Dao and Sign in History: Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China 1438471939, 9781438471938

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Dao and Sign in History

SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture ————— Roger T. Ames, editor

Dao and Sign in History Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China

DANIEL FRIED

Cover image: Stephen Zhang. Untitled work of Chinese calligraphy, based on lines from the Zhuangzi. Reprinted with permission. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2018 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fried, Daniel, author. Title: Dao and sign in history : Daoist arche-semiotics in ancient and medieval China / Daniel Fried. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017058939 | ISBN 9781438471938 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471945 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages—Religious aspects—Taoism. | Semiotics— Religious aspects—Taoism. | Signs and symbols. Classification: LCC BL1923 .F75 2018 | DDC 181/.114—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058939 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for my father

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: Defining “Arche‑Semiotics”

1

Part One Daoist Semiotics in Comparative Perspective Chapter One

Ways through Language

29

Chapter Two

Ways beyond Language

57

Part Two Daoist Semiotics in Early Medieval Culture Chapter Three Tracing the Obscure

113

Chapter Four

Traces of Transcendence

157

Chapter Five

Sign, Translation, Enlightenment

199

Chapter Six

The Arche‑Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons

243

Abbreviations

275

Notes

277

Bibliography

299

Index

307

Preface

This book is about Daoist ideas of the sign in Chinese philosophy, religion, and literature, during a period lasting from roughly 400 BCE–550 CE. Because there is already a significant philosophical discussion in the scholarly literature about Daoism’s relation to modern continental philosophy, I have included significant discussion of the relevance of the continental tradition to this strand of Chinese thought. As one might expect from such a description, this project is highly interdisciplinary in scope—and I hope that it manifests a few of the strengths that the best interdisciplinary work can. My goal was to trace one discourse across all kinds of materials, to explain how it evolved, and I believe that this makes sense in the context of ancient and medieval China. There was certainly a well‑established genre system that arose during the period covered by this study, but there was little sense of different “fields” of thought corresponding to modern disciplinary divisions. I think it can be healthy to bring alien perspectives to bear on a text (otherwise, I would not have engaged with Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida in chapters 1 and 2). However, automatic projection of modern categories onto the past can be distorting—if this study had stuck only to materials that we would consider “philosophy,” “religion,” or “literature,” it would not have done a good job of explaining how Daoist discourses of the sign played out in the early medieval period. Of course, whatever its strengths, I am quite certain that this study does share the weaknesses inherent in interdisciplinary and comparative work. It covers many fields, over a period of almost of a millennium, and therefore there is much that it must skip over. There are many potentially relevant issues and texts which I have knowingly passed by, for lack of space. Although I have also tried to consult as much scholarship as possible in all these fields, in both Chinese and English, there are practical limits to how

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Preface

much one can plausibly incorporate. I am sure that specialists in one field or another will wonder how I could have missed this or that seminal work on a given author or text. The sad and honest answer in most cases would simply be that I am unsatisfyingly human, and have limits as to how much I can cover in even a broad‑ranging study. What this book will attempt to do is to trace one discourse around signs (linguistic and nonlinguistic) through a long period in early Chinese history and suggest some ways in which the history of that discourse might inform contemporary thinking about language. Beyond that general description of my project, an explanation of my terms is in order. In calling this work an examination of “Daoist arche‑semiotics,” I need to be clear about what is meant by “Daoist” and “arche‑semiotics,” since neither word is meaningful without specification. Herrlee Creel once remarked that Daoism “does not denote a school, but a whole congeries of doctrines,”1 and scholarship of recent decades has continued to prove this judgment correct, by finding all kinds of separable strands from different sources buried within the texts traditionally labelled “Daoist.” For the purposes of this study, I will use the term Daoist in a deliberately flattened and simplified way, referring to patterns of influence from and allusion to the standard received texts of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, without regard to the circumstances in which those texts were originally composed. This is a definition that does not very well fit either the standard definitions of “philosophical Daoism” (daojia sixiang), largely comprised of the philosophy of those early texts themselves, along with later secular and intellectual engagements with them, or “religious Daoism” (daojiao), the series of religious movements that began the worship of Laozi and considered his book, along with Zhuangzi’s and various other texts, to be sacred scripture. Isabelle Robinet has argued that this division does not adequately recognize the discursive unity of the tradition and the “cumulative and integrative process of its evolution”;2 I would add that a recognition of Daoism as one of three major religious/philosophical “teachings” only came about very slowly over the course of the Six Dynasties period examined in the second half of this study. I am less interested in self‑identification of individual writers than I am in the continuity of ideas; hence, while chapters 3 and 4 discuss writers who can be retrospectively identified as philosophical and religious Daoists, chapter 5 examines writers whose self‑conscious identity as Buddhists was so firm that they felt no threat from explicit reference to or engagement with the Laozi and Zhuangzi. If a new term is needed to describe this focus, I would call it “discursive Daoism.”

Preface

xi

By “arche‑semiotics,” I mean ideas of and social practices surrounding signification which are advanced in the absence of a cogent theory of how signs function together as a system. For most of the history of premodern thought, both in Europe and China, discussion of the nature of signs focused almost entirely on how one given meaning was attached to and discernible from its outer linguistic shell, without any reference to a contextual system. The dissemination of the term semiotics dates only to Peirce and Saussure, and hence has rarely been given modern scholarly consideration outside of the assumption of systems in which signs necessarily operate; and if I were to use this word to discuss unsystematic theories of signification, it would cause confusion. I hesitate to employ a broader term such as language to name what I am discussing, both because most aspects of language (phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, etc.) are not addressed at all, and because many of the signs referred to by texts used in this study are nonlinguistic. Hence, I have had to resort reluctantly to the neologism “arche‑semiotics” to describe early Chinese theories of signification (when discussing modern and postmodern approaches, the conventional “semiotics” is retained). I am indebted to Derrida’s concept of “arche‑writing” for this term, but do not mean to imply that arche‑semiotics could be one branch of a grammatology devoted to arche‑writing. My usage is intended to be evocative and homologous rather than rigorously subsidiary. Just as arche‑writing is a process of absence‑making, which inhabits writing but also even the presence of ordinary speech, arche‑semiotics might be considered the Daoist reluctance to make or acknowledge signs, which haunts assumptions about how signs come to be. Because this neologism deserves further grounding and justification, the Introduction below will be dedicated to explaining the concept at length and how it is used in this book. A full chapter outline will also be reserved until the end of the Introduction, but here it can be briefly said that that Introduction, as well as chapters 1 and 2, are more theoretical and general. They deal simultaneously with Warring States philosophy and modern continental philosophy, and hence will be of greatest interest to those who work in comparative philosophy, literary theory, and early Chinese civilization. Chapters 3 through 6, in contrast, examine how Daoist arche‑semiotics played out in all kinds of contexts from the second through sixth centuries CE. Those chapters will be of greatest interest to specialists in Chinese literature and religion of the early medieval period. Nonetheless, I hope that most of this book can remain accessible to scholars in any humanities field. To that end, I have segmented each chapter into sections that lean more toward comparative philosophy,

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and those which lean more toward Sinology. As much as possible, technical discussions of field‑specific issues or scholarly references have been pared down or pushed into endnotes. In the notes, two exceptions to Chicago style have been used: (1) In line with frequent practice in classical Sinology, references to premodern works are given by abbreviation and juan number, rather than page number; abbreviations and editions used are noted at the head of the bibliography; and (2) translations of classical sources are cited by the translator’s name; citations of original sources are given by author’s name. Works cited directly from a Chinese source are my own translation unless otherwise noted. Thanks are due to many. Xiaofei Tian, Zeb Raft, and Keyang Dou all provided invaluable advice on early drafts of this manuscript, and helped save me from some embarrassing errors—as have the anonymous readers. Nonetheless, all the embarrassing errors that may remain are purely my own. I have also constantly enjoyed the strong, perhaps undeserved, support of my colleagues and graduate students through the writing and revision process, and I am grateful to them for giving me the time and space to complete this work. I would have given up on this project a long time ago without the love and patience of my wife Esther and my daughter Callia. And some thanks are even due to my cat, Twinkle, who has excellently modeled for me Daoist naturalness and spontaneity in arche‑semiotics: I am frequently impressed by how many varied kinds of anxiety and desire can be conveyed through the polysemy of “meow.”

Introduction Defining “Arche‑Semiotics”

The Sign, Unscienced The language of the first men is represented to us as the tongues of geometers, but we see that they were the tongues of poets. —Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages

Rousseau’s proto‑Romanticism is embarrassing. It is still useful. Archaic language use is not a compendium of the lays of noble savages, who stood up and could only sing the matins of history. But Rousseau’s theory of linguistic origins did help convert older theological models of postlapsarian language into something that we can recognize as intellectual history. It is a lineage that passes later through Hegel and Marx, eventually through Foucault, among a thousand others. And we should be able to recognize that language about language is a “discourse,” one among many. When one wants to talk about the origin of that version of linguistics that we now call “semiotics,” it is hard to know where and how to start. The first person who could have named himself a semiotician was C. S. Peirce; the first who could have equivalently named himself a semiologist was Ferdinand de Saussure. And the writings of both are in the style of geometers. Saussure had inherited a technical vocabulary and a diagrammatic tendency from nineteenth‑century historical linguistics, while Peirce’s work shows his intimate investment in formal logic and its mathematical precision. If we take the birth of semiotics to be the moment at which the discipline was named, then it was born as a child of Science. Structuralist semiotics could only have succeeded for fifty years in the mid‑twentieth century

1

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Dao and Sign in History

by assuming that there was a discoverable, highly technical model for the creation of “meaning”; poststructuralist semiotics could only have succeeded over the past fifty years by demonstrating that any such prior model could not function as a technique. Whether they were being built up or torn down, the models by which linguistic “signs” could be associated with “meanings” always were struggling in, through, or against certain ghostly frameworks that seemed to want to impose a modern, technological rigor upon systems of words. The question is, Do we really need to consider that scientific aura and its attendant technicizing language as a necessary component of “semiotics”? What about the long centuries of thought in which writers talked—at length—about “words,” “meanings,” “symbols,” “ideas,” and, yes, “signs,” without trying to make such discussions sound modern and scientific (or postmodern and postscientific)? Did the poets of the world’s early ages do “semiotics,” or do we have to label their discussions of signs and meaning as something else? Words are, after all, just words, and one could define “semiotics” in any fashion that convention could be persuaded to accept. I would be happy to apply it to any work, from any society or century, that matches the Oxford English Dictionary description: “The science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols as they operate in various fields, esp. language.”1 But I would prefer to leave room for works that belonged to a not‑very‑modern “science of communication.” When in the Cratylus Plato seems to end by claiming that the meaning of individual words is somehow natural and inherent rather than arbitrary and conventional, he is making a claim diametrically opposed to Saussure and Peirce. But he is nonetheless speaking of the same subject as they would later do. It wouldn’t do to categorize the Cratylus as a theory of “language,” because it is not talking about language in general; instead, it is discussing the specific process by which individual vocabulary words are attached to ideas that refer to objects. We don’t have a good word to refer to that topic other than “semiotics,” even if that label is a modern one. I do not think that the question of what counts as “semiotics” should depend upon the length of a text. But it does seem like a more dubious categorization when semiotic issues are raised briefly in texts that seem to be about something else. When Aristotle, in his Poetics, speaks of the inferiority of recognition “according to signs” (διὰ τῶν σημείων)2 such as Odysseus’s scar, this is hardly a grand theory of semiotics. But it is still a smidgeon of semiotics.

Introduction

3

And while, as a general rule for intellectual history, one doesn’t want to rely on sifting through dribs and drabs to find something interesting, Aristotle’s tiny usage here is historically useful, because it gives us a glimpse at a field for a latterly developed semiotics much broader and deeper than pure linguistics. It is not better at being “semiotics” than Aristotle’s own extended discussions in the Categories and the On Interpretation. But it gives a vision of the “sign” as something no longer abstracted and bloodless, but poetically fleshy. The history of a boar’s tusk ripping through the hero’s calf, and the traces of an epic implication that it left behind in his skin, is a key to the Ithacan’s identity. Similarly, we could not have the pathos of the Iliad without the deceptive sign of Achilles’s armor masking the body of Patroclus. Or the satire of Don Quixote without the ironic sign of a cardboard helmet covering the knight’s addled noggin. Adulterers need to be given giant A’s to wear, and superheroes need to be given S’s. Roland Barthes brought such issues into the realm of official “semiotics” with his Système de la mode five decades ago; but there was always a secret semiotic impulse buried in identity and narrative, across broad swathes of culture, long before he systematized it. If one goes on like this, it might seem that there is no end to semiotics, that the term might itself might be vacated by meaning by being applied to everyone and everything. However, that danger itself has an august pedigree: Peirce himself once infamously wrote that “the entire universe is perfused with signs if it is not composed entirely of signs.”3 And Derrida’s still more infamous notion that “there is nothing outside the text” (more literally, “there is no outside‑text,” il n’y a pas de hors‑texte)4 indicates not that only language exists, but that the world is a continuous part of the signifying system of texts, not simply a heap of referred‑to objects. Although this study will try to refrain from declaring anything and everything to be signs, to the extent that it goes beyond linguistic theories in its investigation of signs, it is on well‑trodden ground. Even when one restricts oneself to actual language, the limits of signifying are hard to define, and this expansiveness might reasonably seem problematic to those who come to the discipline from analytic philosophy. However, literary scholars will probably be more familiar with the notion that first‑person texts (like those that occupy much of this book) can act as external signs of the self, akin to the scars or armor of epic narrative. Genres that thematize direct address to the reader (the lyric, the personal essay, the epistle, the autobiography) by being what they are, necessarily bring along the impression of a speaking subject, and the words thereby take on the character of the external image of that subject. Not everything in such works

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Dao and Sign in History

is “semiotic”; much belongs properly to the field we would traditionally call “rhetoric.” But rhetoric is a tangle of motives, and the semiotic impulse to representation is buried within this tangle. Consider how this is framed by Philip Sidney in the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain; Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain; Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain. But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay; Invention, Nature’s child, fled step‑dame study’s blows; And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”5 The lyric I, which argues most of this tense‑wound contraption, is concerned with rhetoric: the lateral search of model speeches and exemplars with persuasive power. But the sonnet begins and ends in a place of pure expression: a desire to find some words that can externally signify an internally felt emotion. This is in no way “semiotics,” if we mean by that word a “science of communication” akin to that offered by Peirce, Saussure, or those who followed. But there is here a “poetics of communication,” a latent or incipient impulse to semiotics, in which it is assumed that the words on the page are signs of the static thought resident in the authorial Mind. This is no new or radical conclusion: semiotics and poetics have been intertwined since Michael Riffaterre’s pioneering 1978 Semiotics of Poetry, a work in which he argued that the poem as a whole, through the hermeneutical process, unifies into a single sign of a larger poetic intention.6 Even if one moves away from actual lyric poems, however, it should still be possible to read via this kind of poetics of the sign, in search of the signifying subject behind it, without departing too far from precedent. After all, it follows close upon the Derridean critique of logocentrism to note that there is a vast assumption of external, written words being at best a sad replacement for more deeply felt internal meanings pent up inside. But because scholars

Introduction

5

in different fields come to the word semiotics with different assumptions, it is reasonable to require a clear definition of what one means when one wishes to study premodern discourse around signs. To that end: this book deals with many ancient Chinese texts, which, in various ways, discuss the relationship of signifiers, signifieds, and referents. Some of these texts put forward explicit theories of language that ought to count as “semiotic” if any pre–nineteenth‑century text can. Others reference ideas about language en route to discussing matters of self‑expression, or philosophy, or theology. Others still do not reference language at all, but discuss nonlinguistic signs, and how they might be used to represent meanings. All of them either theorize or manifest what I have been calling the “semiotic impulse,” even though there are few extended essays dedicated to expounding semiotic theories, and none of those reads like a twentieth‑century essay on semiotic theory. Because some of these materials trace the interests of semioticians without sounding like “real semiotics,” I will resort to a neologism, and call these materials “arche‑semiotic.” Freely adapting the Oxford English Dictionary, I define “arche‑semiotic” as: a discourse of representation, thematizing the use of signs and names as external carriers of thought, meaning, or identity, which might have prelinguistic existence. “Discourse,” and not “science,” because the materials studied in this book echo each other relentlessly, without ever trying to establish a system. “Representation,” and not “communication,” because most of these materials are less concerned with what makes signs decipherable, and more concerned with how signs can or cannot substitute for realities. “Might have prelinguistic existence,” because many of the texts studied in this book are deeply conflicted about language and whether or not every name must indeed stand for a thing. The prefix “arche‑,” inspired by Derrida’s concept of “arche‑writing,” comes ultimately from the Greek ἀρχή, meaning simultaneously a “beginning” and a “ruling,” and this double meaning points toward two ways in which this kind of “semiotics” differs from normal semiotics. It provides two premises, which are tested throughout this work: 1. The Subjective Premise: Arche‑semiotics is a semiotics that belongs to the unsystematized subject at the origin of culture, a way of doing semiotics prior to science, and based in the primordial urge to have like things “fit” each other. One of the first steps out of infancy is the understanding that some words correlate to some objects or ideas. One does not need

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Dao and Sign in History

a complex philosophical architecture to be conscious of the possibility of mistaken correlation. Although there is abstruse philosophy represented in this book, even those works rarely propose technical models of how signs contain ideas. Instead, what comes to the forefront are highly personal, subjective means of matching signs to ideas. Instead of complex and abstract theories of the sign, we find socially or psychologically deeply rooted impulses that signs are critically important— even when they are impossible to explain. 2. The Historical Premise: Arche‑semiotics is a semiotics that governs culture, a set of discursive practices which shape and mold those fundamental impulses to match into a broader system of expression. Archaic and medieval China is deeply imbued with anxieties over the social representation of the self: when should one reveal one’s inner thoughts to the world, and when should one remain silent, put forward no signs and remain silently self‑contained? At the same time, it is concerned with religious transcendence, and how certain forms of subjectivity might require either revelation, or perhaps the absence of revelation: a secret buried somewhere beyond representation. As such, the arche‑semiotic impulses in these materials can be considered semiotics with an unsystematic history: a set of impulses that can only be recognized as they play themselves out in history. In these two senses, the prefix “arche‑” also fortuitously echoes the text with which this study begins, in chapter 1. The Dao De Jing takes its name from the two characters that begin its two books. Dao names the Way—something which cannot truly be named, because it exceeds anything to which one could match it. De names “moral force,” an innate power of the ruler that transforms his subjects without the need for active implementation of policy. “Arche‑semiotics” appears in both senses in ancient Chinese thought: it is everywhere and in everything though never named; and it governs discursive systems that remain present in historically specific social contexts, without necessarily possessing an active program to do anything in particular. Defined in such terms, the arche‑semiotic appears in many different kinds of texts in early China, for many reasons. This study will trace only Daoist arche‑semiotics, from roughly 400 BCE through roughly 500 CE, for several reasons.

Introduction

7

First and most obviously: any scholarly work needs some limiting principle, and I do not want to try to do everything. Secondly, during this period of my focus, Daoism has probably the broadest influence on both thought and rhetorical expression of any of China’s early schools of thought. Other important arche‑semiotic ideas can be found in schools such as Mohism and Legalism, but these virtually vanish from elite discourse. Confucianism had its own arche‑semiotics, as did Buddhism when it later arrived in China, but these were often interpreted through the lens of Daoist texts, and had important but more strictly defined spheres of influence. Thirdly, Daoist arche‑semiotics are the most consistently complex of any of China’s early schools. Daoists did not necessarily reject language, and did not endorse a simple skepticism, much less a univocal eremitism. But in important ways, they had a deep suspicion of names, which played out in complex ways, as they employed various strategies that simultaneously delegitimized language and partially redeemed it. Although Buddhism developed comparatively complex arche‑semiotic ideas late in this period, Chinese Buddhists developed these ideas by mixing influences from Sanskrit and Pali texts with those of the Daoists, as will be shown in chapter 5. Finally, Daoist arche‑semiotics are the closest to our own time, when the lessons of poststructuralism have been broadly influential. There have been many scholars working in Chinese studies who have already elaborated on the resemblances between early Daoist texts and those of Derrida, and the lessons of this existing scholarship will be a major topic of chapter 2. This book does do something new, by actually tracing Daoist arche‑semiotic discourse historically through its many early permutations, and reconsidering the comparisons with poststructuralism in light of that historical experience. But the basic topic is not an innovation of my own; I am able here to build upon the insights of others. However, before turning to those Daoist traditions, it is worthwhile exploring more how arche‑semiotics works in early China. What are the basic issues and orientations that distinguish China from the Western analogues mentioned above? And what is the relationship between ideas about language and more personal impulses around self‑representation? These initial, orientating questions can be answered by examining a little‑known pre‑Daoist text.

The Subjective Premise: The School of Names The earliest period of Chinese philosophy is filled with competing classic visions of life, some of which have left their historical contexts far behind

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and achieved genuine fame. Confucius is now known the world over, and his later disciple Mencius comes in for only slightly less esteem. Laozi and Zhuangzi, whose works, and their influence, are the subject of this book, are admired (and overmysticized) by the spiritually minded of many times and places. Even Sunzi’s Art of War has somehow become a topic for rather dubious business‑world seminars on how to increase quarterly sales numbers. Then there are works that have a measure of fame inside China, if not beyond, and whose importance in early Chinese philosophy has been established for centuries. Xunzi proposed a vision of Confucianism which was forgotten for centuries, and then returned. The Mohists, a philosophical movement drawn from artisans and engineers, were utilitarians and social levelers who posed an impressive intellectual challenge to archaic regional kingdoms. The Legalists and their harsh vision of a punitive and technocratic state were considered intellectually unacceptable following the fall of the Qin dynasty with which they were associated, but their methods may have secretly haunted many a later reign officially devoted to more wholesome ideologies. The Gongsun Longzi is a text that fits into neither of those categories. It is virtually unknown to anyone who is not a specialist in early Chinese philosophy; until recent decades, the text has been considered so marginal that even specialists could be excused from reading it. It has mostly been known through important sections in the Daoist Zhuangzi which make fun of it—and even then, those who did not know what they were looking at would have been likely to simply think of the Zhuangzi’s allusions as effervescent manifestations of that latter work’s weird, wild style. And there are good reasons why the work has been ignored for so long: it did not have much influence after the Zhuangzi’s devastating critique, and hence most of the text was probably lost. What little survives, in six very brief essays, is probably corrupted from whatever original may have circulated, and is certainly filled with cryptic problems of interpretation. However, the work is slowly coming into greater prominence among specialists. There have been occasional attempts to grapple seriously with the text since the late nineteenth century, but attention has accelerated since Chung‑ying Cheng and Janosz Chmielewski began to analyze the text’s logical system in the 1960s.7 These discussions became more public and central with the works of Graham8 and Hansen9 on later Mohist logic and theories of language, so that it is now clear that the Gongsun Longzi represents an important historical bridge from the Mohists to the Daoists. As with most early Chinese philosophy, it is named after its author, Gongsun Long, who was one of two leaders of a “School of Names,” and that school

Introduction

9

was thought of as one of the six major schools of thought in early China, as late as the second century BCE.10 And the early influence (which it later lost entirely) had been well deserved: the topics in logic, ontology, and semiotics which this text addresses are virtually untouched in any other early Chinese text besides a small portion of the Mozi, and the treatment shows a sophistication and precision that can hardly be contained within the highly contextual grammar of early Chinese.11 We know very little about Gongsun Long personally. He probably lived from the late fourth to the mid‑third century BCE. Near the turn of the first century BCE, the historian Sima Qian recorded him as being originally from the kingdom of Zhao, in northern China (slightly west of modern‑day Beijing). He is also recorded as having a political dialogue with Zhao Sheng, a member of the Zhao royal house, suggesting that he may have been the kind of philosopher‑advisor that proliferated at Warring States–era royal courts. The third‑century Annals of Lü Buwei also mentions dialogues with a king of the northeastern kingdom of Yan.12 And the text of the Zhuangzi contains an obviously fictional dialogue between Gongsun Long and a nobody named Gongsun Mou, of the state of Wei. That’s about all the biographical evidence we have for this person, outside the text of the Gongsun Longzi itself. One reason that Gongsun Long might have been almost completely forgotten is that, if one takes as “normal” the sound, style, and concerns of the early Chinese textual landscape, the Gongsun Longzi is a truly bizarre text. From a purely Chinese standpoint, and using the normal rules of Chinese grammar, one must strain to tell what is being said, and to what end. Here is a representative passage from the most famous essay in the text, the “On White and Horse”: When a horse is sought, yellow and black horses may both be sent. When a white horse is sought, yellow and black horses may not be sent. If a white horse is, in fact, a horse, this is a case of what is sought being identical. If what is sought is identical, a white [horse] is not different from a horse.

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If what is sought is not different, how is there “may be” and “may not be” with respect to yellow and black horses? That “may be” and “may not be” are mutually exclusive is evident. Therefore yellow and black horse are the same in that they “may be” taken to correspond to there being a horse, but “may not be” taken to correspond to there being a white horse. This verifies “[a] white horse is not [a] horse.” (Johnston 273–74) For the modern Western reader, ancient Chinese texts can often produce a profoundly alienating sense of dislocation—but they rarely dislocate one to this particular stable. Johnston’s translation is excellent, but like any translation to English from classical Chinese, much must be added to make clear some kind of logical relation, which is simply not specified using the meagre grammatical resources of the original. This is a hard enough trick when one is translating poems about actual objects, but the Gongsun Longzi proffers a series of minutely drawn lines of argument about conceptual objects’ relation to each other, using a desperately imprecise vocabulary. It is the philosophical equivalent of threading a needle while wearing an oven mitt. One suspects that the historical Gongsun Long who may have been teaching these ideas was able to repeat and explain in a way that made them more reasonable—but at a distance, and through the medium of written classical Chinese, one is exiled from this logocentric safe haven. As will be shown in chapter 2, this language was easy to ridicule—and it eventually survived only for the mainstream Chinese tradition through the ridiculous echo sounded by the Zhuangzi. However, the reason why the text is now understandable, and is coming back into prominence as a half‑lost turning point in early Chinese thought, is that it eventually reached readers familiar with Aristotle. The Organon has plenty that can still be debated—but it provided for the Western tradition a clear vocabulary with which to debate topics such as the relationship of universals and particulars, accidents and essences. Although there wasn’t complete confusion about the Gongsun Longzi for traditional commentators, there was enough confusion that it could never sustain serious interest. But the text started to really make sense in the twentieth century, to scholars who had read deeply in both Chinese and Western philosophy, and could recognize the similarity of Gongsun Long’s concerns to those of the Aristotelian system of logic. By now, there is hardly consensus about the exact positions the Gongsun Longzi is taking, but there is pretty much universal consensus about what the topics are, and how the basic logic of the text is intended to

Introduction

11

work. One reference text is typical in its sense of discovery: “The moment the reader grasps that Gongsun Long is merely trying to expound on the existence of ‘universals’ as independent entities, the famous white horse discourse presents no difficulty to understand.”13 And both of these make sense: when one rereads the “White Horse Discourse” while remembering how Aristotle predicates whiteness of objects, the similarity is striking.14 The death and resurrection of the Gongsun Longzi is one of the best arguments for the value of comparative philosophy. The Gongsun Longzi clearly is related to the Mohist tradition, while also expanding on topics that Mohist materials never fully explicated. When one looks for a theory of semiotics in early China, one certainly could extract a semiotics from Mohist materials: the Mozi says many things about names,15 and Graham even finds a semi‑corrupted essay, “Names and Things,” buried in the “Great Pick” chapter.16 But there is no Mohist essay explicitly dedicated to semiotics; in contrast, the Gongsun Longzi does have such an essay, “On Names and Entities.” Although brief (like all the chapters of the work), this is the only essay dedicated entirely to semiotics in the early period of Chinese philosophy.17 For the most part, it is not a very interesting theory of semiotics— one reason why the essay has never been particularly remarked upon, even within the small field of Gongsun Longzi studies.18 The main middle section of the essay harps upon a notion of agreement that seems rather obvious. Names are a kind of matching. If one says “this” in connection with a referent this, then “this” and this had better actually correspond to each other, or else there will be confusion. There is in this discussion a kind of pragmatic desire to set the rules for debate, and establish a method, which is inherited from the Mohists. Such a reformist critique of errant language is not inherently weak: a similar program was put forth in much greater detail by Locke in the third book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.19 Although that program later came in for withering postmodern critique by Paul de Man,20 the reformist impulse, whether in Locke or in Gongsun Long, necessarily recognizes the possibility of a failed semiotics in which there are nonsignifying signs, matched with the wrong referents. However, the problem with this semiotics in the Gongsun Longzi is that there is maddeningly little indication what might count as determining correctness in correspondence. What is the standard for “matching”?21 The word the text uses to express a proper correspondence between signs and references is wei 唯, here probably best translated as “agrees with.” It is a word that strongly implies subjective assent. That apparent subjectivity does not provide

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Dao and Sign in History

any solid ground on which to build a complex semiotic theory, but it does suggest a different kind of interest of the Gongsun Longzi. We can look to it not for semiotics, but arche‑semiotics: not a highly developed theory of the sign, but a revealing statement of the important desires and anxieties that lie behind the desires to get signs “right.” It would be dangerous to read too much into any one word in a text such as this: some vocabulary in this and other texts had clearly achieved a kind of technical status for philosophical use, but it is extremely difficult to police their possible implications at a distance of millennia. However, the traces of subjectivity are all over this brief text, despite its apparent bloodlessness. The vocabulary that is used to set up this contrast of signs and things shows hints of an obsessive‑compulsive personality, who is deeply bothered by the asymmetry of names that do not cover their proper referents. Consider the opening lines of the essay: Heaven and earth, and what they give rise to, are things. When a thing is taken to be the thing which the thing is and there is no “going beyond,” it is an entity. When an entity is taken to be the entity which the entity is and there is no “being empty,” it is “in position.” If it goes away from its position it is “out of position.” If it is positioned in its position it is correct. It is by means of what is correct that one corrects what is not correct. It is not by means of what is not correct that one calls into doubt what is correct. Its being made correct is correcting what it is as an entity. Correcting what it is as an entity is correcting its name.22 At first, this seems to be a somewhat blockheaded kind of pedantry, which wants nothing more than to insist that things are what they are, and that

Introduction

13

they aren’t what they aren’t, and that philosophers should stop making a muddle of things all the time. There is definitely something blockish about the passage, but if one parses the vocabulary closely, it becomes clear that what is being said is more than just a kind of anti‑intellectual rant. The word translated by Johnston as “entity” is shi 實, with a root meaning of fullness—and which by extension can mean the fruit as the fullness of the flower, or the “actual.” This is what is identified as the logical result when a thing sits in its own thingness and does not “go beyond” (guo 過): the thing is “actual,” but also more literally “full.” This seems to be describing the relation of an object prior to cognition (wu 物) with a potential of that object being correctly imported into cognition (shi 實).23 Using Saussurean terms, we might compare this to the relation of “referent” to “signified.”24 When the signified is in and of itself merely still itself, without “being empty,” it is “in position.” “Being empty” is kuang 曠, a word that can mean wide‑open spaces, but which could also simply imply unfilled positions, or gaps; “in position” is simply wei 位, the most basic indicator for a given space, whether physically or socially defined. The implication seems to be that every signified should occupy its own cognitive spot, not leaving gaps and also not dispersing out in endless play. Although the language here is hardly clear (using “full” to indicate cognized objects, if that is in fact what is being done here, is hardly a standard use of the vocabulary), the harping on “position” seems to require that shi really be indicating something internal to cognition. The only other option is nonsensical: that physical objects stop being what they are if one moves their physical position. Assuming, then, that the text wishes to stress that signifieds must each properly stick in their own spots, neither leaving gaps nor encroaching on their neighbors, we can start to see the implication of an unexpressed structure. There is certainly none of the intellectual foundation on which Saussure’s structures are built: no contrast with historical linguistics, no langue/parole distinction, not even a glimmer of understanding that sign‑systems might be conventional rather than natural. But one does feel as if there is the same underlying impulse to draw diagrams—a quasi‑visual, quasi‑mathematical desire underlying this nascent system. The next lines, focusing on the “correct” (zheng 正), confirm the desire for a positionally pleasing semiotics. The notion of “correcting names” (zheng ming 正名) dates back to the Analects of Confucius, and is arguably the oldest semiotic concept in Chinese philosophy. But here, the notion of what counts as “correct” derives more from the Mohists than from the

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Dao and Sign in History

Confucians. This particular language is not to be found in the Mozi, but the word zheng is used in the Canon of actual carpentry measurements, and is related to famous passages comparing logic to a compass and T‑square. And thinking about the category of the “correct” in this Mohist fashion, as a quasi‑artisanal tool, makes the passage entirely straightforward. One judges a faulty doorway by the T‑square, which shows it not to be built at right angles; one doesn’t use the shoddy construction to judge the T‑square. And hence the metaphor of “position” also becomes lucid: if a signified fills its spot just so, flush with its neighbors, then we can call it “even,” that is, “correct.” And once that is done, the passage from signified to signifier is simple, almost automatic. “Correcting what it is as an entity is correcting its name.” If one guarantees that the raw object, once it has passed into consciousness as an “entity” (or signified) is positioned just right among other possible entities, then the corresponding “name” (or signifier) will automatically spring into the correct position as well. As a semiotic system, this has huge gaps. The downplaying of the name, the lack of any consciousness as to what might count as correspondence, and indeed the inappropriateness of the ruling metaphor of physical orderliness in describing language all make this argument a target for easy critique. And indeed it will come in for very heavy critique in the Zhuangzi, as will be explained in chapter 2. As a bundle of arche‑semiotic impulses, this is much more interesting. The value‑laden metaphors of fullness and gaps, placing things in the right positions and making them flush with their surroundings: these metaphors make the language imprecise, paper over central questions, prevent this from being interesting as a theory of naming. But they make it fascinating as an impulse to naming. Evidently, for Gongsun Long, naming is a field that offers both anxiety and satisfaction. Gaps, unevenness, crookedness are how he imagines objects badly conceptualized, which will not produce significant words. Straightness, evenness, properly positioned spaces are how he thinks about objects that have been well conceptualized, and their orderliness automatically results in felicitous names. As has been described above, these master metaphors come out of the Mohist tradition, and its roots in working‑class artisans’ methods of measurement. But it also reflects a more basic psychological impulse, which gains an almost aesthetic pleasure from evenness, and is roused to anxiety by disorder. This book will not venture into actual psychology: it has too much else to do. It is enough to note how powerfully a subjective perspective lurks beneath the surface of this seemingly abstract text. The “subjective premise” posited above is demonstrated first in the early text, which seems most to

Introduction

15

be aiming at an abstract system. In the texts that fill the rest of this book, the subjective presence of authors, their ideals, and their anxieties will often be much easier to see. But what should be remembered from this example of the Gongsun Longzi is that a heavy presence of the author’s subjective hopes and fears does not make a text un‑semiotic. It makes it arche‑semiotic.

The Historical Premise: A Treasury of Traces There are five substantive essays, presumably deriving from original writings of Gongsun Long, which comprise the Gongsun Longzi. Then there is a sixth, biographical essay, “A Treasury of Traces,” which relates a small amount of biographical information about Gongsun Long, and narrates several anecdotes about him of dubious veracity. Unlike some early Chinese philosophical writing, these materials presented as biography are frankly admitted to be collected secondhand. The title, jifu 跡府, says as much: ji (a word that will reappear throughout this book) means either a footprint or a hoofprint, something left behind which one can track. Fu had many possible meanings, ranging from storehouse to royal residence, but the original center of its meanings seems to have been a library or a records depository. By naming this chapter “A Treasury of Traces,” a later editor would have been confessing to collecting for storage representations of a person who was absent. The “trace” is a sign of that absence—but a very personal absence, not simply the Derridean trace of absconded meaning. As the biography opens, Gongsun Long is represented through his writings, rather than what we might think of as “actual biography”: Gongsun Long was a dialectician of the Six Kingdoms period. He abhorred divergence and disorder with regard to name and entity so, because of the abundance of his talent, he fashioned the Shoubai [“Preserving the White”] discussion. Taking things as examples, he used the Shoubai argument to say that white horse is not horse. With respect to “white horse is not horse,” he said that “white” is what names color and “horse” is what names form. Color is not form and form is not color. In speaking of color it is not valid to combine form. In speaking of form it is not proper to attach color. Now to join [them] and take [them] to be one thing is wrong. . . . He wished to extend this debate as a way of correcting name and entity, and so transform the empire.25

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Dao and Sign in History

For a historian, this is useless, telling us nothing other than that he lived in the mid‑third century BCE. For a textual critic, this confirms that the redactor of the text lived at a considerable remove from Gongsun Long, apparently knowing as little about him as we do. For a philosopher, the text confirms that early readers could at least understand the most famous Gongsun Longzi essay at the most basic level, even if they could not necessarily have understood concepts of universals or predication. Such issues are worth noting, but are hardly revelatory. Reading for arche‑semiotics, we can draw two slightly more interesting conclusions. First, despite the fact that his semiotic essay was not as famous as “On White and Horse,” it was perceived by later readers that the relation of names to objects was at the heart of Gongsun Long’s philosophical project. And this was apparently a project driven by those same anxieties that make arche‑semiotics a highly subjective field. “He abhorred divergence and disorder with regard to name and entity”: “Abhorred” (ji 疾) can imply physical illness as well as mental anxiety; “divergence” (san 散) implies looseness and scattered objects, leading to the kind of “disorder” (luan 亂) that could be moral or political chaos as well as physical messiness. It seems that the obsessive‑compulsive anxieties of the “On Names and Entities” were not lost on early readers. The second conclusion is more general. By presenting a summary of Gongsun Long’s doctrines as an adequate substitute for actual biography (and indeed by calling his biography a fu, “records depository”), the editor is revealing the degree to which early writers would have conceived of philosophical texts as the outer “traces” of a subjective personality. This may have been inevitable, given the conventions on naming texts after their authors. We can know Gongsun Long through the Gongsun Longzi, just as we can know Lao Dan through the Laozi, Zhuang Zhou through the Zhuangzi, Han Fei through the Hanfeizi, and so on. Texts become the outer signs of personalities, and while we should not assume that early readers did not take seriously the philosophical content of these texts, there was also a sort of categorization of subjective personality types that happened through the evaluation of writers’ actual published texts. We know Confucius as an upright moral idealist, not just as a name attached to theories of ritual and social order. We know Zhuang Zhou as a crazy, humorous troublemaker, not just as a writer of allegories about abstracted naturalness and spontaneity. And even Gongsun Long, about whom we know nothing other than his text, appears as an anxious character determined to fix language by separating things that don’t belong together.

Introduction

17

After this opening gambit on doctrine‑as‑biography, the editor then offers an actual anecdote about Gongsun Long. As the story goes, one year Gongsun Long was staying at the court of Zhao Sheng, aka Lord Pingyuan of Zhao. At the same court there was a man named Kong Chuan, a descendant of Confucius. Kong Chuan had heard of the fame of Gongsun Long, and asked him if he could become his student. However, Kong Chuan also laid down a condition: he couldn’t accept the notion that a white horse is not a horse, and so he asked Gongsun Long to renounce this doctrine so that he could study with him in good conscience. Naturally, Gongsun Long rejected this request. His pique reflects the editor’s sense that writings become the outer sign of the inner subject: “The way I acquired my reputation [name, 名] was just through the ‘white horse’ discussion.”26 And he then goes on to reject what he perceives as Kong Chuan’s implicit deconstruction of the word teacher: how could you come and instruct me, and then afterwards learn from me? What makes a teacher a teacher is his superior knowledge. This point starts to pivot the arche‑semiotics of the biography from outer image of the pure philosophizing subject to something socially defined: names reflect a position within a social structure. It is a very Confucian argument to make to the descendant of Confucius: just as the names “king” and “minister” or “father” and “son” mutually define hierarchical social structures that should be given clear boundaries, so does the binary “teacher” and “student.” Gongsun Long then pushes home the point, and within this larger frame narrative, he begins to tell Kong Chuan a story of his own about Confucius, in order to prove that Confucius would have supported his white/horse theory of predication. According to that inner‑nested anecdote, Confucius heard how the King of Chu lost his bow while on a royal hunt. Although it was an expensive royal bow which had its own name, the King of Chu did not mind losing it, because he reasoned that “A Chu king has mislaid his bow, a Chu man will find it.”27 Confucius admired the king’s egalitarian sentiment, but still thought his conclusion wrong. “He should say, ‘a man lost the bow and also, a man will find it,’ that is all. Why must there be ‘Chu’?”28 Gongsun Long’s point in narrating the anecdote is that the geographical place name “Chu,” when predicated of the noun “person,” changes the basic concept in the same way as does predicating “white” of “horse.” And indeed, in the anecdote as narrated, the point of Confucius’s objection is precisely that “person of Chu” is not merely a subset of “person.” It is something different entirely: people considered as patriotic subjects, versus people considered as borderless humans.

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Dao and Sign in History

At our own moment of resurgent racialized national discourses, it should be obvious that motivations toward labeling are often deeply enmeshed in historical forces. The world of Warring States China is very distant from our own, and yet we can understand perfectly the way in which differing uses of linguistic signs can mark off the boundaries between group loyalty and cosmopolitanism. That is not, in itself, “semiotics,” if by that word one means a technical theory of how signs are carriers of something perceived as “meaning.” But Gongsun Long is correct in using the anecdote of Confucius to prove his point: more technical and more abstract arguments about the relation of names to reality can be implied in historical arguments over how people should be identified. Often, the most central historical questions of an age, or the most deeply fraught social anxieties, are worked out in terms that question, explicitly or implicitly, the relation between words and things. This is the second reason why the arche‑semiotics explored in this book are “arche,” what I have called the “historical premise”: through their anxieties over the sign (while lacking theories of the sign) they govern behavior, cultural dynamics, and social organization.

A Method for Différance The Daoist tradition of arche‑semiotics, which will occupy most of this book, proposes ideas essentially opposite to those of Gongsun Long. There is no assumption that linguistic signs can represent a “full” reality, that they can be organized in neat, flush little rows with no gaps, or that they can be made even, “corrected.” On the contrary, this tradition, while never simply rejecting language, is deeply suspicious of it, and of the possibility that signs could adequately stand in for anything important. As will be discussed at length, there is a conception that language shifts around in an unstable manner, that “meanings” are not necessarily something present inside language, and that the attempt to fix firm distinctions as a way of getting a clear grasp on what is true or false is itself necessarily an imposition upon the world of an arbitrary and misleading schema. This fundamental difference with Gongsun Long is no accident: as will be discussed at more length in chapter 2, the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou seems to have developed his philosophy in direct opposition to Gongsun Long and to another member of the “School of Names,” Hui Shi. And it was through the core essay of his Zhuangzi, which explicitly made fun of the Gongsun Longzi’s logical terminology, that later readers interpreted the rest of the Daoist tradition, and what it had to say about language and signs.

Introduction

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However, while the stance of Daoism with regard to arche‑semiotics was opposite to that of the Gongsun Longzi, the basic issues were the same: What are words, and how do they relate to things? Even more importantly, the bundles of impulses and anxieties that motivated Daoist arche‑semiotics were the same ones that motivated Gongsun Long. Daoists also saw signs as outward expressions of a deeply held inner subject—but because they were suspicious of those signs, they usually concluded that subjectivity was ultimately private, something to be guarded rather than put out into the world. Daoists also saw language as enmeshed in social and political history—but because they saw language as unstable and unreliable, overexplanation led only to political danger, and one would be better off withdrawing from the world into silence, or at least into safer communities where the problems of interpretation could be overcome. The content of Daoist ideas about signs and language is remarkably similar to those of our own age, heavily influenced by Derrida and poststructuralism. Large swaths of the academy have taken it for granted, for decades now, that language is inherently unstable, and that texts do not have a single meaning that can be caught and fixed under an exegetical eye. Many scholars have already noticed the parallels between the Daoists and Derrida in terms of the content of their attacks on the stability of language, and this body of work will be discussed at length in chapter 2. However, while the content of these ideas is very similar, the context is completely different. During the 1980s, the ideas of poststructuralism and discourse analysis, which had spread from France, resulted in the “culture wars” of the North American academy. Deconstruction became an explicitly political tool with which to confront the Western canon’s biases toward patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, bourgeois class interests, and anthropocentrism. Texts seemingly espousing lofty but neutral “human” values were shown, by the unstable and shifting possibilities of their own language, to also be hiding barely cloaked political interests of one powerful class after another. To read texts against themselves became, for some, a kind of radical political praxis, even a foundation for active resistance against the late‑capitalist state. In early medieval China, Daoism and its ideas about language were sometimes perceived by authorities as a potential ideological threat. But there was essentially no political action carried out in the name of the unstable sign by those influenced by Daoism. Canonical classics were held in suspicion, or reinterpreted, but they were never “deconstructed” with the goal of liberating marginalized groups. In an age of shifting regimes, factional power struggles, and foreign invasions, it would have been all too easy to

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Dao and Sign in History

question the meaning of words such as emperor or dynasty. But because the weakness of those words was so obvious, and the role of military power in upholding rule so forthright, questioning those words was exactly what could not have been tolerated. Instead, those influenced by Daoist ideas of language sometimes tried to disengage from the world. The “world” had staked out a cultural space in which words meant what they said and said what they meant: the emperor was an emperor, and you had better obey him. If one had doubts, the alternative to active belief and submission was withdrawal from society. Some withdrew into private aristocratic estates, some withdrew into kingdoms of letters, some withdrew into sacred meditation. Certainly, not all Daoists were hermits living alone in mountainside huts—and few of the texts presented in this study advocate a hermit’s life. But, on the whole, the trend was the same: in early China, suspicion of the efficacy of signs usually led toward a valuation of quiet private life, rather than toward political resistance. One might say that Daoist arche‑semiotics are very similar in content to poststructuralist semiotics, but have a very different context. However, the very notion that there could be a firm division between a stable “content” and “context” radically contradicts everything that Daoism and poststructuralism ought to be saying. If we take seriously the notion that words are not stable signs pointing to transcendent meanings, then it would be a mistake to say that there is one stable “content” of Daoist arche‑semiotic ideas and impulses which can be abstracted and summarized out of early Chinese texts, and one stable “content” that can be simplified out of Derrida’s ludic and turgid prose. It would be a mistake to isolate and compare these two “contents” as if they could be snatched out of their contexts and re‑presented in language that was simpler, more neutral, and straightforward. Doing so would assume that the actual “content” of these theories is false, and that texts do indeed have straightforward, delimitable meanings, which can be isolated and removed from language. In fact, this study has to operate in this self‑contradictory mode: as do the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, Of Grammatology, and any other piece of writing that wants to argue that the signifying power of language is inherently unstable. But, despite the inescapability of this contradiction, it is still possible to explain this as an aspiration: as much as possible, this study will try to present the content and the context of Daoist arche‑semiotics as inextricable. That which Daoist arche‑semiotics is, is what it worked itself out as. If one could imaginarily isolate “content” from “context,” one might notice that this notion seems similar to Derrida’s famous concept of différance.

