.54 A number of scholars, including Major,55 then argued strongly that the Huainanzi should be seen as a work, or perhaps as the exemplary work, in the Huang-Lao tradition. Robin Yates took the cautious position that “Huang-Lao was one of the three traditions of ancient Daoism . . . it was the philosophy or technique of greatest interest to the early Han emperors Wen and Jing, the powerful Empress Dowager Dou, [and] Liu An.”56

  Soon, however, a reaction set in. Angus Graham questioned how the Huainanzi could be a Huang-Lao work if in chapter 9 it privileges Shen Nong rather than the Yellow Emperor. Mark Csikszentmihalyi began to argue the case against Huainanzi as a Huang-Lao work and for caution in applying the label “Huang-Lao” to any work of the Warring States and Han periods without a clearer understanding of what Huang-Lao was and was not.57 In the end, this debate was inconclusive; when everyone had had his or her say in the matter, it was, as Aihe Wang put it, “still open to question whether or not Huang-Lao was a single ideology and what its tenets were.”58 Pending further discoveries bearing on the nature and scope of Huang-Lao, the identification of the Huainanzi as a Huang-Lao text remains an intriguing possibility but not something that has been (or can be) established beyond dispute.

  Most recently, Griet Vankeerberghen voiced support for the venerable view of the Huananzi as an “eclectic” work in her monograph The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority. Vankeerberghen took issue with two assumptions informing the dominant view that the Huainanzi is a Daoist work. First, she maintains that scholars who hold to this position claim that the Huainanzi was written with the intention of defending a Daoist or Huang-Lao school or tradition. (Many scholars who hold to the “Daoist” or “Huang-Lao” position would reject this characterization of their views, however.) Second, although they recognized that the text draws on a variety of sources, not all of which can be classified as Daoist, they wish to privilege the sources—and the chapters of the Huainanzi that draw most heavily and explicitly on them—that can be easily identified with the Daoist tradition, as exemplified by texts such as the Zhuangzi or the Laozi.59 In contrast, Vankeerberghen argues, “the Huainanzi turns to texts or ideas of the past not to defend a single strand of thought against rival theories but to pick out of the large repertoire of statements, ideas, and stories available those that best represented its vision of the Way, and in the process establish the king of Huainan as one who possesses the authority needed for rulership.”60 Vankeerberghen concludes that if we are to apply a label to the text, Liu Xiang’s “eclectic” rubric is most suita
ble because it underscores the text’s “preference for drawing widely on disparate sources.”61

  Vankeerberghen’s approach (in its arguments, if not in its conclusion) is not very different from that of a number of recent scholars who prefer to eschew altogether the assignment of a particular intellectual label to the text. This is a position supported by Roger Ames, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Paul Goldin, Mark Edward Lewis, Michael Loewe, Judson Murray, Michael Puett, and Sarah Queen.62 Scholars in this group have rejected the “Daoist” or “eclectic” affiliation for a variety of reasons, based largely on internal features of the text itself. Thus this group of scholars tends to underscore the text’s “syncretic,” “synthetic,” and “comprehensive” aspects, and they generally liken it to a “compendium,” an “anthology,” or an “encyclopedia.” For example, based on a close reading of chapter 21 of the Huainanzi, “An Overview of the Essentials,” Queen contended that associating the text with a single tradition contradicts the author’s self-proclaimed vision of the text articulated in this chapter.63 Adopting a rather dark view of the text, Goldin argued that the Huainanzi is marked by an “insidious syncretism” that aims to justify a political state that would subdue philosophical disputation altogether.64 Ames used the word syncretic to describe the Huainanzi and also implied that he regards it as an encyclopedic work that defies classification: “The contents of the Huai Nan Tzu’s twenty books and postface are broad and varied, probably following the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu in attempting to provide a compendium of existing knowledge. It is a syncretic text which borrows widely and heavily from pre-Ch’in sources and adapts earlier contributions to its own ends.”65 Csikszentmihalyi similarly argues: “The Masters of Huainan shows the influence of almost every philosophical or religious current, often filtered through a synthetic worldview that attempts to unify them under a broader conceptual scheme.”66 Lewis identifies the Huainanzi as one of several important works that “claimed to be [a] universal encyclopedia containing everything worth knowing.” This is further borne out by the collective nature of the work, which involved a large number of scholars assembled at Liu An’s court. Lewis further maintains, “This insistence on the large number of people who participated in the writing of the text is part of the program of comprehensiveness that defined the project of composing such an encyclopedia.”67 And again, “As comprehensive treatises produced by large numbers of scholars under the aegis of a leading political figure who aspired to guide a young ruler, both texts [Lüshi chunqiu and Huainanzi] aimed to bring together all the competing doctrines of the period.”