Introduction

21

A portmanteau of the French words meaning “to differ” and “to defer,” différance is meant to explain Derrida’s concept of language as something that performs rather than possesses meaning. According to Derrida’s critique of traditional Western “phonocentrism” and “logocentrism,” most philosophers had imagined oral language as full of meaning which was immediately present to the speakers in a quasi-theological fashion, filling language as if via a ghostly presence. According to such a concept, meaning was a “thing” that was “inside” the words, immediately accessible to speakers and listeners—but written language was only the representation of speech, and hence was the sign of meaning’s absence. In contrast, différance was how Derrida conceived of all language, oral or written: meaning is not perceived in the instant of a lightning flash, but is created sequentially and differentially as one word follows another, in the order of a sentence. As one listens or reads, one has the experience of perceiving meaning through this flow of words, but meaning is never something that stays still, within a moment in time. Language is something that happens always and only within time, hence meaning is never “present” in the instant: it is always either coming toward one from the future, or fading away into the past. As a result, the concept of différance says that there ultimately cannot be any “content” of language use that can be extracted for eternity from the actual words which play themselves out within the world, and within history. Again, it is embarrassing to “summarize” différance like this. (Though at least I am far from the first to do so.) Any act of summary either disproves it (if the summary succeeds in conveying an abstractable meaning for the term), or else proves it (if the summary fails in extracting that meaning from an irreducibly complex original). In other words, one can truly represent the false, or falsely represent something beyond true/false claims. In either case, the summary is not helpful to achieving understanding. The only saving grace of summarizing explanations is that they, too, happen in time, via différance, and hence if they don’t “capture” meaning from Derrida, it might be that they could re‑perform it via a parallel process. But a truly différantiel treatment of différance would probably have to be something that unfolded over time, that traced the historicity of language. This kind of analysis is normally thought of as Foucaultian, not Derridean, and indeed this book owes a great deal to Foucault’s methods, and those of his followers in many streams of theory. Foucault does not play a very explicit role in what follows, because Chinese Daoist writers have little to say that sounds like Foucault. But the drive toward historicizing the sign will be constantly present.

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Dao and Sign in History

It is also appropriate in the terms of Daoism to consider Daoist discourse historically. The Laozi and Zhuangzi both insist that language is not transcendent, that it is conventional, and works by untrustworthy binary oppositions, which impose a false order upon consciousness and upon the world. The Zhuangzi goes farther, and also proposes that there is no set of constant values that can order the world through language, but that instead the world is in constant transformation. The word for “transformation,” hua 化, had been frequently used in Chinese philosophy before Zhuang Zhou, but it had been used as a transitive verb: the wise ruler “transforms” the people of his kingdom through moral force or smart policy, so that they are obedient, peaceful, and productive. In contrast, Zhuang Zhou renounces this moral‑political vision by making hua intransitive: things constantly transform of themselves. It is a vision of constant flux, notably similar to that of Heraclitus. If one tries to discern the principles of a Daoist arche‑semiotics through such a lens, it would not make sense to try to isolate an originary moment of sign‑logic which is the “real” doctrine. Instead, it would be more honest and faithful to follow these arche‑semiotic impulses through all of their own transformations. That is what this study aims to do. Many other studies have done valuable work establishing a strong basis for comparison of Daoist theories of language with those of Derrida and other recent theorists. Those are invaluable, pioneering scholarship, which have made real contributions and which will be discussed at some length in chapter 2. This book reviews some of the same ground, but then tries to build on the foundations others have laid and examine how Daoist arche‑semiotics influenced many aspects of the culture of early medieval China.

Chapter Outline Once one concedes the necessity of history, one is also conceding the necessity of multiplicity. The Daoist notion of “transformation” needs to be taken seriously: historical contingency and contextualization necessarily implies a discourse that transforms as it moves from author to author, from age to age. Hence, the right way to pursue a Daoist theory of signs would be to examine the history of multiplicity in the working‑out of those original impulses from Laozi and Zhaungzi, and this is what I have tried to do. Two introductory chapters outline the theoretical stakes involved in reading each of those writers from the present moment, in particular with comparison to

Introduction

23

Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida—not because phenomenology provides the most direct introduction to arche‑semiotics, but because it frames language relationally in a way that brings out the social character of early Chinese signs. After these introductory chapters, the next three chapters of the book focus on three separate moments in the Six Dynasties period (220–589 CE), when influence from earlier Daoist arche‑semiotics first became a major influence on cultural development, resulting in four very different kinds of historical positionings. The final chapter, on Liu Xie’s Wenxin Diaolong, marks a partial return to a more abstracted theoretical stance, using the canonical work of literary criticism to reflect on the limits of historicist analysis even while it speaks to the state of literary semiotics at the turn of the sixth century. The study begins, in chapter 1, with an examination of the ways in which the philosophy of Laozi proposes a sort of qualified silence as the preeminent way of relating to the world: this is an arche‑semiotics that celebrates the refusal to signify. In order to flesh out the more general implications of this position, the chapter then explicates this by comparison with the late, language‑centric philosophy of Heidegger, who felt a great attraction for Eastern thought in general and Laozi in particular. Because this chapter, and this book, is jointly addressed to audiences of theorists and Sinologists not familiar with each others’ scholarly traditions, a fair amount of background information is included on both the pre‑Qin philosophical setting and the development of phenomenology. However, while this first chapter does provide important background information on both the content of early Daoist arche‑semiotics and the phenomenological constructs that will be used to analyze them, it attempts to go beyond such summaries, to also begin a theoretical argument about the ambiguous relationship of silence to history. In particular, it will argue that Laozi is able to convincingly put forward a call to non‑signification because he himself is only a quasi‑historical figure and a product of his text rather than the reverse; this standpoint before history is what makes him an attractive figure to Heidegger, while also preventing Heidegger from replicating his philosophy. This will set the stage for the second chapter, in which this argument is further adumbrated with respect to Zhuangzi, Levinas, and Derrida. Chapter 2 plays a parallel and complementary role to that of the first chapter, simultaneously introducing and comparing Laozi’s successor, Zhuangzi, with the postwar phenomenological tradition as represented by Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, and Derrida’s critique of that book in “Violence and Metaphysics,” as well as in his later writings. Discussion of Zhuangzi’s

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Dao and Sign in History

arche‑semiotic similarities with Laozi goes on to suggest that this later text allows for greater individuation of the person of Zhuang Zhou, and thus a greater self‑consciousness with regard to the impossibility of speaking concretely about the Way, without actual entrance into history. The history of scholarly comparisons of Zhuangzi’s positions with those of Derrida is reviewed, and it is suggested that a needed addition is comparison with Derrida’s engagement with Levinas, since it is there that the ethico‑political context of early Chinese philosophy comes closest to being replicated. That engagement is reviewed, focusing on Levinas’s expressed horror at the possibility of silence, and Derrida’s nuanced critique, which argues for the necessity of a mutual constitution of speech and silence once one enters the domain of history. Finally, it is argued that this model of mutual constitution is the best way to assess the theoretical value of Daoist arche‑semiotics: unlike the mysterious pre‑Qin Daoist figures, the intellectuals who will be examined in the following four chapters are usually more historically locatable, and hence, taking cues from Derrida, it would be appropriate to seek how both the fact of their writing, and their aspirations to cut themselves off from signification, should be understood as co‑determined, rather than as a simple failure to live up to impossible ideals. Chapter 3 begins the historical exposition of Six Dynasties appropriations of Daoist arche‑semiotics by examining in detail the figures generally associated with the school of “Obscure Learning” (xuanxue), in particular Wang Bi, Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, and Xiang Xiu. This group is oftentimes casually represented as offering a Daoist protest against the prevailing Confucian standards of the court; as is already known to specialists, this is only partially accurate, as the Obscure Learning at times represented more of a fusion of Daoist and Confucian ideas than a protest. With regard to issues of arche‑semiotics, all of the major names associated with the school did indeed share Daoist skepticism about the efficacy and perfectibility of names; however, the way in which they made use of these sentiments varied greatly. Ji Kang and Ruan Ji, as the core of the famous literary circle the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove,” were the most stereotypical, hiding their persons behind screens of non‑signification; on the other hand, figures such as Wang Bi and Shan Tao were much more comfortable with using the inherent instability of the literary sign for flattery and career advancement. On this basis, the movement is theorized as one in which arche‑semiotic skepticism is remembered as a moment of political upheaval, not as itself offering a kind of ideological sign of withdrawal (as is commonly represented), but as opening up a space within which figures could invent different kinds of positionings—some of retreat, others of engagement.

Introduction

25

Chapter 4 discusses the influence of Laozi and Zhuangzi on the arche‑semiotics of religious Daoism, beginning with the early Celestial Masters group, and continuing on through the alchemical researches of Ge Hong, and then the emergence of the Shangqing school under Yang Xi and Tao Hongjing. In general, the writers examined in these chapters are much more concerned with the materiality of the sign than the xuanxue group. In the case of the Celestial Masters, this results in admonition to “cut off one’s traces,” abstain from signs as one would abstain from other indulgences of desire; in Ge Hong, influence of his alchemical interests leads him to reimagine the sign as a means by which to transform matter into the ethereality of the concept. These different streams are combined with the new interest in the art of calligraphy to form a Shangqing approach to textuality which praises the refined, elegant sign at the same time as it wants to restrict the audience of its signification. Ultimately, it is argued that the anxiety over materiality that results in the various forms of heavenly writing forms an interesting inversion of the Derridean critique of logocentrism— here, writing is apotheosized precisely because, unlike orality, it is thought to be immune to différance. Chapter 5 examines the tradition of Daoist arche‑semiotics as it was received by Buddhist translators and intellectuals in the fourth and fifth centuries. After a general introduction to the historical background of Buddhism’s importation into China, the chapter traces how a series of translators beginning with the central Asian monk Kumarajiva and his Chinese partner Monk Zhao, tried to stop the free use of Daoist terms for translation of the sutras, even while they appealed to Daoist principles about the incommensurability of words to do so. As their influence traveled south with other monks such as Daoan, Huiyuan, and Zhu Daosheng, the discomfort with the materiality of the sign that was seen in southern Daoist sects began also to bleed over into Buddhism. In particular, Daosheng put forward an early conception of sudden enlightenment (anticipating Zen doctrine) which conceived the written text as a stumbling block to enlightenment, like any other physical object, and this concept in turn influenced the thought and poetry of the canonical writer Xie Lingyun. Here, the influence of Daoist arche‑semiotics is perhaps at its closest approach to the Derridean vision of European logocentrism, the text as a dead letter that needs transcending. Finally, chapter 6 returns to a more speculative and abstract topic, taking an extended look at Liu Xie’s Text‑Mind and the Carving of Dragons, the most canonical of all works of traditional Chinese literary criticism, in the context of Derrida’s theory of the supplement. Unlike the preceding three chapters, this chapter is deliberately decontextualizing, rather than

26

Dao and Sign in History

recontextualizing, its primary‑source text. This is because (1) Liu Xie is, in his period, uniquely difficult to contextualize (comparatively little biographical data survives, and his work is sui generis); (2) the Text‑Mind has already been decontextualized and appropriated by a recent generation of theorists working in China, and it seemed worthwhile to join that discussion; and (3) it is helpful to use this text to address, in a more theoretical way than the previous chapters, the possibilities and the limitations inherent in examining the social dimensions of semiotics. For Liu Xie, in positing a universal wen manifesting through myriad permutations, seems to agree with Derrida that there is nothing outside textuality; and a reading of his rhetorical gestures against the backdrop of Derrida’s deconstruction of Rousseau can suggest what it might mean to live and read a textual phenomenology, if one took seriously the notion that social life was inherently arche‑semiotic. In lieu of a formal conclusion to this book, Chapter 6 ends with brief general speculation as to the uses to which an arche‑semiotics might be put in literary reading.

Part One

Daoist Semiotics in Comparative Perspective

CHAPTER ONE

Ways through Language

The Blank that Cannot be Blanked The way that can be spoken of Is not the constant way; The name that can be named Is not the constant name.1 Daoism, perhaps the most fruitfully ill‑defined of philosophical/religious traditions, begins2 with this memorable confession of its own impossibility, the first sentence of the Laozi (or Dao De Jing). Memorable, even in trans‑ lation—and yet the English‑only reader can only know the half of it: for the words way and spoken are in fact both attempts to express competing and complementary senses of the one word dao. A traditional understanding of the phrase in Chinese is captured well by this traditional translation; and yet it is also a ridiculous contortion to use different senses of the same word in such a tightly coiled sentence. But other options are either weak (“The speaking that can be spoken”) or weird (“The Way that can be Way‑ed”). So interpretation has often settled on compromise translations, which admit competing meanings into the speaking of this awful word, dao. Fitting, that this speaking/”way‑ing” can never do or be done, and remain still what it is! The sentence and all its difficulties, curious enough as an aphorism, are maddeningly predictive when treated as the gateway to a text, and a multistreamed tradition initiated by that text. The casual, curious, or spiritually minded reader of Laozi has fewer hermeneutical resources to call upon than the scholar, but in the end is merely doomed to different kinds of confusion. This is an elusive text, obscure and obscurantist, which unlike the Mohists or the Gongsun Longzi does not pretend to say what it means or mean what it says. The opening declaration is a (non-)statement

29

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of method and of principle, by which a reader is hopefully conditioned to accept this mode of (uncommunicative) communication as good.3 Daoist traditions, a complex of competing impulses, assumptions, purposes, and practices, are nonetheless generally alike in taking from this opening declaration a focus on arche‑semiotics, and a deep‑seated assumption of the importance of arche‑semiotic questions in determining ethical and political praxis. This is not unusual in itself: during the great first period of Chinese philosophy, the “pre‑Qin” (from the sixth to the third centuries BCE), competing advocates of one philosophy or another all acknowledged the importance of arche‑semiotics for determining proper behavior. But the first Daoists were unusual in insisting on the foundational character of arche‑semiotics at the same time that they expressed deep skepticism about the possibilities of the sign. They were not opposed to language as such. But they insisted that the most important thing in the universe, the Way, could not be captured by language. In another, later passage, even the word Way is confessed to be nothing more than a “nickname,” (字) and that, if one had to force a name onto this essentially nameless entity, one might as well call it, “the great” (大).4 At times, the Way even seems to be engaged in a game of phenomenological hide‑and‑seek: “The way conceals itself in being nameless”5 as if it is deliberately trying to avoid entering into language.6 Although there is evidence from the unearthed Guodian texts that the dao may have been originally considered as having a “form” (zhuang 狀), even that evidence suggests a form “without shape” (wu xing 無形)—a tidy con‑ tradiction to encapsulate the reticence of the dao’s coming‑into‑signhood.7 Curiously, in this text the word name is almost always used as a foil for the dao. There is no general theory of “names” per se, as in the Gongsun Longzi passages discussed in the introduction. Instead, for this text, a “name” seems to be specifically the kind of thing the dao cannot have. However, this should not be taken to mean that the Laozi believes that semiotics is only problematic in the case of the dao, and that language has an easy relation‑ ship with reality for more common sensate properties. On the contrary, the text repeatedly advances a notion that language (and other signs) are not merely potentially ineffective, but actually distorting in their representation of a wide array of objects and concepts. One of the clearest such passages comes in the second section, right after the famous opening quoted above: The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad.

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Thus Something and Nothing produce each other; The difficult and the easy produce each other; The long and the short off‑set each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Note and sound harmonize with each other; Before and after follow each other. Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.8 This focus on binary oppositions comes up elsewhere throughout the text, but this particular voicing of the issue is the clearest in explicating a sort of miniature structuralism, delineated pair by pair. Words do not have inherent meaning outside of a structure of binary difference. “Long,” “high,” and “before” can only have meaning in opposition to “short,” “low,” and “after.” This gives a very different understanding of the concept of “position” than that adopted by the Gongsun Longzi, in which objects are correctly arranged when attached to their own inherently proper names. Passages such as these also are willing to do away with the obsessive‑compulsive aesthetics of neatness that seemed to be driving the Gongsun Longzi. Here, the “beautiful” and the “good” are just two labels to be mixed up. Similarly, the very last section of the work, perhaps ironically anticipating Keats, states that “Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful.”9 In isolation, such statements could be part of a traditional Confucian complaint that names have been misused, the “ugly” being mislabeled as “beautiful.” But what follows makes clear that there is no proper use of such pairs: relative ideas are created by language, and are not logically prior to it. It can be read as a radical nominalist critique: the first exemplary pair, something versus nothing, could just as well be translated as “existence” and “nonexistence” creating each other 有無相生. This line has been sometimes been read mystically, or as a relic of vanished cosmological creation narratives; but given its position nestled within this critique of language, it is at least as plausible to think that it implies that questions of ontology are primarily an artifact of language. It is because the elements of all these conceptual binary pairs create each other through language, rather than having any necessary grounding in reality, that the sage is said to practice the teaching that uses no words. How that happens is not well explained. But for the purposes of this study, it does not need to be. The basic suspicion of this text toward language should be clear: the Laozi is pervaded by a sense that names can impose false structures upon the world. This sly interference in

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binary ­linguistic structures could be thought of as a special form of decon‑ struction.10 However, if we are to grant Derrida’s most powerful assertion that language, in its character of différance, always unfolds within time, then we have to posit the unspeakability of the dao from within history. This is the natural requirement of the “historical premise” of arche‑semiotics, as outlined in the Introduction—but also of the “subjective premise,” since subjectivity is inextricable from history. Does the Laozi assert that dao cannot be spoken because it has an ineffable always‑present fullness that cannot be committed to the decay and accidents of a world of mere language? Or is it unspeakable because its speaking never ends, it is always in the process of its own unfolding within the world? And who is it that would refuse the speaking? Answers cannot be plucked from a single moment in time, as if the fullness of “Daoism” rested entirely at the instant when “Laozi” conceived the text that bears his name. Daoism is an amorphous phenom‑ enon which only exists as a series of historical formations, and the person of Laozi is not a human but a textual ghost, haunting the early history of Chinese philosophy. This chapter will work to introduce the strange subjectivity and histor‑ icity of Daoist arche‑semiotics by showing how the Laozi, at the beginning of that tradition, seems to refuse the status of a text produced by a subject within history. Quotes of some of the text’s most famous statements on language, provided above, have already indicated how the Laozi is suspicious of names and binary categorizations. The next section will focus on the difficulty of determining a biographical center for this text, and how that lack of a center is related to the text’s arche‑semiotic reluctance to signify a self. The following section will then discuss the same arche‑semiotic reticence as a reflection of its almost unlocatable historicity. These sections will then be contextualized for contemporary analysis by a comparative discussion of Heidegger, whose admiration for the Laozi is well known, and a concluding section on the value of arche‑semiotic skepticism for rethinking subjectivity and historicity.

The Rise of the Wordless Restoring the original biography of a man named “Laozi” is nearly impossible, because there is no such individual, except in mythography. The standard version of that myth, as narrated by the Chinese Livy, “Grand Historian” Sima Qian, reads in part:

Ways through Language

33

[Laozi] was an archivist in the Zhou royal storehouses. Confucius travelled to Zhou, to ask Laozi about ritual. Laozi said, “That of which you speak, the people and their bones have all rotted away, only their words remain. So when a gentleman meets with an [appreciative] age, he rides a carriage; when he does not meet one, then he walks while covering his own head. I have heard that a good merchant’s deepest stores seem empty, and the gentleman has exceeding virtue, while his face appears to be that of a fool. Rid yourself of your pride and your many desires, your robustness and wantonness, these are of no benefit to your body. That’s all I have to say to you.” Confucius left, and said to his disciples, “I know that birds can fly, and that fish can swim, and that beasts can walk. For the walkers there are snares, for the swimmers there are nets, and for the fliers there are arrows. But as for dragons, I do not know how they ride the wind and clouds and mount to heaven. Today I saw Laozi, and he was like a dragon!” In Laozi’s practice of the Way and of virtue, he studied how to make seclusion and anonymity his duty. He lived in Zhou for a long while, and then when he saw the imminent decline of Zhou, he left. He came to the western pass, and the guard of the pass, Yin Xi, said, “Since you are going out to hide yourself, I require you to write a book for me.” Therefore Laozi wrote him a book in two essays, on the meaning of the Way and of virtue, over 5,000 characters, and then he left, and no one knew where he ended up.11 It is a very odd kind of biography that focuses on the resistance of its subject to biography, but that is exactly what this text does. Laozi is presented, amazingly, as a royal historian—but one who instructs Confucius about the uselessness of history and records in getting at the real lives of people who have passed away. Semiotic representation is that which binds the subject to history: if one meets favorable historical circumstances, one shows oneself in sumptuary elegance; if not, then one withdraws into the informal naturalness of the tumbleweed. And Confucius takes away from this encounter a conclusion not about biography in general, but about Laozi in particular. He is a dragon, and cannot be “caught.” The Zhuangzi will popularize a notion of linguistic signs as “traps” or “snares” for mean‑ ing; that trope will be discussed repeatedly in later chapters. For now, it is enough to note that Sima was writing after the Zhuangzi had taken

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Dao and Sign in History

shape, and was almost certainly familiar with the trope in question, which is in turn probably shaping this anecdote. “Laozi” the human subject is a meaning that cannot be captured by anything, even the outer text called the Laozi. On the contrary, as Sima editorializes, “In Laozi’s practice of the Way and of virtue, he aimed to labor at reclusion and anonymity [老子脩 道德 , 其學以自隱無名為務].”12 This sentence clearly echoes the statement about the dao itself, cited above: “The way conceals itself in being nameless [道隱無名].”13 It is as if Sima is equating Laozi with the dao as equally deliberate in refusing to show itself within a historical name. Hiding oneself in namelessness like this, as a way of escaping arche‑semiotic engagement in history, will eventually become one of the most important legacies of Daoism. Authorial names, in archaic civilizations still enmeshed in orality, exist as a special kind of author‑function. Foucault’s interest, in his famous essay, “What Is an Author?,” was primarily critical, exposing the construction of literary‑biographical narratives as based on certain assumptions regarding the meaning of identity, and linking the construction of authoritative canons to a stylistics that was always the projection of the critic upon the screen of the revered name.14 But with certain archaic texts, the first extant versions are often those in which the author‑function had been operating unnoticed for centuries, producing multiple cycles of textual agglomeration and redac‑ tion through conditions of textual circulation and reception difficult or impossible to reconstruct. Those who wish to venture into such disputes, with their thousands of intricate corners and doubtful doubling‑backs are advised to bring patience to the labyrinth, and a long string: such questions are usually sufficient for a career. Just as the Sanskritist would be properly hesitant to isolate an actual Vyāsa, and the Hellenist would be reluctant to offer a brief précis of the relationship of the “historical” “Homer” to the “Homeric” “epics,” so would a Sinologist asked about Laozi perhaps do best to speak the speech which cannot be spoken.15 But since silence is here as impossible as precision, let us narrate imprecision. Textual critics and intellectual historians of recent decades have produced a variety of theories as to the origin of the Laozi, but for the most part, only the most conservative are willing to consider that this is a single‑author text dating to the mid‑first millennium BCE. This more traditional historical narrative holds that Laozi may have been, as the Sima Qian biography suggests, an older contemporary of Confucius. There is one reference in the Analects to someone who might be Laozi if one squints and wishes for it to be true;16 there are several passages therein that might but probably don’t show the influence of the Laozi.17 Other pre‑Qin works

Ways through Language

35

after the Analects testify not merely to the existence of Laozi, but also to the actual notion that Confucius came to ask him about ritual: one would expect pro‑Laozi texts to do this, since they imply his position of mastery, and the Zhuangzi does indeed offer several, but there are also Confucian texts that take the anecdote as genuine.18 In fact, the dually Daoist and Confucian heritage of this anecdote can be observed from Sima Qian’s original text: Confucius asks about rites (a very Confucian concern) but Laozi’s answer is completely off‑topic, and offers Confucius a laundry list of Daoist precepts without relevance to ritual—a situation that D. C. Lau argued was due to Sima Qian’s haphazard combination of Confucian‑stream and Daoist‑stream narrative traditions.19 But apart from the unanswerable questions of who Laozi was, when he lived, and whether he had any bodily substance or was merely an accident of the random churning of archaic narration, we should still ask: Even if “he” did exist, did “he” write the book attributed to “him”? It certainly would make things a good deal easier to interpret if he did, for once we settle on a date for the human author, we can proceed along normal lines to offer a reading of the work in historical context. And traditional exegesis was, of course, based upon the assumption that the work was the child of the man. This was true not only among religious Daoist cults, who had deified the man and turned the work into a revelation from the supremely existent dao, but also among less ideologically committed readers, who would have been trained to think of the literary work as a unitary expression of one mind in one historical setting. Traditional Chinese criticism, with some important exceptions, has been, on the whole, vehemently historicist. But there never was any historical Laozi to be found; and in the last few decades, he has been even more conspicuously absent. Archaeological discoveries at Mawangdui and Guodian have provided considerably different versions of the text of the Laozi, demonstrating the persistence of a fluid tradition considerably later than the traditional date of the person Confucius met.20 It has become clear that the received text of the Laozi, stable since at least the turn of the first millennium, is not traceable to any founder‑figure. There are good reasons why this text has appeared to many non‑Sinologists as a book with no time, no history, and no subjectivity.21 With that in mind, consider how this text without an author speaks from its own “authorial” voice: The multitude are joyous As if partaking of the t’ai lao offering

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Dao and Sign in History

Or going up to a terrace in spring. I alone am inactive and reveal no signs, Like a baby that has not yet learned to smile, Listless as though with no home to go back to.22 There is still an important residue of an unquestioning structural binarism: the difference between the “multitude” and “I” is portrayed as real, and deeply felt. But the response is not to rescue the signs of the “I,” to insist that one has been misunderstood and to try to become better known through working on one’s own rhetoric or self‑presentation. Instead, the strategy of the “I” is a retreat from arche‑semiotics: s/he23 does not want to reveal anything. This refusal to signify is in itself a kind of subjectivity (or absence of sub‑ jectivity): a newborn not only prelinguistic but pre‑smile, or a person who does not belong anywhere. These are being contrasted with humanity at its most social, in community ritual celebrations and gatherings. The decision to construct a non‑signifying self is simultaneously a declaration that one is refusing to join the society for which signs are necessary. Another passage puts the same arche‑semiotic reluctance in terms that are slightly less radical, but in some ways more instructive. Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign. It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me. Those who understand me are few; Those who imitate me are honoured. Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.24 Words’ having an ancestor, and affairs’ having a sovereign, is a statement of signs’ source within a subject—and simultaneously a confession of distance from that subject. Within this text, ancestors and sovereigns are distant figures, far removed and not active in the lives of the living people who comprise a society. In fact, words may be easy to understand, but because of that distance and the ignorance of the masses, the “I” cannot be understood, and remains aloof from the world. This is not necessarily the aloofness of a real sovereign; it is also perfectly possible to read the “I” as asserting a kind of inner self‑governance on the part of a social outcast. The word that Lau translates as “honoured,” gui 貴, probably should be read as “honorable” or “noble” (and hence rare). Parallel with “few,” the notion is that there are only a select elite who can penetrate the non‑signifying surface

Ways through Language

37

of the speaker’s person and truly understand him. This is what drives the final fashion‑based metaphor: the external signs the Daoist presents to the world are low‑class; one harbors in one’s breast a fantastic secret which is non‑signifying, innately noble to oneself, but not interpretable. Considered in this light, signs are the junction where the subject meets society. Daoist arche‑semiotic suspicion is part of a reluctance to acknowledge the standards by which the world carries on. Although deeply embedded in its own history, the Laozi promotes a vision by which the non‑signifying subject could escape from history.

The Laozi and History As described above, there are plenty of good reasons to think that the text of the Laozi is a mishmash of texts, oral or written, composed at a late date and in tension with a variety of movements and schools. It may have been produced by those who were reacting against Mohists just as much as against Confucians; it may have been composed by people better categorized as Huang‑Lao adherents, or even as Legalists, rather than Daoists. But this is an enormously complex story which cannot be told here. Instead, for the purpose of understanding how Daoist arche‑semiotics became a discourse influential on later readers, it is sufficient to tell a simpler, more traditional story. According to most early accounts, Daoism in general, and the Laozi in particular, are antagonists of Confucianism specifically. The biography of Laozi given by Sima Qian, and quoted at length above, is a relic of that discursive tradition: the encounter with Confucius is a kind of fictionalization of what was perceived of as a conflict between competing schools. It is a dialogue closely related to many such fictional encounters in the Zhuangzi, and the episode may even have been narrated in a version of the Zhuangzi now lost. Fuller discussion of the Zhuangzi and its legacy will be left for chapter 2, but here it is sufficient to note that the profound influence of the Zhuangzi helped to construct for later readers the notion that Laozi and Confucius were frenemies, and hence that Daoism was primarily to be framed as a discursive and political alternative to Confucianism. In order to understand how Daoism’s arche‑semiotics were perceived historically, therefore, it is necessary to explain a bit about its putative foil. Confucianism is a massively complex tradition of its own, highly resistant to summary, and even farther off the track of what is explicable here. However, it can be said that the person of Confucius is, by general

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Dao and Sign in History

consensus, somewhat more historically attested than that of Laozi—there is little doubt that the proper name of Confucius was Kong Qiu, or that he lived in the late sixth to early fifth century BCE, or that he was from the state of Lu, or that he had a mixed career in and out of court service for various regional rulers, or that he was able during his life to attract a sizeable body of disciples. Moreover, while there are a considerable number of texts whose authorship or editorship was falsely attributed to Confucius, there is general agreement that the Analects, at least, mostly represents a gathering of Confucius’s statements recorded by his disciples within the first few generations after his death. And on the whole, those statements suggest a cohesive ethico‑political philosophy, focused around the impulse toward a sort of social harmony through universal propriety maintained by active engagement. Relationships are properly built upon distinctions (father‑son, ruler‑minister, husband‑wife), which must be strengthened even as they are transcended; this process is effectuated by personal self‑cultivation, care for both the local particular other and for the abstracted people of a state, and an honest arche‑semiotics of one’s person, in which one labors to be good rather than to seem great. There is a deeply felt humanistic burden that animates this ethics: the ideal world it posits is a human world, in which all real material limits, social structures, and psychological impulses are structured and channeled into a realistic harmony, not metaphysically transcended or eschatologically abolished. As traditionally indulged, it is a philosophy with an aesthetically realist appeal, in that it locates profound significance and value in quotidian detail that is universally practicable. (As disparaged in modernity, Confucianism later became a similarly realist class nightmare, in which the distinctions policed by an obsessive‑compulsive ritualism prove much easier to maintain than the genuine care for the other, which they are meant to shape rather than to choke off.) In either case, the critique the Laozi offers is of the supposed realism25 of Confucius—at least, as it is received by later tradition.26 Aesthetic realisms are not normally dismantled by politics, but by the growing realization that no act of mimesis was ever going to be adequate to the real. Laoist critique of Confucius is directed squarely at the hope for an omnipresent propriety, since propriety depends upon definable and enforceable distinction, and distinction is a fantastical dream of language. Hence, a true “realism” ought to be constituted by a deescalation of the compulsion to perfect the world, a stepping‑down from activity into mere existence, a withdrawal most of all from definition, rather than hoping via an obsessive pursuit of correct definition finally to make the myriad is‑es of the world correspond with its

Ways through Language

39

oughts. Hence, the standard features of the philosophical outlook attributed to Laozi: a belief that one acts through inaction, a valorization of weakness over strength, an abandonment of the deliberate for the spontaneous and the human for the natural, a belief that language does not necessarily represent truth, nor truth the Way. For example: A man of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why he has virtue. A man of the lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue. The former never acts but leaves nothing undone. A man of the highest benevolence acts, but from no ulterior motive. A man of the highest rectitude acts, but from ulterior motive. A man most conversant in the rites acts, but when no one responds rolls up his sleeves and resorts to persuasion by force. Hence when the way was lost there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites. The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith And the beginning of disorder; Foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way And the beginning of folly. Hence the man of large mind abides in the thick not in the thin, in the fruit not in the flower. Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.27 It is too easy, and incorrect, to say that this text is launching a determined critique of Confucianism—but only because putting the issue in these terms mistakes a set of philosophical gestures for a program. Nonetheless, without a program, this passage still opposes values that Confucius promotes: the positive, active, moral, and decorous fusion of ethical behavior with ritual practice. Those values undergird a fascinating worldview, in which ethical questions are viewed with an almost neoclassical aesthetic, assigning to each element in the social fabric its own proper place, and insisting that the distinctions between those places be drawn finely and so as to leave the elements in harmony. It is a philosophical outlook whose vast humanistic potential was endlessly adumbrated into a long and gloriously complex

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discourse, Confucianism—but in its incipient moment, in the Analects, in the originary scene of Confucius with his gathered disciples, it is not a dis‑ course, but only a teaching, an orientation, a stance toward the world. And this text, in opposing it, is also occupying a stance: perhaps deliberate, but opposing deliberation. In this sense, the development of a Daoist tradition was an odder phenomenon than the parallel development of Confucianism, for an injunction to primary silence is not auspicious for the creation of tradition. But here, in its own origin (if indeed the Laozi is an original text rather than a recompilation from a thought‑stream’s coming‑into‑tradition), the Laoist method matches its position. Do not develop morality, we are told, do not push forward to establish precepts and standards, for such steps are both the signs of decay from the simplicity and natural spontaneity of the Way, and also the tools by which the Way is further carved up and processed. Every step forward in the ritualistic ethics of Confucius is, to Laozi, but another stumble. This is a primitivism.28 And there are, in it, brief gestures toward the sort of historicist primitivism that is familiar in the West since the pre‑Ro‑ mantics: this is, partially, a work of political philosophy and there is a clear advocacy of the dismantling of those distinctions that one normally associates with “high” civilization: titles and class distinction, legal codes and systems of honor, education, transportation, and trade. Nonetheless, there is very little consciousness of history, no assumption that such marks of civilization would normally exist in a trajectory of progress, and hence the primitivism is not that of a Rousseau slavering over a discursively Edenic diorama. Laozi’s is not a historicist, but a phenomenological primitivism—the human is to withdraw from the being‑human, and return instead to the natural: one is enjoined to be like an infant, a supine valley, an uncarved block. And herein is the real relevance of Laozi to Confucius, as a historic‑ ally unlocatable critique of a historically definite position. One could not seriously argue that historicism is unnecessary, much less impossible for a modern reading of the Laozi; regardless of the vast imprecisions inherent in any discussion of authorial or textual dating, the Laozi represents a thought tradition clearly specific to first‑millenium‑BCE China. However, historicist analysis here reveals that the Laozi is a text that resists historical pinpoint‑ ing (in that there are too many open issues concerning its authorship and transmission) while manifesting antihistoricist philosophical leanings (in that it refuses to acknowledge the actions, distinctions, and language that form the stuff of historical narrative). The serendipitous match of historicist‑re‑ sistant context to content is deeply resonant, and offers up a record of a soundless echo, speaking (it seems) from the void and on behalf of it. If

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Confucius is a voice, from a particular place and time, asserting the value of being‑located, in a family, in a governing structure, in a system of signs of personal worth, then the absent author behind the Laozi is akin to the silence of the world that eats up that too‑human speaking, the rejoinder of reticence, critique without critiquing. The “historical premise” of arche‑semiotics as outlined in the Intro‑ duction is therefore required by this text, without being applicable to it. It is clear that arche‑semiotic issues drive the Laozi’s suspicions toward social engagement: the suspicions of language as imposing false categories on the world are certainly applied to Confucian terms such as benevolence and righteousness. But at the same time, we cannot say how or why this arche‑semiotic suspicion and apparent antipathy to Confucianism arose from its own historical context, because we do not know the specifics of that context. Being able to locate the work in (probably!) the pre‑Qin period tells us a lot of basic information, but it does not allow us to read the text the way we would read an autobiography. The uses of reading the Laozi are not to apply its arche‑semiotic les‑ sons to itself, but to see how they play out in other contexts—first in the Zhuangzi, which was a text certainly originating from a clear individual; and then in the much more historically locatable world of the third‑to‑sixth centuries CE. There, it will be possible to trace with greater precision how the subject‑focused and socially focused anxieties of arche‑semiotics reflect the specific situations of clearly historical individuals. However, before moving on to that history, it is worth pausing to assess these arche‑semiotics in comparative terms. The Laozi is a familiar text to many Western readers. It has also been an influential one on twentieth‑cen‑ tury Western writers and thinkers working in many different modes. Within academic discourses of the last few decades, Daoist theories of language have been particularly fruitfully compared to those of Contintental philosophy, from Heidegger to Derrida. Although the central thesis of this book is that arche‑semiotics must be understood with respect to its historical voicing, this does not mean that comparative or external perspectives must be banished from assessment. On the contrary, the act of analyzing classical Daoism in twenty‑first‑century English foregrounds my own (and your own) separate historicity. In fact, a consideration of the implications for modern thought of Daoist arche‑semiotics should enrich, rather than distract from, the tracing of this historical discourse, which will occupy chapters 3 through 6. Doing so will show us the stakes, for our own questions and our own history, of the arche‑semiotic anxieties that led ancient Daoists to refrain from showing their own signs.

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Dao and Dasein Heidegger’s various entanglements in East Asian philosophy generally are well known. He has been one of the most influential of modern European philosophers, in Asia as elsewhere. From a very early period, his works were eagerly discussed in Japan (the first Japanese translation of Sein und Zeit appeared many years before the first English translation), and Japanese schol‑ arship on Heidegger remains among the world’s most thorough.29 Chinese philosophy has been slower to engage: the New Confucianism of Xiong Shili and his followers was inclined toward neo‑Kantianism, and hence was less amenable to phenomenology; and official Marxism during the Maoist period shut down space for alternative approaches.30 Nonetheless, interest did rebound slowly through the 1980s and is now quite robust.31 But of course, modern East Asian philosophy shows Heideggerian influence partially because Heidegger takes no pains to conceal East Asian influences—especially from Laozi and Zhuangzi. References to the Laozi will be discussed at length below; Otto Pöggeler has noted that Heidegger was familiar with the Zhuangzi, through Martin Buber’s translation, by 1930 at the latest.32 And because of this known history of influence, there has been considerable scholarly work done in recent years working comparatively with Heidegger’s thought and the Daoist traditions that influenced it. To a large degree this work was founded on two volumes published three decades ago, Graham Parkes’s edited 1987 volume, Heidegger and Asian Thought, and Reinhard May’s 1989 Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. Some scholars have continued to flesh out the details of these correspondences—for example, articles by Parkes, Chan, and Nelson have all argued for the importance of Daoist influence on Heidegger’s critique of technology, while Guenter Wolhfart has offered a closely researched proposal that Laozi 11 was the source of Heidegger’s late metaphor of the jug. However, in recent years, other scholars have taken the patterns of influence established in those works as given, and turned toward the explication of the content of Heidegger and Lao‑Zhuang thought in comparative terms. So, for example, Katrin Froese pairs off Laozi and Zhuangzi against Heidegger and Nietzsche on the question of universality versus partiality, using the topic recursively to justify comparative method.33 And Steven Burik has performed a similar recuperation by enlisting Daoist, Heideggerian, and Derridean perspectives on language and thought to think through the embeddedness of philosophy in contexts, and the possibility of comparative work.34 However one wishes to figure the relation of Heidegger and the Laozi, to whatever degree it ought to be considered “influence,” and to whatever

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ends in comparative philosophy the fact of that influence may be put, no scholar would suggest that Laozi’s influence on Heidegger somehow outweighs the entire context of the Western tradition, from Parmenides through Husserl, that he is working in and through and against. May has suggestively titled his study Heidegger’s Hidden Sources but is hardly suggesting that those hidden sources operate to the exclusion of the many obvious sources that permeate his writings. Whatever it may be, Sein und Zeit is not a roman à clef! That being the case, influence is secondary to confluence. The Laozi clearly gave Heidegger a means of saying (or at least circling round) the unsayable, and though in taking in that rhetorical form the content of his philosophy must have altered (since, especially to phenomenologists, there are no free‑floating forms, noumenal or otherwise, that get attached to the real stuff of things), there is also no revolution in his thought necessitated by the new rhetoric. And, indeed, why would Heidegger be receptive to East Asian influences unless he perceived continuities with his own already established positions? This was not the sort of thinker who, either by tem‑ perament or from principle, was eager to acknowledge explicit discontinuities in his own track of thought. It is because of this well‑known influence of Daoism upon Heideg‑ ger, and the similarities he perceived therein to his own attitudes toward language, that his work offers an interesting comparative perspective against which to assess the arche‑semiotic reticence of the Laozi. Heidegger is not simply an exegete of Daoist texts, and the goal in consulting his position is not for enlightenment into a supposedly “correct” phenomenological meaning of the Laozi. Instead, the ways in which Heidegger adapted and transformed the lessons of Daoist reticence for his own phenomenological project are useful because they can demonstrate for us what is at stake in that very distant discourse. Although ancient Chinese theories of language were incipient and unsystematised, “arche‑semiotic” rather than “semiotic” in the mode of Peirce or Saussure, this does not mean that such thoughts on language were unphilosophical. Heideggerian phenomenology can show us exactly how such writing can simultaneously be appreciated for what it is while also speaking to readers grappling with modern philosophical problems. In fact, the reason why Heidegger showed such enthusiasm for the Laozi was precisely because in its primordial, seemingly prediscursive way it anticipates the phenomenological project—and by thus standing before a period when phenomenology was possible or necessary, seemed to surpass it. Even where there is no influence, as with Heidegger, there is structural sim‑ ilarity between the half‑enunciated positions of the Laozi and the intricately

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argued treatises of those generally identified as phenomenologists. Consider the way in which Husserl enunciated phenomenology out of, and eventually against a specific background of psychologism in late—nineteenth‑century philosophy: the genius of the phenomenological method which Heidegger took from Husserl was his discovery of the “prior‑to.” As is well known to historians of phenomenology, Franz Brentano’s reputation as the pre‑phenomenological precursor of Husserl (and not merely as his influential teacher) rests upon his importation of the medieval scholastic conception of intentionality into discussions of psychological phenomena. Understanding of the world was not simply, as with the neo‑Kantians, given by a priori categories undergirding sense experience and offering it receptacles, but was in fact something to be given in experience of the object‑world: thoughts had contents. But for Brentano, this was not a turning‑away from psychological method but a rigorous employment of it, an attempt to make psychology more scientific by making it more logically sound in its philo‑ sophical assumptions. Even granting the nineteenth‑century predilection, across various fields in the social sciences and humanities, to assume that scientific precision could be achieved with materials not amenable to the scientific methods of the physical sciences, Brentano’s scientism was not merely a naive intensifier, but had the integrity of a genuine attempt to rethink foundations of epistemology. In the Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl was working out of similar impulses and assumptions about the continuity of the psychological and the philosophical, extending Brentano’s intentional method to the issue of a priori categories, and operations (his habilitation was on the psycho‑ logical underpinnings of mathematical reasoning). Even as late as his 1929 article on phenomenology for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Husserl had still reserved a place of value for “phenomenological psychology.”35 However, in that article, as had been the case long since, such a psychology was separated from, and subordinated to, the more fundamental realm of “transcendental phenomenology,” from which psychology was excluded. The establishment of this barrier between psychology and phenomenology is conventionally dated to the 1913 publication of the initial volume of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. While it is possible to overstate the rupture caused by the Ideas—it would be a mistake to declare it the firm beginning of Phenomenology as a discipline, since the real evolu‑ tion was slower and more contextual than is retrospectively reflected by that one volume—it does at least mark the first clear instance of an attitude of intellectual segregation, which was to mark most succeeding self‑identified

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phenomenologists. With the Ideas, the phenomenological became for the first time an identifiable field. The nature and character of that field, its relation to any possible external fields, whether it was the site of being, knowing, or something that transcended both—such questions remained open, and offered axes of debate until the movement petered out. But cognizance of the primary importance of a phenomenological space, stretching from the infinitely thin surface of the object, to the infinitely thin surface of the conscious, outward‑directed ego, remained a defining property of all those conventionally identified as heirs of Husserl. In this sense, the initiation of phenomenology can be seen as a parallel and complement to the Kantian revolution. Kant’s ingenious solution to the apparently insoluble skepticism of Hume was to grant his conclusions regarding the unknowability of the object‑in‑itself the status of a premise, and then simply to note that, because any potential essential natures were eternally cut off from cognition, they did not matter, and hence the thing to do in epistemology was to work out an understanding of how the mind is able to receive and process the only data to which it has access. Idealism after empiricism was a solution akin to having followed a lab rat’s maze to a desperate dead end, and then remembering that one is not a rat, but a bird. Husserl’s innovation was to set off the question of the workings of the internal world in the same way that Kant had agreed to set aside the essence of external objects, drawing firm boundaries around the unknowable in order to mark off a space of more fundamental inquiry: Kant had started from the rational Cartesian center and drawn a compass circle through the surfaces of objects, and Husserl excised that center also to create a great phenomenological doughnut. This is not just a newly separated space of philosophical inquiry, it is deemed the foundational space, because all philoso‑ phizing, even concerning the nature of the mind’s internal operations, must arise out of the mind’s contacts with the appearances of the outer world. While others of Husserl’s original circle accepted the premises of the phenomenological reduction to address separate issues, or details of the process, Heidegger’s project was something more radical, a rejection of the notion that there was any prior “ontic” to be reduced. That is, if we can say that Husserl was effectively the first to define the phenomenological space as the realm of mutual encounter between the directed attention and its would‑be objects regardless of the actual ontic nature of either mind or world, it is precisely his priority that requires this definition to be couched in the terms and by the logic of traditional ontology. In order to discover the phenomenological realm, and later to communicate it to peers, he had

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to start from the precise starting place that the phenomenological thesis argues is not foundational, namely, the question of existence. This is why the key step in Husserlian phenomenology, the transcendental reduction, can be posited as a “bracketing”—because in the historical process of an individual’s approach to the world, one cannot but start with the naive assumption that the world is actually there. To Husserl, the foundational realm of the phenomenological may be logically prior to traditional ontology, but this does not mean that it is ever the perspective from which a student of philosophy can actually begin. The phenomenological is something which has to be attained by a passing-through the ontological. Heidegger viewed this as an incomplete philosophical revolution; in the words of Daniel Dahlstrom, he “faults Husserl for his infidelity to the phenomenological method due to a failure to bracket a certain kind of scientific and naturalistic preconception of what ‘to be’ means.”36 One way of viewing Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is as an attempt to start from the phenomenological itself. This is not exactly to say that Heidegger is shy of reference to forbears—the book begins where Heidegger himself did, with Aristotle, and passes on in turn to Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Dilthey, Max Scheler. But the structure of the argument of Division I is, of course, to explicate Dasein, the notion that there is no abstract “existence” as in traditional ontology, only the being‑toward‑the‑world of the thinking human subject. This requires a demolition of Descartes, but it also replicates, with touching naïveté, the Cartesian expectation that something can be logic‑ ally grounded in itself, and developed out of itself, shifting the location of that foundation but still (perhaps unconsciously) replicating it. Husserl seems not to have fully accepted or understood this direction, believing that Heidegger’s focus on Being was actually an attempt to reduce the phenomenological to the ontological and psychological which he himself had left behind; but in fact it was quite the opposite gesture, a statement that there never had been a Being prior to the directedness which Husserl had thought to promote. No doubt, the length and complexity of this re‑laid foundation derives from the workings of Heidegger’s own mind—but those workings were set to work within an intellectual‑historical context that could not have abided a simple and brief phenomenology. Granted that Heidegger was radicalizing Husserl, framing the phenomenological in its own terms rather than those of ontology; yet the simple desire to do this could not have obviated the original technical specialization in the realms of knowledge which allowed for the phenomenological space to be opened in the first place. If there

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could ever be a phenomenological intellectual history (rather than a history of phenomenology, of which there are several excellent examples), one of its primary postulates would have to be that one starts necessarily from where and when one is. Heidegger himself never morphed into a historian, but his later work does put greater emphasis on the possible contexts in which phenomenology can arise. The example most obviously relevant in this context is the well‑known “A Dialogue on Language, between a Japanese and an Inquirer [“Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache—Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden”],” published in 1959 but based on a 1954 conversation with Tezuka Tomio, a Tokyo University professor of German poetry. The dialogue, as one might expect, revolves around issues of translation, the suitability of Japanese ver‑ sus German and Greek to express phenomenology, and the hope that new terms might fortuitously body forth the structures of Being as understood in Heidegger’s phenomenology.37 But it is structured as a (vaguely nativist) bilateral engagement through a question: Can “Eastasian”38 civilization do without accepting the highly elaborated discursive formulations that have followed the track of European reason? The premises of the dialogue betray a philosopher’s indifference to the nuances of regional and period variation, but do at least acknowledge that Being as such is not (as one might easily expect from his earlier work) context‑free. Because its Orientalism explicitly thematizes the approach to the “East” as an approach toward a different relationship with language (more poetic, less technical), the work is a good introduction to thinking through Heidegger’s relationship with the Laozi. The dialogue is, in its own way, literary. It is, of course, fiction: the separate account of the conversation given by Tezuka makes it clear that the discussion has been heavily retouched in its Heideggerian transforma‑ tion.39 Tezuka narrates a cordial conversation, but in his own description he is primarily interested in Heidegger for his readings of the poets, and is politely uneasy with some of the philosopher’s attempts to make Japanese terms fit into his schema. In the “Dialogue,” however, there is a meeting of the minds between East and West, rather than a somewhat imaginative use of a native informant. This is a special conversation—and it self‑referentially comes around to the conclusion that the heart of Being does indeed lie in such moments: J: In our ancient Japanese poetry, an unknown poet sings of the intermingling scent of cherry blossom and plum blossom on the same branch.

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I: This is how I think of the being‑toward‑each‑other of vast‑ ness and stillness in the same Appropriation of the message of unconcealment of the two‑fold. J: But who today could hear in it an echo of the nature of language which our word Koto ba names, flower petals that flourish out of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth? I: Who would find in all this a serviceable clarification of the nature of language? J:  That nature will never be found as long as we demand infor‑ mation in the form of theorems and cue words. I: Yet many a man could be drawn into the prologue to a messenger’s course once he keeps himself ready for a dialogue of language. J:  It seems to me as though even we, now, instead of speaking about language, had tried to take some steps along a course which entrusts itself to the nature of Saying. I: Which promises, dedicates itself to the nature of Saying. Let us be glad if it not only seems so but is so.40 There are gestures here easy to characterize as typical of Heidegger’s late work: the turn to language itself, the growing willingness to entrust philosophical points to the care of poetry. But the preference for considering language a “house of Being” rather than a method of denotation is also clearly parallel to the main project of Being and Time, which he had inherited from (and radicalized beyond) Husserl: to remove the notion that traditional epistem‑ ology is legitimate in its attempt to judge the nature of the world from the outside. The recognizability of the continuity of motive, in greatly altered form, is a hint (in the miniature confines of a single author’s oeuvre) of the limits of historicist intellectual history—some motions of the mind can be recognized as parallel, despite vast alterations in the world (such as between Germany 1927 and Germany 1959), or in genre (the modern summa philo‑ sophica versus the modern Platonic dialogue). This one small data point about

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Heideggerian continuity is nothing to build a theory of historiography upon, but it is worth note that the possibility of seeing‑through context, valid or not, is the whole point of the structure of the Dialogue as such: a meeting of the minds—improbably, in language—is possible despite differences in linguistic and discursive traditions. Or rather, because of them: the context of the Other allows the same truth to be re‑presented to the Self in a way one would never have thought of, something that gives shape to a pre‑known inchoate conclusion. The Orientalism here functions by way of primitivism: the ancient poetic image, which is lost in rationalization, the hope for a prior entrance into Saying before anything can be said. Given Tezuka’s alternate history of the conversation, this dynamic represented in the dialogue is evidence against contextual transcendence: it is clear that Heidegger projected onto Japanese his desire for it to supply a revelatory language harmonious with his own prior concept. This is not a useful heuristic for discovering valid methods of comparative intellectual history in general. But it does help define the reasons for, and limitations of, Heidegger’s particular interest in Laozi—the “Eastasian” continuity assumed between China and Japan means it should not be surprising if Heidegger found in both literatures the same embryonic, poetic, intuitive description of phenomenology that he had labored to describe by fighting through the thicket of epistemological and ontological terms. This finding of antecedents occurred partially because Heidegger was determined to find them. The same pattern of overinterpretation of source texts to match his own philosophical predilections as is noted awkwardly by Tezuka in his alternative narration of their conversation, is repeated by Paul Shih‑yi Hsiao in his account of their work in translating the Laozi into German: “On the other hand—and I have to admit this—I could not during our work get free from a slight anxiety that Heidegger’s notes might perhaps go beyond what is called for in a translation. As an interpreter and mediator this tendency unsettled me.”41 The same description of a pattern of enthusiastic projection, marked by the same embarrassment at correcting (not to his face) the eminent philosopher. These forcible but productive misreadings are evident in “The Nature of Language,” a lecture series in which Heidegger’s late interest in language was framed in terms at once most explicitly Daoist and most explicitly semiotic. The piece begins with an extended reading of and meditation on a poem, “The Word,” by Stefan George, with a particular and lasting focus on the final line: “Where word breaks off no thing may be.”42 It is hard to avoid the possible semiotic implications of such a line, but Heidegger uses

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it to argue against the primacy of semiotics in language. Things do not have a prior ontology, to which words are attached as labels: instead, things only become what they are through language. Though he does not use the language of “concept” (much less of “signified”), Heidegger is at bottom making an argument about the conceptual realm as the proper sphere of human attention, and proposing that language mediates our place in that conceptual realm. After his initial exposition of the George poem, Heideg‑ ger then goes on to discuss language as the experience of neighborliness, invoking the central notion of “dwelling” which Young has identified as a postontological version of “essence” in the later Heidegger’s thought.43 The neighborliness of language is in this text a realm in which life‑as‑interaction happens—even while the terms related are themselves linguistic, language is also the realm of their interaction: for example, word and thing, thinking and poetry, being and saying. It is a de‑instrumentalizing vision of language, which is open to devastating political critique44 but which is at least proffered as a means of reestablishing a holistic communal life. In the final lecture, Heidegger goes on to relate this vision of language as a mode of being to the dao of Laozi: The word “way” probably is an ancient primary word that speaks to the reflective mind of man. The key word in Laotse’s poetic thinking is Tao, which “properly speaking” means way. But because we are prone to think of “way” superficially, as a stretch connecting two places, our word “way” has all too rashly been considered unfit to name what Tao says. Tao is then translated as reason, mind, raison, meaning, logos. Yet Tao could be the way that gives all ways, the very source of our power to think what reason, mind, meaning, logos properly mean to say. . . . Perhaps the enigmatic power of today’s reign of method . . . stems from the fact that the methods, notwithstanding their efficiency, are after all merely the runoff of a great hidden stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything. All is way.45 This wild overreading of dao as being, meaning, logos, and everything else under the sun, represents a massive departure from the Laozi. But Heidegger’s misreading is instructive. It ends in a vision of dao as the archaic antidote for modern technicalization of language, essentially the same role that Heidegger had posited for “Eastern” thought in his dialogue with Tezuka. This is not necessarily a ridiculous association: if one posits a late date for the Laozi,

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it is possible to read the text as a primitivist reaction to Mohist technical logic. However, Heidegger is not reading the text as a Sinologist, but as an amateur Orientalist, arriving at his notion of a universal dao, simultaneously being and cognition, almost solely through an overly lyricized experience of the text’s alterity. The value of Heidegger’s reading is not its accuracy, but the consonance of his historical anxieties with those of the Laozi. The Laozi’s vision of lan‑ guage is as something to be suspected and held at arm’s length on account of its tendency to draw one into a dangerous game of social demarcation and even political ordering: its desire to return to simple, non‑signifying silence is proposed as a solution to the worrisome implications of language within the chaotic context of the Warring States. Heidegger is ascribing to the concept of dao the role of an idealized fusion of perfected language and being that it never has in the Laozi, but one can also view it as taking on the role of a space of retreat. Even if one could put aside his deeply troub‑ ling engagement with the Nazi state, and desire to flee from that personal history in the postwar period, the argument here—taken entirely in its own terms—is marked by the same kind of antimodern impulses and suspicions that had marked his work since Being and Time. Although he projected his own ideas onto the notion of dao, badly misreading the content of its ideas on language, Heidegger correctly intuited from the Laozi its historical anxieties, and amalgamated them to his own. These patterns of adaptation and fortuitous mistake that are undeniable in Heidegger’s encounter with Daoism need not be taken as absolute—and indeed, such an absolutist reading would be as nonsensical as one that took Heidegger as an authoritative interpreter of Daoism. If one were to posit that there were in fact nothing about Daoism’s approach to the world remarkably like that of the phenomenological tradition, one would have to account for why someone such as Heidegger would want to choose Laozi rather than Confucius or the politically dangerous Han Fei as a spiritual antecedent. If all interpretation is projection, why choose one screen rather than another? It could be a chance confluence of rhetorics incidental to Heidegger’s separately developed phenomenological program, an “encounter with Daoism more confirmative than seminal,” in the words of J. J. Clarke,46 in which the Laozi simply lay conveniently to hand, as already interpreted as a common hammer in the Heideggerian system. But the historical fact of influence makes us want to find “something there.” This impulse itself poses a knotty problem for comparative philoso‑ phy—what is the ground on which one can judge the apparent similarity of disparate philosophical traditions? This is a variation on a familiar problem:

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how one estimates the similarity or difference of two works’ thought‑content would seem to assume that there can be something identifiable as “content” and separable from the formal aspects of language, genre, historical context, and so on. This replicates familiar divides: meaning versus language, referent versus sign, transcendence versus immanence, philosophy versus history. If there is something in different philosophies that could be considered innately similar despite histories of comparison, this would seem to imply a ground for truth external to the mind and more stable than provisional consensus. There is no way here to fully solve this particular variation on a famously vexing philosophical problem. Even a provisional and limited solution would be arrogant in this section of a study, which is ultimately historical rather than theoretical. If I may be permitted a vaguely neo‑Kantian approach to intellectual history, it is really not of primary importance where the truth of foundationalism or antifoundationalism lies. Consider the question of meaning to be its own black box: whether or not anyone has ever opened the real box itself, or merely a faux preliminary black box (inside which the real box is nestled), is unknown—and because unknown, unknowable whether or not it is unknowable—that is to say, a box not merely black, but of most inky ebon. Insofar as the intellectual historian is concerned, the actual contents of the box being most thoroughly cut off from view, all one has to work with is the analysis not of the actual object itself, but of our own scholarly perceptions of the object. And in our perceptions we can discover rules by which questions of philosophical similarity and difference can be ordered, precisely because the ability to perceive similarity and dif‑ ference is something like a scholar’s transcendental logic. Matched with the scholar’s transcendental aesthetic of time and space, we have something like an idealist’s intellectual history, not able to make claims about the history of the actually thought, but perfectly capable of definitive statements about the way the actually thought presents itself to us through the appearance of texts, both primary and secondary. If, in the end, this sounds more than faintly Foucaultian, it is—with the caveat that insofar as intellectual history becomes a kind of discourse analysis, it is only so methodologically, implying no teleology of the merely text. Agnostic, not atheist. In the case of Laozi’s possible similarity to Heidegger, it is in any case devilishly difficult to know where the boundary between purely comparable idea and negligible context would run. Both reject the idea that there is a proper form of knowing in which such categorizations can be effective. But we do have, in both cases, a resistance to apprehension as an analytical action separate from and somehow above the process of living. Their stances

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toward the world were, like ours, stances toward philosophy. Or rather, stances against philosophy: each is partially defined by his opposition. This is where the difference is most clearly visible. Laozi’s opposition was to philosophies, Confucianism and Mohism, defined only in the barest terms. Indeed, as has been noted, Laozi himself may have been an invented figure, himself arising into a name after the delineation of Daoism as an anti‑Confucian school, that delineation itself a hermeneutical construction of generations of readers attempting to make sense of a fragmented and fluid record of partially known, conflicting texts. Heidegger, on the other hand, was an unfortunately too‑historical person, writing at great length against a 2,500‑year epistemological trad‑ ition of even greater length. “Clarity” is not a term one usually associates with Heidegger, but in comparison with the formative period of Daoism, Heidegger’s tasks and goals are refreshingly clear because they are so pro‑ lix—one can be stumped by sentences here and there, and still “get it,” because the terms of engagement with tradition are fully extant and hence open to inspection. So is Heidegger a Daoist? Is Laozi a Phenomenologist? No, insofar as either term brings history with it, for one of these writers is historical, and one ahistorical. But the comparison is still instructive for a reading of the Daoist tradition, for whether or not Laozi was actually a person with a history, or merely a labeled author‑function, his successors in the Chinese tradition were increasingly historical, and increasingly self‑con‑ scious about their positions within history. As Otto Pöggeler has written, “When Lao‑tzu saw that his country was declining irrevocably, he left the archive at the court of Chou in order to wander across the border pass. As Heidegger engaged the Lao‑tzu, he on his side left the archive in which the Western tradition was articulated. The return to the ground of metaphysics was also a way to one’s own origin, and yet this origin, which was supposed to have left substance‑thinking behind, was in turn understood again as a pre‑given, quasi‑substantial beginning.”47

Formal Guests of History Of old he who was well versed in the way Was minutely subtle, mysteriously comprehending, And too profound to be known. It is because he could not be known That he can only be given a makeshift description:

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Tentative, as if fording a river in winter, Hesitant, as if in fear of his neighbors; Formal like a guest; Thick like the uncarved block; Vacant like a valley; Murky like muddy water.48 The description fits Laozi himself. He shies into biographical existence; we only have of him a formal set of author‑gestures, he has not opened up to us, human to humans. Absent in his presence, he can only seem to match our makeshift descriptions, via a metaphorical language that is always‑else‑ where anyway. He is, in this respect, like the Way itself—unassimilable, not really nameable, a being in understanding so far from being an object that it is not even knowable as a “subject.” He is “of old,” lost to any certain history. And the combination of these traits—archaism, ineffability, and nonhumanity—are what bind this nonpersonage to the unanalyzable ground of Being that he proposes. Heidegger was, to his contemporaries as to himself, too modern, too nameable, too human. The postwar period, in which his fascination with both language and East Asian civilization reached its height, was inaugurated for him by literal and figurative interrogations, first by occupation authorities, and then by the international scholarly community—contemporary accounts detail a period of depression as he struggles against being defined as a mere Nazi apologist. His interests cannot be reduced to this trauma—there is a clear line of development out of the argument of Sein und Zeit that leads to the late work, and it has a philosophical cohesion of its own. But the fact that historical contextualization becomes an option, whether chosen or not, changes the significance of his argument. Heidegger’s desire for the primordial, his attraction on that basis to Laozi, is human—his work is not “just there” in the fashion of an archaic Chinese compilation of gnomic verse. Therefore, there are two self‑evident uses for the category of the historical in juxtaposing Laozi with Heidegger. History could be used to explicate how the abstracted conceptual pattern of similarity and difference, Heidegger to the Daoists, is a function of the attempt to argue before or after a complex millennia‑long articulation of possible philosophical positions. History could also be used to examine the embedded process by which the modern writer discovers and appropriates the archaic materials, and thereby understand how a contemporary attempt to read Daoist understandings of language, whether more or less Heideggerian, must encounter the same

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awkwardness, trying to appropriate for the present moment a text that cannot confess to a historicity. However, there is also a third use: the gap of history between Laozi and Heidegger can serve as an analogue for the difficulties other readers of Laozi also faced, trying to read his ahistorical, anti‑arche‑semiotic manifesto into their own intricately constructed historical cages. Later chapters in this book will examine how the motive toward disengagement with socially driven categorizations and distinctions was replayed and adapted in highly structured political and religious environments through the early medieval period in Chinese literary criticism; in such cases, the attempt to negotiate a rejection of epistemology was certainly less technical than Heidegger’s (obliged to deal as it was with a modern scholarly apparatus, which they still lacked) but no less conscious of discursive and historical webs from which they were trying to extricate themselves. Given that there has already begun a scholarly discussion of Heidegger’s appropriations from Daoism, it is hoped that by putting this example first, and pointing out the relevance of history as a conceptual category (and not just as a method), a model has been established by which it will later be possible to assimilate the much less familiar world of Six Dynasties arche‑semiotic thought. However, before passing on to the mainstream tradition of literary criticism, in which Daoism was a fully defined philosophical school among other philosophical schools, and available for intellectual appropriation, it is necessary to take stock of the figure who, more than Laozi, first pushed Daoism into schoolhood and historical definition. Laozi, whether real or not, had at least one “disciple”: Zhuangzi.49 It is with him that Daoism first learned the unspeakable difficulty of a real individual’s speaking (especially when one has something particular to not‑say), and with him that we will come up to the cusp of history.

CHAPTER TWO

Ways beyond Language

The Sign of Virtue Complete Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, “Can a man really be without feelings?” Chuang Tzu: “Yes.” Hui Tzu: “But a man who has no feelings—how can you call him a man?” Chuang Tzu: “The Way gave him a face; Heaven gave him a form—why can’t you call him a man?” Hui Tzu: “But if you’ve already called him a man, how can he be without feelings?” Chuang Tzu: “That’s not what I mean by feelings. When I talk about having no feelings, I mean that a man doesn’t allow likes or dislikes to get in and do him harm. He just lets things be the way they are and doesn’t try to help life along.” Hui Tzu: “If he doesn’t try to help life along, then how can he keep himself alive?” Chuang Tzu: “The Way gave him a face; Heaven gave him a form. He doesn’t let likes or dislikes get in and do him harm. You, now—you treat your spirit like an outsider. You wear out your energy, leaning on a tree and moaning, slumping at your 57

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desk and dozing—Heaven picked out a body for you and you use it to gibber about “hard” and “white”!1 This dialogue ends an ironically titled chapter, “The Sign of Virtue Complete [De Chong Fu 德充符],” which is packed with stories of ugly, maimed, and deformed sages. Some of the stories feature those with limbs cut off—ordi‑ narily a sign of criminal guilt, but here transformed into signs of wisdom. The Zhuangzian sign is being described in this chapter as something that does not express an inner truth, but which hides it: the “meaning” of a man’s subjective identity is the opposite of his physical appearance. This closing anecdote is founded upon the same irony. There is a true subjective interior, and a false social exterior. But it is more radical than the versions of this irony that the earlier stories in the chapter voice. Normally, in contemporary literary theory, one assumes that the truth of the subject is an intensely human truth, the core of one’s actual humanity despite how one is slotted into a matrix by society. But Zhuangzi is here asserting that the human is the false exterior. The dao has created humans with faces, and it is by means of those faces signing pleasure or displeasure that they can engage in the game called social life. The interior life is a space that may not be truly without emotion, but where emotions are not connected to any external agents. The face serves to block those off, to protect the interior subject. Huizi is Hui Shi, the second member of the “School of Names” along with Gongsun Long, whose anxieties over the sign were discussed in the Introduction. The actual Hui Shi is somewhat of a mystery: none of his own texts survive, and as Lisa Raphals has shown, he has been given consider‑ ably different portrayals in various pre‑Qin texts.2 There is something odd about the textual reference embedded here: the argument about “hard” and “white” is a theory of predication that occupies one chapter of the Gongsun Longzi, and not an argument usually attributed to Hui Shi. But the confu‑ sion is instructive, because it brings out the arche‑semiotic character of this encounter. Hardness and whiteness may be phenomenal qualities predicated of a stone, but they are not the stone; the School of Names was anxious to put them together, work out a theory of matching. Zhuangzi is content to match nothing, and dings Hui Shi for externalizing his own subjectivity, projecting his spirit out into that world of signs and social engagement. Within such a structure, a face is not merely a failed sign of a sub‑ jectivity that lies buried beneath. The falsity of the face is the founding condition of the Daoist subject. It simultaneously substitutes for the real human subject, taking his place in the world, and it blocks out from the

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spirit all the likes and dislikes that are threatening to get in and do him harm. The interior of the subject can remain something happily natural and inhuman. This is a new twist on the “subjective premise” outlined in the introduction, but critical to understanding what will come later in the Six Dynasties works influenced by the Daoist tradition. Often, those later writ‑ ers will be driven by arche‑semiotic anxiety to obsess over the signs of their interior subjects, which are being manifest in the world. But, sometimes, their hope is not necessarily that they will find a skilled reader to decipher their external appearance. Sometimes, they really want to keep their internal subjectivity private, and put forward a blank face to the world which will keep the merely human at bay. This denigration of the face, and the concomitant evacuation of humanity from subjectivity, is something that presents the gravest challenge to our best traditions of humane letters. As will be discussed below, the possibility of such a philosophy was a horror to one of our best ethicists, Emmanuel Levinas. But before turning to that comparative explication, we should try to discover who exactly was this Zhuangzi person, who flaunts his desire to be unseen.

The Historical Zhuangzi Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P’ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, “This book Your Grace is reading—may I venture to ask whose words are in it?” “The words of the sages,” said the duke. “Are the sages still alive?” “Dead long ago,” said the duke. “In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!” “Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?” said Duke Huan. “If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it’s your life!”

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Wheelwright P’ien said, “I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won’t take hold. But if they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. Not too gentle, not too hard—you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can’t put it into words, and yet there’s a knack to it somehow. I can’t teach it to my son, and he can’t learn it from me. So I’ve gone along for seventy years and at my age I’m still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.”3 This is an odd text, historically as well as theoretically.4 It is a distant narra‑ tive cousin of the encounter between Confucius and Laozi which Sima Qian preserves (“That of which you speak, the practitioners and their bones have all long rotted away, and only their words remain”),5 with the skepticism as to the value of records attributed to the petitioner rather than the textual guardian. Since that anecdote may well have been borrowed from strata of the Zhuangzi later edited out by Guo Xiang (editor of the received ver‑ sion), it seems as if recopying and recirculation may have caused an organic evolution of these sentiments, which contradict their import. However, we do not need to get into the rank weeds of textual criticism in order to track down the basic contradiction here. This is also ancient China’s preeminent meditation on the death of the author. As all such meditations, it itself makes for an odd squib of a text, simultaneously grand and self‑loathing. Here, as will be expanded upon below, the text is part of a ploy (if we can bracket the worries about intention upon which it insists), an expression of frustration with language, and an explanation for why such frustration has here resulted in a ridiculous profusion of narrative, rather than in a simpler shutting‑up.6 But in addition to self‑referentially pointing out the problem of how texts can and cannot function, it is also quite inadvertently evidence as to how this particular author assumes texts come to be. They are composed. Quite contrary to our actual knowledge of how pre‑Qin texts evolved through various levels of accretion, redaction, and recomposition, this parable assumes that the text aspires to be the faithful emanation of an author’s mind—and as such, the external image of the internal, anxious, arche‑semiotic subject. In this, the famously skeptical Wheelwright Pian is if anything more naive about the origin of texts. At

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least Duke Huan does not have a clearer conception of the authorship of these books that that they are the words of the sages: here the indistinc‑ tion of singular and plural in classical Chinese grammar colludes with the anonymity of some unspecified sage. Perhaps this is merely hauteur (how could one expect a mere wheelwright to know the name of a particular sage?),7 but if so, it is the same obnoxious reticence that the bygone archaic world maintains vis‑á‑vis modern scholarly inquiry. In any case, Wheelwright Pian reveals by his analogy that he consid‑ ers the sage in question to be singular, because wheelcraft is solitary. He makes his own wheels by the knack his own hands have acquired, and the knack is not transmissible by words. To assert that the books of the sages also fail to transmit requires first an assumption that there is some idea for which transmission has failed. The subjective premise of arche‑semiotics is fully at play: the problems of language help to bifurcate the subject between what he knows he wants to say and what he knows he cannot get across. Although this text does not speculate on evolved texts, we can recognize in this structure as presented that it is only because a book is a composed work by an individual that the death of the author would be a cause for pessimism. If there never were any author to begin with, and the text’s only life were in itself, the text could not be the dregs of anything. It would be the same self‑presence it had always been. What we have here, bizarrely, is an ancient text whose understanding of textuality is in fact wholly theoretical, anticipating Roland Barthes with a fascinating prescience,8 but completely oblivious to the actual conditions of textuality with which a nontheorizing scholar of the period would immediately wish to grapple. This perhaps perverse, but inescapable reading of Wheelwright Pian as an archaic postmodern wunderkind, tells us much about why this book does in fact—despite all its agonized self‑doubt—seem to confess to being an authored work. Zhuangzi is, in all standard histories, ringed round with a halo of tangible presence that Laozi lacks. Or so says intellectual history, for reasonable reasons. He is conventionally dated as a more recent figure (fourth century BCE rather than sixth), and it is a well‑known principle that the more ancient an attribution is, the less reliable. If that principle is not, in fact, strictly true, it nonetheless sounds about right in this case (as in so many others) because the biography of Zhuangzi given by Sima Qian is somewhat less mythological than that of Laozi: Zhuangzi was a person of Meng, named Zhou. Zhou was once a functionary of the Meng Lacquered Garden, of the same era

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as King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi. In his studies he examined all, and in the essentials he hewed to the words of Laozi. Therefore his writings run to over 100,000 words, and most of these are in the form of “imputed words” [speeches attributed to other historical figures]. He wrote “The Fisherman,” “Robber Zhi,” and “Cut Baskets” in order to mock the disciples of Confucius, and in order to explain the methods of Laozi. . . . His words were ridiculous and suited only himself, and no one, neither king, nor duke, nor grandee, was able to employ him. King Wei of Chu heard that Zhuang Zhou was a worthy man, and he sent messengers to entreat him with wealth, to agree to be a government minister. But Zhuang Zhou laughed, and said to the Chu messengers, “A thousand pieces of gold is a hefty profit, and the role of Minister is an honorable position. But do you alone not see the bulls offered in sacrifice? Raised and fed for a few years, they are decked with finery as they are led up toward the altars. At that time, though they might wish to be lonesome little pigs, how could they? Be off, don’t pollute me! I would rather play in the mire, and please myself, and not be leashed by one who has a kingdom; I will never serve, so that I can enjoy myself to my heart’s content.9 Laozi was also placed historically by Sima, given a specific royal job in a specific age; but when Zhuangzi decides to stop serving in office, he has the modesty to simply retire to the local muck, and not start off on any grand quests out of the western borders of the known world. Unlike Laozi’s reputa‑ tion for living to the age of two hundred, Zhuangzi apparently continued on his way into transformation at an unremarkable age. He is a weirdo, to be sure, but a human one. There are also more textual sources suggesting the reality of an actual Zhuang Zhou, who lived, died, and wrote some of what is attributed to him, slightly more than we possess for Laozi. However, these texts are still merely texts. This is not a theoretical problem of referentiality, in the same way that a complete crank might dispute the existence of, say, the great twelfth‑century‑CE philosopher Zhu Xi, on the grounds that our only evi‑ dence for him, too, is but textual. The assumption of a historical Zhuang Zhou rests on no such foundations: for his life, we have few sources, none of them contemporary. This is a small difference in degree, not a difference in kind, from what we possess concerning Laozi.

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What really distinguishes Zhuangzi from Laozi, and which has probably preserved the idea of a historical Zhuang Zhou in the minds of all but the most skeptical scholars, is the text of the Zhuangzi. This is a very differ‑ ent sort of book than the Laozi: highly stylized and deliberate rather than abstruse and gnomic, and thus, it seems, certainly the deliberate creation of a particular mind, rather than what might well be the perhaps accidental compilation of a quasi‑catechistic oral tradition.10 However, the basic fact still remains that the most famous sections of the Zhuangzi, those attributed to the historical Zhuang Zhou, very much read as the literary production of a single and singular mind. It is a striking contradiction that this text, which seems to many to advocate a doctrine of selflessness,11 seems so strongly marked as the product of an idiosyncratic personality. Of course, stylistics can be a dangerous game, encouraging the illusion of empirical judgments12 and relying heavily upon established notions of what oral or written, or fluid or fixed, texts ought to look like. There is ultimately no guarantee that the regular, doctrinal four‑character couplets and quattrains of the Laozi, which emerged during a period known for prevalent orature,13 have to have been oral, impersonal, or evolved. For that matter, the Zhuangzi does itself contain examples of apparently oral four‑character verse. But—even if it is due to a failure of critical imagination—it remains hard for a self‑conscious critic to imagine that bizarre, unique allegories with a high degree of detail, logical complexity and unusual diction could have coalesced without a primarily literary compositional impulse. And when thought and style of those allegories is so similar, with many of the most striking concentrated in the first, “inner” section of the work, it is even harder not to imagine the core of the work being a deliberate composition of the man to which it is attributed, Zhuangzi. Even if such an imagined compositional unity exists, there is no way to guarantee its authenticity: the difficulties involved in dating any pre‑Qin material are fully operative with this text; and if there is a unified literary core to this work, we still have no evidence that this core must have been composed by Zhuang Zhou himself, rather than a disciple, or the disciple of a disciple, or an unconnected admiring fabulist. But then, this writer would of course himself be the real author Zhuangzi, whoever the character “Zhuang Zhou” might have happened to be. Once one credits this text with an actual origin at a certain point on a timeline, and assumes an actual human mind as its guarantor, there are certain implications for what it would mean to say that there is such a thing as a Daoist arche‑semiotics. After all, it is not evident that there must have been any such thing: not only would neither Laozi nor Zhuangzi have

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recognized any such field as “semiotics,” they would not have been aware that there was any such school as “Daoism”—despite the quite obvious truth that these two stand as the universally acknowledged founders of a long‑lived philosophical school, specialists are all keenly aware that this school (like most) was named, and thus constituted, retrospectively. There are many reasons, philosophically and textually, why that retrospective naming was a sound one based upon undeniable continuities; it has not been steadfastly maintained merely by inertia. But when one is isolating a particular element from a retrospectively constructed tradition, it is important not to assume that continuity must exist there because it is agreed to exist elsewhere. What is Zhuangzi’s understanding of the linguistic sign, and to what extent is this understanding inherited from the Laozi tradition? And, most importantly, how does the notion of signification relate to Zhuangzi’s concept of the subject and its location in history? In fact, in terms of pure conceptual content, there is little to distin‑ guish Zhuangzi from Laozi on questions of how language works. Picking up from the opening, paradigmatic statement that “[t]he Way that can be named is not the constant Way; the name that can be named is not the constant name,” Zhuangzi writes: The Great Way is not named; Great Discriminations are not spoken. . . . If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way. If dis‑ criminations are put into words, they do not suffice. . . . There‑ fore understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest. Who can understand discriminations that are not spoken, the Way that is not a way? If he can understand this, he may be called the Reservoir of Heaven. Pour into it and it is never full, dip from it and it never runs dry, and yet it does not know where the supply, comes from.14 This is a significant expansion on the Laoist formulation, and hence risks betraying the language‑practice it demonstrates: if one really cannot name the Way or make distinctions, why feel compelled to go on about it? The Laozi has the decency, at least, to remain obscure and oracular in its formulations. The comparative loquacity of Zhuangzi is in fact of critical importance—but of importance to the positioning of this critique in a historical milieu, not to any difference in philosophical content. Both texts assert the impossibility of putting the telos of Being into words—and hence prescribe a strategic distance from language, if not a full retreat from it.

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The metaphor with which that passage ends is probably loosely con‑ nected to the tradition of the self‑tipping, self‑emptying vessel of Laozi 9. The metaphor has interesting resonances within the Laozi, but it is import‑ ant to note that only in one of the later chapters of the Zhuangzi does it take on a specific significance for arche‑semiotics. There, the text describes the putative compositional principles of Zhuangzi in a text entitled Yuyan, which in context meant “Entrusted Words,” but which has evolved into the standard Chinese compound meaning “allegory.” It is far from clear what the category of tipping‑vessel words is meant to represent, exactly, though there have been abundant commentarial conjectures. However, in general terms, this rhetorical mode, the zhiyan, is usually taken to be a description of nonrepresentative language, words that are either inherently unstable, self‑defeating, or self‑referential and cyclical—that is, the perfect mode for a Daoist language that does not know what to do with itself. Following Derrida, it can perhaps be considered a kind of writing sous rature, a writing betraying self‑consciousness of the impossible position of the writer obliged to use language, a defective tool. And zhiyan is a term that is made even more powerful for being listed as the ultimate (and by far most mysterious) term in a three‑part division of language. Yuyan is described as a species of allegory in which meaning is “entrusted” to a resonant image, with the understanding that an outside actor (i.e., the linguistic sign) is rhetorically more persuasive than the meaning itself; chongyan, repeated words, appears to be a description of quotations, either real or spurious, which lay claim to authority. But the zhiyan is some kind of trope which does not have a definite structure or purpose to it: it is as close as one comes in archaic China to a theory of free‑floating signs. As such, it has been a source of confusion and inspiration for critics, some boxing it up in the tight and embarrassed quarters of textual corruption, while others such as Kuang‑ming Wu seem liberated by its oddness to gush: “We are mutually goblets and their recipients.  .  .  .  We are comrade discoverers, “friends” who are overcome with joy and converse in locutionary abandonment, who forget even the goblets and the deformities.”15 The passage is in many ways characteristically Zhuangzian: this is the first extant use of the word yuyan, and in later literary history Zhuangzi’s parables are thought of as the paradigmatic case. This is the Chinese locus classicus for both the definition and the practice of allegory. The apparent self‑referentiality of the passage, describing the contents of the Zhuangzi as a whole, adds to the appearance of authority: if this is not an instructional key left behind by the author himself, then it would appear to be that of a

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commentator early and authoritative enough to have his own writing incor‑ porated into the main text. However, it is in fact nearly impossible to place this section as belonging to Zhuangzi himself or his disciples. This is one of the notoriously unreliable “mixed chapters” in which there is much clearly spurious material, some of it from non‑Daoist sources, and the apparently external description of the rest of the work that it offers seems to argue that this must be a later accretion. However, there are numerous textual similar‑ ities between this chapter and the original material of the “inner chapters,” especially the seminal “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” to be discussed below—suggesting a text that comes straight from Zhuangzi himself.16 And yet, the fact that this section grows out of a series of mysterious, half‑ex‑ plained rhymed quatrains suggests a pre‑Zhuangzian origin in the same gnomic tradition out of which the text of the Laozi was slowly constituted. That “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” the second chapter of the work, is the key statement on language in the work, and the founding essay on language in philosophical Daoism. That it is primarily arche‑semiotic ought not to be surprising (semiotics is the originary form of linguistics in most traditions), but it is emphasized by a commentarial tradition that (wrongly but understandingly) read the title not as meaning “Discourse on Making Things Equal” but as “On Equalizing Things with Discourse.” Virtually all the statements in the Laozi that relate to language have their counterpart here, and the philosophical positioning of the two sources with regard to language is essentially indistinguishable. The Zhuangzi passage paralleling the opening lines of the Laozi, cited above, is located in the “Discourse”; so are parallels with the Laozi asserting the structural consti‑ tution of meaning through mutual differentiation, the concomitant need to restrain from certain kinds of destructive speech and the divisively analytical processes they promote, and the fundamentally harmonious naturalness such strategic reticence enables. The newness of Zhuangzi’s arche‑semiotics is not in a revised concep‑ tion of the linguistic sign or its function, but in the way in which those conceptions are expressed. Formal differences in most philosophical works would be a secondary, or even tertiary, interest, depending on who was doing the reading. However, in a philosophy of language, language can only be primary. Whereas the arche‑semiotic sentiments of the Laozi are scattered here and there, phrases that melt into other extralinguistic concerns, the “Discourse” is a sustained topical meditation, as unified in its exposition as it is possible for pre‑Qin philosophy to be. After the essay opens with the extended parable of the “heavenly pipes” (天籁) about sound and

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soundlessness, nature and the paranatural Dao, and an exposition on the mysteriousness of the springs of Being, it then addresses the impossibility of speaking about speech, in an extended fashion that the Laozi never forced itself to undertake: Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, that we have right and wrong? How can the Way go away and not exist? How can words exist and not be acceptable? When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Mo‑ists. What one calls right the other calls wrong; what one calls wrong the other calls right. But if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its “that,” everything has its “this.” From the point of view of “that” you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it. So I say, “that” comes out of “this” and “this” depends on “that”—which is to say that “this” and “that” give birth to each other. But where there is birth there must be death; where there is death there must be birth. Where there is acceptability there must be unacceptability; where there is unacceptability there must be acceptability. Where there is recognition of right there must be recognition of wrong; where there is recognition of wrong there must be recognition of right. Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of Heaven. He too recognizes a “this,” but a “this” which is also “that,” a “that” which is also “this.” His “that” has both a right and a wrong in it; his “this” too has both a right and a wrong in it. So, in fact, does he still have a “this” and “that”? Or does he in fact no longer have a “this” and “that”? A state in which “this” and “that” no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So, I say, the best thing to use is clarity.17

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The frustrated playfulness of these sentences is the result of trying to describe the insufficiency of language while taking it seriously. A radical arche‑semiotics that observed the basic conventions of lucid prose would contradict itself; and while self‑contradiction is perhaps not the worst tack for linguistic skepticism to take, it does have rhetorical disadvantages in persuading those of conventional assumptions. Hence, recently, we had Derridean prose style; Zhuangzi, working with a different grammar and network of texts, produces a text that is equally sprightly, in very different ways. Not willing or able to stay in the laconic, withdrawn mode of the Laozi, he crashes right through the quotidian space of adequate exposition, and invents a new prose of ridiculous superfluity. The thissing and thatting which dominates here is a sort of tongue twister that juggles concepts rather than phonemes: a mind twister. Not fully speaking what was thought has helped “Laozi” to avoid emerging into full humanity in intellectual history; it is fully possible to assert the absence of an actual particular author behind this text because there is nothing personal about it. Speaking too fully, acknowledging his own doubts about language even while satirizing those doubts—this opposite means of expressing the same suspicions has helped to emphasize Zhuangzi’s personality. Here, the style of the passage and its content work in harmony to create the powerful illusion of a personality standing behind this text. Formally, this writing is distinctly playful: unlike the Laozi half‑emerging from orature, here we seem to have a human with a particular kind of self‑conscious voice, and if this does not exactly degrade into the neurotic logorrhea of a Woody Allen, it is still garrulously comic, and produces an instantly recognizable character. And, in terms of content, the point of passages such as this is that one cannot deputize abstract standards of logic to take over from the self the right and responsibility of judging. As Eske Møllgaard has observed, “Zhuangzi does not advance a proposition, but existentially he posits authentic presence, the presence of an ethical subject, against the ethically blind self of disputation that can only exists [sic] in so far as it denies its other.”18 When later chapters take up the arche‑semiotic impulse in materials that are not concerned with debate per se, this Zhuangzian impulse to preserve an authentic self against the danger of too‑much and too‑precise language will remain a powerful force. For now, we should note that if Zhuangzi is accorded personhood, then he is necessarily historically specific in a way that a vaguer accumula‑ tion of texts such as the Laozi is not—but the bare fact of his historical existence does not equal an openness to historical contexualization, except in

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the broadest of terms. True, both in their classic form are evolved texts; but the Zhuangzi can be and has been analyzed into different strata by content and style alone, whereas similar work on the Laozi has had to wait until the unearthing of the Mawangdui and Guodian texts in the last forty years. And in those early‑strata portions of the Zhuangzi, such as the “Discourse,” where we hear the distinctive voice of this particular person all have agreed to call Zhuangzi, the granting of personhood to our author makes it much easier to separate that person from his specific intellectual milieu. This is no more historicist than a reading of the Laozi, but it is a more familiar kind of historicism, in which one can talk of influence and reaction in clear stages. As argued above, the “Daoist” character of Laozi and the “Confucian” character of Confucius were opposing poles of thought, which needed each other’s opposition in order to evolve into distinct schools; there may have been an original affiliation that was erased by the heirs of a later schism, and the legend of Confucius’s visit to consult Laozi, relayed by Sima Qian, is an example of how these polemics were later shaped into fiction about the heads of the two schools. But Zhuangzi, this particular writer, is advancing a doctrine of antidis‑ cursive dao in a period where there are already schools promoting established doctrines. This milieu is received as a given, and the “Discourse” is voiced explicitly against the background of a network of established, recognizable philosophical positions. Hence, the passage directly and by name attacks not only the Confucians, but also the Mohists, a competing school founded by the fifth‑century Mozi. These were two schools that were not accustomed to being lumped together: Mohism was in its own way as much an antagonist of the Confucians as was Daoism. Instead of Confucian focus on ritual, propriety, and traditional social relations, Mohists argued for an indifference to social status and innovation following the needs of the present. There is some evidence that the attacks on the two schools are staggered in the slow accretion of materials to the Zhuangzi. Steve Coutinho has argued reason‑ ably that the main thrust of the earliest materials of the Zhuangzi should be viewed as a rebuttal of later Mohist logic;19 while most of the attacks on Confucius come from later materials in the outer and mixed chapters, after “Daoism” seems to have been codified as a coherent school standing in opposition to “Confucianism.” However, for present purposes we do not need to examine the extremely complex compositional histories of the Zhuangzi: this is best left for dedicated books such as those of Graham and Liu. Instead, we only need to consider how the extant corpus presents itself, as if it were by a single author, to

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later readers. Considered in this light, the Zhuangzi acknowledges the two schools’ antipathy: one affirms what the other denies, and vice versa. But in their mutual opposition, they are thus mirror images: both wrong through their petty clinging to one side of a bifurcation in logic. The solution to this kind of irresolvable argument is not to dig deeper into one’s position and insist ever more firmly on the thisness of one’s own this, and the that‑ ness of one’s that, but rather to learn to see through the this and the that, to understand how category boundaries elide and mingle, each system a continuation of its supposed binary opposite. Within this context, it should be stressed that Zhuangzi is not neces‑ sarily opposed to all language as language. The text’s nuances can be read in many different ways, but there are at least certain kinds of language (such as the “entrusted words” and “goblet words” tropes, mentioned above) which the work seems to endorse. The kind of language the text most clearly declares itself in opposition to is the language of the School of Names and the Mohists, language conceived as a tool for making distinctions. In this regard, Eske Møllgaard’s distinction of “language” from “disputation” is quite helpful: Zhuangzi is clear about the limitations of disputation (bian), but he is much more hesitant about making definite claims about the nature of language or saying (yan). The reason is that disputation is merely a technique with obvious uses and limitations, but for Zhuangzi language (yan) is an unknown in which he himself is deeply and inextricably involved. The mystery of language, which is constantly exhibited in the Zhuangzi, is that language or saying always hovers in‑between saying something and saying nothing and so maintains an indeterminacy and openness in relation to that which it speaks about, namely the world. Disputation, on the other hand, denies itself this productive indeterminacy by deeming saying either right or wrong.20 In general, I concur with Møllgaard’s position here, and statements below about Zhuangzian suspicion of language should not be taken to imply a simple denial or negation of language. There is a denial of Mohist disputa‑ tion, and a deep ambivalence toward other forms of language. However, that denial, and that ambivalence, should make clear that Zhuangzi is also not trying to fence off a kind of “safe” language, and the act of drawing distinctions between forms of language would itself have

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appeared to him part of the problem. Hence, while not endorsing a view that Zhuangzi was crusading against all language, there is an inescapable slippage here, by which the originally anti‑Mohist positioning tends to lend a directionality to the arche‑semiotics of the text more generally. Discourse is composed of words, and words—however susceptible to analyses that stress the monosyllable and the out‑pointed, indicative finger—generally do not come to consciousness in ones and twos. To see past the rigid categories imposed upon the world by the unavoidable distinctions between discrete markers, is also to see through any one system built up out of those cat‑ egories. Intellectual peacemaking (or at least the sad and deliberate decision to exit from debate) is inseparable from making one’s peace with the world as it is, a system of flux and interdependence rather than a blank space in which objects are exhibited one by one. This manner of describing Daoism is not very new; it has long been recognized that, among the various pre‑Qin philosophical schools, Daoism was the one school for which it is most difficult to narrate a genuine history of school‑formation. What can be added here is that these descriptions of Daoism have always been indebted primarily to these very passages from the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” and similar ones elsewhere in the Zhuangzi, and that they should not be extrapolated back onto Laozi. When an ill‑defined but thoroughly suspicious arche‑semiotics emerged in a definite and personal historical context, it not only developed a more complex apparatus, turning disposition into theory; it also approached with that theory a concrete set of proposals, equating propositions with sets of definitions accorded to simple signs. These developments were parallel because they were interdependent: the possibility of a more structured theory depended on having more definite, pregiven objects, which could call forth an approach. This discursive evolution is an example of the universal sys‑ temic evolution from the simple to the complex, which itself was described embryonically in the Laozi: The way begets one; One begets two; Two begets three; Three begets the myriad creatures. The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.21

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But which description of evolution itself evolves in the Zhuangzi along the same lines which it describes, from cosmological unity to individuation, changing a universal narrative of evolution into one that is both personal and discursive: Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me. We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can’t tell where we’ll end, much less an ordinary man. If by moving from nonbeing to being we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being? Better not to move, but to let things be!22 Zhuangzi does not wish to be an individual, a concretely formed person in history. Here, as elsewhere, he wishes to forsake the distinctions created by language and return to the amorphous unity with the universe, which holds so long as one does not speak. The very last sentences in the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” are devoted to this very topic, in the most famous of all the allegories of Zhuangzi: Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.23 This famous parable is not simply about skepticism. It is about the inter‑ play of labels with the knowing subject. When one has two separate labels, “Zhuangzi” and “butterfly,” that difference must create the possibility of distinction of the knowing, self‑naming subject from the nonhuman world. However, if one is willing to hold those labels lightly, or perhaps leave them for the social realm in which language and faces matter, but not internalize their importance, then one is liberated to transform oneself into something

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more natural. The problem remains that we cannot access that “natural” and subjective Zhuang Zhou; insofar as we engage with him through his work, that is the outward‑facing, merely human philosopher. This problem of the philosophizing subject is only heightened by the ways in which specific quarrels are foregrounded in the “Discourse on Making Things Equal.” The explicit swipes at Confucianism and Mohism have already been mentioned; but the dense argument of the “Discourse” reserves its most direct criticism for the “School of Names,” especially Gongsun Longzi, discussed in the Introduction and mentioned again in the opening of this chapter. Gongsun Long’s famous argument of the “white horse paradox,” as well as his system of “indications” (zhi 指) is explicitly singled out for critique in the “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” and there are important anecdotes of encounters between Hui Shi and Zhuang Zhou scattered through the book. The relationship of the “Discourse” to these thinkers is complex: much of the playful banter about thisness and thatness—later taken as of a piece with the playful allegorism of the rest of the work, and hence typical of Zhuangzi—is in fact adopted whole from the School of Names. These debates clearly place Zhuangzi (uncomfortable as he might be) as an individual voice at a particular moment in intellectual history; technical disputation and refutation is not the sort of thing that evolves through a series of redactions of orature. The implications of this personal presence of Zhuangzi in his work are evident through a famous anecdote in which Zhuangzi and Hui Shi go for a stroll on the shore: Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Chuang Tzu said, “See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!” Hui Tzu said, “You’re not a fish—how do you know what fish enjoy?” Chuang Tzu said, “You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?” Hui Tzu said, “I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand, you’re certainly not a fish—so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!” Chuang Tzu said, “Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy—so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the Hao.”24

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This anecdote has attracted considerable interest and commentary,25 with most discussions starting out from the issue of whether this anecdote can be assimilated to conceptions of skepticism and relativism familiar from the Western epistemological tradition. However, before commentators reach such questions, they must deal with significant hermeneutical problems in the passage. Normally, in cases where the protagonist of a philosophical anecdote is given the last word, one can expect it to be a clearly conclusive summation, and can see how it is meant to settle an argument, whether or not one personally agrees with the solution on offer. Here, however, the response of Zhuangzi is transparently wrong—Hui Tzu was asking “how” rhetorically, not literally. And then, even the answer proffered to this lit‑ eralized question is deliberately noncommunicative: the Chinese an 安, which Watson translates as “how” throughout, can also mean, in a loose sense, something close to “where”:26 after using it in the sense of “how” in the beginning of this banter, Zhuangzi escapes at the end by answering a question that was not meant. Where do you know it? I know it on the Hao. Watson’s interpolation of “by standing here” is perhaps as well as a translator can do here, and does capture one aspect of the likely intended meaning, namely that the “where” really is the same issue as the “how,” and that there is something in simple presence that is more powerful than logic. But in Chinese, the effect is much more jarring: the character of Zhuangzi is playing semantic games. (The disrespectful ru, which Hui Tzu had not used, but which Zhuangzi attributes to him, shows well enough that Zhuangzi understood the original question as a challenge, not a sincere query. So does the fact that Zhuangzi challenged back with the same formulation.) Hui Shi is a logician, thriving on the assumption that a logic of minute distinctions, and even paradoxes drawn out from the complexities of arche‑semiotic reference points, can be of primary value in making the distinctions that need to be drawn in order to know true and false, proper and improper. Zhuangzi’s flamboyant response is to play the game of arche‑semiotic paradox in order to sweep away logic rather than confirming its explicatory power. Ultimately, Zhuangzi’s rather hypocritical minute parsing of his interlocutor’s grammar is done in order to declare the conversation beside the point. One knows something not by discourse, but by being here, together with the other. This anecdote was not composed by the author, Zhuangzi: it talks about him in the third person, with the respectful title of zi, and comes from the unreliable “Outer Chapters”: this is likely the production of a disciple or later admirer. But this niblet of fan fiction—well‑enough informed to

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understand the tense relationship of Zhuang Zhou and Hui Shi, and the main lines along which their disagreement ran—does know that historical placement matters, and why. When Daoism ceases to be an amorphous set of free‑floating inclinations against the language of social engagement, and becomes a set of principles with traceable differences among individual articulations, then it does indeed matter who one is, and where one stands. When the ambiguity of signs is being used to escape discourse into a concrete being‑with, rather than into the abstracted naturalism of the Laozi, it becomes clearer what sort of phenomenology ought to be the comparator for the Daoist impulse. This is not the phenomenology of Husserl, with its starting point as the same heavy, conglomerated epistemontological tradition it seeks so lightly to bracket. Nor is it even the phenomenology of Heidegger, at least in his Being and Time period, in which he sought primarily to radicalize Husserl’s project, re‑found it from within itself rather than from the frameworks it sought to discard.27 There, as in the Laozi, the fundamental character of relation has been stated, but it is not fully clear that its character is something other than a new means of thinking about perception. But Heideggerian Care is the embryo for a different type of phenomenology. It is to that latter half of the phenomenological tradition that Zhuangzi’s fish directs us, by demonstrating that the deconstruction of logical systems results in a phenomenology that is a renovation of ethics. The prescriptive ethico‑politics of the Confucians and Mohists and the School of Names, like conventional Western ethics, sought to ground their oughts in basic principles; the Daoist tradition asserts that there is more to the fabric of relation than can be codified in oughts. It is an understanding of the nature of Being, for which we need to turn from Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas and Derrida.

The Poststructuralist Zhuangzi Recently, scholarly commentary on Zhuangzi has left the specialized pre‑ cincts of Sinology and begun to address a broader theoretical audience. The Zhuangzi that is represented to this less tiny “public” is of course not the Zhuangzi of textual divisions with layers of interpolation and redaction, not the Zhuangzi of a certain Warring States intellectual context, and not even the Zhuangzi of the full, presumed‑authentic inner chapters; but is for the most part the Zhuangzi exclusively of the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” and those isolated passages elsewhere that most resemble it. This is

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not a horrible misrepresentation, for such sections have always played an outsized role in traditional commentaries. But if not misrepresentation, it is still at least as fully representation (with the attendant, silent “mis-”) as traditional takes: we have creatively remade for ourselves a poststructuralist Zhuangzi, whose doubts about the efficacy of language have been rejiggered into more familiar form, an ancient kerygma heralding the advent of the decentred logos. It is a comparison outwardly, historically impossible to maintain—and yet too strikingly apt to dismiss: as with Heidegger and Laozi, it is a question of what one makes of a series of resemblances. If one is at all sympathetic to Daoism or poststructuralism, can one be comfortable asserting that their founding texts have abstractable contents, immanent ideas that can be detached and equated from the words in which they were expressed? Such an approach, which would threaten to stymie any serious attempt to speak, is not what has generally been voiced. Instead, the growing field of theoretical Zhuangzism has been developed out of a much more traditional staple of intellectual history: the comparative author study. Moreover, with a few exceptions, these comparisons have usually paired Zhuangzi with Derrida. Not a bad choice, but one that, repeated so often, asks us for a response: Why, other than the fact that they are both puckish figures within their respective philosophical ages? Do they in fact share a vision of semiotics, and if so, how could one ground one’s own standards for judging that similarity? And perhaps, even, what started this? Derrida himself bears some of the responsibility: his engagement in the first part of Grammatology with the Chinese character, and with the seventeenth‑century mis‑imaginings of its supposed pictography, were bound to draw attention from those with the linguistic authority to offer supplements. However, the first critical assessment of Derrida’s relation‑ ship to Daoism came in 1983,28 with an excellent article by Michelle Yeh which set up many of the points of comparison which have endured in the discussion. Yeh compared Dao specifically to Derridean difference as an onto‑theologically null term, which recursively resulted in Zhuangzi’s famously ludic prose style.29 And then, in 1984, a book by Robert Magliola comparing Derrida mostly to Buddhism, but also incidentally to Daoism, served some value in continuing the discursive buildup of the question.30 In addition, A. C. Graham brought up the relevance of Derrida specifically in respect to the Laozi, noting that there were quasi‑Derridean tendencies to deconstruct chains of binaries, but without any logocentrism to kick against: “Perhaps Lao‑tzu’s Way is how the Trace will look to us when we

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are no longer haunted by the ghost of that transcendent Reality the death of which Derrida proclaims.”31 However, it is the work of Zhang Longxi that was most influential in converting these observations into a sustained discourse, beginning with a 1985 article in Critical Inquiry—not because Zhang’s work has been universally accepted, but because it has been most vigorously debated. Starting from the same mistakes regarding the Chinese character by Hegel, Leibnitz, and Pound that Derrida addressed, Zhang pivots away from broad linguistics to launch an attack against the discursive logocentrism of Daoism specifically. In his argument, the dao is functionally equivalent to the logos, and when Laozi says that the true dao cannot be spoken, this is because of an overriding assumption of a presence in the dao that is too full for expression. The argument culminates with Zhuangzi, who is rather pitied for the naïveté evident in passages such as: It is for the fish that the trap exists; once you’ve got the fish, you forget the trap. It is for the hare that the snare exists; once you’ve got the hare, you forget the snare. It is for the meaning that the word exists; once you’ve got the meaning, you forget the word. Where can I find the man who will forget words so that I can have a word with him?32 This is an extremely important passage for the Daoist arche‑semiotic tradition: as will be seen in later chapters, it is one of the most popular reference points in the Zhuangzi for later thinkers in the Six Dynasties period. At first blush, it also seems to be very unlike both Derrida and earlier passages in the Zhuangzi, espousing a notion of language in which meaning is a surplus over words—though this common interpretation has been forcefully disputed by Hans‑Georg Moeller.33 To Zhang, the importance of the passage is that Zhuangzi himself is a contradiction of the point, his meanings often forgotten and obscure while the clever and artful prose vignettes remained a powerful literary force. Given what was to come later—a small subfield’s worth of articles comparing Zhuangzi with Derrida as kindred spirits on semiotic issues—it was an interesting and counterintuitive move, to accuse the old Daoist of a pre‑Qin version of logocentrism. And, in fact, the premise was disputed by James J. Y. Liu, in his last book, published posthumously, where he sug‑ gested that if logocentrism were to be interpreted as phonocentrism, there is nothing in Zhuangzi to suggest a preference for speech.34 Zhang responded

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to this critique in a review of Liu’s book;35 however, to Zhang’s credit, he pursued the point for its own sake and beyond what mere rebuttal would have required, incorporating the Critical Inquiry article into a much‑expanded argument in his 1992 book The Tao and the Logos—a book that remains the foremost statement on the subject. There, he maintains his earlier assertion of a sort of logocentrism pervading early Daoist thinking, by which the Dao is the name for a kind of ineffable presence, too full for language and nearly parallel to the conception of God in European mysticisms. However, he supplements this by a new recognition that there is more to Zhuangzi, at least, than a simple longing for presence, and that he is comparable to Wittgenstein and Derrida in his belief in the inevitable metaphoricity of all philosophy.36 It is a balanced argument: the strong assertion of Daoist logocentrism is imperfect, since key evidence for the point is drawn from non‑Daoist sources on the grounds of its displaying attitudes supposedly common in early China.37 However, the bizarre self‑mockery of the “Dis‑ course on Making Things Equal” can be read in varying ways, and Zhang’s ultimate stance that Zhuangzi is somehow both Derridean and logocentric is an utterly reasonable self‑contradiction, in which Zhang has quite responsibly cleaved to the paradoxes of the original. It was in the wake of Zhang’s book that the issue took on momentum, and began to stimulate broad interest and multiple publications from various quarters. Reaction to the book by Sinologists was sometimes negative, at times unfairly (the explicitly comparative theoretical study was repeatedly attacked for not being a work of historical Sinology), but the reviews agreed in at least conceding to Zhang a highly intelligent take on an issue that was worthy of sustained attention. And the attention did in fact sustain itself: the first independent assessments were a pair of articles published in a September 1992 edition of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature: Peide Zha surveyed the Zhang‑Liu dispute, and extended Zhang’s point to Wei‑Jin xuanxue, arguing for a dominant “Taocentrism”;38 Shaobo Xie and John M. Chen, in contrast, initiated the now much more common argument that Derrida and Zhuangzi are fundamentally similar, not shying away from labeling the latter’s work a parallel “deconstructionist discourse.”39 Mark Berkson, in opposition, stressed the differences, arguing that while the Zhuangzi is Derridean in his skepticism of language, ultimately it advocates replacing language with intuitionism as a proper mode of knowing—a position obviously highly un‑Derridean.40 A full decade after the original publication of The Tao and the Logos, Timothy Nulty devoted a paper specifically to a rebuttal of Zhang.41 And other works such as those of Froese and Burik

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(mentioned in the last chapter) continue to appear and contribute to this ongoing comparative dialogue. However, there are two major limitations to any comparison (includ‑ ing negative ones) between Zhuangzi and Derrida, both historical.42 These are not raised to dismiss the possibility of comparative philosophy. To raise historical difference against philosophical affinity is simply a non sequitur, unless one can show how the apparently similar terms of debate have irrec‑ oncilable fields of reference. But to ask history to work alongside philosophy is to provide the latter with a particularly skilled translator, who knows how best to replicate nuance. The first limitation is parallel to the difficulty of matching Heidegger with Laozi: the cognizance of temporality in which historical difference is given, exceeding the mere obvious and useless facts of time and space. Although appearing as an actual person in a way that Laozi does not, Zhuang Zhou was working and writing close to the very beginning of what turned out to be a long and complex philosophical tradition; to him, that tradition was invisibly future, and hence while there was certainly argument (with Confucius, with Mozi, with Gongsun Long), argument did not take place in time—it comes across as a timeless debate between abstracted contemporary alternatives, not a highly technical intervention in an ancient debate where numerous divisions and subdivisions had already been delineated. There were some words that had accreted specialized philosophical meanings,43 and as already mentioned, these constituted an explicit reaction to the history of debate between Confucians and Mohists. Nevertheless, the Zhuangzi still does read very much like a text closer to the beginning of a philosophical tradition than to the end. There are important ways in which the text can‑ not be understood without noting its status as a reaction to prior currents of thought, yet on the other hand, this did not grow out of an extensive history of working through a highly technical set of philosophical problems over the course of centuries. Hence, the level of precision of which Zhuang Zhou could have been capable was severely limited. The possibility of argu‑ mentation was given in a form which had prior established positions, but not a real “history of philosophy”: Zhuangzi had not read Hegel. Derrida wrote at the seeming end of a long tradition. It had an incredible elaborate and intricate vocabulary. It had a history, and it had a philosophy of the history of philosophy. By the 1960s, it seemed ripe for closure—and so Derrida attempted to close it surreptitiously, by refusing to acknowledge the origin. As well as to reopen it, for wherever there was no origin, there could only be history (i.e., différance). Every motive, every

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gesture, every clever feint in his corpus—including those against the situ‑ ated—are situated. None of the above‑mentioned scholars would argue that Zhuangzi and Derrida are simply the same, nor that they are simply different; each individual is working from a more nuanced position than that. But considered as an ongoing dialogue, the debate about whether similarities or dissimilarities are the more striking limits us to only one version of comparative philosophy: Given that there is neither perfect identity nor absolute negation, how does the particular distribution of affinity and contention between two think‑ ers set off (as if by chiaroscuro effects) the particular forms in which each system is given to us? In this particular case, if recent theory can be of use in parsing ancient thought, it will not be via the sudden revelation that deconstruction was prediscovered in the pre‑Qin, but rather in providing a familiar modern model of semiotic skepticism against which the archaic impulses to a form of arche‑semiotic skepticism emergent before intellectual history can be measured. The second limitation of the comparison is that its framework—semi‑ otics—is contemporary. Unlike the case of Heidegger and Laozi, Derrida never seems to have drawn any very deep inspiration from classical Chinese philosophy (debunking seventeenth‑century misconceptions of the Chinese character as ideogrammatic does not count); hence, unlike work on Heidegger and his hidden sources, research comparing Derrida and Zhuangzi has never been in the mode of influence‑studies, but rather a series of abstracted, con‑ ceptual comparisons. But one needs to ask what such abstractions need to be lent to Zhuangzi in order to work—as there was no discipline of semiotics recognized in the pre‑Qin, does the isolation of an arche‑semiotics from Zhuangzi’s writing distort it by systematizing it? Does it distort it by remov‑ ing it from its original context of a response to the historically embedded programs of ethical and political behavior prescribed by competing schools? This is the most profound difference between the Chinese and the Western philosophical traditions: Greek philosophy began with ontology and moved through epistemology to ethics, politics, and all other questions, eventually giving form to Christian theology. In contrast, while early Chinese thought did ask cosmological questions in some ways comparable to the pre‑Socratics, rigorous ontology and epistemology of the sort begun by Plato had to be imported from India, through Buddhist theology, and was not really incor‑ porated into secular philosophy until a single millennium ago. There is a sense in which Zhuangzi could be considered “anti‑ethi‑ cal”—not in that he does not have a vision of how one should live one’s

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life (by responding spontaneously to the transformations of nature), but in that he does reject traditional dichotomies for what constitutes ethical behavior, on the grounds of such dichotomies representing (like analytic language) an arbitrary imposition on the world. Yet this is a position that could only have been staked out in a context of an already adumbrated ethical system. To isolate his skepticism of the efficacy of signs from the skepticism of signifying social practices, which motivates his work, is not an analysis but a distortion. As in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, the language games of Hui Shi and Gongsun Long are framed in the Zhuangzi as a distraction from the problem of the subject. Things that make us most human (emotions, linguistic signs, the face) are not merely false projections of the subject, they are the condition by which the subject can define itself against social entanglements. This way of conceiving the Daoist self is a serious challenge to any normal ethics, and we are only getting a partial view of the valences of Zhuangzi’s arche‑semiotics if we treat it as if it were an abstract system, as in Peirce or Saussure. In fact, the issue of ethics has not been entirely absent from the initial phase of Derrida‑Zhuangzi comparisons. Hongchu Fu, for example, in a paper that otherwise focused on critiquing the details of such comparisons, eventually suggests a broader principle that the primary difference may be attitudinal, poststructuralist engagement versus Daoist evasion of textual dissention.44 However, Fu’s paper, a good beginning, is an exception to the mainstream of the debate; and on its own it does not pursue the issue far enough. In order to understand how poststructuralism might speak to Zhuangzi without excising it from its ethical context, it is not sufficient to buy an antibiotic from “Plato’s Pharmacy.” A more helpful starting point is to consider Derrida’s engagement with the phenomenological ethics of Levinas.

Levinas: The Horror of Silence It is hard to know whether to cast Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) as one of the last great phenomenologists or as a destroyer of phenomenology. His intellectual pedigree favors the former: a philosophy student at Freiburg just after the publication of Being and Time, Levinas read deeply in the phenomenological tradition, moving from Heidegger to Husserl and other of the latter’s students. Levinas later wrote his dissertation on Husserl, and published the first French translation of one of Husserl’s works (the Cartesian Meditations). However, while his own writings are resolutely in the idiom

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of the phenomenological tradition, the lesson Levinas most thoroughly learned from Husserl was how to entirely recast a philosophical tradition by insisting upon a previously unthought foundation for it. Husserl attacked the venerable ontological tradition by positing that the space of encounter must take logical priority over the thing‑in‑itself; Levinas in turn undid Husserl by arguing that the space of encounter is foundationally not an experience of objects, but an ethical relation with the Other. Though born and raised in Lithuania, Levinas had become a French citizen several years before the beginning of World War II, and served in the French army against the initial German invasion. He was captured along with his entire unit, and spent the rest of the war as a German prisoner of war, in a labor camp comprised entirely of Jewish soldiers. However, during this period, he managed to continue writing philosophical notes—and these became the core of his first major postwar work, Existence and Existents, published in 1947. The ethical work for which Levinas is known was thus literally a product of the war. Given his own experience, given the fact that much of his family in Lithuania ended up dying in the concentration camps, it is not surprising that Levinas could not accept the untroubled accommodationism, and at times enthusiasm, that Heidegger displayed for the Nazi regime. In a much‑quoted line from his Talmudic commentaries, Levinas says, “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.”45 This occurs in the context of an exegesis of a passage in which a brilliant scholar is not forgiven his fault, precisely because his brilliance requires him to be held to a higher standard. Heidegger was far from the worst Nazi, but he was among the most culpable, because he should have known better. Given the deep frustration with Heidegger, it is not surprising that Levinas’s postwar ethical (anti-)system represents a sharp break with the Ger‑ man phenomenological mainstream even while it continues habits of mind deeply ingrained from Husserl. As expressed in Totality and Infinity, Levinas asserts the primacy of the Other (variously implied to be God/metaphys‑ ics/other humans/ultimate alterity in any form) not only over the self, but over all classificatory schemes that might conspire to contain or diminish (by pretending to offer a prior foundation for) that Other. The self is not negated by this contrast, but it cannot be the self ’s ideation of the Other which is given priority, but the Other her/himself. As did Heidegger, Levinas absolutely rejects the notion that there can be an ontology elaborated prior to the Other (who is always too fundamental to merely exist in a space delin‑ eated by abstract principles). But he then also goes on to reject the solution

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of Heidegger’s version of phenomenology, that Being is a continuum that obviates the need for any particular existents: the Other cannot allow for merging into an experiential system of relation, any more than it can suffer the reduction to being a mere object in a rationally delineated prior universe. The Other is the Other, or Ehyeh‑Asher‑Ehyeh, as the Tetragrammaton put it. Against the absolute Other, there must exist the self—the site of self‑contented subjectivity.46 By this structural necessity, Levinas is effectively undoing Husserl’s brackets, returning from a monistic to a dualistic world in which there is a reality to psychology, and an important structuring gap between the subject and what the subject perceives. Yet this is not the traditional world of epistemology, in which that perceived by the subject is the object; the Other is no object, nor can there be any room for objects in the space across which self and Other gaze. The self for itself Levinas labels (not dismissively) “atheist”; yet even the atheistical self seems to desire the Other—and the form that that desire takes, is language: “[T]his is why language institutes a relation irreducible to the subject‑object relation: the revelation of the other.”47 In part, this is because language before it gets to the work of representation, by nature of what it is, is a communication to someone who can receive it; Levinasian nouns are all, at heart, in the vocative. But it is also because, even in its apodictic functions, language’s categorizing force, by gathering all individual objects into a collective, presents reality to the Other as a shared mass, a gift: “To recognize the Other is therefore to come to him across the world of possessed things, but at the same time to establish, by gift, community and universality. Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. To speak is to make the world com‑ mon, to create commonplaces. Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundations for a possession in common.”48 This commonality is reached slowly. The separability of the self is foundational. After his opening section defining his terms and laying out the direction of his intent, Levinas turns to an extended demolition of the Heideggerian phenomenal world. He may not be intending satire (very little in the book is funny), but satire is certainly the result of his redefinition of “dwelling” as not a being‑in‑the‑world, but as first an actual house, and then perhaps by metaphorical extension, physically limited spaces (such as the body) that behave like houses.49 The point is the necessity of limita‑ tion: the ego cannot be absorbed into the functionality of objects laying to hand, it is a thing that takes pleasure in the appropriation of the object world. Eventually, perhaps, one can practice hospitality by inviting the Other

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in—but the separateness of the dwelling, its limiting instrumentality, must first be firmly established. Once that limitation is understood, Levinas can point out the Other as the infinitely unassimilable, he whom one desires, he who begs and he who commands. And the quality of the Other that gives him this radical alterity Levinas names “face”—the accusatory phenomenal sign by which the Other makes clear his own withdrawn absence from being‑with. And he is very explicit about the semiotic quality of the face—the face is not a phenomenologically immanent manifestation of the Other, but the sole trace left in the phenomenological world (“totality”) of the Other’s immeasurable nature (“infinity”). The reception of that sign by the self works by reference to a conscious surplus: the face is not the sign of the actual Other, but the sign that the fullness of the Other necessarily exceeds the self ’s concept of the Other. The structural result for Levinas’s relation to the immediate philosophical past is that it is the Other, by means of the sign of the face, who unmoors the phenomenal world from its Heideggerian foundation: The who involved in activity is not expressed in the activity, is not present, does not attend his own manifestation, but is simply signified in it by a sign in a system of signs, that is, as a being who is manifested precisely as absent from his manifestation: a manifestation in the absence of being—a phenomenon. When we understand man on the basis of his works he is more surprised than understood. His life and his labor mask him. As symbols they call for interpretation. Here phenomenality does not simply designate a relativity of knowledge, but a mode of being where nothing is ultimate, where everything is a sign, a present absent‑ ing itself from its presence and in this sense a dream.50 The absence of the Other from his own sign, the face, causes the whole system of the world to dissolve into a congeries of signs of absence—Das‑ ein is a dream. Most of these signs presumably point nowhere, at empty instrumentality; the face alone points toward infinite plenitude. So far as this part of the argument goes, it is noticeably consonant with that of Zhuang Zhou in dialogue with Hui Shi. Just as the Zhuangzi implies, Levinas’s version of the face is an explicitly bifurcating sign. The face of the Other demands recognition, but only because it is an imperfect sign of a radical alterity, the inherent sovereignty of the subject to which the face gestures but cannot ever express.

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However, these parallel visions move in opposite directions. In the Zhuangzi, the split between interior self and appearance cleaves the subject from the social and ethical, while in Levinas the same subject, through the same face, cleaves to the world: the division is the source of the ethical claim. As one might expect from an ethical system expressed in such terms, theorization of semiotics is integral to the argument. However, it must be stressed that, for Levinas, ethics is not founded upon a semiotic base; rather, the reverse, that semiotics is essentially an epiphenomenon of the primor‑ dial ethical relation to the Other. All signs tend to replicate that founding movement of the buried subject toward the expressive face: [I]t is not the mediation of the sign that forms signification, but signification (whose primordial event is the face to face) that makes the sign function possible. The primordial essence of language is to be sought not in the corporeal operation that discloses it to me and to others and, in the recourse to language, builds up a thought, but in the presentation of meaning. . . . the being of signification consists in putting into question in an ethical relation constitutive freedom itself. Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language. . . . This relation is not added to the interior monologue—be it Merleau‑Ponty’s “corporeal intention‑ ality”—like an address added to the fabricated object one puts in the mailbox; the welcoming of the being that appears in the face, the ethical event of sociality, already commands inward discourse. And the epiphany that is produced as a face is not constituted as are all other beings, precisely because it “reveals” infinity. Signification is infinity, that is, the Other.51 Reason, considered logically prior to its expression, would have to be a source of commonality. In an unusually Platonic turn, Levinas asserts that there could only be one, and not multiple Reasons, and hence any appeal to Reason must constitute a recognition of commonality with the Other. It is to effectuate this commonality that language exists, and hence the primordial act of semiotics is not a naming, but a naming‑to. Before a sign can refer to any given referent, it must refer to the possibility of the Other’s apperception and understanding of that sign. And because this ethical relationship undergirds the sign, enables its possibility, even thought kept wholly within the confines of the self, unfolding necessarily in language,

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must be an ethical phenomenon. Language thus emerges as a secret door by which the Other can access and lay claim to the self—even the “atheist” self, employing objects for pleasure within the confines of his own psychism, could not name such objects to himself without implicitly recognizing the possibility of an Other’s prior claim. More than any other modern theory of semiotics, the Levinasian ethi‑ cal sign approaches the implicit conceptions of early Chinese philosophical approaches to language, and thus uniquely suits it to a discussion of Daoist arche‑semiotics. Chinese philosophy is ethico‑political in its foundation, rather than onto‑epistemological, as in early Greek thought; a philosophy such as that of Levinas, which takes the ethical as its first principle, while revolutionary for the West, is necessarily a reenactment in modern terms of the assumptions present in archaic China. The ancient Chinese sign‑system is manifestly not essentialized as a relationship between an object and its representation. It is rather a network of reference points within which humans arrange their patterns of social organization. As a result, the signs of most interest to early Chinese arche‑semiotics are not those indicating objects, but indicating people—humans’ own signs of themselves, their appear‑ ance and reception within the social sphere, are of paramount importance, and the trauma of the possibility of arche‑semiotic failure is not because “things are not as they are supposed to be,” but “I am not understood as I understand myself.”52 But commensurability is not concord. Levinasian language does not merely play out in the intellectual field of the possibly ethical, it endorses the ethical relation as the prime foundation of Being. Daoism is first articu‑ lated in the ethico‑political context of pre‑Qin Chinese philosophy, and takes its direction and character from that context, but in intention it is “anti‑ethical” in the sense explained above, not lacking a vision of the good life but kicking against artificial categories for behavior, hostile to the social world to the point that nonaction within it is enjoined even upon kings, and deeply suspicious of the efficaciousness of the signs that structure that world. The claim of the Levinasian face could be thought of as deeply parallel to Confucian “humaneness” (perhaps with an added smidgeon of Mohist social leveling); it is a claim that is dependent on the prior dismantling of the Heideggerian phenomenological world of inherent interrelation, as, just as in Confucianism, distinctions must be drawn in order to be transcended, the self and the Other must be recognized as separate before any ethical claim can be asserted. It is these distinctions, coded in language, that the Daoist refuses to accept.

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Hence, at his most direct relevance to pre‑Qin Daoism, Levinas is also at his most hostile. The seeming concord on the importance of the face merely brings to the fore the critical question: Does one use the impossibil‑ ity of representation to pose a claim upon the Other, or to reject all such responsibility? Indeed, the terms of the Levinasian critique of withdrawing from signs are so apropos that one suspects they were voiced partially in reaction to Heidegger’s appropriations of Laozi: But a world absolutely silent that would not come to us from the word, be it mendacious, would be an‑archic [sic], without principle, without a beginning. Thought would strike nothing substantial. On first contact the phenomenon would degrade into appearance and in this sense would remain in equivocation, under suspicion of an evil genius. . . .  The silent world is a world that comes to us from the Other, be he an evil genius. Its equivocation is insinuated in a mockery. Thus silence is not a simple absence of speech; speech lies in the depths of silence like a laughter perfidiously held back. It is the inverse of language: the interlocutor has given a sign, but has declined every interpretation; this is the silence that ter‑ rifies. Speech consists in the Other coming to the assistance of the sign given forth, attending his own manifestation in signs, redressing the equivocal by this attendance.53 The silent world that horrifies Levinas is one version of the Daoist world as read by a theist. The face is merely facial, with nothing beneath. “The true way cannot be spoken”; therefore, do not speak. Even though neither the Laozi nor Zhuangzi should be considered simply as rejecting language, their praises of silence are real and important—and, in some readings of the text, dispositive. More important than the silence of this world, though, is what Levinas thinks of as its anarchism: Zhuangzi assumes a world with‑ out a genesis from first principles, ruled only by transformation, in which things are what they are until they are not. His dao is certainly not anthro‑ pomorphic enough to laugh as an evil genius might—whether it should be considered as a nominalist descriptor or an actual spiritual presence is a debatable question, but it certainly does not have mind enough to be either god or demon. But to a theist perspective, a world without logos is traditionally a horror of blank materialism, meaningless reproduction and unmourned exterminations.

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Salvation from this world (beset with horribly Daoist water imagery) lies in ratiocinative grammar: Speech first founds community by giving, by presenting the phenomenon as given; and it gives by thematizing. The given is the work of a sentence. In the sentence the apparition loses its phenomenality in being fixed as a theme; in contrast with the silent world ambiguity infinitely magnified, stagnant water, water stilled with mystification that passes for mystery, the proposi‑ tion relates the phenomenon to the existent, to exteriority, to the Infinity of the other uncontained by my thought. It defines. The definition that situates the object within its genus presup‑ poses the definition that consists in disengaging the amorphous phenomenon from its confusion to orient it in function of the Absolute, its origin, to thematize it. Every logical definition—per genesim or per genus et differentiam specificam—already presupposes this thematization, this entry into a world in which sentences resound.54 The use of language is classificatory, Aristotelian: by it the self and Other can jointly appropriate the object‑world, take the individual phenomena and convert them into objects of knowledge, given new identities in anthropocen‑ trically defined categories of genus and species, and thereby made useful for the needs of the ethical relationship. “The presence of the Other dispels the anarchic sorcery of the facts: the world becomes an object. To be an object, to be a theme, is to be what I can speak of with someone who has broken through the screen of phenomena and has associated me with himself.”55 By the act of division, sharing is enabled. And this urge to divide is what makes water, so dear to the Daoist consciousness, an image of disgust for Levinas: a continuity, water cannot be cut. Waters must be divided from the waters in order for the Other’s order to take hold of the world. Derrida’s engagement with Levinas was a long‑term one, but the first seminal text through which his engagement with Levinas is most often read is the famous long essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” of 1963, which is also considered as offering in embryonic form many of the same arguments that would later be the focus of On Grammatology. Derrida’s argument fol‑ lows Levinas too closely to be called truly unified—every twist and turn of the latter is amplified by Derrida’s comparative exegeses on the relations to antecedents in Husserl and Heidegger, as well as his own strong readings on

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minor points, which always threaten to spin off into separate discussions. But Derrida’s main interest in Levinas, and the main thread of his praise and respect for him, is of course the positing of language as an epiphenom‑ enon of ethics, rather than of ontology. Indeed, Derrida could be accused of overreading Levinas on this point; as seen above, the issue of language is genuinely important in Totality and Infinity; but Derrida makes it central. After an initial gambit praising Levinas’s stance at the intersection of an old, dead way of doing philosophy, and the unarticulated possibility of a new way, Derrida proceeds through an analytical explication of his revisions to Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies in the early work, to a main focus on Totality and Infinity. Derrida recognizes, of course, the fact that Levinas subjects language to the primordial relation to the Other, but then begins to recast that relation as itself a form of language. How can the nonphysical space in which the self and the Other meet be anything but a sort of inscription of the possibility of violence? For that matter, how can the Other be known except by language, and doesn’t the naming represent a failure? “If one thinks, as Levinas does, that positive Infinity tolerates, or even requires, infinite alterity, then one must renounce all language, and first of all the words infinite and other.” Derrida goes on to note that this ought to lead normally to a classical negative theology, but for some reason (perhaps a knowledge, hidden to himself, of the inescapability of language) is unable to make this traditional turn. But since the Other must indeed transcend one’s knowledge of him, at the same time that one gives him the finite name of Other, the discursive relationship in which Levinas finds the possibility of ethical relationship must also simultaneously be a site of aggression, diminution of the Other: If, as Levinas says, only discourse (and not intuitive contact) is righteous, and if, moreover, all discourse essentially retains within it space and the Same—does this not mean that discourse is originally violent? And that the philosophical logos, the only one in which peace may be declared, is inhabited by war? The distinction between discourse and violence always will be an inaccessible horizon. Nonviolence would be the telos, and not the essence of discourse. Perhaps it will be said that something like discourse has its essence in its telos, and the presence of its present in the future. This certainly is so, but on the condition that its future and its telos be nondiscourse: peace as a certain silence, a certain beyond of speech, a certain possibility, a certain

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silent horizon of speech. And telos has always had the form of presence, be it a future presence. There is war only after the opening of discourse, and war dies out only at the end of dis‑ course. Peace, like silence, is the strange vocation of a language called outside itself by itself. But since finite silence is also the medium of violence, language can only indefinitely tend toward justice by acknowledging and practicing the violence within it. Violence against violence. Economy of violence.56 Here we begin to see the ways in which Derrida’s critique is assimilable to Daoism, and the ways in which it is not. As in the Daoist critique of Con‑ fucianism, which denies its ethics without refuting the assumption that the field of signification must also be a field of relation, Derrida seems to accept Levinas’s reconception of language as subordinate to the encounter even while he puts into question the idealism of the Levinasian vocative. For Derrida, as for Laozi and Zhuangzi, language is necessarily the founding condition of strife; for him, as for them, one does not end contestation and violence by getting the words right, but by having done with words. But Derrida is also human, in a way that Laozi and Zhuangzi (both shadowy figures, the former possibly nonexistent) were not. For them, silence seems to actually be an option—even in the midst of Zhuangzi’s self‑conscious tomfoolery in the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” about speaking against speech, he does seem actually to be advocating silence. Derrida suggests silence only as a theoretical possibility against which one knows the actual state of the necessary condition of language: language must appropriate the peace of silence as its telos even while it enacts its own disruptions. After a section in which he tries to show that Levinas, by taking issue with phenomenological conclusions while still making use of the phenom‑ enological method, replicates some of the issues he critiques in Husserl and remains inescapably within the faults of the Greek tradition, Derrida asserts that something non‑Greek, anti‑logical, might be opened within the silent aporias of logos, an inescapable “strange dialogue of speech and silence.”57 His final section takes on Levinas at the heart of his quarrel with Heidegger, ontology—is there a Being different than, prior to, individual existents? Of course, this very traditional ontological question is precisely what Heidegger was declaring to be the wrong question; but Derrida reads Levinas as still finding something of Being (rather than the Being‑there‑with) in Heidegger. The problem with this is that, by so thoroughly denying the existence of the copula (rather than as in the later Derrida, effacing it)—indeed, denying

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any possible predicate—the vision of language that undergirds the Levinasian system of relations would be a language of proper nouns only, the interpel‑ lative outcry to the master. Thus, in its most elevated nonviolent urgency, denouncing the passage through Being and the moment of the concept, Levinas’s thought would not only propose an ethics without law, as we said above, but also a language without phrase. Which would be entirely coherent if the face was only glance, but it is also speech; and in speech it is the phrase which makes the cry of need become the expression of desire. Now, there is no phrase which is indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence appears with articulation. And the latter is opened only by (the at first preconceptual) circulation of Being. The very elocution of nonviolent metaphysics is its first disavowal. Levinas doubtless would not deny that every historical language carries within it an irreducible conceptual moment, and therefore a certain violence. From his point of view, the origin and possibility of the concept are simply not the thought of Being, but the gift of the world to the other as totally‑other. . . . In its original possibility as offer, in its still silent intention, language is nonviolent (but can it be language, in this pure intention?). It becomes violent only in its history, in what we have called the phrase, which obliges it to articulate itself in a conceptual syntax opening the circulation of the same, permitting itself to be governed both by “ontology” and by what remains, for Levinas, the concept of concepts: Being. Hence, only in its silent origin, before Being, would language be nonviolent. But why history? Why does the phrase impose itself? Because if one does not uproot the silent origin from itself violently, if one decides not to speak, then the worst violence will silently cohabit the idea of peace? Peace is made only in a certain silence, which is determined and protected by the violence of speech. Since speech says nothing other than the horizon of this silent peace by which it has itself summoned and that it is its mission to protect and to prepare, speech indefinitely remains silent. One never escapes the economy of war. It is evident that to separate the original possibility of speech—as non‑violence and gift—from the violence neces‑ sary in historical actuality is to prop up thought by means of

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transhistoricity. Which Levinas does explicitly, despite his initial critique of Husserlian “anhistoricism.” For Levinas, the origin of meaning is nonhistory, is “beyond history.” . . .  The anhistoricity of meaning at its origin is what profoundly separates Levinas from Heidegger, therefore. Since Being is history for the latter, it is not outside difference, and thus, it originally occurs as (nonethical) violence, as dissimulation of itself in its own unveiling. That language, thereby, always hides its own origin is not a contradiction, but history itself.58 The peace of silence had previously been teleological, even eschatological; here, it is reformulated as the origin (the arche‑ological), but in any case it is still the unreachable in a world of speech. Which is, we learn, the world of “history,” a word that forces itself into the discussion as if without Der‑ rida’s say in the matter. In any case, the word is welcome, and fascinating, for the assumptions it reveals. This description of history only makes sense as history: the worst kind of violence that follows the decision not to speak is the violence of the concentration camps—and this is, of course, the source of the silence which Levinas found monstrous, the sign of the God who mocks. The real silent peace must rely upon the speaking of war; the Levinasian vision of a peace through static language is as impossible as the provision of an actual silence. The site of meaning is always in language, language is always sliding away in history: différance. The violence of the Warring States period was terrible, with high (if ultimately unknowable) death tolls, but it was of a different character than that of the Holocaust: merely the result of an archaic people’s wars of bloody conquest, not the chilling technocratic evil of rationally organized genocide, the darkest hour of logos. One understands why, living after a different hist‑ ory than the pre‑Qin Daoists, Levinas hates silence and Derrida suspects its impossibility. However, early China was no less embedded in history than twentieth‑century Europe, and by offering the word history as a rubric for interpreting the impossibility of silence, and positing history as the mode in which the potential of silence gets to be spoken, Derrida has accident‑ ally also provided us with what could be a hermeneutic for understanding the playing‑out of Daoist ideas of the sign in the early medieval period. The problem with “history” as a universalizing category, though, is just as obvious as the problems with using a text to voice suspicions of language. The embeddedness of the Levinas‑Derrida dialogue within a given history should make it just as unhelpful to Daoism as it is suggestive.

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There is no resolution to this contradiction; its unresolvability is part of the reason we should keep it close to heart. However, we can at least set up some guardrails of negation along the Way, to protect the following chapters from the wrong kind of theorization of history.

Three Versions of Non‑Daoist Non‑Articulation To use an attribute to show that attributes are not attributes is not as good as using a nonattribute to show that attributes are not attributes. To use a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using a non‑horse to show that a horse is not a horse, Heaven and earth are one attribute; the ten thousand things are one horse.59 This dense passage from the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” is a rejoinder to the argumentation of the Gongsun Longzi, in particular chapters other than those discussed in the Introduction. The details of that debate are irrelevant, but the basic logic is worth noting. Ultimately, this is an inversion of logic developed by the artisanal‑class Mohists: one sets up clear logical standards for measuring arguments, just as one measures a crooked frame by the known‑to‑be‑correct T‑square. Zhuangzi is being deliberately disagreeable, stating instead that one ought to use unknowable absence, rather than officially recognized presence, as the standard for evaluating claims. Focusing on nonexistence and nonsignification will ultimately make the socially sanctioned “real world” start to seem dubious and hollow. We might therefore extend this pronouncement to suggest that using Daoism alone to show what Daoism is not, is not as good as using non‑Dao‑ ism to show what Daoism is not. In the previous section, the importance of Levinas and Derrida to thinking through parallels with Zhuangzi has already been fleshed out. Hopefully, it should be clear that Derridean semiotics was formulated against a deep background of serious historical and ethical engagement, and that we therefore might also profitably look for this historical and ethical context in Daoist discourse as well. There comes a point, however, at which a philosophical comparator ceases to be enlightening: discourses are not identical, the point of comparison has to be a recognition of sufficient similarity, followed by the adumbration of difference. In fact, it is still possible to learn more about Zhuangzi and the Daoist discourses that followed by continuing to read Derrida on Levinas

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for a short while further. However, what we can learn is via a negative dialectic: the moments that follow are suggestive historicities for language which the Daoist tradition did not take. It is well known that in his later work Derrida engaged in various ways with history, ethics, and politics, on topics such as the “end” of Marxism, the rise of terror, and the rights of animals. A work that wanted to trace Derridean conceptions of the sign through all of those permutations would be a long book, not a short section of one chapter of a book on Daoism. For present purposes, it is easier to maintain a focus specifically on Derrida’s continuing engagement with Levinas, and how that played out in works after “Violence and Metaphysics.” What follows is a brief examination of three moments from that later engagement, each of which speaks to the relation between language, history, and ethics, and each of which shows up a version of what Daoist arche‑semiotics was not.

Version 1: Silence as Elimination of the Trace of Relation In 1980, Derrida published an essay, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in a multiauthor collection, Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas. The work is one of his more “literary,” in that he gives fairly free rein to his impulses to play in the anarchic interstices of texts, which elsewhere he takes pains to explicate. Especially in its opening sections, the text is highly self‑referential, addressing the reader regarding the reading of itself, in a way highly reminiscent of then‑new trends in postmodern fiction. (Calvino’s methodologically similar If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller was published the year before, for example.) However, the “you” addressed by the text is not nearly as important as Levinas, for whom the essay declares itself to have been written. Emmanuel Levinas, in this essay, is usually abbreviated to “EL,” thereby becoming a barely coded reflection of the Hebrew God: this is a self‑conscious admission of the centrality of Levinas, by Levinas, since of course it admits Levinas’s central contention that the claims of the face of the Other are a responsibility owed toward the divine. The essay’s main goal is to interrogate its own status as a titular text for Levinas. What does it mean to be a text for another? Can textuality be a space for ethical relation? One might assume that it should be, given the essay’s own title: Derrida seems to be insisting that he, as an ethical subject, is present in the text, and can through the medium of the text give a gift of recognition to his respected elder interlocutor. The “Here I Am,” especially the notion of presence to “EL,” carries with it shades of the

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calling of Abraham, which Derrida would later explore in The Gift of Death. And so the essay seems at first to be asking the reader to follow along the personal Derrida in giving himself textually to an ethicist who had cleared the very ground on which both Derrida and the reader have come to meet. This position would be as un‑Derridean as one could imagine, however, and the essay is of course not actually endorsing textuality as a means of encapsulating personal authorial presence. On the contrary, the second‑per‑ son address to the reader, as the person who is not merely consuming a text about Levinas but “authoring” it through hermeneutical construction, serves to displace the “I” who is presumably present in that text. At the same time, of course, a text about and for Levinas must in a sense come from Levinas—but if the “I” that is “Derrida” wishes to show gratitude toward Levinas, he cannot simply give Levinas back to himself, but must alter “Levinas” into something else. Hence, there is someone in the text, but the someone is not Derrida, it is a trace—of Derrida, of Levinas, of the reader’s projection, of the text itself: To say “he will have obligated”—in this work, taking into account what makes the work within this seriasure—is not to designate, describe, define, show, and so on, but, let us say, to entrace. . . . He will not have been (a) present, but he will have made a gift of not disappearing without leaving a trace. But leaving the trace is also to leave it, abandon it, not insist upon it in a sign.60 And once one realizes that the text is not a simple meeting place for presences, one has to ask of this essay (as it directly asks of the reader) what ethics could mean, since ethics is expressed textually. Putting the core problem of the essay exposes a (tonally warm and admiring) quasi‑attack on Levinas, which parallels that from “Violence and Metaphysics”: as Simon Critchley has written of the essay, “In order to maintain the ethical moment, Derrida must commit an ungrateful violence against Levinas’s work: he must show how the work does not work.”61 Derrida honors EL by grappling with him, in the style of a wrestling Jacob. There is no “ultimate conclusion” to this text, there are a complex series of turnings in the argument which result in provisional conclusions regarding ethics and textuality, but all of these would have been subverted by a final rule. There is a theme to these turnings, though: that, given the nature of the text as a suture, what is given in the ethics mediated by text is something also joint, unwhole, but perhaps better for being such.

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Much of this structure, and its themes, echo with Daoist arche‑semi‑ otics. There is the titular assertion of a false presence within the text. There is the suspicion that the sign that one hangs outside oneself is a mere trace, something from which one can take one’s leave. There is the assumption that textuality is the site where ethics is assumed to happen—but that in fact it cannot, and the problems with signification are intimately involved with the problems of adopting any ethics. And there is even the notion, parallel to Zhuangzi’s rebuke to Hui Shi, that the subject can only be constituted by a denial of the possibility of officially constituting subjects where they can be recognized, in participatory language. Where later versions of Daoism cannot follow Derrida is in his deconstruction of the “for.” Derrida does not deny the Levinasian space of relation and absolute claims upon the other, but it is part of the complex of Levinasian claims, which he is trying to dismantle through its susceptibility to the flaws of language. Levinasian ethics imagines responsible relation at the core of the Other’s claim; Derridean anti‑ethics agrees that that relation is paramount in ethics, so that even when he is writing a literal “text for Levinas” he must turn the gift into a contestation. There is considerable variation among Six Dynasties writers influenced by Laozi and Zhuangzi; the following chapters will include texts by those who identify as Daoists, and those who identify as non‑Daoists. They come from very different regions of their eras, and have very different concerns. However, in general they never make the assumption that mere relation is the same as the ethical‑political “world.” In that world, though (because?) there is no common philosophical discipline named “ethics,” the space of what we would call the ethical is also the hierarchical space emanating from royal courts and spreading out into all kinds of public society. Those influenced by Daoist arche‑semiotics are usually cautious about these public spaces to varying degrees. But they are also not hermits, and enjoy other spaces of nonhierarchical relation: the Daoist commune, the Buddhist monastery, the private estate on which one can gather friends. Such private spaces are escapes from hierarchy and politics, and hence also escapes from the anxieties of self‑representation. If one can simply “be” together with equals who already understand, there is no need to search for signs.

Version 2: The Self‑Historicizing Non‑Speaker The essay “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” only mentions Levinas once, in passing, but the tone, subject, and approach are impossible to imagine

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apart from Derrida’s deep engagement with Levinasian ethics. Face, trace, and place are all central to the argument in ways that inherit Levinas’s points of departure from Heidegger. Originally delivered as a lecture in Jerusalem in 1986, the text is constituted as Derrida’s attempt to assert that deconstruction is different from negative theology—an association through which many scholars in divinity schools and religious studies departments had begun to read his oeuvre. The basic argument to which Derrida was responding is that, like negative theology, deconstruction was a mode in which language is deemed insufficient to capturing that which it aims at (God/meaning). Many of those who advanced this argument understood very well that theological language (even negative theology) ultimately requires a kind of presence or fullness over language, which was attacked in Of Grammatology. Nonetheless, the argument went, Derrida never avers nihilism, and deconstruction deconstructs in the name of a supposed absence, which might (because not simply nothing) be recuperated into an absent something—perhaps the divine. It is as if Derrida and his acolytes appeared as a Hellenistic mystery cult, not divulging anything to the noninitiated, yet jealously guarding a supreme secret. Derrida’s talk throughout the first half is highly personal. He notes that there has been a long history of charging him with negative theology (some charges more friendly than others). He summarizes others’ critiques of his work with a manifest bitterness. He speaks of his own growing sense that he would need to speak of negative theology—but also of his reluctance, and a series of pregnant deferrals. He localizes the notion that the moment has come to speak of not speaking, invoking the Haggadah: “Next year in Jerusalem, I told myself, in order perhaps to defer indefinitely the fulfill‑ ment of this promise.”62 He finally details the origin of his title—having been asked to give an immediate title for his Jerusalem talk while on the phone from Yale, knowing that at last the eschatological hour had come for him to speak of negative theology, he titles it with his own personal fear: “Comment ne pas dire . . . ?”63 Eventually, however, he moves on from speaking about his own pro‑ cess of speaking on not‑speaking, to speak of not‑speaking. In describing how his own method is not simply a negative‑theological secret, Derrida takes the position that such secrets are themselves not transcendent, every secret (by its necessary accompanying denials) negating itself: “There is no secret as such, I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret to whoever allies himself with me.”64 But he argues this primarily not by jokes, but by historicization—or, as he puts it, a focus on “place.” The second half

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of the essay analyzes three modes of not‑speaking as negative theology: the Greek, the Christian, and the Heideggerian. (A “Hebraic” mode is delib‑ erately elided: as Shira Wolosky has noted, the essay constantly highlights the possibility of a “Hebraism” while also maintaining a cool distance from it.)65 These are offered annalistically, with no telos, but indicate how not‑speaking is not a universal mode, it is grounded in circumstance. The essay ends in questions rather than conclusions—Is not‑speaking a trope to be deployed, or a mode of ontology? And is not‑speaking different when it is not‑addressing a divine Other? Again, we find in this lecture a series of issues and negotiations strikingly resonant with Daoist discourse. First and foremost, “how not to speak” is one of the most important problems of Daoist discourse; as has been explored at length in this chapter, it occupies some of the core materials in the Zhuangzi. More specifically, “negative theology” is a term usually deployed in regard to Western religious experience. However, it could arguably be used to describe Laozi’s attitude toward the dao, and it is certainly very similar to much of the theology of various religious Daoist and Buddhist thought during the early medieval period. When those materials are discussed in later chapters, it will be clear that there is some assumption of a surplus of presence, which mere words cannot catch. Deciding whether Derridean deconstruction is or is not a version of negative theology is a more polemical parallel version of a question scholars of Daoism have often had to ask: Is the dao just a mode of speaking/thinking/living, or is it a presence? But just as important as the content of the issue is the personal framing. Derrida is an inveterate punster, and cannot resist witticisms. In this case, the wit has tied together his own fate with that of the subject. How not to speak? It is as much about negative theology as his own reluctance to speak of negative theology. This is a situated way of doing philosophy, very much learned from Levinas (albeit with less wordplay), which recognizes the social context as interior to the subject of philosophy. There is no phenomenology without a system of human relations, and also no discussing “not‑speaking” without acknowledging the fact of the lecture hall in which an audience is addressed. As has been explained from the Introduction until this point, such elisions between the position of the subject and the nature of representation are at the heart of what I have been calling “arche‑semiotics.” For Daoist discourse, the position of the self in the sign is of the highest importance. It is not always foregrounded: in the coming chapters we will see texts that

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seem to talk about signs in the abstract. However, these are never very far from historical anxieties, self‑questioning and hesitations of various kinds, which we can see echoed in Derrida’s. Where Daoist discourse departs from Derridean is in their self‑con‑ sciousness of the possibility of self‑historicization. This point may be obscured by the fact that the method of this study is eagerly historicist, and has insisted on the “historical premise” of arche‑semiotics. However, it is one thing to historicize thinkers from the outside position of contemporary scholarship, quite another thing to assert that those thinkers historicized themselves! Daoist arche‑semiotic discourse is relentlessly engaged with the ethical and political position of the subject in history: people try to represent themselves, or to avoid representing themselves, in part because they are responding to historical forces. However, with a few exceptions, they were rarely fully conscious of the historicity of their own rhetoric. While Derrida is explicitly grappling with how to not to assimilate his own struggles with not talking about theology to a historical tradition that he takes pains to discuss as history, most of the writers who invoke the Laozi and Zhuangzi treat the principle of nonrepresentation as a timeless wisdom.

Version 3: The Unresponsive Antecedent as Friend “Adieu,” in the volume Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, is a transcript of the funeral oration delivered by Derrida at the graveside of Levinas in 1995. By Derridean standards, the text is abnormally short and clear (though perhaps still abnormally long and abstruse by the standards of what one normally says at an outdoor funeral in the dead of winter). It is, of course, not meant as a complex work of philosophy, but as an “adieu” to a mentor and friend who was also a philosophical giant. In terms of assessing the content of Derrida’s late appraisal of Derrida, the second and much longer essay in the same volume, “A Word of Welcome,” is considerably more substantial—that text was delivered a year later at a conference in Levinas’s honor, and con‑ tains a proper reflection on the role of the subject in the Levinasian ethical system. However, I wish to focus on the “Adieu” here precisely because it is not intended as a neutral philosophical statement, but as an address to a specific Other. This is a text more appropriate in its own terms—situated within a relationship, as Levinas would have wanted. And it is also a text more resonant with the Daoist arche‑semiotics of the early medieval period, which are more often also situated within systems of relations, rather than

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offered as abstractions. The “Adieu,” lacking a program, comes from the same place of conditioned impulse as do the arche‑semiotics of Daoist discourse. In his address, Derrida happens to say many nice things about Levi‑ nas. It is a text appropriate to its graveside genre. He notes the influence of Levinas, his achievements, his excellent personal and humane qualities. There is no “point” other than encomium. And yet an encomium for this man would have had to invoke his own philosophical themes in order to properly honor him, and this is what Derrida does. One of the major themes of the address is the unresponsiveness of the dead—a point he drew from a course, “Death and Time,” taught by Levinas two decades earlier. Derrida takes the lesson of Levinas and applies it to his own passing beyond response: Often those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one, deep inside, to a dead friend or master, those who make themselves heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond. . . . This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of the rhetoric of oration. It is rather so as to traverse speech at the very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent.66 Speech is difficult precisely because it highlights the failure of relation. The dead one acts as a hard surface, echoing back one’s own words to oneself rather than offering a proper response. There is a possibility here of horror, the mocking silence that Levinas had identified, which was cited above. But, in the course from which Derrida drew the trope, there is also foregrounded an alternate possibility: the silence of the Other as a reinforcement of one’s own responsibility, as one is forced to respond on behalf of the Other. It is with this “entrusted responsibility”67 in mind that Derrida ends his speech: But I said that I did not want simply to recall what he entrusted to us of the à‑Dieu, but first of all to say adieu to him, to call him by his name, to call his name, his first name, what he is called at the moment when, if he no longer responds, it is because he is responding in us, from the bottom of our hearts,

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in us but before us, in us right before us—in calling us, in recalling to us: à‑Dieu. Adieu, Emmanuel.68 The position of Levinas as forbear ultimately recuperates his own silence in death. He no longer responds, but because he has already pre‑re‑ sponded—the fact of our wanting to speak to him as mourners is our own ventriloquistic acknowledgment of our debt to him, felt as unending respons‑ ibility. Within such a framing, nonresponsiveness is tamed, brought back into the system of relation. Despite the theistic framing of the inescapable à‑Dieu, this is a deeply humanistic response, and one that seems to want to preserve friendship beyond death, not teleologically but as felt responsibility.69 So far, I have discussed Daoist arche‑semiotic discourse as writing, a way of representing the dao and the self, or of avoiding representing them. But as one leaves behind the Laozi and Zhuangzi for early medieval texts that were influenced by them, reading and exegesis become just as impor‑ tant as self‑expression. In the chapters that follow, we will see numerous examples of writers reading the Laozi and Zhuangzi, and then recasting their antiexpressive arche‑semiotics in terms more appropriate to their own historical positions. There is some diversity in how different writers read the earlier texts. Nonetheless, all of them do have to grapple with the difficulty of trying to interpret two texts whose writers made clear their desire not to express themselves. Laozi and Zhuangzi left without saying goodbye; how do later readers deal with their absence from their own texts? None say adieu to Laozi and Zhuangzi in the way that Derrida does to Levinas. This is not humanistic discourse—but more importantly, it is not relational in the Levinasian sense. Later writers influenced by the Laozi and Zhuangzi revere those texts and their authors, but never assume that those authors wanted relationships with them. For that matter, even the religious Daoists who see Laozi as a divinity and Zhuangzi as a kind of saint do not presume to have a personal relationship with those immense forces, as would some praying subjects of Abrahamic faiths. For the most part, the secrecy and non‑expressiveness, which those texts hold up as semiotic ideals, are presented as a model for imitation, not a limitation to be overcome. Later readers see Laozi and Zhuangzi as having wanted nothing to do with the world, and having withdrawn into nonrepresentational silence: in doing so, they were trailblazers who discovered a perfect dao. One should not fixate on their historical persons; instead, one should do likewise, and vanish.

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The Strange Dialogue of Speech and Silence Yan Hui said, “Might I ask what is a ‘mental fast’?” Confucius said, “It is like being singular in your intent. Do not listen with your ears, but listen with your mind. Do not listen with your mind, but listen with your pneumas. Hearing stops with the ears, and mentation stops with signs (fu 符). But the pneumas are void, and wait upon objects. The dao gathers in the void. This void is the ‘mental fast.’ ” Yan Hui said, “When I had yet to begin putting this into practice, I was truly myself, ‘Hui.’ But since I have been practicing it, there is no longer any ‘Hui.’ Can this be called the ‘void’?” Confucius said, “Completely. I will give you a comparison. It is as if you could wander along Hui’s fences and not feel his name: if you enter, then it sounds, but if you do not, then it ceases. Do not wait at the door for him, do not poison him, but live with him as if you had no other option, and then you will be close to the answer. It is easy to stop leaving traces, but it is difficult not to walk upon the ground.” Of all the passages in the early‑stratum inner chapters of the Zhuangzi, this is one of the most seldom noticed by modern commentators, with the notable exception of Harold Roth, who has found it a central text in his studies of inner training (neiye) in early texts.70 Roth, however, is a scholar of religion, so it is understandable that he would be more attuned to this passage than those who come from philosophy or other related fields. There is no arresting image here that has become part of the allusive tradition, and no doctrine that seems to be at war with the other intellectual options of the pre‑Qin. For those not inclined to accept Roth’s reading of early Daoist mysticism, there is a strong incentive to find a way to push the provenance of this text into the Western Han, if not later, despite its presence in the Inner Chapters. But if the passage is not of any particular interest to the explication of the subtler points of Zhuang Zhou’s personal philosophy, it is of consid‑ erable and underappreciated importance for intellectual history. Whatever its actual date, the religious character of this passage, which has led to its being generally ignored in histories of pre-Qin philosophy, was naturally of great inspiration to the Daoist religious cults that began to arise in the late Han dynasty, and which are the subject of chapter 4 of this book. Like

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similar passages in the outer and mixed chapters, this advice offered by pseudo‑Confucius is deeply practical, giving actual instruction as to spiri‑ tual practice in a way that many of the Zhuangzi’s most famous allegories and logical conundra do not begin to offer. And, even more important for the present study, it is arguably the first text in the tradition to offer an arche‑semiotics of religious practice. This is the first example in the book of the notion of the “footprint” or “trace,” (ji, the characters 跡 and 迹 being used interchangeably for both meanings in practice) as something which the Daoist practitioner should attempt to avoid leaving; it is the only example in the Zhuangzi of the phrase “cutting off traces,” (絕跡, jueji) which was to become an often‑mentioned ideal among Daoist cults of the Six Dynasties period, and eventually through them became a common way of referring in the classical language to eremitism in general. Detailed discussion of how the concept played out among those reli‑ gious groups will be left for later in this study; here, it is sufficient to note why the text of the Zhuangzi figures arche‑semiotic expression as a personal failure to reach the Way. A society of arche‑semiotic interchange is taken for granted; participation in that society would normally result in traces of oneself being left behind. Unlike many other parts of this book and this tradition, the above passage does not assert that an ultimate, perfect transcendence is possible. One is in the world. It is hard to walk on anything other than the ground. But the next‑best solution to one’s situation in the world is to stop being of the world—that is, to stop leaving behind footprints, the signs of one’s presence. Signs are the objects over which the active mind plays, just as the sensual ear delights in sound; in order to attain peace, one must fast from sounds and signs, receive them only in the silence of the pneumas (qi), emit them not at all. And when one renounces the socially identifying traces of oneself, one is renouncing one’s own name, one’s identity. Yan Hui has lost his name: through renunciative spiritual practice, he has come to feel alien‑ ated from himself (i.e., his socially determined identity). Pseudo‑Confucius expands upon the conceit: there is a splitting of personalities, an alternate, self‑constructed and nameless subjectivity alongside the named one. One cannot leave behind one’s social self; one is forced to share a bodily home with him. But one should not be the social self, not even be friendly with him; one should maintain a cold indifference, as if stuck in an apartment lease with a roommate one can no longer like or respect. Whenever some‑ one comes calling, it will doubtless be one of his friends; let him answer the door.

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The “trace” that Yan Hui is instructed to cut off is thus much more personal than the Derridian trace, even though Derrida has appropriated the term from Levinas. But it is at least as open to the inscription in history as is Derrida’s critique of Levinas, as the previous section has shown. The chapter from which the above passage is taken is “In the World of People” (Ren Jian Shi) and no passage from that chapter better fulfills, either in itself or in its influence on later tradition, the potential of that title. Even among Six Dynasties intellectuals who were not religious Daoists, the ideal of the recluse responsible only to the Way held great appeal, and this was usually understood, explicitly or implicitly, as an anti‑arche‑semiotic move, a need to efface one’s own personal trace from the world. The metaphor of the “trace” is one that has been invoked repeatedly, if casually, by recent scholars of the Zhuangzi. Of course, the notion has come up repeatedly in the explicitly theoretical studies of Zhang and others described above. But the notion has seemed to have held a special sugges‑ tive power for those scholars who have been engaged in textual criticism, attempting to sift out the various strata of the Zhuangzi into various schools. At the end of his unusually technical treatise on quantitative evidence from rhyme in the various sections of the text, David McCraw offers an unusu‑ ally personal anecdote, narrating his childhood basset hound’s comic hunt through a Vermont winter: Flailing desperately through deep snow, his ears flung wide on the surface as if to help snowshoe him, and his nose buried deeply in some scented tracks . . . rabbit tracks in an enthusiastic set of loops, whorls, and switchbacks. A snarled skein, and amyloid Alzheimer’s route. But, at the end of the trail, not 10 feet in a straight line from Hubert, crouched a hardly senile bunny. Now, 50 years later, I cannot remember what the rabbit looked like. . . . Poor Hubert had to deal with only one rabbit; when we pursue an author named “Zhuang Zhou,” we may have a whole warren of hares, sprawled tantalizingly out of reach. (100) McCraw’s technically brilliant work is not Derridean. His frustrations at the lost rabbit are a practical consequence of a hundred pages of regression analysis statistically proving any surviving texts from the historical Zhuang Zhou to be vanishingly thin. But the terms he chooses to voice Sinological frustration are ones that will also determine the rest of this book, tracing the “trace” into very different contexts of medieval Chinese reading and

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speculation. Are the tracks in this story those of a rabbit? They seem to be the signs of lost memory, and with it lost identity. The rabbit cannot be caught in image by the Sinologist any more than in flesh by his childhood dog: instead, the tracks suggest themselves as the threat of senility and a plaque‑plagued brain. Just as the objective rabbit, Zhuang Zhou, cannot be caught, the snow bears the equal trace of the subject’s own effacement: as if proactively, he reduces “David” to “d,” the perfect counterpart of the “Zz” he has discussed throughout the text. For the remainder of this book, the loss of identity will be a con‑ stituent part of the trace, and its uses by Six Dynasties theorists. Just as Confucius is counseling Yan Hui to lose a certain version of himself by losing the trace, Zhuang Zhou must be lost in order to become a model for later writers. This does not mean that those writers had the same methodological problems faced by modern textual critics—though even the traditional division into “inner,” “outer,” and “mixed” chapters since at least Guo Xiang shows that Six Dynasties writers would have known the Zhuangzi was not a simple monograph. However, the “self ”‑effacement of Zhuang Zhou performed from within the surviving text would become a model for later writers. An author who could threaten at any time to take off, turn into a dream‑butterfly, is not just leaving technical instruction about theories of language; he is establishing a pattern for how one can learn the subversion of the self. Perhaps there were recluses who succeeded in doing just that—but, of course, if there were, we have no trace of them. Methodologically, the only intellectual history of aspirant Daoists that we could ever write is the his‑ tory of those whose writings we possess because they failed in their avowed goal of leaving no trace. But instead of calling this a failure, perhaps more sympathetic nomenclature would also be more instructive? The traces those intellectuals moved by Laoist and Zhuangzian arche‑semiotics left behind in intellectual history are not simple failures of willpower, as if they failed to refrain from an addiction to brush and ink; much less are they disingenu‑ ous hypocrisy. The different sets of thinkers who will be discussed in the following chapters came from different traditions, and had various motives for their appropriations from Laozi and Zhuangzi, but none of them suffered from a lack of seriousness or sincerity in their appreciation of the concepts outlined by the Daoist thinkers. Moreover, they were licensed by them: if Laozi and Zhuangzi found it necessary to write about the impossibility of language, why couldn’t they? The efforts of later intellectuals to replicate those foundational self‑abnegations of the grapheme only look more anxious in

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retrospect because we can place them historically with much more certainty than we can the historical Lao Dan or Zhuang Zhou. And it is in this context that we can hope to appropriate the inten‑ tionality of Derrida’s critique of Levinasian language, without resigning this swatch of Six Dynasties intellectual history to the misleading category of “mistake.” As Derrida explains, the complete peace of utter silence could only obtain during the absolute origin, before the beginning of speech, or else after its ending, in eschatology; the middle period, the period of language, which we are also accustomed to call history, is thus a period in which the Levinasian call to peace‑within‑speech in the relation between self and Other must be struck through with a violence. Though in “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida castigates Levinas for abhorring predicates, his own grammar is still deeply enmeshed in the pure semiotics of the noun: violence arises because of the unjust reduction of an alternate subjectivity to the bare fact of the name. And yet, while Derrida is subtly attacking Levinas, he also has always been engaged in praise and partial agreement— as is made clearer by his later engagements with Levinas. The period of language‑that‑is‑history cannot simply be taken as justice, even in the case of a self and Other mutually open to recognition, perhaps the ground of language within which they meet is always inescapably a field of contest; and yet peace is also not banished from that field—it exists as telos, if never couched in the language of eschaton. In the Six Dynasties, too, we can note that the field of language is a field of violence, just as predicted by Laozi and Zhuangzi, and also that the preferred solution, which dominates most of their texts, withdrawal from the world into perfect silence, did not happen; but that silence may in some way be inscribed within their language—which comes to us apart from its society, as a silence. Society may insist on naming the social self with a present interpellation; but writing is a trace of silence. If this is recognized, the question then becomes, How to analyze the teleological silence of Six Dynasties writers’ writing upon the Way? It will not do to reduce the question to a vulgar mixology: any intellectual movement is a product of both ideation and necessity, add one ounce Philosophy and a half‑ounce of History, and garnish with a lemon twist. “Philosophy” and “History” do not get measured in discrete quantities where one could have more or less of either one, depending upon the individual writer’s taste— because they are not actually things. In setting up this study so far, I have been at pains to stress the historicity of philosophical concepts, in order to distinguish my work from the valuable works of comparative philosophy

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that have most often explained Daoism in the terms of Western semiotics. But that is not intended to constitute a subversion of the philosophical by the historical: the history of Daoist arche‑semiotics only makes sense if one takes seriously the pained truth‑claims that lie behind it. Abstract nouns which count as shorthand disciplinary names are only understandable as distinguishable but intertwined processes, each of which unfolds as much within thought as within time. At the risk of reinventing the Hegelian, we could say that the two processes ought to be read mutually, as the condition of each other’s progress. This is harder than it might at first sound. There is an empirically demonstrable desire on the part of even great thinkers to reduce the varieties of thinkable intellectual frameworks to a single master‑ground of analysis, within which all other previous grounds are secretly and unconsciously constituted. Look only to the history of phenomenology, the unity of which lies more in a methodological constant of recasting the fundamental grounds of philosophy than in any actual agreement as to the nature of the world under inspection. Husserl’s great founding insight was the bracketing of epistemology in favor of perception; Heidegger outpaced Husserl by show‑ ing that the phenomenological reduction was still unaware of the fact that its objects of perception were not separable from the perceiving subject; Levinas overthrew Heidegger by arguing that the primordial being‑with must be with the Godlike Other rather than with random household tools; Derrida surpassed Levinas by inscribing that Other within language, ever falling away from itself. The solution to this seemingly endless cycle of radical reconfiguration is not to pick one or the other ground, nor to continue the process via a multiplication of even more newly discovered “ultimate” analytical metrics, but rather to note that every ultimate ground for analysis is itself also multifariously grounded elsewhere, there is no one privileged vantage point from which all else becomes clear, to which all other discourses must somehow reduce. Given that Derrida begins his early essay on Levinas with an epigraph from Matthew Arnold on Hebraism and Hellenism, and ends with a citation of James Joyce’s sock‑puppetry of Molly Bloom on the jewgreek/greekjew, perhaps the disinclination to pick a single ground of analysis might be nick‑ named a consubstantiation? Not only to deny both the absolute apotheosis of the material and the merely symbolic appropriation of the essentially (though itself no less constructed) historical, but also to humbly confess the impossibility of a clear formula of dividing different modes of the Real, one from another? Because if there is a method to be divined in relating the

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history of the Six Dynasties to its intellectuals’ hopes for a transcendence of social arche‑semiotics, one could not hope for the simplicity of a formula. But once the idea of a calibrated titration of quantities is abandoned, and the necessity of interdependent groundings is granted, then the proper methodology traces itself. One need only to read the ideal as an epiphe‑ nomenon of the material at the same time as one performs the exact reverse operation. In the present study, this would, of course, first imply that the aspiration to silence and the necessity of writing in Daoist‑influenced intel‑ lectuals of the Six Dynasties period as mutually constitutive, held in their “strange dialogue.” If expressed theoretically here, this should also make perfect sense within the traditional terms of the period‑specialist study. The four major social groups studied in the following chapters (xuanxue intellectuals in the Wei‑Jin, religious Daoists, Buddhist translators, and elite court literati of the Qi‑Liang) were all, in their varying ways, groups that defined their relationship to the remainder of society by means of a certain relationship to texts—elite or popular, ancient or newly revealed, Chinese or foreign. One need not indulge the worst excesses of an actual Hegelianism and subscribe to a cultural Spirit possessing the hearts and hoes of every last fourth‑century peasant to note that, for carefully self‑defined subgroups within a complex traditional society, ideas can be motivating factors in his‑ tory rather than simply being the visible form in which social, economic, and political forces (i.e., “real” history) play themselves out. Traditional historiography of Chinese civilization—whether in poetry, criticism, reli‑ gion, or visual arts—tends to damn the Six Dynasties, and in particular its transcendant aspirations—with just this species of faint praise. The period is intellectually fecund, we are told, because the constant war, rebellion, and social dislocation that dominated daily life in both north and south pushed would‑be intellectuals out of their “normal” courses of service in the central bureaucracy, and into spiritual or artistic pursuits. But this sort of narrative won’t work. The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove might be (rather dubiously) argued to match this model of social outcast, but such a figuration holds rather more tenuously for the Liang royal family! In fact, cultural and spiritual pursuits, and the attendant reformulations of Daoist arche‑semiotics that followed along with them, were chosen out of desire as much as out of necessity, and at times, as will be shown in the following chapters, the latter had to wait upon the former. So: the practicalities of historical arche‑semiotics and the aspiration toward transcendent silence must be read through each other. But another, and equally important implication of the above dialectic is not for the

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content, but the structure, of such a study. It is probably wrong to think of traditionally Sinological content as “material” and of theoretical speculation as “conceptual”: both are wholly textual. But insofar as one must work within a system in which such assumptions prevail, these also must be held in a mutually constitutive tension. It would be no use trying to draw theoreti‑ cal conclusions about Six Dynasties arche‑semiotics without a substantial engagement with the actual texts relevant to the question (some canonical, and some not); at the same time, while there are many topics on which solid period scholarship could be written without any major theoretical engage‑ ment, attempting to write a nontheoretical assessment of arche‑semiotics would only demonstrate a remarkable ability for self‑unawareness while undoubtedly failing to say anything particularly interesting. In this case, not only speech and silence need to be read through each other, but also the evidence and the interpretation of that speech and silence. Hence, in the following chapters most of the space will be devoted to the relatively detailed explication of each movement of intellectual history; explicit (and perhaps self‑indulgent) theorization of each particular formation that has been revealed will be saved for a brief coda to each chapter. It is my hope that the reader will enjoy the unfolding of these narratives, even if the after‑the‑end silence is ultimately sweeter.

Part Two

Daoist Semiotics in Early Medieval Culture

CHAPTER THREE

Tracing the Obscure

History and Trace Modern Chinese intellectual historiography may surrender itself too easily to notions of origin. There is too much that is old not to do so: virtually any discursive move has recognizable antecedents in the most ancient strata of the tradition: responsible narratives can only be told chronologically, to show how later problems are elaborated out of earlier ones. One goes back to the pre‑Qin, always, because that is always where the search for beginnings ends. The empirically careful historian knows this end‑beginning to be a product of chance rather than of true originary status: one does not track the evolution of ideas prior to surviving records because one cannot. The theoretically careful historian would also know that any conceivable ori‑ ginary point would have to have its own origin in the ever‑moving end of intellectual history, the now‑point in which any imaginary reconstruction of pre‑Qin (or Greek, or Vedic, or pre‑Columbian) origins takes place. One cannot trace a discourse from its origin without a prior confession of faith in the Origin, that it is what we at the End have deemed it to be. It is common knowledge that “Daoism” is a complex conglomeration of movements, and that neither in its elite, intellectual forms nor in its popular religious ones can it be understood as a simple continuation of Lao‑Zhuang philosophy. What must be stressed in addition is that the dis‑ continuities between Lao‑Zhuang and the rest of the Daoist traditions do not exist simply because later Daoists misread their originary texts, which we (supposedly free of the blinders of tradition) may now read unencumbered and therefore correctly. It would be better to say that discontinuities exist because we cannot fix the Dao in its Origin, while traditional interpreters attempt to do exactly that: Laozi and Zhuangzi deliberately heighten the self‑effacing properties of language in the (absent) presence of the Dao,

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thereby rebuffing interpretation while seeming to leave multiple paths of interpretation open. Different streams of readers make different types of hermeneutical choices to suit their needs: what is striking is not that they make the wrong choices, but that they make any choices: ineffability gets defined. Those definitions may in fact not be any more inherently stable than their supposed reference points, but they are differently unstable. In moving from the supposedly originary texts of Daoism to their later reconfigurations during the Six Dynasties period, it is necessary to identify these texts not as a falling‑away from origins, nor even as appropriations, which would imply the repackaging of a limited thing to new and subjectively confident purposes. It would be somewhat better to think of the various moves that are the subject of the remaining chapters as reenactments of the attempt to speak the unspeakable, which haunts Laozi and Zhuangzi. But better still to call it what it “is”: the ontologically‑not‑quite‑not‑there dao, or as it is better known in Derridean Franglais, the trace. In the most‑cited definition that Derrida gives this seminal term, we have such a propriety to the situation of the student of Six Dynasties Dao‑ ism that one might appropriate the term as an accidental allegory of dao: To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognize in the contortion the necessity of a pathway [par‑ cours]. That pathway must leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra‑transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable from it. . . . The trace is not only the disappearance of origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally, by a non‑origin, the trace, which then becomes the origin of the origin.1 Derrida’s description of the trace in this passage has become a kind of précis of his method in general; in her famous analytical introduction to Of Grammatology, Spivak even hints that the trace can become a sort of master metaphor for language under erasure: “Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience. For somewhat different yet similar contingencies, both Heidegger and Derrida teach us to use language in terms of a trace‑structure, effacing it even as it presents its

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legibility.”2 One wouldn’t want to reduce related concepts such as erasure, différance, the supplement, etc. to the status of grammatological echoes of the trace—one doesn`t essentialize anti‑essentialisms! But this is not Spivak`s point, nor Derrida`s—the trace/track is not, after all, a thing; it is a method of convenient visualization of a process of language’s self‑alienation from its (retroactively imagined) origin. But if one were to take the trace as a master metaphor for the outworking of dao in history, would this be an ironic sin against its Derridean origins? After all, Derrida’s point is not about reception histories; to the extent that one reads it as such, one misunderstands, and reduces the radical vision of deconstruction. We did not need Derrida to learn the utterly banal point that, over time, misreadings happen. The point of the trace is that there was never a moment of non‑misreading, not even in speech supposedly prior to writing: the only actual origin of language is in the condition of alienation from any origin. The Heideggerian world is always‑already interpreted, the Derridean always‑already misinterpreted; to write of a trace from within an actual reception history would seem to suggest that the author has perfectly misunderstood misunderstanding, and assumed that there may have been a moment in which language could have been safe and whole. I hope that the preceding chapters will inoculate me from charges that I believe in an actual simple origin of Daoism, in which the meaning of the dao was clear and uncontested. But a few words are necessary to explain why use of the concept of trace for a reception history can be a sly, Derridean misreading of Derrida, rather than a naive misreading. In fact, so long as one understands that the trace is not “originally” a symbol of vulgar misreading, its literary‑historical appropriation is appro‑ priate, certainly less naive than a reading that tries to fence off its relevance to “language itself.” If language is always‑already not‑itself, and there is no lower bound to the time frame in which différance has effect, there is also no upper bound separating an act of reading from a history of reading. Just as the trace is the origin of the origin, the notion of history—that is, that time necessarily implies change—is already a precondition for Derrida’s conception of the always‑already‑there trace. To say this is not simply to assert the logical priority of the concept of history in the conception of the trace; it is also to recognize the truth of the trace’s historical development. Its most canonical expression is in Of Grammatology, but its own track of development lies through Levinas, and in particular Derrida’s critique of Levinas’s hopes for an anhistorical peace, as described in the previous chapter. Derrida’s full assimilation into

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the canonical mainstream happened after “Violence and Metaphysics,” and before Spectres of Marx,3 but this does not mean that there is a “real Der‑ rida” who is innocent of history. As also discussed in the previous chapter, if there were a “real Derrida,” his late career would have been inextricable from considerations of historicity. Hence, I consider the following tracing of dao in history, authorized.

Decay and Authority Daoist thought was relatively marginalized during the first centuries of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and its promotion of a state Confucianism. There are some important exceptions, such as at the early regional court of Huainan, but on the whole it is only during the last century or so of that dynasty, in the midst of its slow collapse, that interest in Laozi and Zhuangzi began to return to centrality in the intellectual tradition. For the tracelike qualities of elite Daoist philosophy, one must examine the school of “Obscurism” or xuanxue, generally credited as the invention of Wang Bi (226–249). Wang was an exponent of syncretism who saw no great conflict between Confucian and Daoist thought; it is no surprise that much of his exegetical fame derived from the Classic of Changes, the divination manual that had evolved through allegorizing commentary into a Confucian classic. Moreover, just as he occupies an ambiguous syncretic point halfway between Confucianism and Daoism, Wang Bi also sits in a strange middle ground between philosophy and intellectual history. As remarked in the Introduction, there aren’t any texts in ancient or medieval China that offer a systematic semiotics akin to those of Peirce or Saussure; but, like Gongsun Long or the Later Mohists, Wang Bi often seems to come close. He does, in fact, have quite a lot to say about signification in the abstract, so that it is possible to review his work purely as that of a theorist. At the same time, his work is also explicitly political, and emerged during an era of transition from the defunct Han dynasty to the successor‑kingdoms that followed. And Wang, who died at the age of twenty‑three, wrote these works while rising quickly through court patronage networks. In starting with Wang as a founder of Obscurism, we can thus also get a good introductory picture of the limits of semiotics in the early third century CE. Vast amounts have been written on Wang Bi, but a good place to start would be with Rudolph Wagner’s magisterial scholarly trilogy. Across his three volumes, Wagner presents Wang as a precocious talent who had had

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almost the perfect social and intellectual background to become an influential philosophical commentator on the Laozi and the Classic of Changes. He had inherited from Eastern Han intellectuals, especially the Jingzhou Academy, an impatience with the disconnected glosses of zhangju‑style commentar‑ ies, and aimed to use the commentary form to discover common themes throughout a text, and thereby to in effect erect a system. Much of Wang’s interests centered around the issues of language and the ability to represent ideas about the dao in language, and hence his system reflects these interests in different ways. In Wagner’s analysis in his first book of the trilogy, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator, much of Wang’s attention is devoted to the careful construction of a unified reading out of what only appears to be a fragmentary text. Much of this method is contextually determined by the nature of early medieval exegesis: Wang is trying to establish one reading in a competing field of approaches. He relies on rhetorical tools, such as the structures of parallel prose, as well as intellectual‑historical assumptions just then coming into common use, such as the rising belief that Confucian and Daoist texts were not opposed schools, but merely voicings of the same approaches in different language. Overall, Wagner (who has had deep training in modern hermeneutics) discovers a familiar hermeneutic circle in Wang’s method, arguing that he used the text of the Laozi to create a method for its own exegesis. Whatever one thinks of this position, Wagner certainly has demonstrated that Wang’s method is meticulous, deserves serious attention, and is directly tied to Wang’s own semiotic theory. That theory is explicated in the final work of Wagner’s trilogy, Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Exploration of the Dark. In the first quarter of that book, Wagner begins by reviewing the history of semiotics in early China, and at the beginning of the Wei dynasty—a valuable source complementary to this study, with the major caveat that Wagner is presenting that history as Wang Bi would have understood it, highlighting linguistic skepticism while passing over important counternotes such as the Confucian motivation to “rectify names.” From there, Wagner argues that Wang takes the semiotic suspicion of these texts and interprets it as a means of deflecting falsely definite representations of the “That‑By‑Which” (suoyi 所以). This term, normally a grammatical marker, to which Wagner interprets Wang as giving new force, plays the role of a ground of Being—except that it is a nonbeing, or in Wagner’s translation, a negativity (wu 無). The possibility of a negative ontological system is opened up precisely by the non‑signfying character that Wang finds in the Laozi, Analects, and the Classic of Changes. In Wagner’s reading, Wang Bi

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identifies negativity as the “One,” which, in its namelessness, serves as the source of Being for the “Many,” that is, the myriad objects that appear infinitely diverse, but which in fact take their nature from negativity. This ontological conclusion in turn had political implications: Wang Bi read the One versus Many dynamic through the contemporary struggles between the Wei court and regional nobility, producing a concept of the Daoist ideal of kingly “non‑action,” which answered directly to the political turmoil of the day. Nonetheless, Wagner insists on the importance of reading Wang’s work as an ontological‑political philosophy of inherent interest, and not merely an ideological epiphenomenon of political positioning. Across Wagner’s lengthy argument, there are many insights as well as many assertions with which one could argue; my purpose here is neither to champion his argument nor to quibble with it. What follows in this section is merely a brief attempt to recuperate from Wagner’s work the inherently “philosophical” content of those positionings from which he had been at pains to demonstrate transcendence. Although only a few pieces of evidence can be rehearsed here, it is worth viewing Wang Bi as a kind of hinge between philosophy and history. There is in his work as systematic an approach to an abstract (i.e., non‑“arche”) semiotics as one can find in the early‑medieval period. At the same time, his work is just as much offered up in a context of patronage and court politics, so that it is hard to avoid recognizing Wang’s own interests in thinking through his self‑representation while he theorizes representation in general. With that in mind, let us examine in more granular detail what Wang’s semiotic positions were. Wang’s best‑known contribution to exegetical theory is a troubling statement from his commentary on the Changes, in which he is trying to explain the relationship between the prophetic hexagrams and the commentaries on them. At first blush, he seems to manifest a naïveté about language, quite different from anything one could find in Laozi and Zhuangzi, let alone Levinas and Derrida: Images are the means to express ideas. Words [i.e., the texts] are the means to explain the images. To yield up ideas completely, there is nothing better than the images, and to yield up the meaning of the images, there is nothing better than words. The words are generated by the images, thus one can ponder the words and so observe what the images are. The images are generated by ideas, thus one can ponder the images and so observe what the ideas are. The ideas are yielded up completely

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by the images, and the images are made explicit by the words. Thus, since the words are the means to explain the images, once one gets the images, he forgets the words, and since the images are the means to allow us to concentrate on the ideas, once one gets the ideas, he forgets the images. Similarly, “the rabbit snare exists for the sake of the rabbit; once one gets the rabbit, he forgets the snare. And the fish trap exists for the sake of the fish; once one gets the fish, he forgets the trap.” If this is so, then the words are snares for the images, and the images are traps for the ideas.4 The language in which Wang phrases this interpretation is not original; in fact, it is obliquely yet clearly indebted to a famous passage from Zhuangzi, the same passage used by Longxi Zhang as evidence of Zhuangzi’s linguistic naïveté: “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”5 The provenance of this particular passage is iffy; it is not from the earliest layer of the Zhuangzi, the one that also contains the “Discourse on Equaling Things,” and most likely represents a later accretion to the original text. Nonetheless, it does, if attributing rather too much stability to the extralinguistic concept, maintain a healthy suspicion of words and their ultimate usefulness: such things are at best disreputable tools, means to an end. The passage is inherently, deliberately problematic: the final desire to “have a word” with someone who has forgotten words could perhaps be read in a way to suggest a desire for better‑grounded language, rather than simple hostility to language. And it may be that Wang Bi is reading the passage through that hopeful ending note: in his surreptitious importation of Zhuangzian rhetoric, he maintains the instrumental understanding of language, yet combines this understanding with a deep faith in the propriety in the powers of the sign, which can completely and satisfactorily express its referent.6 However, there are other good reasons to believe that Wang Bi is not merely a Confucian retrospectively mislabeled as founder of xuanxue. In fact, while that passage from Wang’s commentary on the Classic of Changes is his most frequently referenced, it gives only a very partial view of his arche‑semiotic position when excerpted. Considered in the context of his

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full argument, Wang’s sensitivity to arche‑semiotic complexity becomes much clearer: Therefore someone who stays fixed on the words will not be one to get the images, and someone who stays fixed on the images will not be one to get the ideas. The images are generated by the ideas, but if one stays fixed on the images themselves, then what he stays fixed on will not be images as we mean them here. The words are generated by the images, but if one stays fixed on the words themselves, then what he stays fixed on will not be words as we mean them here. If this is so, then someone who forgets the images will be one to get the ideas, and someone who forgets the words will be one to get the images. Getting the ideas is in fact a matter of forgetting the images, and getting the images is in fact a matter of forgetting the words. Thus, although the images were established in order to yield up ideas completely, as images they may be forgotten. Although the number of strokes were doubled in order to yield up all the innate tendencies of things, as strokes they may be forgotten.7 The notion that one not only may forget the words (as Zhuangzi had previously asserted) but also must forget them as a necessary process in interpretation is an important development in Chinese semiotic and her‑ meneutical thought; as will be argued in chapter 5, this line is important in influencing Buddhist translation practice, and even the development of Chinese understandings of Buddhist sudden enlightenment. However, one should not read that later history of the line into Wang Bi’s usage, which is directed primarily against late‑Han attempts to interpret the appearance of the hexagrams. Similarly, one must also not be over‑hasty in referring such statements back to the Western semiotic tradition—in doing so, it might at first appear that Wang Bi is proposing something akin to the notion that one must not merely account for sign and referent, but signifier, signified, and referent. However, of course, it is imperative to remember that the “image” is not a concept prior to expression in physical form, it is itself the physical form of the hexagram, which then receives explication by the “words.” However, even if the layered structure of Wang’s theory is not an exact equivalent to that of European models, the perceptual experience of that structure might be close enough for useful comparison. In a paper comparing this passage to the phenomenological semiotics of

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Roman Ingarden, Keyang Dou has noted the similarity of Wang’s notion of forgetting to Ingarden’s reuse of Husserlian “bracketing,” and this does seem to place emphasis in the correct place.8 Although Wang Bi presents his tripartite layers as a continuum (the relationship of idea to image is identical to that of image to words), it should be easy enough to see that he is combining what we would think of as arche‑semiotic and hermeneutical processes: the hexagrams embody a meaning, but the glosses explicate the hexagrams. However, it would be unfair to fault Wang for this because he is not trying to present a theory of the sign in some ahistorical state, but is instead offering a description of the process of the reader’s encounter with the text of the Classic of Changes: one proceeds to understanding through an amnesiac reduction of the fullness of text. Both interpretation and composition conscious of the process of interpretation must therefore occur in time. There is a forgetting that must precede the getting. Moreover, the process of time in interpretation is also a progress between the different levels of imagined language, from the invis‑ ible to the visible and indecipherable trace (i.e., the hexagrams) and on to the trace of language—and then back again. This is not exactly différance, but it is a recognition of the fact of separation of the grapheme from its putative origin, and a concomitant importation of the process of time into the presumed originary moment. In one sense, Wang Bi is more naive than Laozi and Zhuangzi (despite the fact that he is citing the latter), and though Wang is not theorizing historicity, there does seem to be in his work the felt presence of history— the exegetical effort required to assess distantly dead‑canonical works is felt more strongly when viewed across the gaps of time. One knows that the primordial authors must have meant something great; it is a struggle, in the merely‑now, to reach back to those hidden meanings that must have been there. It is easier for the reader stationed later in the tradition to assume an originary presence, because the presence does not need to be present to him. As a result, Wang Bi is more specific than Laozi, and less skeptical than Zhuangzi, that there must be a core to which the trace may be traced. But the recognition of time is in itself a different kind of progress. When Laozi says that the Way is that which cannot be spoken, his assertion seems to assume an eternal present, present to the speaking. When Zhuangzi asks if language is meaningful at all, or merely a series of chirpings by baby birds, those are birds who stay frozen in the early spring of their hatching. In the pre‑Qin period of vigorous contemporary debate and only the most tenuous of canons, still in the process of evolution from oral to written texts, there

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was plenty of consciousness of ancient precedent, but little consciousness of a fixed and ancient text whose meaning must be pieced together in time. This is what Wang Bi invents. There is a problem with recognizing, in the trace, the temporality of writing. As soon as one leaves behind the merely theoretical version of Der‑ ridean reading in which différance could somehow happen in the non‑time of cloistered reading, the trace as it actually must be requires that writing’s processes of signification play themselves out within a social setting. The inherently political character of writing and reading has long since been acknowledged; it is necessary to add that, in a premodern context, those politics are monarchical and feudal. Consider the much‑maligned Theuth, from Plato’s original, in a story central to Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”: The story I heard is set in Naucratis in Egypt, where there was one of the ancient gods of Egypt—the one to whom the bird they call the “ibis” is sacred, whose name is Theuth. This deity was the inventor of number, arithmetic, geometry, and astron‑ omy, of games involving draughts and dice—and especially of writing. At the time, the king of the whole of Egypt around the capital city of the inland region (the city the Greeks call “Egyptian Thebes”), was Thamous, or Amon, as the Greeks call him. Theuth came to Thamous and showed him the branches of expertise he had invented, and suggested that they should be spread throughout Egypt. Thamous asked him what good each one would do, and subjected Theuth’s explanations to criticism if he thought he was going wrong and praise if he thought he was right. The story goes that Thamous expressed himself at length to Theuth about each of the branches of expertise, both for and against them.9 Despite being a god, Theuth is still very much a client; Thamous is the king, and he sits in judgment upon Theuth’s various inventions, declaring this one good or that one dangerous. The hierarchical nature of the interaction is only emphasized by the geography—which, indeed, seems to serve no other purpose in the tale: Theuth comes from Naucratis, a city founded as a Greek colony in the Nile delta, perhaps as late as the sixth century BCE; in order to present his offering, Theuth travels upriver to Thebes (i.e., Luxor), the center of the Egyptian royal court, and powerful cult of Amun, during the New Kingdom period (mid‑late second millennium BCE).

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From whatever source the tale filtered to us through Plato, there is a clear power dynamic hidden beneath the anachronistic mythology: Theuth is an Egyptianized representative of the “modern” and Hellenic entrepôt, trying to offer new foreign wares to a much older, more powerful, and more conservative cultural order. Wang Bi’s offering of a mode of reading is less suggestive of intercultural trade contracts, but it is no less political, and exists in a patronage context at least as clear as that of the Egyptian god. Wang himself came from an aristocratic family, but the reason for his fame is due to his securing of favor from an elite courtier, He Yan: When [his] father, [Wang] Ye, was a Secretarial Court Genleman, shangshu lang, Peh Hui (fl. 230–49) had been a Court Gentle‑ man at the Ministry of Personnel, libu lang [that is, there was a connection between the two families]. Before [Wang] Bi had even been capped [and completed his 20th year in 245], he [already] went to visit [Pei Hui who was then a high official]. [Pei] Hui considered him extraordinary at first sight, and asked [Wang] Bi: “Generally speaking, negativity is in fact that which forms the basis of the ten thousand kinds of entities. The Sage [Confucius,] however, was absolutely unwilling to discourse about it [about negativity], while Laozi holds forth about it endlessly. Why [is that so]?” [Wang] Bi answered: “The Sage embodies negativity. Negativity, furthermore, cannot be elaborated upon, that is why [the Sage] does not speak [about it]. Laozi [however] belongs [to the realm of specific] entities. In that sense [his] constant talking about negativity is [exactly his] deficiency.”10 This brief encounter encapsulates the relative standing of the streams of the textual past at this moment. Confucianism carries with it the power of orthodox authority; Confucius is first upon He Yan’s lips in his sighs of admiration, and the question put to Wang Bi and his rejoinder both assume that Confucius and his followers are authority figures to be ranked higher than Laozi. Yet Wang Bi only concedes this ranking by wholly transforming its significance: it is a brilliant rhetorical move to posit the sages as not needing to speak of negativity because they already embody it, but it turns intellectual history consensus (of that time as well as of ours) on its head, pouring Daoist content into the structures of Confucian authority. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the reverse is also

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occurring—explicit Daoist philosophical positions are associated with the Confucian hierarchy. The sages did not need to speak of nothing; the fact that Laozi did marks him as a self‑conscious inferior—and by extension, a young man who likes to invoke Daoist positions might also be considered as knowing his place! Why wouldn’t He Yan sponsor him? In one line he displays his cleverness while hinting at his suitability to the hierarchical system. The result is—the progress of an Obscurist sensibility up into the worldly power of a monarch’s counsel. It is well known that Wang Bi manifests a fusion of Confucian and Daoist gestures in this early phase of Obscurism; but it is less recognized how much this intellectual fusion is a product of the historical position not just of Wang Bi, but also of He Yan who, as his patron, opened this space for his theories to be heard. He Yan, in fact, was an important, and perhaps more antitraditional thinker than Wang Bi himself; there was at one point a brief intellectual dispute between patron and client, in which the former—one of the great ministers of the empire—took the more anti‑ social position.11 He Yan’s original argument is lost, but Wang Bi’s response is preserved: The way in which the sages excelled men was their divine bril‑ liance; that in which they were the same as men was their five emotions. Because their divine brilliance excelled, they were able to embody equanimity and arrive at Nothingness. Because their five emotions were the same, they could not but by grief or joy respond to things. Thus, the sages’ emotions responded to things without being entangled by things. [But] now to take their unentangled state, and to call it, “no longer responding to things,” this is greatly to miss the mark.12 Such a debate foreshadows the great debates on the nature of emotional entanglement, which delineated the schools of Chinese Buddhism from the fifth to the seventh centuries. However, in the context of late‑Wei court life, the broader resonance of such questions is still within the traditional networks of Chinese texts from the pre‑Qin. This is not Confucianism versus Daoism per se, because the boundaries between schools have been seriously blurred; we might say that the debate is between more and less thoroughly Daoist visions of Confucian sages, one that posits their liberated naturalness as an alienation from their humanity, and one that suggests that it incorporates their humanity (and neither of which seems to suspect that the sages weren’t all that liberated).

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In any case, whatever their differences with regard to their various mixtures of Confucian and Daoist streams of thought, the intermingling was one of consequence to both sides. Above examples suggest a hollow shell of Confucian‑conceived roles of ethics and governance which has been refilled with the obscure and fluid legacy of Daoist mysticism—and it was. However, fluids do in fact take on the form of that which they fill—and in this case, the semiotic legacy of Daoism is clearly filling a more social role than it had had to in the works of Zhuangzi. Consider another essay of He Yan, “Dis‑ course on the Nameless” (Wuming Lun), in which the topic is broached thus: That which is honored by people is that which has a name; that which is without honor is the nameless. But as for the sage, he names the nameless, honors the honorless, calls the nameless his Way, and calls the honorless Great. Thus, the nameless can be said to have a name, and the honorless can be said to have honor.13 The legacy of distrust in names from the Laozi and Zhuangzi is certainly intact in such sentiments; even the sentence structure here recalls the opening lines of the Laozi, “The Way that can be said is not the constant Way; the speech that can be spoken is not the constant speech.” Yet the significance of the hesitancy toward language is utterly changed, for the notion of the name as a noun with its own proper lexical sphere of (mal)function has been entirely conflated with name as empty fame and useless reputation. This is, perhaps, the inevitable result of the promotion of the mingjiao (or “teaching on names,” a way of referring to Confucian emphasis on prop‑ erly ordered titles for those in appropriate social roles), which had dominated court intellectual circles in the late Han. The best way to understand how He Yan’s thoughts on mingjiao may have influenced Wang Bi is to turn from his commentary on the Changes to an equally important commentary of his on the Laozi. To take just the Laozi commentary, the relevance of names is, of course, obvious enough from the opening lines of the original text; but Wang Bi very naturally extends the relevance of naming to portions of the text where it has not been broached. So, in a comment on the line, “not to shower worthies with honors induces the people not to struggle”14 [不尚賢 使民不爭],” Wang writes, “If, in granting honors to worthies and glorifying the famous, the emulation exceeds their assignment, those below will rush forward to compete, compare their [own] capabilities [to those of the hon‑ ored], and outdo each other [尚賢顯名榮過其任下奔而競效能相射].”15 An original point about the use of talent (a traditional bone of contention in the pre‑Qin era, which was revived in the Wei‑Jin with works such as the

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Renwu zhi) is extended, not unreasonably, into the realm of appearances and social signifiers—as common in this period, “fame” is a “name,” ming, which like other signifiers can be bestowed as an external form of glory. It is also not an absolutist position; there is a place for honors, which is fine so long as it is not excessive honor—a doctrine of the mean not alien to Confucius and wholly consonant with contemporary Confucians such as Xu Gan. Or, for an even more curious insertion of the issue of names where it certainly does not belong, there is the commentary on section 6, “The spirit of the valley does not die. [I] call it ‘Dark Female.’ The door [from] which the Dark Female [comes] [I] call the root of Heaven and Earth.” Wang opines, “Spirit of the valley” is the non‑valley in the middle of the valley. It [this spirit] is without form and contour, without contrariness and deviation; it resides in a lowly position [namely, the valley] and does not move, it keeps the calm and does not deteriorate. The valley is constituted by it, but it does not show its form. This is the highest entity. Its lowly position [notwithstanding], there is no way to define it. That is why [Laozi only] “calls it” Dark Female [but does not “define” it as such]. “Door” is that on which the Dark Female is based. Basically what it is based on has the same substance as the Taiji, the Great Ultimate [of the Xici 11 of the Zhouyi which “creates the two formations (Yin and Yang)”]. That is why [this door] is spoken of [by Laozi] as “the root of Heaven and Earth”!16 Both in the original text, and even more so in the commentary, the female valley is a nearly explicit type of the vagina, and there is a fetishization of the quasi‑Kristevan ontology of absence which such a perfectly‑not‑there place implies. Within such a context, the inability of Wang to name the object in question takes on something of the character of polite, smirking embarrassment—but still, the social configuration of the lines is real, both in its obvious assumptions about the place of women, and also about its association with all inferior positions, since it is a standard trope of early literature to associate the power relations of court with domestic hierarchy. There are several other examples of the insertion of names by Wang where the original text does not broach the issue, and most of these display, to varying degrees, the same mixed rhetoric of Confucian with Daoist value systems, which is probably more than a simple conflation.17 Wang Bi is a fan of obscurities who is yet not railing against the system. However, he is

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not to be confused with an apologist, in Obscurist terms, for royal power. The outer limits of his political tolerance for authoritarianism are defined, it turns out, in the section of the commentary where both the original text and he himself are most explicit in their semiotics, a section (25) which is one of the most‑often‑cited portions of his commentary by later writers. A lengthy excerpt bears scrutiny: I [Laozi] do not know its name. A name is something to define the shape [of an object]. That which “completes out of the diffuse” and is “without form” [as the Laozi says in 41.14 about the Great Image] is impossible to define. That is why [the text] says: “[I] do not know its name”! I give it the style “Way.” It is a fact that a name is something to define the shape [of an object], while a style is something to designate what is sayable. The Way is taken for [the aspect of that by which all entities are] that there is no entity which is not based on it. This is the greatest among the sayable designations concerning “that which completes out of the diffuse.” [Only] if forced to make up a name for it, I would say “[it is] great.” The reason why I gave it the style “Way” was taken from this being the greatest of sayable designations about it. If one puts too much weight onto the reason for which this style was determined, one would tie [the Way] down to being great. If a greatness has ties, it necessarily has particularity, and once it has particularity, its absoluteness is lost. That is why [the text] says: “[Only] if forced to make up a name for it, I would say ‘ [it is] great’ ”! [That] “[it is] great” means “it passes through.” “To pass through” means “to travel.” It does not keep to one single great substance and stops there, but “travels all around” [as the Laozi says in 25.3] and there is no place to which it does not get. That is why [the text] says: “It passes through”!

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[That] “it passes through” means “it gets far.” [That] “it gets far” means “it returns [to its own eternal nature].” “Getting far” means “reaching the very end.” It “travels all around” [as the Laozi says in 25.3] and there is no place where it does not reach the absolute end, it is not one‑sidedly [restricted] to one single “passing through.” That is why [the text] says: “It gets far.” It does not follow what it chances upon; its substance “stands alone” [as the Laozi says in 25.2]. That is why [the text] says: “It stands aloof [from change]!” The Way is great, Heaven is great, Earth is great. The king, too, is great. [As Confucius says in the Classic of Filial Piety, Xiaojing, answering the question of Zengzi: “May I ask whether among the virtues of the Sage there is none superior to filial piety?”] “Among the natures [bequeathed to the ten thousand entities] by Heaven and Earth, the human being is the most exalted,” but the king is the lord of the human beings. Although [the king] is not positionally great [by just having this office] he, “too,” is great [if ] matching the other three [Great Ones]. That is why [the text] says “the king, too, is great!” In the Beyond there are four Great Ones, The four Great Ones are the Way, Heaven, Earth, and the king. Generally speaking, that of entities which has a name and has a designation is not their ultimate. Saying “the Way” presupposes that there is a basis for [this expression]. Only as a consequence of there being a basis for [this expression] will one talk about it as being “the Way.” Accordingly, “Way” is [only] the greatest among [aspects that can be assigned] designations, but that is nothing compared to greatness of the designationless. The designationless which it is impossible to name is called [here] “the Beyond.” The Way, Heaven, Earth, and the king all are indeed located within the [realm] of the designationless. That is why [the text] says: “In the Beyond there are four Great Ones!”

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and the king has a place as one of them! He has the place of the great one which is there for the lord of men.18 This interpretation is one with cultural resonance: Wang Bi’s definition, “a name is something to define the shape [名以定形]” is one of the more frequently cited statements in the history of Chinese semiotics. And not without reason: the notion of settling (ding) an inchoate, free‑floating meaning by limiting it to the confines of a word is perhaps naive by the standards of poststructuralism, assuming as it does that there is a possibil‑ ity of meaning outside of words. However, it does at least evince a rather strong hermeneutic of suspicion: words are insufficient precisely because the “settling” function of the sign does not work very well—there is always, one might say, a kind of surplus? One that cannot be contained within the normal precincts of the orderly world. Moreover, those orderly but insufficient regions are where the King dwells. Wang gives free reign to his hermeneutical genius in this difficult passage, particularly in explaining how it is that the Way can be placed on a level with mere Heaven and Earth, much less a mere King. Of course, the problem is a semiotic one: the Way as it really would be far exceeds even the word great, but its actual greatness has no way to be contained within language. By nicknaming it the Way, we reduce it to the sphere of human comprehension, bring it into the regions of those things that can be perceived with the senses. It is by this reduction only that it is placed on a level with the King, and, perhaps more importantly, the King—if perhaps accorded the same greatness as the nameable (i.e., untrue) Way, and Heaven and Earth—is yet only given this grudgingly, as the least great Great in the regions perceivable from ordinary life in the capital. The terms in which Wang Bi distinguishes the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao show why Levinas’s horror of silence is misplaced, at least for the premodern world. For Levinas’s ethical system to result in ethical outcomes, one must first assume its application to a modern mass society. In Levinas this is not only assumed at a level so deeply as to not need explication, it is the very motivation for his phi‑ losophy. The possibilities of horror, which were enabled by the modern mass society at its worst, where mass‑production techniques were turned toward the unspeakable, and hence silent, final solution of the concentra‑ tion camps, are precisely those which would be impossible in a regime of language whereby one is forced to recognize the Other in his/her fullness

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and inviolability as having an unshakeable claim upon oneself. Levinas restores identity to unitized humans. But that is only a progressive formulation if it occurs in a historical setting where individuals are shrunken into dimensionless points within the megalith of the people, and even the absolute dictator claims power in terms of embodiment of the popular will. In a feudal society, where ruling mandates are derived in principle from Heaven, and in practice from the supposedly more complete humanity of the “great names” of the realm, there is nothing innately ethical in being forced to acknowledge the Other who must always‑already have had an inviolable claim upon oneself. This is the inescapable fact of life for anyone in a feudal society from the land‑ less peasant to the great aristocrat: social obligations are structured not as an abstract duty to generalized laws, but as a series of claims upon the self by one or more fearsome Others. Only the nameless ultimate escapes this system by “standing alone,” following no master. Hence, while Wang Bi explicitly sets down the King as less than the natural forces of Dao, heaven, and earth, his critique goes beyond this. Even Dao, as far as it can be named, is not the true Dao; there is something that serves as its source which is uniquely great. And it is the recognition of the greatness, which can only reside in this silence, that is able by structural contrast to bring limits to those powers that do exist in language. Because the King can be named, his claim upon the self could not possibly be absolute. The above passages were composed as textual exegesis, not political manifesto. And yet—the possibilities of political dissonance (if not dissi‑ dence) remain. To introduce Confucian acceptance of the validity of social organization into this Daoist text is, at the same time, to allow Daoist values to qualify, check, or even reinvent the meanings of those named categories. This is not a statement of resistance, but it provides the intellectual foun‑ dation upon which such a statement could be (and later was) elaborated. Perhaps it should not be surprising that, soon after the composition of this commentary, Wang’s patron had been executed, and he himself died in poverty, having been stripped of his position. We do not know what Wang Bi felt about his own ending: his surviving texts are not lyrical ones. Although the above analysis has, hopefully, shown the relevance of the “historical premise” outlined in the Introduction, there is little support to be found in Wang Bi’s writing for the “subjective premise.” Though his work was intimately connected to both actual court politics and political theory, though he relentlessly placed the sign in history, and even at times came close to theorizing the historicity of the sign, Wang Bi was quite

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unusual among Chinese literati in that he never seemed to display any deeply personal anxiety over the possibility of misread signs. He theorized, his theoretical brilliance was connected to his rapid early political advance‑ ment, but so far as we know he never brooded with either disappointment or ambition, wondering how to make his inner subjectivity manifest—or to keep it hidden. Perhaps in not leaving any trace behind of his inner core he was the most “Daoist” thinker ever, the first person to succeed in not writing! Or perhaps he simply didn’t care. In the Obscurist readers later influenced by Wang Bi, however, one does not have to look hard for the arche‑semiotic expression of anxiety over one’s own subjecthood. In order to understand how those subjective anxieties were both expressed and suppressed, we need to consider carefully the historical context of one famous coterie, the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.”

The Seven Worthies of the Arche‑Semiotic Grove Whether or not Wang Bi and He Yan considered themselves part of an official neo‑Daoist School (unlikely), there does seem to have coalesced something like a self‑conscious school immediately after their deaths, known afterward as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian). The classic membership list, and earliest instance of the name, is in the Shishuo Xinyu: Ruan Ji from Chenliu, Ji Kang from Qiaoguo, and Shan Tao from Henei were all of comparable age in years, though Kang was somewhat younger. Along with them there was Liu Ling from Peiguo, Ruan Xian from Chenliu, Xiang Xiu from Henei, and Wang Rong from Langya. These seven men frequently joined beneath the bamboo forests, enjoying themselves without restraint, and thus the world referred to them as the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Forest.19 The picture we get from other sources is a thoroughly romantic one: the seven worthies engaged in “pure talk” (qingtan) in a bamboo grove on the country estate of Ji Kang, they roamed through the wilds of the mysterious Dao, and they eschewed the strictures of the honor‑based economy of names for the deeper presence of nature. A romantic picture, and one that attracted later generations of literati: the theme of the group was an attractive one

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for literary allusion—and imitation, by those who felt the need to form themselves into groups of seven if they were to have a really culturally res‑ onant literary circle. However, for the purposes of understanding the actual intellectual constitution of the group, and the historical importance of its indebtedness to Zhuangzi, it is necessary to go beyond romanticism and generalities, and to dive into the details of the treacherous court history of the mid‑third century. By definition, a literary circle is a social formation; and in this case, one defined by withdrawal from the court; certain court conditions prompted its formation and ideological elaboration in the high point of xuanxue, and when those conditions became untenable, the group was dissolved and its ideology distributed textually. It would be a great misreading to think that the social and political situation during the period of the Three Kingdoms was ever actually stable, but by the year 239 there had evolved in the kingdom of Wei an equilibrium of chaos. It had been four decades since the great general Cao Cao had effectively succeeded Dong Zhuo in establishing himself as military regent over the Han emperor, and defeated Yuan Shao to consolidate control over northern China. It had been three decades since the famous Battle of Red Cliffs checked Cao Cao’s southward expansion and began the stalemated division of China. It had been two decades since the death of Cao Cao, the formal declaration of the Wei dynasty by his son Cao Pi, and the succeeding official establishments of Liu Bei’s rival kingdom of Shu Han to the southwest and the uneasy enfeoffment of Sun Quan in Wu to the southeast. In the time since, there had been no shortage of chaos in the precincts of Wei: there was continued palace intrigue and military action, but neither internal nor external forces seriously threatened the constitution of the state; there were grandiose building projects intended to restore the eastern capital of Luoyang from its late‑Han razing, but the heavy taxes levied to support the expenditures never did provoke revolt. By 239, then, when the third Wei emperor, Cao Rui, lay dying, there was no inherent flaw in the political economy or military standing of the state that would have fated the downfall of the dynasty. However—as seems so often to be the case with otherwise promising premodern monarch‑ ies—there was a succession crisis. Despite a huge royal harem, apparently numbering in the thousands, all potential male heirs to Cao Rui had died young. In 237, the emperor embarked on a crash program to rectify this danger to the state by promulgating an edict that any and all wives in the empire were potentially forfeit to enjoyment by the military, and that the most beautiful would be honored with entry into the royal concubinage. But

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despite this herculean task which the public‑spirited emperor had set himself in endeavoring to provide continuity to the house of Cao, it proved to be in vain, as the emperor died only two years later, no doubt of exhaustion. As the emperor lay dying, the best successor who could be found on short notice was one Cao Fang, a descendent of an external branch of the Cao family, whom the emperor had adopted several years previously, and whom he had since favored. However, in 239, Cao Fang was only eight years old, and needed a regent. Even that might not have been a problem had there been only one regent picked. Unfortunately, there were two: Cao Shuang, a distant cousin several generations removed from Cao Fang whose minor branch of the Cao house had been serving in its military campaigns since Cao Cao’s early days, and Sima Yi, a descendent of one of the great aristocratic families of the Han who was also a veteran of the Wei court, having served Cao Cao, Cao Pi, and Cao Rui in turn. Indeed, he had been one of Cao Rui’s own first appointed advisors upon his own minority ascension to the throne. Nonetheless, despite his deep experience in court politicking, and despite possessing his own military command at the time of the joint regency, Sima Yi was marginalized within the court, stripped by Cao Shuang of most of his effective power while giving him a “promotion” to the largely ceremonial post of Grand Tutor. Seeing how things were tending, Sima Yi did not resist, but encouraged the perception of his own powerlessness, retiring from public life and even feigning grave illness (a technique he had tried with less success decades earlier when trying to avoid joining Cao Cao’s administration). At the ten‑year anniversary of Cao Rui’s death, Cao Fang, who should have been about to come into his majority rule, went to pay his respects to his late father at the royal tombs at Gaoping. With him went the regent Cao Shuang, and other members of the clan who had been appointed to top government and political positions. Sima Yi saw his chance, placed his partisans in charge of the capital armies, had the city gates barred, and compelled the empress dowager (Cao Fang’s mother) to write an indictment against Cao Shuang. The latter capitulated with the expectation of clemency; however, he was in fact executed, along with the most prominent members of his court faction. This did not, however, mean a complete domination of the court, along the same lines in which Cao Cao had previously dominated the last Han puppet‑emperor. The palace coup had been legitimized with the justification of an indictment from the empress dowager, and Cao Fang was old enough, and had enough allies of his own, to prevent unchecked domination by Sima

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Yi and his sons. Perhaps most importantly, not all of the Wei armies were at the capital and under the control of Sima Yi, his sons and partisans—and in fact there were a series of three risings against the Sima faction by the armies along the Yangtze border with Shu‑Han and Wu. The decade or so during which this political stalemate prevailed seems to have been the high point of the Seven Worthies circle, and it is import‑ ant to note that part of the mystique of the group, and its influence as a model for later literary coteries, has depended on its formulation as a sort of antipolitical shadow court. The Bamboo Grove was a place of literary and artistic competitions (wen) rather than life‑and‑death power struggles (wu), a place of equality rather than hierarchy, “pure talk” (qingtan) rather than self‑interested talk, and perhaps most importantly, a place of non‑signification rather than social semiotics. Bamboo groves provide excellent shade—they can be “obscure” (xuan) places. There is nowhere any actual description of the physical location in which the Seven Worthies met, and very little description of their forming a distinct coterie. However, in the extant works of those writers whom the Shishuo Xinyu actually names as part of the coterie, there is a constant bleeding over of “obscurity” from physical to social usages. These writers did not wish to be seen—physical obscurity is a metaphor for disengagement with the systems of social signification that had been erected by the late‑Han mingjiao. Withdrawal from the world is usually implicated in a withholding of signs. Because there is very little hard evidence for the existence of the Seven Worthies as a cohesive coterie, and because several of the members have few or no extant works, it is best not to try to formulate a semiotics of the group as a whole, as this would require too much speculation. Instead, it is helpful to examine the major players on their own terms: in particular, this means Ji Kang and Ruan Ji.

Hiding in Language: Ji Kang and Ruan Ji Ji Kang’s family background is difficult to parse, but has at least an auspi‑ cious beginning for a world‑weary semiologist: the character used for his family name was (at least rumored to be) a neologism, indicating a move to a mountain district, possibly in fleeing royal disfavor.20 His father seems to have joined Cao Cao’s army as a minor officer, thus guaranteeing the family some kind of consideration upon the establishment of the Wei; his father died early, however, and he was raised by his mother.21 He came to the attention of the court of Wei Mingdi by the emperor’s admiration of

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the then‑teenager’s “Nine Mount‑Roaming Lays [Youshan Jiuyin],”22 married a minor member of the royal house, and was appointed to a position in the palace security administration.23 However, before his career went very far, he retired to his family estates in what is now Henan, and remained there for most of the rest of his life. As the factionalism at court became more intense and the Sima faction gained power, this would, of course, have been the prudent thing to do—as someone related by marriage to the Cao family, he might well have been treated as a threat by the Simas (or as expendable by the Caos). In fact, after the actual establishment of the Jin dynasty, Ji Kang was eventually executed. The proximate cause of his death was an accidentally intercepted letter of an acquaintance which seemed to implicate him in opposition to the Simas,24 but no doubt this fit into preexisting concerns over Ji’s marriage alliance to the Cao family, as well as his reluctance to serve at court, which had been previously expressed in the terms of Daoist retirement. A canonical statement of this renunciation of the world can be found in the Treatise on Letting Go of Selfishness: When we speak of the “Gentleman” we mean someone whose mind is unconcerned with right and wrong, whose actions are not opposed to the Way. How can I explain this? One whose breath is tranquil and spirit empty has a mind which does not dwell on arrogance and self‑praise; one whose substance is pure and mind penetrating has feelings which are not attached to that which he desires. Since arrogance and self‑praise do not exist in his mind, he can transcend the moral teachings [mingjiao] and follow nature; since his feelings do not cling to that which he desires, he can carefully examine noble and mean and thoroughly understand the nature of things. Since the nature of things is followed and understood, the Great Way will not be opposed. Since he transcends fame and follows his heart, he will not be concerned with right and wrong. For this reason, when we speak of the Gentleman, we take “lack of concern” [with right and wrong] as the central thing, and understanding things as his point of beauty.25 This piece, which is one of Ji Kang’s better‑known essays, is (like the Laozi and Zhuangzi) suspicious of ethical categories, and frames the typical xuanxue renunciation of the world in terms that have been easily appropriated into narratives of the movement. There is nothing wrong with doing so; the piece

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does nicely capture many easily understood gestures toward renunciation which are associated with the Seven Sages group. The generally representa‑ tive character of the work should not lead one to overlook the importance of the specific terms in which it is introduced, a denial of right and wrong (shi fei) clearly related to the same argument in Zhuangzi’s Discourse on Making Things Equal. Unlike Zhuangzi, Ji Kang goes beyond this opposition to systematized versions of ethics and logic to locate the key to reclusion in this transcendence of categories. Every category is apparently a social category; to leave behind dualistic structures is the same thing as to leave behind the corrupt mingjiao system. Both the refusal to make distinctions and the desire to withdraw from society are depicted as viable options in Zhuangzi, but they are not there usually posited as parts of the same process. These sentiments are scattered across Ji Kang’s surviving poetry, but a particularly clear and relatively compact place to assess their impact is in his “Poem on the Roving Immortal [遊仙詩].” “Roving Immortal” poetry was to become an extremely familiar subgenre—in fact, through the end of the Tang dynasty, it was the preeminently “Daoist” poetic subject, often one imitated by those poets who themselves had stronger commitments to Confucian or Buddhist ideals. The form seems to have been particularly popularized by Guo Pu (郭璞, 276–324) in the generation after Ji Kang, and Ji did not invent the title either: there is one “Roving Immortal” poem extant by Wei prince Cao Zhi; there may have been other such poems from the late Han which are now lost; and in any case, the tropes are often taken directly into the shi form from the older spirit‑journey fu and its pre‑Han predecessors. However, the form does seem to have rather special significance for Ji Kang: the now‑lost poems that brought him to the notice of Cao Rui, usually identified as “Roaming Mountain” (you shan) poems, may in fact have actually been “Roving Immortal” (you xian) poems—hence, it is perhaps this trope that earned him a place in the extended royal family. If so, this is deeply ironic, for unlike Cao Zhi, in his sole surviving “Roving Immortal” poem, Ji Kang places a great deal of stress on the roving immor‑ tal as one who must leave behind social attachments—a trope that would become central to the later practice of the subgenre: From afar I gaze at a pine on the mountains, So green and lush, even in the depths of winter. It finds itself so lofty, Standing alone without a grove around. I wish to roam beneath it,

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But it lies beyond all roads and paths. Prince Qiao left me and went, Riding the clouds on his six‑dragon team. Floating off to play in the Obscure Garden, I met him on the road of Huang‑Lao teachings. He bestowed on me the Way of nature, He enlightened me as if I was a child. I have picked medicinal herbs on Mt. Zhong, I have taken them, and my face has altered. As a thing shedding its skin, I left the muck and entanglements. I live and make new friends on Mt. Bantong. I enjoy my wine as the “Nine Tones” are played— How harmonious is this elegant music! I will part forever from the common people— Who will be able to espy my tracks?26 The Mt. Bantong mentioned in the poem is a hideout of immortals, as is the “Obscure Garden”: these are visions of sacred spaces in which the like‑minded Daoist elite can be at their ease, enjoying perfection away from the crowd. Note that while Ji Kang is certainly renouncing the desires of this world, those desires are apparently not conceived of primarily as sen‑ sory attachments: the land of the immortals is one of sensory enjoyment (and there is no clear allegorization by which one could convert wine and song into decorous abstention). The primary motive to return to natural seclusion is not driven by a suspicion of materiality (as will be observed in following chapters), but by a distaste for society. And in the final line, this desire to escape is given an arche‑semiotic twist—he wishes to escape so thoroughly that no track or trace can be left visible. The notion of the “trace” will grow in importance for practicing Daoists of the later Jin and Liu‑Song dynasties, and “effacing one’s traces” will become a religious ideal to which one ought to strive; here, Ji Kang is simply composing on the level of assumptions. This society of immortals (like the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove) would wish to gather somewhere where their signs would be entirely inward‑directed, cut off from the outside. This is what makes the life of an immortal obscure: a life with signification held in reserve. In order to get a better picture of the philosophical underpinnings for this anti‑semiotics, it is helpful to turn to one of the most important philosophical debates that remains from the period, between Ji Kang and Xiang Xiu. The work is extremely useful in setting out the differences

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between the two with regard attitudes toward the court, and the ways in which slightly differing intellectual emphases resulted in vastly different political outcomes. Ji Kang began the exchange with his Treatise on Taking Care of Life (Yangsheng Lun),27 a title taken directly from one of the chap‑ ters of the Zhuangzi. However, the content, while broadly similar in theme to the traditional Daoism of the Zhuangzi, is more specific in arguing for the necessity of renunciation of desire, and even practices similar to those advocated by the growing religious Daoism of the Celestial Masters, and that to be soon after advocated by Ge Hong in his Master of Clinging to Simplicity (Baopuzi). The primary argument of the piece is that which may have come to represent a later Obscurist consensus regarding nature,28 namely, that a return to nature—and hence longevity‑inducing harmony with the Dao—required a renunciation of the quite unnatural pleasures of society, sensual desire in all its forms. Xiang Xiu’s response (Nan Ji Shulun Yangsheng Lun)29 is highly clever, and advances the philosophical complexity of the debate considerably. While agreeing with Ji Kang about the basic Daoist desire for a naturalism that would preserve life, he opens up the question of what, after all, is “natural” when one speaks of humans. If humans are, by nature, endowed with more complex sensibilities than plants or ani‑ mals, then does it not logically follow that humans behaving naturally can and should engage in those activities which other natural objects cannot? “Moreover, craving and desire, love of glory and hatred of disgrace, love of ease and hatred of labor, all arise from nature,”30 and it should be no particular moral dilemma to participate in such natural inclinations, so long as they are “restrained with the rites.”31 This is perhaps still Daoism, but a Confucianized Daoism very similar in approach to Wang Bi’s, outlined above, which ultimately accepts the social world as appropriate to humans. Ji Kang’s response to Xiang Xiu (Da Xiang Ziqi Nan Yangsheng Lun)32 matches cleverness for cleverness, slipping in a new category, that of wisdom (zhi 智), as also natural—slipped in, and not explicitly justified, because to draw attention to the term would perhaps have made plain to the author as well as to Xiang or other readers just how far the debate had carried him from the Lao‑Zhuang distaste for the logical categories necessary to the application of wisdom in this sense—but nevertheless, wisdom, celebrated as the ruler for humans of other natural inclinations. “Now craving and desire, although they come from man, are not things proper to the Way. It is like the fact that trees have grubs; although they are produced by the tree they are not appropriate to it. Therefore when grubs abound the wood decays, and when desires win out the body withers. . . . Therefore the ancients, knowing that

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wine and meat are sweet poisons, rejected them as things to be abandoned, and recognizing fame and position as sweet smelling baits, left them and did not look back.”33 The logic here relies upon the same erroneous entomology of spontaneous generation that prevailed in European biology through the seventeenth century, but within that framework, it is just as clever as Xiang’s objection. However, in defending the position of the recluse and his distaste for winning a name in the world, Ji Kang has maneuvered himself into a position in which the distrust in social arche‑semiotics and return to a simple lifestyle can no longer be associated with a return to simplicity of thought. This is, perhaps, still entirely consonant with the clever humor of Zhuangzi, but it is a step away from the Laozi—particularly as it has been established in the Wei‑Jin consciousness through the Wang Bi interpretation. In contrast to Ji’s clear antipathy to court life, Ruan Ji’s position with regard to the Cao‑Sima feud is much more difficult to understand. He was clearly a favourite of Sima Zhao, and reluctantly accepted several posts in the Jin government, yet his father Ruan Yu was in fact one of the “Seven Masters of the Jian‑an,” and a favourite of Cao Pi, and in fact the emperor’s “Prose Poem on the Widow” (guafu fu) was intended as a comfort to the family after Ruan Yu’s death while Ruan Ji was a young child. Naturally, this ambiguous status with regard to the factional politics of the age would lead one to suspect that Ruan’s intellectual development had potentially ambiguous gestures. And in fact, one does see evidence of this conflicted status, particularly in his “Essay on Understanding the Changes [Tong Yi Lun],” which mixes Daoist elements with considerable Confucian respect for the established ruling order. In using a mixed approach to the Changes, Ruan may seem quite similar to Wang Bi; however, Ruan does not show much clear influence from Wang, and in fact his hermeneutical method is generally far more conservative than Wang’s. Ruan does not elab‑ orate principles of exegesis, but in general he seems to be working from the “image‑number” tradition, stays close to the text of the “Appended Words,” and certainly never invokes Wang’s theory of the “ruling” line. Hence, Ruan is using a fairly conservative (and hence more broadly acceptable?) methodology to outline a theory of the Changes which offers a more novel mixture of intellectual gestures: Master Ruan said: What are the Changes? They are the obscure truth of old, the changing classic of the ancients. When Bao Xi came to reside between heaven and earth for a generation, the people and things decayed, nothing retained its use, the laws were

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unclear, the virtues of divine brightness could not be accessed, and all the ancient categories were confused. Therefore he first made the eight trigrams, and “extended them, enriching them with all that they contacted,” dividing yin from yang, ordering firm and soft, building up mountains and marshes, connecting water and fire, unifying the various and making continuous the variable, all the way through to the last of the sixty‑four hexagrams, which though finished could not be exhausted. Thus heaven and earth gained images and all things took form, auspicious and inauspicious were made clear and regrets were born, the practical could be acquired, and transformations were completed.34 This opening passage leads off with the language of Daoism, tracing the Changes back into a sublime Obscure Truth, defining the text in terms of transformation. Yet immediately the rhetoric changes over into a Confucian mythological history. Bao Xi enters the world at a time of illness, legal and moral confusion, and category errors; in order to set the age to rights, he begins a task of structural arche‑semiotics, properly distinguishing binaries, and using the images of the hexagrams to make clear good and evil fortune. This is a narrative of the Changes as a Confucian righting‑of‑names (zheng ming), from proper arche‑semiotics to clarify the categories necessary for social life. Most of the individual exegeses of hexagrams that Ruan offers are largely in this Confucian mode, asserting the relevance of the various images called up by the hexagrams to good governance. However, there are also occasional clear Daoist resonances, and these are often where the social valences of the text are most interesting. Consider his comments on the very first hexagram, qian (“the empyrean”): the similarities to the Daoist vision of the great man untouched by his times are hardly original to Ruan, but his phrasing is curious: As for the Changes’ becoming a book, it originated in heaven and earth, followed yin and yang, progressed through flourish‑ ing and decrepitude, emerging from the dim and subtle so as to make things clear. Thus at their head is the hexagram qian, “the hiding dragon, not to be used,” which says that the great man hides his virtue and does not let it show, covers and does

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not express it, but waits for the right time to arise, following along with the changes in setting forth.35 What is the dragon? It is the sort of thing which is vigorous and healthy, a metaphor for the full in virtue, or the respected and noble. When matched with the generosity of heaven, then there is nothing more worthy of esteem than it. When the great man receives a charge, and is able to lodge in the yang, this is the perfection of virtue. What is “the extreme dragon has that which he regrets”? This is the status of one who receives ennoblement, yet lacks the virtue to sustain it. When one desires greatness and does not notice the humble, enjoys luxury and does not think of penury, occupies the highest position and has nothing inferior, has nobility and honor without any support, then this destroys the intent and endangers the body, and this is what one will regret.36 There are two innovations in these exegeses. First, the exposition of qian is given immediately following and in parallel with the description of the book itself. The Changes emerges from the obscure depths of the universe like a dragon surfacing from the ocean (where Chinese dragons typically live). Indeed, it is because the notion of hiding until sudden revelation is so definitive of the book that it places the qian hexagram first. The hexagram is a model for the dragon, the dragon a model for the great man, the great man a model for the book itself. One suspects that in general the model of the hiding dragon must have been an important self‑image both for Ruan Ji and for the rest of the Seven Worthies—it is an excellent foundation for the hermit’s self‑regard. But of course Ruan Ji was not himself a full‑time hermit, even if he did spend pleasant days in the bamboo grove—and the details of the above exegesis do sound strikingly reminiscent of Ruan Ji’s actual position vis‑à‑vis the Sima family. In the second passage above, it is hard to read the phrase, “matched with the generosity of heaven [pei tian zhi hou]” without remembering that Ruan himself was the recipient of a generous match, in his marriage into the royal family‑to‑be. In this context, the warning about the “extreme dragon,” while gesturing toward a more Confucian notion of humaneness (ren) also sounds almost like a self‑warning, and seems to reflect Ruan’s own ambivalent politics, his attraction to Ji Kang and retirement despite his high status.

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As one might expect, Ruan’s Daoist impulses come out much more strongly in one of the period’s most significant interpretations of Zhuangzi, his “Essay on Understanding Zhuang [Da Zhuang Lun].” The essay, which is put forward within a fictional frame narrative in which a wandering Daoist meets a group of Confucians, is in fact the period’s most extended discus‑ sion of the principles in Zhuangzi’s “Essay on Making Things Equal” apart from actual commentaries on that work. As such, it merits close attention. The essay begins with a description of an anonymous man who, in sympathy with the seasons, wanders out into the wild, following rivers and climbing mountains until at last able to look back from afar on the human world. He stops, enlightened and sober, understanding that there are no reasons for his actions, and just remains in the wilds, playing a zither. A group of scholars hear about his presence there, and come to see him in their curiosity about his philosophy, approach respectfully, but then begin aggressively to challenge him to explain Zhuangzi. Their leader notes that they are orthodox Confucians who trace their intellectual lineage back to the sage kings, and stresses that they are dressed in properly Confucian robes and marks of office. Then he argues for a strongly anthropocentric value system, in which heaven and earth yield to humans, binary distinctions are correct because they are made by humans and necessary to life. Clearly going beyond anything a real orthodox Confucian would say, he then argues for the necessity of a certain selfish egoism, and the importance of both force and profit. Zhuangzi is specifically singled out for critique—how could one seriously maintain that binary distinctions are merely illusory? The recluse pauses, playing his zither and smiling, and then begins his response by noting that the external signs of mere clothing, of which the Confucians seemed proud, are irrelevant to finding the realms of the immortals. Then he counters the Confucians’ anthropocentrism, stressing the “all-encompassing” (wu wai) nature of heaven and earth, and while admitting that there do seem to be distinctions within nature that can be named, these names in fact refer to phenomena which are themselves the expressions of the unity of nature. “Nature is one body, and thus all things are regulated by its constancy; when they go in they are called ‘hidden’ and when they come out they are called ‘clear’ ”37; whether things are different or the same is simply a question of perspective. Using this logic, humans are not necessarily the definers of difference, but are themselves confluences of raw substance (yin and yang), and have no more to do with life or death than the elements of which we are made. One could enforce a distinction between “beards” and “eyebrows,” but in reality, both are just kinds of

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hair; similarly, Confucianism takes a small‑scale vision of the world, while Zhuang Zhou sees the world on its proper large scale, in which distinctions are effaced. The Confucian penchant for drawing distinctions is a symptom of overattachment to the senses, while the “perfected man” (zhiren) makes himself immortal by giving himself over to the transformations of nature. After further discussion of some of the benefits of the Daoist life, the recluse then begins to discuss the relationship of Daoist practice to arche‑semiotic vision: Thus the ultimate perfected way, is one in which the inchoate is undivided, and of one body, and loss is unheard of. When Fu Xi began to tie ropes, and Shen Nong to teach agriculture, those who opposed these ways died while those who followed them lived—so how could one have known greed as a crime, or purity as an [honorable] name? Thus the essence of perfect virtue is merely to have nothing external—a great evenness in the substance of things, no duality in standards. Pure silence and solitude, waiting upon emptiness: no one discriminating good from evil, nothing about which right and wrong could argue. Thus all things return to their places and achieve their states. After the Confucians and the Mohists, the discussions of “hardness” and “whiteness” also arose, so that “auspicious” and “inauspicious” attached to things, and “gain” and “loss” were on peoples minds—then people banded together into factions, attacking each other with their discourses. . . . The reason why the goose perished is that it lost its substance and therefore con‑ fused its pattern. Because it does not change with life or death, the tortoise is viewed as a treasure for prognostication. Thus the perfect person purifies his substance and clouds his pattern, does not change with life or death but never begins to speak.38 As in so many other Daoist statements, Ruan Ji is contrasting a period of primordial edenic simplicity with a fall into the complexities of civiliza‑ tion. The arche‑semiotic suspicions of the passage are at first confused by the reference to Fu Xi, the mythological inventor of Chinese characters—if the decline of civilization is associated with the binarisms of the anti‑Daoist “School of Names” (mingjia), it seems that language is not in itself danger‑ ous. However, whether intentionally or not, Ruan Ji has misrepresented the legends of Fu Xi, attributing to him not the invention of characters but the

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even earlier system of knot‑notation. As a result, the primordial simplic‑ ity of the Daoist ideal is represented as a period before writing—and this makes sense, given that the overall character of the age is described as one of uniformity and nondiscrimination. Only when one has words, each dif‑ fering in material form from the other, can one have the structural division of reality into this and that, self and other. However, salvation is not simply synonymous with non‑signification. The recluse alludes to a story from the “Mountain Tree” (Shan Mu) chapter of the Zhuangzi, in which Zhuang Zhou’s host chooses which goose to kill based on the fact that it does not have the ability to cry out—an example in which an inability to communicate results from some unknown internal defect in the goose. In contrast to this, the recluse then offers the contrary example of the tortoise, which is killed precisely because of the combination of its natural longevity, and the fact that its shell can be used in divination. Neither the absence nor the presence of signs about oneself is sufficient to guarantee one’s life; instead, the key is to combine healthy internal substance with external non‑signification. To exist, strongly, outside of society. The following section of Ruan’s argument expands on the need for a personal refusal of arche‑semiotics, and then runs into the same contradic‑ tion as Zhuangzi’s writing in critique of the discriminatory functions of language, while trying to draw his own set of distinctions in the service of that critique: Now the separation of words is talk that destroys the Way; and the twisting of arguments is the beginning of the ruin of Virtue. A divided vital breath means sickness for a single body; a man of divided loyalties is a catastrophe for all of creation. . . . Chuang Chou, seeing things were in this state, related the wonders of the Way and its Virtue and revealed the bases of non‑activity. He expanded his descriptions with metaphors and developed them with fictions. [That was the way] he diverted his non‑active mind a little and [that] he roamed at ease during his lifetime. How could he have hoped to have his work [posted on] the gate of Hsien‑yang or argues with the scholars at Chi‑hsia?39 In the closing of the essay, Ruan actively disparages Zhuangzi’s book; Donald Holzman, in his very Confucian reading of Ruan Ji, argues that this is due to Ruan’s ideological reluctance to embrace Daoism.40 While a reasonable reading (as mentioned above, there are real Confucian sentiments echoed

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in his work), it seems at least as plausible that Ruan is not criticizing Zhuang Zhou the man, but the Zhuangzi as a settled canonical book. In the paragraph cited above, at least, the recluse offers a complex series of views on language. At first, he critiques the language of the Mohists and the School of Names: the kind of language that draws divisions. Against this, Ruan Ji praises a different kind of language which Zhuangzi used, a language of continuity and extension: he “revealed the bases of non‑activity. He expanded his descriptions with metaphors and developed them with fictions [敘無為之本 , 寓言以廣之 , 假物以延之’].”41 In addition, of course, to invoking the Zhuangzian concept of “imputed words” the language here is very similar to that of Ji Kang in his “Poetic Exposition on the Zither”: “if it wasn’t enough to chant, then one could entrust it to words to broaden one’s meaning [吟詠之不足 , 則寄言以廣意].”42 Ruan’s formulation is more ambiguous, and could be using the words “expand” and “develop” to indi‑ cate dissemination; however, the general thrust of the passage suggests the opposite—Ruan Ji certainly does not support broad publication of one’s personal engagement with the dao, he wishes to keep the self whole and secret. Rather, his use of these phrases seems much more likely to be directly linked to Ji Kang’s related use: the point of language is to create meaning. That which is “entrusted” to language is not a whole image, formed in the mind prior to any expression; rather, it is the inchoate sentiment, which is worked up into “meaning” something by its being affixed to words. Ulti‑ mately, though, as the last line makes clear, that language is still not meant to be fully public: he did not hope to write a canonical classic for public discourse. The result seems to be a picture of language in which allusive tropology is linked to retirement and disentanglement from the world, as opposed to a logic‑chopping version of language that belongs to a public sphere of acclaim but also unhealthy debate. These are sentiments which also well describe the writing for which Ruan Ji is most famous: his dark, lament‑filled poetry, eighty‑two lyrics in all, which has always been collected under the title, Songs of My Cares (Yong Huai). It is an odd oeuvre: not at all difficult by the standards of classical poetry, often borrowing phrases and image‑sets from the popular yuefu song lyrics and “old poem” style, or else borrowing from contemporaries who had borrowed from the same popular sources; yet despite the clarity of the diction, there is often a near‑impenetrability which hangs about the sentiments. Common enough images and turns of phrase are wrested from their typical placings within—and then twisted off, left shivering, resonant. Certain patterns of lyric structure are deployed which carry with them

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expectations of a set emotional development—but then the resolution is either thwarted, or else dismissed in a pat piety insufficient to resolve the emotional details that have been stirred up. Perhaps for this reason, it is a corpus of poems that has traditionally been thought of as allegorical—and while such classifications depend heavily on how one defines “allegory,” it is a judgment that correctly reflects the Obscurist fascination with language’s insufficiencies and misdirections. One of the most common compounds in the Songs is xiaoyao, “carefree roaming”—the word is the title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi and is strongly associated with that work; but the significance of its frequent appearance is not simply in its reflection of the influence of Daoism, but also in the ironic attitude toward language that motivates it. There are many images of wandering in the Songs, but they are the wanderings of an exile, past‑haunted and death‑expecting. One could pile up citations for all of these characteristics, but an extended look at one poem that combines most of the common elements will be sufficient: I speed my cart out the gate, I think I want to voyage far away. But voyage how? By taking leave of honor and name. Honor and name are not properly one’s self—I wish only to suit my inner feelings. A single shade blocks the shining sun, the high pavilion is cut off from faint sounds. The toadies and bastards have made my connections sparse, as floating clouds make the day get dim. Alluring, and of the same raiment; yet with a glance, the city fell. I was carefree for a while; but the flourishing blossoms will not again bloom. Morning comes swiftly upon dusk, and does not reveal the shape of my delight? The yellow bird flies southeast, and I send with it words taking leave of a friend.43 Not all Chinese poems are as mysterious in the original as they tend to sound in context‑free English translation; but this one comes close. There are plenty of allusions, echoes of the Classic of Odes, the Lyrics of Chu, Laozi, Zhuangzi, popular yuefu, poems by Cao Zhi (the brother of Emperor Wen of the Wei)—but the thick tissue of these allusions cannot be structured into a narrative of the lyric moment such as one normally expects from a Chinese poem. Instead, readers are offered a series of gestures, a posi‑

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tioning, even a history: the speaker is of an elite from which he has been exiled, or exiled himself, he renounces the world reluctantly. But there is also more of a history, which lies on the far side of these allusions, and we can only observe as if on the far side of a curtain, listen as if to con‑ versations in the street far below. Who is it whose glance topples a city? For whose beloved form would the narrator be waiting? This is supposed to be a poem of renunciation, not love. And then: Why end by apparently lifting from a famous popular lyric (“Southeast Flies the Peacock”),44 and who is the friend with which the narrator would wish to cut off relations in such bizarre fashion?45 In the end, the “entrusting” of words is less that of a lonely man to a yellow bird46 than of a half‑muzzled allegorist to the imperfect resources of a poetic tradition. Ruan’s “sending” of words (jiyan 寄言) is cognate to Zhuangzi’s “entrusted words” (yuyan 寓言); the phrase is common enough that there is no specific allusion here, and yet the underlying sentiment betrays a similar arche‑semiotic concern. Who is available to receive words, and how can one structure an inherently unstable semiotic system in order to be capable of carrying one’s own inexpressible cares? Just as the Classic of Changes and the Zhuangzi needed to find or create special, unusual forms of signs (the hexagrams, and “broadening” tropes) in order to express the obscure abstractions of the dao, he needs a natural rather than a social vehicle to carry his true words of his inexpressible inner subject, once he has lost faith in name/fame. Ji Kang and Ruan Ji both seem to have internalized the abstract system of semiotic difficulty and possible strategies for overcoming that difficulty, which had previously been voiced by Wang Bi, and in regard to the same sets of texts. Unlike Wang Bi, they go farther in internalizing the possibilities of that semiotic suspicion. That subjective anxiety was not new: it was present in many kinds of early texts, and Wang Bi is unusual in not manifesting it. But Ji and Ruan seem to have taken this old anxiety and reconfigured it in the Obscurist terms that Wang had begun to open for them. They seem to have staked out different responses to the pressures of the world: Ji’s more rejectionist, and Ruan’s more engaging, and on this ground they have sometimes been discussed as if Ji leaned more toward the Daoist side of the Obscurist synthesis, and Ruan more toward the Confu‑ cian. Sorting and labeling each in this manner is probably unwise; in any case, their arche‑semiotic impulses seem to have run in parallel. It may even be this arche‑semiotic reluctance to engage with the world through full self‑revelation that the tradition had intuited all along, in identifying these friends as members of a “Seven Worthies” coterie.

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As mentioned at the end of the last chapter, this form of arche‑semiotic anxiety is in a sense deeply concerned with ethics and politics, yet not wholly consonant with the terms in which Levinas and Derrida connected those to semiotic issues. True relation, the place of the true expression, is figured as happening in a private sphere, which is also the sphere of non‑ communication. Not exactly the silence that had most horrified Levinas, it is a space in which language is at least more allusive and elusive, rejecting precision and distinction as something that belongs to the tiresome, perhaps unhealthy public space of the court. One finds one’s real friends via a kind of half‑language that neither says what it means nor means what it says.

After the End In the spaces of leisure afforded after the end of productive days, in their comfortable and responsible positions with the regime, the former Seven Worthies members found there was plenty of time for nostalgia and perhaps regret. Xiang Xiu’s “Rhapsody on Recalling Old Friends [Sijiu Fu]” is most famous because it has provided speculative clues about the possible location of the actual historical bamboo grove; but it is of more real interest as that which it claims to be, a picture of a mental reflection on the past: Of old, when Li Si was condemned to death, He sighed for his yellow dog with countless moans. I grieve that Master Xi [Ji Kang] has eternally parted, Looking back at his shadow and playing his zither. Understanding that he was dependent on the turn of fortune, He entrusted his remaining fate to the final moment. As I listen to the moving sounds of the singing flute, The sublime notes break off and then continue again.47 Xiang Xiu is not a haphazard writer: playing music is a traditional occupation of the lonely, but in this case it is a specific tribute to the musical abilities of Ji Kang—as his preface to the piece notes, Ji Kang played his zither just prior to his execution, and it was the sounds of a neighbor’s flute playing that apparently inspired Xiang to compose this rhapsody. Given that care for details, it is all more striking, then, that he should choose Li Si as a parallel case! Li Si was also a slandered and then executed figure of history, who in his last words to his son regretted never

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again being able to take out his hounds on the hunt; and this longing for the woods of a maligned executee seems thus to fulfill minimal genre expect‑ ations of parallelism between the historical and the contemporary figure. And yet—in almost every other way—Xiang Xiu could not have chosen a more bizarrely unsuited comparison to Ji Kang, for Li Si was the famously brutal and amoral counselor to the Qin Emperor, one of the most often detested heavies of Chinese history. Nor is the discrepancy merely one of choosing to mourn a friend through comparison to a “bad guy”; the two figures were, apart from their moral reputations, temperamentally wildly at odds, for in contrast to the free‑spirited Ji Kang, Li Si was the official responsible for fitting all of China to one rule, through standardization of scripts, currency, road- and axle‑widths, tax and corvee levies, heavy, uni‑ versally binding penal codes—and of ideology, through book burning and executions of rival schools. Li Si stood for intolerance of individual differ‑ ence by the reigning system; Ji Kang was the difference in his own. There are really only two easy explanations for Xiang Xiu’s choice of comparison, given how many historical figures besides Li Si had been wrongly executed. Either Xiang was a fantastically incompetent writer of prose poems; or else he was relying on semiotic slippage, from the persecuted to his unnamed persecutors, encouraging readers to associate the name of Li Si not finally with Ji Kang, but with the emperor who could not tolerate difference of opinion and had him executed. Xiang Xiu never did previously go all the way, with Ji Kang, to a radical distrust of the names assigned by the ruling elites; now he needs names precisely to reveal that they mean what they seem not to mean, to indicate the opposite. Praise has become blame, and if this satire is too late to offer more than coded and ineffectual protest, it is at least something other than ineffectual silence. In the mid‑Jin, silence must have seemed an attractive option to many otherwise inclined more to Daoist than to Confucian ways of seeing the world; indeed, do not the opening lines of the Daoist tradition’s first work discourage speech? Here we run very squarely up against one of the more obvious, yet little accounted‑for problems of intellectual history: the difficulty of assessing self‑hiding ideologies. Intellectual history is always prejudiced in favor of those who write. Yet, with the caveat that much of relevance to late‑Jin Daoism is probably buried in the obscure dusts of what were once memories, there are nonetheless clear residues from the afterlife of the Obscurist movement, which make it possible to trace how preferences for the Dao were configured at a time when open declarations of independence had passed.

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One of the more interesting Jin figures sympathetic to Daoism is Sima Biao (司馬彪, 243–306), a member of the royal family—in one of its branches outside the line of succession, but still the son of a powerful regional governor. Sima Biao is today usually thought of as a historian, for his compilation of the now mostly lost Continued History of the Han (Xu Han Shu), and the sentiments ascribed to him in the Book of the Jin on the role of the historian are typically Confucian;48 and a weirder anecdote, about his interpretation of a two‑headed foal as a sign of rebellion to come, suggests his loyalty to the clan regime.49 However, Sima Biao was also, from the same records, unfit for governance and relegated to the library through his own dalliances and loose living;50 and in fact, this ungentlemanly fellow was not entirely satisfied with the sobriety of history, but also completed a substantial commentary on the Zhuangzi, probably written at roughly the same time that his contemporary Guo Xiang was finishing his own edits to the Xiang Xiu commentary. This commentary also had apparently ceased to circulate by the Tang dynasty, but parts of it were reconstructed in traditional times by scholarly culling of surviving citations. Shan Tao’s surviving corpus is relatively small, and not particularly concerned with issues of semiotics. It does, however, seem to grow out of the semiotic context of the early Jin, in which men felt compelled to hide their traces. He shows a historian’s interest in reconstructing the past—but particularly through biography, both in the Continued History and in his Abstract of Stratagems (Zhan Lue), a work surviving only in citations from the Taiping Yulan and elsewhere. There is a certain longing for knowledge of past worthies, itself no more Daoist than Confucian, but which seems heightened by curiosity toward the lives of men who took care to shield themselves from view. These attitudes seem to be the motivating force behind his “Poem Sent to Shan Tao [Zeng Shan Tao Shi].” Shan Tao was Sima Biao’s senior by almost forty years; although the exact date of the poem is unknown, at the earliest time Sima would have been old enough to compose it, Shan would have already joined the Jin court as an elder statesman. He was certainly the most obvious personal representative of the recently lost world of late‑Wei xuanxue, and hence a prime figure for the focus of a bookish nostalgia such as Sima’s—though this poem seems to be more of a request for assistance in political rehabilitation than an abstract intellectual exercise. He writes to the elder statesman a lyric that does not speak of personal semiotics until near its close, but which is clearly imitating Ruan Ji’s allegorism throughout:

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Lofty is the qitong tree, Which finds a life in the southern mountains. Above are dark clouds, and rainbows, Below, a valley thousands of yards long. It has chosen a place both lonely and steep, Where can one even trust to place one’s feet? Formerly planted to face the sun, Leaning branches await the bird of paradise. Now, cut off from worldly employment, I am desperate, and tightly bound. Gongshu Ban and Carpenter Shi take no notice of me, Bo Ya and Shi Kuang do not record my name. How can I perfect my zither or harp? Whence can I raise my miraculous melodies? The lights of heaven keep rushing forward, How swift their disappearance! At night I cannot sleep: I grasp my sword and stay stock‑still. Moved at sagely Confucius, I sigh, Despairing at the brevity of one’s years. Bian He hid something in the secluded dimness; Who could put to the test his amazing jade treasure? I hope a divine dragon might come, Lifting up his light to illuminate!51 This seems to be the poem of an exile. Unfortunately, Sima’s biography in the Jin Shu is rather cursory, and records no clear event or period of exile in his life—although it does make clear that he was excluded from real power, and forced to resort to his library for comfort, due to unspecified immoral behavior. One might speculate that the southern site of exile is a literary flourish, if not for the specificity of his reference to the three rivers (i.e., Luoyang). In any case, Sima is clearly “entrusting” himself to a thinly veiled allegory, the lone mountain tree, placed precariously. The style is simple, reflecting popular yuefu; but the actual content—filled with darkness and loneliness, punctuated by repeated rhetorical questions—owes more to the style of Ruan Ji’s yong huai poems. It is a poem that is not particularly innovative or important to the development of poetics. But it is curious in its address to Shan Tao—the former worthy of the Bamboo Grove, and the

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betrayer of Ji Kang. Sima compares himself to Bian He, who was mistakenly punished with mutilation after presenting the king of Chu with a valuable jade; he is looking for a skilled appraiser who can determine his true worth. The man he hopes for, apparently Shan Tao himself, is the hidden dragon of the qian hexagram in the Book of Changes, the worthy who himself was once hidden, but has now come out into the light of court acceptance. Very little of Shan’s own prose survives, and none of his poetry. He is frequently mentioned in period documents, and many letters to him by his contemporaries remain extant. But it is ironic—Ji Kang, the absolut‑ ist recluse to the end, left behind a large corpus of self‑representation in which he clearly flees from socially situated semiotics; Shan Tao, having left Obscurism for the bright sunlight of the court, remains now obscure. What could he have thought of this poem—would he have been struck by the language of lonely hiddenness, reminiscent of the Bamboo Grove? Perhaps Sima’s not‑too‑subtle plea for patronage at the end would have formed an ingratiating contrast with Ji Kang, or perhaps a bitter contrast. Answers would lie hidden beyond speculation. What can be read out of Sima’s plea is not the result, but the full field of options implied by the approach. Sima Biao was a black sheep in his branch of the extended royal family—perhaps a rake, certainly enough of a Daoist sympathizer to write a Zhuangzi commentary. Had he been fifteen years younger or so, he would have been a perfect candidate to join whatever parties were being held at Ji Kang’s estate, and to make real contributions to Obscurism. As things stood, he did absorb both the diction of Obscurism and the recluse’s impulse to self‑allegorism as a semiotic shield. But the option to celebrate one’s obscurity no longer exists; he has to lament it, via the very Confu‑ cian allusion to Bian He. He cannot appeal to Shan Tao’s friendship as a fellow Daoist, but must lay a claim to his patronage, as a Daoist hidden dragon, the indifferent great man who has somehow managed to succeed in the capital. One might feel oneself to be lonely and subtle by nature, one might still live in a library and write Zhuangzi commentaries—but one needs one’s signs to be recognized. With these later works by writers who had survived the founding of the Jin and its immediate aftermath, one can see the ways in which history does and does not interact with arche‑semiotics. On the one hand, political history is ever present to these writers: allusions to the distant past become a key method of not‑speaking‑about‑the‑present. That political history is a motive to further arche‑semiotic anxiety: knowing what has happened allows one to guess what could happen, and that calls for watching what

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one says. However, the strategies that these writers reach for are apparently timeless: by this point, the Laozi and Zhuangzi are more or less canonical to the same degree as the Classic of Changes, and the strategies of nonrep‑ resentation and non‑self‑disclosure that they had advocated were apparently ancient and timeless wisdom. In other words, heightened consciousness of political history did not bring with it a heightened attention to intellectual history. This shortsightedness will be even more evident in the following chapter on religious Daoism, where the Laozi and Zhuangzi were treated as divine revelation. But even among elites who still took those texts as secular philosophy, it is still important to remember that their exegetical methods were usually not historicist, even when they extracted arche‑semiotic lessons to deal with the complex social settings in which they found themselves.

Arche‑writing and the Monarchical Those writers traditionally associated with Obscurism are most uniform in their arche‑semiotics: they have accepted the position of Laozi and Zhuangzi that words are unreliable signs. There is no full‑fledged recognition that meaning exists only in words; the possibility is left open that meaning could potentially be found elsewhere, prior to language. However, this is not where the emphasis falls: there is no mystic quest toward the source of extralinguistic plenitude—only a deep anxiety about the fact that signs are poor delegates of meaning, who cannot be relied upon to adequately represent one’s interests in the social sphere. How one reacts to this anxiety was a much more difficult question, for it produced a wide range of theoretical and practical solutions. Wang Bi and He Yan, as client and patron, saw no inherent contradiction between the construction of a society upon a personal arche‑semiotics and the failure of that arche‑semiotics. Wang developed a theory of nonrepresenta‑ tion as an actual governing principle, whether in the Confucian sages who were so secretly Daoist that they decided they never had to speak about non‑speech, or the hermeneutically “ruling” line of hexagrams that directs the rest unseen, or the actual ruler of the state, as unrepresentable as the Way. In contrast, Xiang Xiu promotes the much more familiar notion that the position of nonrepresentation should be associated with those outside of power, rather than at the center of it; but he also supports a historicist and realist view of such an arche‑semiotics, suggesting that if non‑speech might be an ideal, yet it is one not suited to every age, or every social actor.

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Shan Tao seems to have acknowledged the Daoist claim to nonrepresentation and then abandoned it with a Confucian critique (that nonrepresentation is itself a sign of there being nothing worth representation) for the sake of safety and employment under a new regime; Sima Biao seeks restoration to the social order with Shan Tao’s help by praising him in the terms of the formerly unrepresentable who has found his appropriate system of signs in which to shine. Only with Ji Kang and Ruan Ji do we find anything like a real rejection of social semiotics on the grounds of a Daoism consonant with the linguistic and ethico‑political impulses of Laozi and Zhuangzi. But even with them, one must not take xuanxue arche‑semiotics as equaling a simple rejection‑ ism. In the case of both writers, the inherent impossibility of the sign is a reason for suspecting that the social world is inherently dangerous; in the case of both, one can see a longing for the safety of retreat from society being equated with a silence that begins at the end of socially significant words. However, both also implicitly recognize that the rejection of social semiotics must itself also be carried out in language, and they employ slightly different strategies by which they seek to turn the unstable properties of the sign toward their own defense. Ji Kang is guiltiest of a naive romanticism, with his expressed hope for expression in silence and nonentanglement as a sufficient means of escape; but even he, when pressed to return to the fold of loyal service, uses his inability to create proper rhetoric as its own rhetorical excuse for refusal. Ruan Ji is cannier, rejecting the center obliquely while giving serious impetus to the development of Chinese allegorism through his yong huai poems—which claim to be singing of his cares, but do so while managing to never designate them! What the Wei‑Jin period, then, offers is a diffuse positioning of desire and fear in which silence and speech mutually shape each other—and these options, grouped around common axes of arche‑semiotic assumptions and violent possibilities, constitute neither a random collection of unrelated responses nor the unitary expression of a bounded period. Each of those dual extremities would both be mischaracterizations of the evidence, and misunderstandings of how language and history condition each other. It is a common enough assumption of new historicist criticism that history acts like a language, no prior self‑present meaning which is then expressed in texts, but a meaning only that is history as it is cognizable, coexistant with those texts. But in writing a history of semiotics, the place of the written record is not merely “more so” for being recursive, it is also the historical key (which is to say, its theoretical key) to its own situated significance.

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One must respect the enormity of the horrors that brought to Levinas the antipathy for silence as a spiritual death, a breach of the Other’s covenant of relation. There is no need to compare, and so it is not a comparison when we can point out that there are other kinds of violence which spring from the prohibition on silence instituted by governments that are not content with tacit assent. China reached the height of this silencing of silence a few years after Derrida’s critique of Levinas, when each individual in the mass was expected to produce speech without aporias, so pro‑Mao as to be immune to interpretation. But the prohibition on silence was practiced many times before that in the late imperial era, and occasionally in earlier periods, such as the transition to the Jin dynasty, and it needs to be understood that the motivations to silence shaped speech, gave history a form. Before the demands began to come, in the commotion of civil war, the first impetus to Obscurism is set forth by a young and apparently ambitious thinker who wishes to posit silence as the undisplayed power of the ruling principle. If governance was too chaotic, if there is no longer a fiction of empire holding together warring regional kingdoms, it must have been attractive to posit that very absence as a sign of control and author‑ ity—the silence of power becomes a comfort. It was a fiction that did not have immediate consequences, as the Jin royal house decided to move in a different direction with their own propaganda needs—but as will be seen in chapter 6, it is an idea that eventually became critical to imperial self‑representation. By the time that a decade of factional struggles between the Cao and Sima families had begun, it would have been impossible to think of the vacancy and blankness of kingship as a form of praise—it would have hit too close to the truth of an unstable regency. The rhetoric of silence was returned to its traditionally Daoist location at the margin, but the recognition of the artificiality of the social sign, its distance from the self, results in texts being deployed as shields, deflecting blows and attention by misdirection. Silence could not remain silent, because it needed speech to fulfill that role—or at least writing, the perfect sign of absence. The triumph of allegorism in Ruan Ji reverses, by its personalization, what Paul de Man called in the Romantic context the “rhetoric of temporality”:52 when the allegorical sign is a non‑signifying sign of the self, it does not confess to a liability to corruption of anything but itself, the disposable husk. And yet the mode in which silence ultimately prevails is not as the guiding subject of speech, but as its licensing agent. The split between Xiang Xiu and Ji Kang on the question of nature prefigures this: If humans

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should embody nature, shouldn’t they embody the nature of what it means to be human, namely, social life? From the Zhuangzi commentary, we learn that the sign itself follows suit: the motive toward the escape into Dao is always already put into language, because it is in history that the valorized endless transformation of Zhuangzi must occur, not in a stable unworldly metaphysics. There is no way of knowing whether such arguments helped to motivate the likes of Shan Tao, but based on the recognition he received, that is the effect—the reincorporation of Daoist reticence into the system became a guarantor that mingjiao would not remain an empty system of polite nomenclature. There is no one mode of complementary opposition between speech and silence, only the common site of writing in which they blend. To posit a unitary relation between ideal and inscription would be to belie history, but also to belie this particular ideal—the Dao was never meant to be easy to describe.

CHAPTER FOUR

Traces of Transcendence

Signs of Power (I) When one asks, “What is language?” in certain company, one might be told either that it is a communications system, or that it is an evolved predispos‑ ition toward symbolic representation according to certain rules, or that it is a marker of ethnic or national identity, or that it is an engine of difference. One answer that is unlikely to be offered is that language is a means of suturing together differing realms that seem otherwise to be irremediably sundered. Depending on which realms one is concerned with, this function can be either too obvious to deserve comment (as in the fact that language bridges the private space of hidden need and desire with the social world) or else too suspiciously spiritual to allow for analysis (such as the notion that language might bind the physical world to eternal verities). The latter conception has been one of the most fruitful and most damaging presuppositions driving forward traditional philosophies of lan‑ guage. It is the shocking strength of Lao‑Zhuang linguistics, perhaps alone of Iron Age philosophies, that it directly attacks the possibility of such acts of suturing into reliable structures: human language is simply not capable of creating reliable frameworks for ultimate truths, nor of fixing the character of a phenomenal world whose outstanding characteristic is unending flux. However, Lao‑Zhuang thought is not Daoism. One stream of Daoism, the political/intellectual “Obscurism” discussed in the previous chapter, trans‑ formed that deconstructive thought into a method of negotiating personal position in a dangerous world. Another, the religious Daoism that will be the focus of this chapter, takes the dissing of human language as a covert gesture toward the necessity of divine language. What makes the case more interesting than a transposition into Asian narrative terms of familiar Western prelapsarian imaginations is a decided focus on the substance of language as

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a bridge between worlds of matter and spirit. Language as silent thought has no material expression, but communicative language must, whether through the sound waves on which oral tradition traveled, or the bamboo strips, silk, and newly invented paper that carried tangible written traditions. And, of course, these tangible objects were not mere matter—they were a special form of matter, which converted object‑stuff into a noetic link to the divine. Within the Derridean canon, there is a particular text that shows us both the fearsome and the liberating possibilities which arise when one focuses upon the materiality of expression. In Part 2, Chapter 1 of Of Grammatology, Derrida offers a famous critique of Lévi‑Strauss’s “Writing Lesson” from Tristes Tropiques. The setting is among the Nambikwara people of the Amazon rainforest, a people of an exclusively oral culture whose first encounter with writing, the possession of the anthropologists who have come to study them, is narrated poignantly. The leader of the Nambik‑ wara band notices the anthropologists writing, and practices an imitation of their action, borrowing pencil and paper from Lévi‑Strauss, scribbling on it, and showing it back to him, assuming that his meaning would be naturally legible. And then the leader turns the new discovery not toward communicative, but political ends: And now, no sooner was everyone assembled than he drew forth from a basket a piece of paper covered with scribbled lines and pretended to read from it. With a show of hesitation he looked up and down his “list” for the objects to be given in exchange for his people’s presents. To so and so a bow and arrows, a machete! and another a string of beads! for his necklaces—and so on for two solid hours. What was he hoping for? To deceive himself, perhaps: but, even more, to amaze his companions and persuade them that his intermediacy was responsible for the exchanges, that he had allied himself with the white man, and that he could now share in his secrets.1 Though clearly admiring the aesthetic neatness of Lévi-Strauss’s elucida‑ tion of this scene as an encapsulation of a secular “fall” into the tyranny of a hierarchical world enabled by writing, Derrida takes issue with this proposition of a lapsus calami. Not to reverse the logocentrist assumptions in writing’s favor—he clearly accepts “the violence of the letter”—but to show that there never was any fall from innocence, that this violence was already present in the form of writing called “speech,” and that no myth of

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immediacy and presence can remove the contamination of domination from language. Curiously, he works up to a formulation notably reminiscent of his engagement with Levinas: To recognize writing in speech, that is to say difference and the absence of speech, is to begin to think the lure. There is no eth‑ ics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, difference, writing. The arche‑writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening. As in the case of the vulgar concept of writing, the ethical instance of violence must be rigorously suspended in order to repeat the genealogy of morals.2 (140) The presence of the other is the possibility of either ethics or violence, both of which lurk inescapably within language, whether oral or written. There is no prelapsarian state. Adam did not name Eve so much as inscribe her. And we must grant that even in the canonical Western tradition’s own logocentric terms, Derrida is right—the rustic agoras of Rousseau which Derrida goes on to dismantle were always classically the site of philosophy, but also of rhetoric. The Levinasian confrontation of the other was a site for the possibility of ethics, not its necessity—didn’t the SS look their prisoners in the face? And yet, Derrida’s reasonable desire to trace the violence of the letter beyond the boundaries of “vulgar” writing flattens and melds things that are not the same. For presence is not simply a characteristic of people, but also of objects, and the physical materialization of language in a written form of text is also a presence. Just as Heidegger’s hammers need to be tangible in order to be preinterpreted as always lying to hand, the physical written text makes its own kind of claim upon attention in a way that disappearing sound cannot. Surely, the existence of violence is not the only question— what of its character? Does the presence of an artifactual text rather than an evanescent one alter the nature of language’s social deployment? There cannot be a single answer to such a question: once one insists on specifics, one is in the field of history, where, axiomatically, different things happen. What one can say is that, whatever the presence of a tangible text does to social hierarchies, the question of the presence of the text begins to be asked—and to be conflated with other conundra, such as the rela‑ tionship between body and soul, earth and heaven. Derrida deconstructed

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such binaries so thoroughly that one must return forcefully to historical texts to realize that there are versions of the metaphysics of presence that are very differently logocentric. When one examines in detail the early history of religious Daoism, one finds that the materiality of the text becomes a lens through which consciousness of all materiality is heightened, for both condemnation and celebration in their turns. The result is a discursive practice that is invoking the same texts from the Laozi and the Zhuangzi as the Obscurist writers, but which has a subtly different interest in arche‑semiotics. The religious Daoists had very different social locations: the Celestial Masters community seems to have been a truly grassroots religious movement, while the leading figures of the Shangqing school had direct connections to elite circles. However, they were not con‑ cerned with self‑presentation to royal courts, or anxious over the possibility of slander: in this they were extremely different from most Chinese literati of their age, and of the preceding centuries. Instead, they had developed religious subjectivities. Sometimes, they were concerned with the ability of gods and other numinous beings to correctly “read” their own faith and devotion; more often, they downplayed their own subjective experience, and were more concerned with “reading” the gods themselves, who were trying to reveal themselves to the elect in cryptic language. History was important, but only as a negative quality: they tended to produce narratives of originally complete revelation in a timeless past, which had been crowded out by the merely human processes of false signification by people too attached to the world, and hence too subject to history. Although, again, the texts that are analyzed in this chapter are not intended as theoretical systems of semiotics in the mode of Peirce or Saussure, they do offer up visions of how eternal truths are imperfectly manifested in language, and in other signs of revelation. It is just important to remember that imperfect manifestations can be read in different ways: the Celestial Masters could reasonably be charged with a logocentrism akin to that which Derrida attacked, but for the Shangqing school, the written text itself approached a kind of apotheosis.

The Celestial Masters: Marks of the Elect The Later Han dynasty saw a number of local and regional movements that integrated religious belief with more or less aggressive plays for secular power. The “Red Eyebrows” (chimei) of the early first century CE who were involved in the overthrow of the “usurper” Wang Mang, integrated local

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animistic religion of their Shandong home base into their revolutionary movement; somewhat later, Zhang Bolu (張伯路, fl. first‑second century) used the trappings of heavenly titles to decorate his own acts of piracy along the Shandong coast. More significantly still, the “Yellow Turban” movement of the late second century, under Zhang Jue (張角, d. 184), more con‑ sciously and consistently invoked the concepts of Huang‑Lao Daoism, and established itself as a religious organization spreading far beyond its Hebei base, before ultimately rising against the imperial state and causing massive damage, which helped bring down the Han. However, to an extent, these movements owe their retrospective clas‑ sification as Daoist to the influence of the Celestial Masters tradition (also known as the “Five Pecks of Rice” movement), the first movement to truly consolidate a religious, sectarian claim to the name Dao. The first Celestial Master was one Zhang Daoling (張道陵, traditionally 34–156), who reportedly had an encounter with the deified Laozi on the top of Mt. Heming, in Shu (modern Sichuan); Laozi told him to found a church dedicated to him, which would guarantee salvation to adherents. Zhang may have served as a minor official during the Han before his vision; however, all the information that we possess about him has been filtered through the hagiographical accounts promulgated by his grandson Zhang Lu (張魯, d. 216). Zhang Lu took over a thriving and essentially autonomous community in Shu; he was commissioned by the Han governor of Sichuan, Liu Yan (劉焉, d. 194), to partner in a punitive expedition against the rebellious Hanzhong commandery. Zhang Lu eventually took control over Hanzhong himself, making it the center of Celestial Masters administration, and kept control through the creation of the effectively independent kingdom of Shu Han under Liu Bei (劉備, 161–223). After this, Zhang Lu declared his allegiance to Cao Cao, gaining for the Celestial Masters a recognized status and some privilege within the Wei kingdom, but also making the Hanzhong a region of contention between the Shu‑Han and the Wei. During the ensuing warfare, the Celestial Masters cult was effectively dislodged from the Hanzhong, but in becoming a fully diasporic religious community, rather than a local theocratic state, it was enabled to avoid the fate of the Yellow Turbans, and continued to exert a major influence on popular belief through the third and fourth centuries. In trying to assess any aspect of the beliefs of the Celestial Masters in this early period, there are evidentiary difficulties related to the fact that much of the teaching was orally transmitted, and among that which was written down, these texts were not subject to the same conservatory impulses as elite literature. Nonetheless, it might be worthwhile to begin by examining the

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Scripture on Great Peace (Taipingjing 太平經), a rather mysterious text that was edited and broadly disseminated first in the sixth century, but which seems on content and linguistic grounds to date to the Later Han.3 The material in the text is Daoist by retrospective categorization; it does seem to reflect the social anxieties, the magical worldview, and the proselytizing orientation of the Yellow Turbans and the Celestial Masters—and in fact the authority figure in the dialogic sections of the text is named “Celestial Master.” Given the impossibility of reconstructing an exact point of origin for this text, this fact should not be taken as proof that it derives from the actual ecclesiastical organization of Zhang Lu; however, it is a relatively safe conclusion that the text derives from the same intellectual milieu of the early Celestial Masters, if not actually from their own hands. Even when one restricts oneself to the portions of the text with the clearest claim to an early provenance, there are some conflicting attitudes toward textuality. In some cases, the Celestial Master is recorded as instruct‑ ing his disciples to disseminate his written teachings as broadly as possible, both offering them to the ruling classes and also promoting them among the people; in others, the strictest secrecy is enjoined. It may be that this represents an original bifurcation in the textual circulation of whatever group produced the Scripture—intending some materials to be used for proselytizing and others reserved for initiates into the mysteries—but this is never made explicit in the text itself, and reads on the surface as a simple contradiction. However, when the text touches specifically on arche‑semiotics, it does have a more consistent stance of suspicion toward the outer appearance, and preference for the inner, unspoken life. The most striking examples are voiced through arboreal metaphors: Some plants grow with many leaves, others with few. Here lies for them [the difference between] substance and decora‑ tion. . . . Substance is enough; embellishments and the use of precious garments of dark and yellow silk are not necessary. For this reason, should you be intrigued by the branches, turn back to the center. Should you be intrigued by the center, then turn back to the root. Should decorum (wen 文) fascinate you, turn back to substance. Should substance interest you, turn back to the basis.4 The attitude toward sumptuary issues may count as evidence against the text’s direct association with the Yellow Turban movement, since it seems

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to go beyond the real critique of the expense of silk to indicate that all sartorial decorations are unnecessary. One might be tempted to identify a quasi‑Confucian impulse in the suspicion of wen, or outer external pattern‑ ing, as inferior to substance; often, such gestures in aesthetic criticism are so labeled. However, it should be remembered that Confucius never argued for the abandonment of wen, but rather its harmonization with substance: he has a basic faith in the possibility of an efficacious arche‑semiotics between external appearances and the internal worth they could represent. Moreover, the return to substance is, perhaps surprisingly, not the endpoint: after leav‑ ing the merely pretty leaves for the impressive sturdiness of the trunk, one can also return from that timber to the root, the origin. This is phrased in terms that will become much more common in the development of Daoist religious traditions over the succeeding few centuries, but the impulse of returning to an undefined simplicity is clearly present (in somewhat differ‑ ent language) in both the Laozi and the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi, as well as its later accretions. Calling this presumably second‑century text “Daoist” must necessarily be a retrospective construction, but it is a reason‑ able one: there is clearly an arche‑semiotic continuity that links this back to the pre‑Qin movement, and forward to later developments in defined Daoist communities. Suspicions of the externality of wen as a sign, combined with a greater emphasis on the materiality of that externality, can be seen in another text that can be tied to the Celestial Masters with more certainty and specificity than the Scripture on Heavenly Peace. This is a partial text of the Xiang’er Commentary to Laozi, discovered among the Dunhuang scrolls. The Xiang’er Commentary is a text referred to several times in other early texts, and ascribed to Zhang Lu, but it was lost to the tradition at some point before the compilation of the Ming Daozang. There is, of course, no way to know whether the Xiang’er Commentary actually dates to the time of Zhang Lu, much less any way to authenticate his authorship; however, it does seem from both external and internal evidence to have been in circulation dur‑ ing the Hanzhong period of the church.5 In general, the text suggests a community in which the norms of social life are related to the individual’s own spiritual practices. These practices are not worship per se, though Laozi may have served as a deity; rather, spiritual practice seems to have been focused on the quasi‑physiological regulation of internal pneumas through harmonization with the dao, something that both promoted and was made easier by harmonious social behavior. Naturally, arche‑semiotics was not a primary concern of the Hanzhong Celestial Masters community, many of

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whom were illiterate. However, in a commentary on the Laozi, something has to be done with that text’s meditations on names and namelessness, and in fact these sections were directly incorporated into the social and ethical system of the sect. Unfortunately, the opening sections of the Laozi are lost from the Dunhuang manuscript of the Xiang’er, so there is no way to know what the Celestial Masters would have said about the original’s famously skeptical opening. However, enough has been preserved of sections that do mention language, that one can begin to speculate on the community’s arche‑semiotic assumptions: Lines 175ff Floating about, it cannot be named. Again it returns to nothing. The Dao is like this. It cannot be named. It is as if there was nothing there. It is the formless form, the insubstantial image. The Dao is of the highest worthiness. Hidden away in its subtlety, it has no shape or physical image. Since it cannot be seen or known, one can only follow its precepts. Now, those who practice false arts in the mortal world point to shapes and call them the Dao. They assign to these shapes variously colored garments, names, appearances, and heights. This is false. Such things are entirely deviant fabrications.6 Line 450ff Good deeds leave no trace When one keeps faith with the Dao and practices good, there is no trace of evil. Good words lack flaws and bring no blame. When people go against the Dao and speak evil, heaven in each case subtracts counts of life. Now, when those who keep faith with the Dao speak words and instruct others not to go against the Dao, there is no blame attached.

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Right calculations do not require counting sticks. Those who understand computation can solve problems in their minds and do not need to use counters. Those who keep faith with the Dao to the depths of their hearts do so in complete sincerity and do not require others to urge them along.7 There are two things to be said about the semiotics at work here. First is the rather obvious point that Zhang Lu (or whoever the Xiang’er commentator is) follows the Laozi’s own notions of the Dao fairly closely: it is something wholly beyond the mere object‑world, and hence cannot be pointed to with a merely material sign. The second point worth observing, however, is that this arche‑semiotic suspicion is taken beyond the naming of the Dao itself, and turned into a sort of ethical principle. From the bare statement that Dao is “the formless form, the insubstantial image,” Zhang immediately extends it to critique rival religious expressions, which are hard to place exactly but seem to correspond to the more magical elements in Huang‑Lao and Yangist thought. This sentiment then later burgeons out into a sort of anti‑arche‑semiotic ethics: just as the Dao cannot be represented, so good behavior is that which “leaves no trace” and is unconnected to worldly affairs. The comment on the counting‑sticks is telling: Dao is something possessed internally and spiritually by the true believer, and should not require material support or expression (with the exception of exhortations of one’s fellow‑believers to good works). A later text, the Commands and Admonitions for the Families of the Great Dao,8 continues in the same vein, indeed citing directly from the Xiang’er commentary as an authoritative source. The text is written in the voice of Zhang Lu, but, as Stephen Bokenkamp has argued, it seems to be the result of a shamanistic invocation of Zhang’s spirit after his death.9 The text was written in 255, just as the Sima faction was gaining firm control over the Wei dynasty, through the series of palace coups described in the last chapter. And it is clear that there is a perception of crisis within the church it addresses, as the protection the cult had received from the Wei since Zhang Lu’s deal with Cao Cao is threatened by the relative power‑ lessness of the ruling house in the face of its unworthy ministers. Within this setting, one can at least speculate that the spirit of Zhang Lu was being invoked to offer ethical and political guidance at a critical juncture. The text does have a fair deal to say about the grand sweep of history, but arche‑semiotics is made explicit in its invocation of the Xiang’er, and in the process of advocating an ethics of disengagement:

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You should remember that the Dao conceals itself and is nameless. Name is an axe that hacks at the body. “Good actions leave no trace.” If they wish to make it so that others do not see their “traces,” then those who practice the Dao should regulate their bodies and nurture their lives to seek blessing. Instead of which you teach others to give free rein to the self. If the self is given free rein, people will see its traces and the axe will be keen. If the axe that hews down the body is keen, good fortune departs and bad arrives. Should you not be cautious? Should you not be fearful? “The reason heaven and earth endure” is that they lack willfulness. And that which “does not act falsely, leaves nothing undone.” Only when one does not allow others to see one’s traces can one truly accomplish wonders.10 The admonition against leaving any traces at all to be seen, in imitation of the Dao, seems to suggest a preference for reclusive lifestyles, or at least an avoidance of entanglement with the power struggles between the Cao and Sima families. This is noticeably parallel to the strategy of the Seven Worthies clique, albeit enacted on a popular rather than an elite level: the very old (and not necessarily Daoist) impulse to retreat to private life in the face of social disorder is framed as an issue of specifically Daoist personal arche‑semiotics. Retirement means to act as the ineffable Dao, and leave no trace of oneself in the world. During the mid‑Jin, and especially after the evacuation of the dynasty to the south following the northern invasions of non‑Chinese peoples, it becomes very difficult to trace continuous lineages of Celestial Masters practice, and the texts associated with them. Partially this is simply due to the fact that the original Hanzhong community necessarily behaved differ‑ ently in its diaspora across the empire. However, one major later text that seems to be continuous with the Celestial Masters tradition is the Scripture of Western Ascension, which purports to be the record of a conversation between Laozi and Yin Xi, the guardian of the western passes. According to an old tradition, already noted in the Han by Sima Qian, Laozi had left China traveling west at the end of his life, and bestowed the Daodejing on the pass‑keeper as he left. By the fifth century, this old story was circulating more frequently in the form of an anti‑Buddhist polemic: Laozi was said to have actually traveled to India and called himself “Buddha,” teaching an inferior version of Daoism to the barbarians there. Hence, it is not entirely surprising to see a text of that period trying to recapture the

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famous scene. However, since the Daodejing was itself understood to be the text transmitted on that occasion, the Western Ascension has to become, in effect, a rewriting of the Daodejing. This is a curious position—in a period of fluid textuality, spurious classics, and proliferation of alternate editions, the Daodejing was one of the very few Daoist texts that was fixed in a stable form by its wide distribution via multiple commentaries, and hence one of the very few texts which one could not have spontaneously rewritten and passed off as the original. And yet, enough of the structure, the themes, and the actual diction of the Daodejing (up to and including complete lines) is present in the Western Ascension that one must assume it was intended to be recognized. This is an intertext that works as a particularly translucent palimpsest, inviting readers to see the original which has been pasted over. Without a knowledge of the original context, it is impossible to guess at the intent behind such a production; but from the vantage of intellectual history, it is legitimate to read it as a commentary on the Daodejing, phrased in the form of a quasi‑fictional imitation of it. Because of this pattern of intertextual resemblances, the Western Ascension is perhaps the Six Dynasties Daoist text that most closely approaches pre‑Qin Daoism in both style and content. This is not to say that it is somehow “authentic” Laoist Daoism: the frequent use of terminology and ideas borrowed from Buddhism clearly precludes a pre‑fifth‑century origin; and there are various other differences that, if not so immediately obvious, yet clearly mark the Western Ascension’s rewriting of Laozi as something more complex, more socially contextualized than simply a repetition. But in terms of arche‑semiotics, the Western Ascension is close to its model in terms of the level of attention given to the issue, the terms in which it is explicated, and even the rough position in the text (mostly scattered through the first half of the Laozi) in which such statements are made. There are some subtle and interesting adjustments of this arche‑semiotics—for example, the Western Ascension offers a clearer statement of the arbitrariness of the sign than the Laozi ever does,11 and there are interesting ways in which fifth‑century context shades even the portions of greatest fidelity. But it is important to note first the comparative fidelity with which the text follows its model. The opening section is slightly more worldly and sensible than the first chapter of the Daodejing, but espouses the same opposition between truth and the sayable: The Tao is nature. Who practices can attain [it]. Who hears can speak [about it]

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Who knows does not speak; who speaks does not know. Language is formed when sounds are exchanged. Thus in conversation, words make sense. When one does not know the Tao, words create confusion. Therefore I don’t hear, don’t speak; I don’t know why things are. It can be compared to the knowledge of musical sound. One becomes conscious of it by plucking a string. Though the mind may know the appropriate sounds, yet the mouth is unable to formulate them. Similarly the Tao is deep, subtle, wondrous; who knows it does not speak.12 The true Dao, as always, is something that cannot be spoken—but this is something more psychological here than in Laozi, where there is little if any conception of the struggles of mind in expression. This is not in itself an original development in the Western Ascension: Zhuangzi’s “Discourse on Making Things Equal” has an equally self‑conscious approach to the issue of why language cannot capture truth. However, the metaphor of the plucked string takes the discussion even farther into psychology than Zhuangzi, while stripping it of some of Zhuangzi’s “poststructuralist” orientation: in Zhuangzi, the difficulties inherent in language can be the difficulties inherent in thought. Language’s aporias do not simply exist in the realm of linguistic interaction; they are (at least in certain passages) suspected of inherently deconstructing any attempts to know. The above passage gestures in that direction (“I don’t hear, I don’t speak; I don’t know why things are”) but then asserts that, as in music, one can know a pitch without actually hear‑ ing it or being able to reproduce it. If one insisted on a rigorous parallel between the plucked string and the spoken word, one would presumably end up with a Saussurian distinction splitting the sign into the conceptual signified and the material signifier; however, it is probably better to hold the metaphor loosely and read it as proposing that knowledge of the Dao, while possible, is not something either expressible or even silently thinkable from

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within language. (This reading is buttressed by a later use of the metaphor, comparing one ignorant of the Dao to a deaf‑mute who cannot hear the plucking of a lute.)13 If Zhuangzian, this stance is not the most radical doubt of the “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” but rather something more akin to Wheelwright Pian, who certainly does know the feel of his craft, even if he cannot begin to decide how to explain it. Yet if we cannot reconstruct in the Western Ascension a complete Saussurian concept of the sign, much less a poststructuralist critique of it, it is clear that the author is at least quite conscious of the possible div‑ isions between truth and conception, thought and expression, orality and writing. These differences are, moreover, part of a psychological process that may lead one away from the truth of the Dao: “When the eyes see something the mind is agitated; the mouth then expresses words formed in the mind. The nose is pervaded by wind and breath; the nose and the mouth are their gates.”14 This is not a neutral process, but something to be feared—mental agitation is exactly the wrong state, and sensory objects capable of producing it are warned against. But the normative judgment is less interesting than the fact that it seems to be a transformation of a much older sentiment, the notion that “the poetry speaks the intent” (shi yan zhi). As will be described in a later chapter, the addition of external stimulus to the original formula is something that occurs only at roughly this period; pre‑Qin sources figure the creation of poetry as a purely sub‑ jective output, not as a reaction to stimuli. However, the description of language in general here is very similar to how the expressive theory of poetry is being reconfigured in the fifth century. If it seems doubtful that the text—which does bear all the stylistic marks of popular, oral com‑ position—should be well attuned to the concerns of elite literary‑critical tradition, consider the even clearer borrowing from the “Appended Words Commentary” (xici zhuan) to the Book of Changes: Though you may hear its doctrine, in your mind you don’t grasp its subtlety. Why is this so? The written word does not exhaust speech, And by relying on scriptures and sticking to texts your learning remains on the same intellectual level. Rather, you must treasure it: recollect it within, meditate on it and consider it carefully.15

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“The written word does not exhaust speech” (書不盡言) is a prefix to the better‑remembered, and more frequently cited, “speech does not exhaust the thought” (言不盡意); given the context here, it seems that the corollary is at least implied. The argument is not in favor of oral transmission as opposed to written text, but rather that linguistic transmission of the Dao is insufficient, and must be complemented with (if not superseded by) con‑ templation. It is an attitude that is brought forward repeatedly in various statements in the text—not denigrating textuality per se, but warning against the multiplicity of textuality as a possible distraction from the understanding of truth. This might be a result of the need to distance the text’s standpoint specifically from the Shangqing school, to be discussed below, which was rising in the fourth century with a new emphasis on elaborate gradations of revealed texts. It is impossible to extract any specific polemics without additional certainty as to the point of origin of the Western Ascension, since the “cinnabar scriptures of ten thousand scrolls,” which it elsewhere derides,16 were hardly specific to the Shangqing. But it does seem fair to say that the mistrust of the written word is at least partially being driven by the need to establish firmly a sectarian identity clearly separated from other would‑be teachers of the Dao. But the characteristic of the Western Ascension’s arche‑semiotics that most clearly separates it from the pre‑Qin is its suspicion of the materiality of the sign. This may grow from an originally Laoist suspicion of the senses,17 but it goes beyond this common denominator, to posit language as the medium by which sensory data can impinge upon an otherwise whole inner realm: Observe sounds and sights on the basis of your personal body; then beings and affairs won’t easily crowd in. Once you attach specific labels to sounds and sights, you will be seduced by them.18 The same sentiment underlies a more poetic, and more complex passage, which hints at why language might be able to have this catalyzing effect on the infection of the soul by externalities: In the world of constructs, these things are there, yet even though they are there they will only lead men astray. Thus you know that the world is superficial, it is full of splendor and ornaments that soothe you.

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Words rush ahead even of flying dragons, yet actions limp in the wake even of lame turtles . . .  Compare it to the image in a mirror: you can see but not get hold of it. Words are like the response of an echo; how could one ever catch the response of an echo; how could one ever catch the sound of wind? The world of constructs holds on to teachings in this manner. Such delusion has been going on for a long time since.19 Words seem to occupy an intermediate space between Dao and the physical. Like the mirror‑image, or the echo, they are simulacra of existence. Some‑ thing about such simulacra—perhaps their very immateriality, because in that they resemble the Dao?—encourages one to grasp and to chase after them. Names, honors, but also abstract concepts lead one on a chase, and cannot be caught: they are swifter than the dragons. A return to the Dao, to quiescence, and spiritual non‑striving would have to be a renunciation not simply of the grossly material, but also of the diaphanous stuff of the sign. The conclusion of the dialogue essentially acts out in fiction this half‑materiality: Laozi said: . . . I shall now return in spirit and go back to the nameless . . .  Suddenly he was nowhere to be seen. In that moment the office building was illuminated by a brilliance of five colors, simultaneously dark and yellow. Yin Xi went out into the courtyard, bowed down and said, “Please, dear spirit man, let me see you once again. Give me one more rule so that I can guard the primordial source of it all.” He then looked up and saw Laozi’s body sitting suspended in mid‑air several meters above the ground. He looked like a statue. The image appeared and disappeared, vague and indistinct. His age did not seem to stay the same. He said: “I will give you one more admonition, make sure you get it right:

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Get rid of all impurity and stop your thoughts, calm your mind and guard the One . . .  These are the essentials of my Tao. Finishing this admonition the image vanished again.20 It is, of course, standard hagiographic practice in many religious traditions to have departing saints float upward while giving their last instructions. What is unusual in this particular account is the oddly chimerical character that Laozi takes on as he floats away. As he delivers the epitome of his teaching, he flickers in and out of vision, his outline somehow blurred. This half‑there‑ness is the perfect state from which to deliver a summa of his doc‑ trine: the word is here not made flesh, the word is the state of indeterminacy between physical necessity and the truth of the Dao which must be known by silence. As Laozi disappears from physical being, he is transformed into and leaves behind the words of his five thousand–character text: this is the Laozi, which Yin Xi can then bestow on the world. As if to emphasize his transformation into text, Laozi’s final age‑indeterminacy sees him becoming a pun upon his own name: the old possibility of deliberately misreading the name, “Master Lao,” Laozi, as “Old Child” is here made visible. The Lord Lao, in accordance with his name—or rather, transformed into his own name—is made visibly old and young as he melts away into Dao. This positing of language as the pivot point between materiality and immateriality is of lasting importance. It is not exactly a replay of Lévi‑Strauss’s encounter with the Nambikwara, because to the Celestial Masters the problem of visible versus invisible signs is not exactly the same thing as the tangible written versus the intangible oral. Signs, or “traces” of the elect are their deeds, which leave marks in the world or do not. The “historical premise” of the introduction is rather more difficult to trace in these materials, because members of the Celestial Masters church do seem to have successfully avoided entrance into history—this does appear to have been a movement drawn largely from lower classes (or at least not the great eminences of the realm). From the outside, we can historicize them: their worship, and the arche‑semiotics which supported it, was that of a religious community experiencing growth in a chaotic age, suspicious of public life and its web of appearances, and hungrier for something invisible. We can, however, from these stances, identify a religious subjectivity remarkably familiar to Western readers. Although their soteriologies are radically differ‑ ent, the Celestial Masters suspicion of external, material signs is noticeably

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similar to early Protestant critiques of Catholic iconography and ornament. Without any other theological similarities to that alien debate, one can nonetheless see a parallel construction of subjectivity in opposition to the sign: in both cases, there is an arche‑semiotics of finding one’s spiritual home in that which cannot be seen, and identifying with the apparent nothingness that is in fact supremely sacred. And, although neither case is truly Manichean in its opposition to matter per se, both seem to have developed their arche‑semiotic suspicions out of an identification of signs with the material world. In the Reformation case, that identification had ancient roots in the Hellenistic texts of the New Testament, but in the case of the Celestial Masters, it was a new development, which had little clear precedent in the Laozi and Zhuangzi. This bifurcating vision of an inner, invisible life as opposed to the showy material realm of signs and society should also make clear how different the experience of reading the Laozi and Zhuangzi was for early religious Daoists as compared to Heidegger. As examined in chapter 1, Heidegger used the Laozi to articulate his vision of a holistic realm of being‑through‑language: an understanding of those texts which was deeply Orientalist. For the Celestial Masters adherents, language was not at all the place where one had one’s being. Although they were not anti‑language per se, their own arche‑semiotic suspicion of wen, that which is visible and legible, was clearly that it was something opposed to the real core of life for which they were searching. There were other somewhat different approaches to arche‑semiotics offered by different sects of religious Daoism during the early medieval period, but all did tend to associate the sign with the realm of matter. Eventually, religious Daoism would come to equate arche‑semiotic materiality specifically with writing, in the Shangqing and Lingbao schools—and those schools take a much more positive view of the powers of the tangible text than does the antimaterialist Celestial Masters cult. But in order for the tangible sign to be transformed, it had first to pass through the alchemical theorization of Ge Hong.

Ge Hong and the Southern Turn In the first decades of the Jin dynasty, it may have seemed as if the for‑ tunes of the Han for a long period of prosperity were within reach. The short‑lived Wei had successfully unified the country and then passed it on, just as had the Qin for the Han dynasty. Sima Yan and his sons were

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extremely successful in consolidating power and, as seen with the disruption of the Seven Sages clique, were beginning to insist on a centralization of intellectual life. Had things continued in this vein for several more decades, perhaps the Jin would have been established a lasting state Confucianism comparable to that of Dong Zhongshu in the Han. However, Sima Yan’s eldest son, Sima Zhong (259–307), was born with a mental disability that prevented him from any but a titular rule. Foolishly, given his own grandfather’s experience as a co‑regent for Cao Fang during the Wei, the dying Sima Yan appointed co‑regents for his son—and the empire never recovered. Just as in the Wei, one of the two co‑regents pushed out the other; he in his turn was soon pushed out, and there was soon a revolving‑door regency spun round by an ongoing, internecine war among the various princely uncles and cousins who wished to be in charge. By the time this “War of Eight Kings” had exhausted itself in 307 with the death (by poisoning) of Sima Zhong, the military and economic resources of the empire were so exhausted that non‑Chinese ethnic groups staged a series of uprisings, until the Xiongnu people drove the Jin out of north China altogether in 317. The dynasty regrouped at Jiankang (modern‑day Nanjing), and managed to rule most of southern China for another century. However, the imperial house never regained the central power that it had enjoyed during the opening decades of the dynasty, and much of fourth‑cen‑ tury life in the south was dominated by the great aristocratic houses, which maintained an uneasy fealty to the Jin emperors. Any hope for a strong, renewed state Confucianism faded away; instead, the decentralization of power abetted the further development of religious Daoist cults and, even more so, the rise of Buddhism, which began its first great Chinese flowering. Often, the intellectual developments of the later Jin, and the rest of the “Southern Dynasties” period (317–589), are treated by Chinese histori‑ ography as representing a flight into the impractical (e.g., theology, alchemy, aesthetics) in an age when wars and economic upheaval made entanglement in earthly affairs seem the height of foolishness. And this is a fair enough description, from the lofty vantage point of the survey‑text; but it should be remembered that the actual experience of this process was anything but the modular swapping‑out of one ideology for another. The real creativity of the southern dynasties—which resulted in wholly new configurations of religion and philosophy, of art, of poetics—was usually experienced as an enforced freedom to roam, without institutional guidance, among old and new models. Cultural reconfigurations during the period are usually best seen as attempts to deal with contradictory influences, not by rationalizing reconciliation, but by a sort of appropriative free play.

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For a history of arche‑semiotics, the most convenient thinker with whom to mark the beginning of this “southern turn” is Ge Hong (葛洪, 284–343),21 a man with the perfect background to express the intellectual contradictions of the age. Grandnephew of Ge Xuan (葛玄 164–244), a well‑known Daoist “wizard” of the Three Kingdoms period, Ge Hong’s father had a much more conventional career in the Jin government service. This father died when he was thirteen, forcing him to work the fields and sell firewood in order to be able to buy writing materials; in his late teens, he began to read the Confucian classics but also became a disciple of Zheng Yin, a Daoist who had himself studied under Ge Xuan. After joining the army (possibly as a conscript) during a local rebellion, Ge Hong served well and was transferred to the capital, Luoyang, where he spent most of his time searching for rare books. As the War of Eight Kings began in earnest, he requested and received a transfer to the peaceful far south, near modern Guangzhou. For a time he returned home to Jiankang after the southern flight of the Jin, and served at court, but eventually returned to live at Mt. Luofu, in the far south, because it contained cinnabar deposits useful to his fascination with alchemy. This rather confused alternation between stereotypically Confucian and Daoist influences and modes of life is reflected in Ge’s major work, the Baopuzi (or, “Master of Embracing Simplicity”), completed in 317, the very year in which the Jin had to flee south. The work is often casually remembered as a seminal text in the development of Daoist alchemy—which it certainly was. However, the alchemical chapters are a relatively minor portion of the work, which ranges over most of the ethical, cultural, and ontological debates of early Chinese intellectuals, and the modern reputation of alchemy as the primary discipline of Unenlightenment has tarred the work. In fact, it is a complex work, as various in viewpoint as it is in topic. The autobiographical postscript written by Ge Hong confesses explicitly: the “Inner Chapters” (including all the alchemical tracts) are Daoist in outlook, while the “Outer Chapters” are Confucian.22 But even this confession only states the apparent topical self‑contradictions; in fact, there are admixtures of Confucian and Daoist attitudes scattered throughout (not to mention occasional doses of Mohism, Legalism, etc.), and much that transcends or redefines these categories. When the Baopuzi is mentioned in histories of Chinese literary criticism, it is common practice to devote exclusive attention to the outer chapters; reasonably so, since all of the discussions that concern the more practical and social aspects of literary production and consumption are there. However, in order to understand the arche‑semiotics of Ge Hong,

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and how those more social conceptions of the literary field are founded upon certain ontological assumptions regarding the nature of signs, it is necessary to examine the inner chapters as well—in particular, the chapter “The Meaning of Dao [道意].” The title and opening topic of the chapter are of course drawn directly from Laozi 25: “I know not its name. So I style it ‘the way, I give it the makeshift name of ‘the great.’ ”23 Ge Hong’s opening is worth examination at length: Baopuzi said, “The Way includes heaven and earth; in its origin it is nameless. Though one speaks of its nonexistence, yet in it, shades and echoes become the existent; though one speaks of its existence, yet in it, all things become nonexistent. Li Shou could not calculate its quantity, Li Zhou could not examine its appearance. Wu Zha and Jin Ye, were they to strain their hear‑ ing, could not search out its sounds within the primordial; were Zhou Xi and Bu Zhu to hurry after it, they could not trace its tracks beyond the empyrean. To speak of it at close, it might roam a filament of down with room to spare; to speak of it at a distance, it would overfill the vastness of space. It is the sound‑ ing of sound, and the echoing of echoes; it is the formness of forms, and the shading of shades. The square attains it and is quiet, the round attains it and moves, the falling attains it and descends, the rising attains it and ascends. To force on it the name of “the Way” is already to have lost its truth—how much more so the thousandfold judgments and the myriad analyses, which have multiplied its names without end. Is this not to wander far and wide from the Way?”24 There is little, if anything, in this passage that is not utterly familiar from various texts of the Laozi and Zhuangzi. It is, at root, a statement of the ineffability of dao, and therefore also a position concurrent with the traditional Daoist skepticism toward the efficacy of signs in dealing with concepts. In this tradition, it is not novel—the allusive, recycled language is laid on too thickly to give any impression of freshness—and hence the sentiments do not at first brush appear to advance Daoist philosophy. In fact, the interest of the passage is almost wholly contextual. What follows in the remainder of this chapter is not a theory of semiotics, but a materialist critique of popular religious practice. The argument runs as follows:

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the masses of people are incapable of discerning the subtleties of the dao, or even of understanding the meaning of this name which refers to nothing corporeal. Therefore, they are overly attached to material objects, resulting in all sorts of indulgence of bodily desires and unprofitable emotions—but also resulting in superstitious religious practice. Material attachments are reproduced symbolically in religious practice via sacrifice, as it is assumed that the gods also must desire material objects, and repay their offerings with material blessings. This results at times in great impoverishment, as the people spend lavishly on useless and superstitious rites; the chapter ends with several fictional anecdotes intended to demonstrate how miracles resulting from faith and sacrifice can be explained by physical causes, a line of argument notably indebted to the agnostic materialism of Wang Chong. However, this endpoint is striking, running diametrically opposite to Ge Hong’s reputation as the primary representative in his age of superstition and magical thought. And, it must be repeated, the reputation is partially deserved—he dedicates other chapters to proving the existence of gods and immortals, and explaining how humans can attain divinity through alchemy. The contradiction can be resolved by understanding that Ge perceives this as a conflict between faith and method, and that he bases his method on the understanding that there are purer and coarser forms of existence. The fundamental alchemical operation is the extraction of mercury from cin‑ nabar—through heat, the conversion of a rough and chunky red ore into “water‑silver” with unusual properties. And while the actual processes of alchemy were obviously complex, involving cycles of repeated sublimation and condensation of mercury, gold, sulphur, and so on, the goal of the process was of course the production of ultra‑pure medicines.25 As in much of premodern medicine, the guiding assumption was that of the transi‑ tive properties of objects: if one were to consume materials that had been ultra‑refined away from their normal material states, one’s own body would also be sublimated into divinity. This line of Ge Hong’s is prescientific think‑ ing—it has no clear conception of empirical method; but it does insist on the possibility of advancing knowledge and efficacious action, rather than on the mysticism and revelation common to many of the popular Daoist religious movements of the period. Within this context, the apparently humdrum opening on ineffable Dao becomes more interesting. Though the individual sententiae are all drawn more or less directly from Laozi, they are not random allusions; rather, the paragraph suggests a particular understanding of namelessness. The Dao is that which cannot be named because it is, in itself, too refined

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and sublime an order of existence to be captured by the physical substance of a written or spoken name. The denigration of “thousandfold judgments and myriad analyses” as a denunciation of intellectual history is strangely physical—words that in later Chinese combine to become standard terms of debate are here still separate, and imply that disputers wish to “cut,” “split,” “part,” and “cleave” the Dao into names. But it is of course an order of existence far too sublime for such coarse actions—not anything so obvious as a mystical essence or a god, it is something like raw potentiality, that which enables all things to be as they are. It is reminiscent of a conception of Platonic forms that has been obliquely intuited rather than dialectically delineated—and though there is no exact hierarchy, one does sense, as in Plato, a superiority to coarse physicality. In fact, the association of physical coarseness or refinedness with lan‑ guage is already voiced in Zhuangzi’s “Autumn Floods” chapter: Before we can speak of coarse or fine, however, there must be some form. If a thing has no form, then numbers cannot express its dimensions, and if it cannot be encompassed, then numbers cannot express its size. We can use words to talk about the coarseness of things and we can use our minds to visualize the fineness of things. But what words cannot describe and the mind cannot succeed in visualizing—this has nothing to do with coarseness or fineness [精粗].26 But in this passage, subtlety and coarseness are not properties of language (or thought) but of the object‑world which they can represent. And “subtlety” in itself is not the goal. That which is relatively obvious can be discussed, and subtle distinctions can be made in thought, if not adequately expressed; but the really interesting Dao is either infinite or infinitesimal, too large or small for numbers, going beyond coarseness or subtlety and hence going beyond both language and thought. In contrast, for Ge Hong, language if deployed properly is itself subtlety, the transformation of objects: Someone said, “Though there are prolific writings, suitable for use in adorning one’s diction, they are of no help in teaching right from wrong, and are thus inferior to the advice to practice rather than preach virtue. Thus, Yan Min was supreme and You Xia was inferior to him in the order of the four affairs, with study first and behavior last. Thus literary ornamentation must

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be extraneous—and yet my master does not respect this source, but only values that which flows from it. Is this acceptable?” Baopuzi answered, saying, “Moral behavior is that which has its effects, the better and worse are easy to see. But literary works are subtle and sublime, its structures difficult to discern. The easy‑to‑see is coarse [粗], while the difficult‑to‑discern is refined [精]. Because the one is coarse, its scales can be settled; because the other is refined, its gradations are hard to unify. Thus I let go the coarseness of the easily‑seen, and discuss the refinement of the hard‑to‑discern. How could that not be acceptable!”27 The terms of this justification of literary inquiry over moral didacti‑ cism may not exactly amount to a logical assertion that style is superior to ethics—and elsewhere in the work, Ge does more clearly insist on the moral function of literature. Nevertheless, it is clear where Ge’s interests lie. The categories of praise and blame map exactly onto his discussion of the Dao: while the grossly material may always be more popular, the truly essential is that which is subtle. This does not necessarily translate into a straightforward arche‑semiotics: no matter how refined the description might be, writing is not able to reach the ultimate sublimity it would need to fully represent the Dao. Rather, it seems to set up literature as a sort of approximation of Dao, if not a substitute for it: something that can be engaged in, as a positive activity. From there, the passage continues in a more moralistic vein—which nonetheless moralizes by way of Zhuangzi: Someone said, “Virtuous behavior is the root, literary pieces are the tips. Thus in the order of the four types, literature is not on top. Thus the marking of paper is just an idle affair of the “dregs”; that which can be transmitted is just the straw dog after the sacrifice. I can recognize base and lofty [behavior]; could I hear from you about the basic structure of writing?” The Master Who Embraces Simplicity said, “One can get rid of the trap but one won’t catch a fish, thus one can’t do without traps. Writ‑ ing can be thrown out but the Way won’t be practiced, thus one can’t do without writing. As for whether the traces of the brush are grand or cramped in their resonances, whether words fit loosely or tightly with the affairs they describe, whether the flowthrough to the end is continuous or comes up short, whether the concepts are deep or shallow, these are all so far apart from

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each other that there is no distance in the universe capable of compare with it. . . . Pure and turbid are uneven, and there is that in people which governs their qualities—bright and dim are of unequal levels, and strong and weak have different pneumas; yet the common person only looks at whether they are able to stain a brush and mark paper, and so see them all as one.28 Both the fictitious interlocutor and Ge Hong’s alter ego invoke Zhuangzi—the former via the “dregs” of the Wheelwright Pian story, the latter in once again referring to the fish-trap metaphor. Ge uses his fish‑trap allusion here to propose a theory of the sign nearly opposite to that of its original usage: he says, “One can get rid of the trap but one won’t catch a fish, thus one can’t do without traps [荃可以棄而魚未獲 , 則不得無荃],” while, again, the original claimed precisely that traps can be done away with: “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap29 [荃者所以在魚 , 得魚而忘荃].” Ge Hong isn’t necessarily making a mistake; this is most likely an appropriation of a familiar saying, which radically shifts the emphasis—but one can’t deny that the emphasis is shifted from a more skeptical to a less skeptical vision of language. More interesting than the adaptation of the metaphor, though, is what comes out of this—a theory of literary style as capable of supplying distinctions, with the concomitant implication that it is one’s responsibility as a reader to distinguish. The assertion becomes personal: most people can only see literacy or illiteracy, but in order to distinguish the character of people, one would have to observe the nature of their brushwork—their style. Distinctions between good and bad writing are no longer phrased in the terms of alchemy, but the loss of “refined” and “coarse” are made up for by alternative binaries more typically applied to personal character: pure/ turgid, bright/dim, strong/weak. And the notion that degrees of elevation of character might be discerned from the “traces” of brushwork on paper, as explored below, will become increasingly more important in the Daoist religious traditions of the Southern Dynasties. In terms of the intellectual history of Daoist traditions, it does seem fairly clear that Ge Hong repre‑ sents a midpoint between the pure suspicion of the material sign evinced by the Celestial Masters, and the celebration of the written text as a kind of immanent divinity, as in the Shangqing school discussed in the next section. It is much more difficult to know where to place Ge Hong’s alchem‑ ism within the context of semiotics, or comparative philosophy. There is enough here about the basic representational function of signs and texts to

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keep these discussions in the realm of “semiotics,” but the main interest is in the physical status of the sign. Coarseness or refinedness of those signs is simply not an issue that is usually broached in most modern theories of semiotics—and at a minimum, this fact can remind us of the importance of the historicity of semiotic discourses: ideas of representation cannot be reduced to geometric models. However, there is at least a strange echo here of Derrida’s intervention in Levinasian ethics. The Baopuzi is not really an ethical text, but it does seem to say that the moral is the coarse, whereas the literary is the refined, as above quoted: “Moral behavior is that which has its effects, the better and worse are easy to see. But literary works are subtle and sublime, its structures difficult to discern.” This marks a fascinating inversion in Daoist arche‑semiotic discourse: normally wen and all forms of literary expression are the outer expression that must be gotten beyond to the hidden truths, either of dao or of the subject. This is almost a mirror image of Derrida’s grammatological erasure of the boundaries between the inner and the outer: whereas Derrida argues for the always‑already “written” character of speech, in which there never was a fullness of presence, Ge Hong seems to be arguing for an oralogical view of the literary work, in which the letter, precisely by being subtle and difficult, is the place where real presence can happen. This alchemy of the text is not primarily about the status of the indi‑ vidual subject; that is not Ge’s main focus in the text. Nonetheless, given the importance of personal arche‑semiotics to the culture at large, it is not surprising that he does at times talk about problems of personal signs that might function (or fail to function) as signs of transcendence. Consider his “Essay on Immortals [論仙],” the second essay of the “Inner Chapters”: Suppose there was a person of exceptional knowledge and great ability, living in reclusion without office, concealing his circum‑ stances and literary talent, expelling contrivance and eliminating desire, clinging to his own nature in the midst of utmost purity, forgetting the engagements and trifles of the common world. The average person already is unable to distinguish between such a man and the ordinary, unable in his words and actions to see his outstanding conduct and will, and in his crude form investigate sufficiently the true expression of his spirit [世人猶 鮮能甄別 , 或莫造志行於無名之表 , 得精神於陋形之裏]. How much more so the transcendent, whose inclinations follow a different path, who takes wealth as misfortune, who sees glory

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as obscene, who takes pleasure to be dust and sees renown as the morning dew. He treads on fire but is not scorched, walks on the waves but with a lighter step than on land, beats his wings through the void, rides the clouds in a celestial chariot, looking up he traverses the polestar, looking down he perches on Kun Lun. How could walking corpses [ordinary people] see such things?30 In his other major work, the Records of Divine Immortals (神仙傳), Ge Hong has many different kinds of hagiographic interests—in particular the recording of natural and alchemical substances the various immortals ingested en route to their divinity. Here, his interest is arche‑semiotic in a curiously self‑conscious, justifying fashion. It has been long acknowledged by the tradition that even the normal sort of secular recluse is extremely difficult to pick out by sight from the common man: that is the basic dilemma facing the classical Chinese subject stuck in a world of “readings” by aristocratic and royal patrons. Here, however, Ge argues a fortiori that the immortal should be even more difficult for the common lot to discern. The logic here is odd: presumably miraculous behavior such as walking on water or flying should be a fairly legible sign of something special! However, these behaviors seem to be, if not metaphorical, yet somehow subtilized in a fashion parallel to reagents: the truly miraculous is even more invisible to the average unbeliever than is the common sort of retirement from the world. Note that this kind of personal semiotics, too, is framed in terms of refined essences (jing) being opposed to the coarse form of the body (xing) and the name/reputation (ming). And Matthew Wells has found this sort of alchemy of the self to be a critical component of Ge’s own autobiographical essay affixed to the end of the “Outer Chapters.”31 With all of these hints toward the importance of the subtilized sign (whether of writing generally, or of subjective self‑presentations), these remain at the level of hint, implication, or assumption for most of the Baopuzi. The exposition of a theory of textuality is not Ge Hong’s main purpose in writing. However, the status of the text is elevated to a founding principle of salvation in the Shangqing school, the most literary sect of religious Daoism.

The Marriage of Spirit and Text: The Shangqing School In the middle of the Jin dynasty, there was a woman named Wei Huacun (魏華存, 252–334), who loved the study of Laozi and Zhuangzi, as well as

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the more recent revelations of the Celestial Masters, and she was made a ritual libationer in the Masters’ organization. Wei was the daughter of one Wei Shu (魏舒, 209–290) who, around the time of his daughter’s birth, managed the remarkable feat of passing the civil service exam as an adult autodidact.32 Perhaps his accomplishment favorably inclined him to the suitorship of a man named, “Text,” for he forced Huacun to abandon her religious post and marry one Liu Wen (劉文) at age twenty‑four. After her two sons from the marriage were grown, and her marriage with Text was dissolved by his death, she returned to her devotion, acquiring a certain fame in Celestial Masters circles for her piety. This is when the powers of the Daoist heavens began to favor her with revelations—the first significant set of revelations since the communications to Zhang Daoling nearly two centuries earlier. Of these, the most influential to later Daoism was the Scripture of the Yellow Court (黃庭經), a text that uses seven‑syllable verse to advocate a system of meditative regulation of the body’s spiritual humors, and which was instrumental in the evolution of the so‑called inner alchemy meditation practice of medieval Daoism. There is a great deal to be doubted in the official hagiographic accounts—not least, whether Wei Huacun should be considered the author of the full text of the Scripture of the Yellow Court that exists today. With‑ out being able to resolve such questions, we can note that in terms of the arche‑semiotics of the text, it does not diverge greatly from the other Celestial Masters texts referenced in an earlier section. There is, at first, somewhat of a different attitude: some of the early stanzas are devoted simply to a labeling of the different portions of the spirit‑body, and despite the weirdly ecstatic physiology it espouses, the arche‑semiotics of these passages are almost Confucian, declaring an uncomplicated inner/outer distinction between name and meaning: The kidney’s numen, dark and recondite, is called the “Nursing Infant” The spleen’s numen, ever‑present, is called the “Soul’s Stopping‑point” The gall bladder’s numen, with dragon’s glory, is called the “August Brightness” The six cavities and five organs all have numens which embody essences,

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All of them, inside the mind, move along heavenly tracks.33 Most scholarly attention given to this text and other proto‑medical Daoist texts is primarily concerned with explicating the nature of the bodily processes or spiritual principles;34 from the perspective of arche‑semiotics, it is more relevant to note that there is no skepticism to these acts of matching: organs are given declared names, physical is tied to spiritual, the realm of the mind is the seat of universal control. The other references in the Scripture of the Yellow Court to textuality are generally not concerned with arche‑semiotics per se, so much as the uses of revelation. However, these passages do generally indicate an attitude toward textuality that focuses less on the validity of cosmological correspondences and more on the sort of in‑between state between the physical and the metaphysical, which was noted in other Celestial Masters texts: Indifferent, eyes shut, you will brighten internally, No object will touch you, serene and peaceful. Unassuming and refusing engagement, though aged you will return to your prime.35 Thinking on and chanting the jade writings, you will enter into the Supreme Clarity.36 Yellow Boy’s amazing voice is hard to hear, Jade writings, crimson slips and cinnabar texts, These are called, “Cloth of the Perfected” and “Gold Cloth.” Wearing armor and holding talismans, they open the seven gates.37 Golden writings and jade visions may be announced, When transmitted, they may be received, and announced to the “Three Officials,” But do not let the “Seven Ancestors” receive the dark sickness.

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These supreme ethereal words are offered to gods and immortals: For the way of the undying, this is a true text.38 In such passages, one is advised to avoid entanglement with the physical; and yet the same texts that are keys to the divine have their physicality stressed with ornate (and expensive‑sounding) adjectives. There are no arche‑semiotic statements clear enough to establish textuality as a coherently theorized medium point between the physical and the metaphysical; it is at least as likely that this is simply accidental paradox by a text whose main concerns lie elsewhere. However, if accidental, it is also happy—for the paradox captures something essential about the luscious style of the text. Other Celestial Masters texts from the mid‑third century are, as mentioned above, often prescriptural, commentarial, quasi‑legal. This is imagistic through and through, in a way that borrows from earlier Huang‑Lao materials, but which concentrates it into a sort of new and flowery rhetoric. Despite the verse form, one should not mistake the Inner Scripture for fine or important poetry—it is loose and prolix popular verse, of more mnemonic than artistic value. But it does help establish an ecstatic, imagistic vocabulary, which becomes highly influential in later Daoist materials, especially Shangqing, and even comes to exert influence on the elite literary tradition. It is a vocabulary that makes the most of metaphor to tie physical and nonphysical realms: oddly specific physical attributes are put together in such impossible concatenations that the transcendent comes to seem the only possible referent. Metaphysics is not a pale and ghostly abstraction from the physical, but an intensification of physical attributes beyond the carrying capacity of any actual substance. Fittingly, Wei Huacun’s stylistic influence took permanent hold on the Daoist tradition after she had made the transition from a physical body to a ghostly one. Three decades after her death, her spirit began to make semiregular visits to one Yang Xi (楊羲, 330–?), a spirit medium and cli‑ ent of local aristocracy in the region around Mt. Mao, near modern‑day Nanjing. As a former medium and recipient of revealed scriptures herself, Wei was a perfect go‑between, introducing Yang Xi to various divinities who made their own further revelations, directly to him. She had become a messenger angel—but also a spiritual matchmaker: “Though you are announced as mates, this only established your respective functions as inner and outer. You must not recklessly

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follow the filthy practices of the world by performing with her base deeds of lewdness and impurity. You are to join with the holy consort through the meeting of your effulgent inner spirits. I betroth this daughter of a noble Perfected being to you so that, in your intimate conjoinings, there will be a great benefit for your advancement and no worries that you will injure or deplete your spiritual forces. Hereafter, you may command the myriad spirits. . . .  “The Perfected Consort possesses the precious Divine Tiger Text of Inner Perfection written in cinnabar and blue. This is far finer than the sort of thing you now own. If, with your fine talent, you seek to copy it, I am certain she will not keep it a secret from you. But the joining of your hands in wedlock is not just a matter of texts. You two will ride your effulgent inner spirits into the gem‑filled heavens . . .39 It is perhaps natural (if deeply annoying) that Yang imagined Wei as fulfilling one of the few jobs in the heavenly hierarchy, marriage object, that women were allowed on earth. However, the text does still do its share of recon‑ figuring gender: from the surrounding text, it is clear that Yang Xi himself is being placed in the role of the passive “bride,” losing control of his own person in order to receive the gift of revelation. Yang is fulfilling the role of the “inner,” the wife who remains inside the home; indeed, since there won’t be any grossly corporeal sex, the entire point of this marriage is to establish a certain structural relation. His mate will reveal heavenly scriptures, and Yang Xi will copy them. Passages such as this are clearly justifying a kind of automatic writing, but it should be noted that the distinction between the heavenly scripture and its earthly copy is not one of oral versus written: even though the scriptures Yang Xi receives are sometimes dictated, their heavenly form is still written—in this case, in cinnabar and blue. This apotheosis of the written text is a hallmark of what would come to be known as the Shangqing (上清) teaching. The term is prominent in Wei Huacun’s writing, and she is recognized as the founding matriarch of the school, a fact that helped to make the Scripture of the Yellow Court and other texts attributed to her into canonical reference points for the new school. However, it is only as Yang Xi’s ghost that Wei earned this honor: his appropriation of her memory for his own very different set of published revelations was what created the first major Daoist sect clearly distinct from the Celestial Masters. And one of the key distinctions that sets the Shangqing apart is its emphasis on the importance of texts and textuality.

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Later, in the Tang dynasty, the sect was to evolve a complex gradation of initiations by which one received additional scriptures as one moved up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. At the beginning there is no such regulated system, but the basic structure of revelation and adherence is everywhere mediated by text: Yang Xi receives these texts from the spirit‑world, and he then initiated the Xu family, his earthly patrons, into these same texts. The logic of the written script is in fact critical to canon formation for the school: the third patriarch, Tao Hongjing (陶弘景, 456–536), compiled the Declarations of the Perfected out of one portion of Yang Xi’s revelations,40 made his editorial decisions about spurious or genuine texts based on the calligraphic style of the texts available to him. Tao, like Yang, was a master calligrapher, and he only included in the Declarations those materials from texts written in Yang’s own hand. To get an understanding of the way in which such a focus on textual‑ ity affects the arche‑semiotic assumptions of Shangqing, it is best to start with an assessment of how Yang Xi uses and misuses received formulations. Consider his sole invocation of Zhuangzi’s fish‑trap metaphor, from juan 11: The impulse behind all books and commentaries is to transmit ideas and principles. Since the hidden family has arrived to personally serve and be presented to the numinous visages of the two Immortals, Lords Minister of Fates, Heaven has revealed its desire to bathe them in sacred favor. Why again bother with books and commentaries? This is what is called “getting the fish and forgetting the trap.”41 This is, of course, not really what is called “getting the fish and forgetting the trap.” Zhuangzi’s original metaphor is about a form of expression, and the wish for a form of rhetoric that has no need of words. This is about soteriology: revelation need not be offered to those who already are enjoying divine favor. Although this is phrased in the negative case, the logic implies of course that those who are not yet in the presence of the divine do need texts; the function of the text is to save via the transmission of meaning. It is hard to guess who the “kith and kin” are; the Declarations are filled with obscure references where one cannot even be sure if contextual knowledge would provide an adequate explanation. But, if the persons referred to must remain obscure, the basic structure of revelation is plain enough. Although the full phrase of Zhuangzi does not appear again in the Declarations, it does seem to have been the basis for a neologism used twice by Yang: the “obscure trap” (xuanquan, 玄筌). In juan 2, we have:

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Everyone has a dwelling‑place for his endowed purpose, and the inborn natures of all persons have their resonances. How is it that you can tread in things’ errant footsteps and turn against your own proper calling? Why not display the ultimate freedom with which heaven has marked you, be at ease with the inner pleasures of the quest for Perfection, dedicate yourself to seclu‑ sion and purity to delight you heart, find solace in the place of escape to give rest to your thoughts, retreat to the eastern mountains to hide your traces, grasp the mystic fish‑trap on a wondrous peak, protect your Sui pearl in order to contain its radiance, and dispel the five obstacles within your breast?42 Or again, Regarding those who can recede far away from the present world, the only thing they consider important is the body. Only the ones who reduce the external obstacles around them have no place for death. For this reason, the learners of old grasped the mystic fish‑trap to hide among the peaks, hid their bright mirrors from miscellaneous affairs, concentrated their spirits in the courts of mountain caverns, and nurtured Perfection next to streams in secluded valleys.43 It is probably impossible to determine Yang Xi’s meaning with certainty; the phrase “obscure trap” (or “mystic fish‑trap” in Smith’s translation) occurs exactly one other time in the Daoist Canon, in the title of a now‑lost book. It is possible that Yang means something like a writing brush taking divine dictation, since it is “darkened” (xuan) and since it is held in the hand (wo). However, the exact denotation is perhaps not as important as the connotation: the Mysterious Trap is a thing one uses to refrain from self‑disclosure. Joining it with the “Pearl of Sui” is telling: this is a reference to the story of the Duke of Sui, who got a pearl as a thank‑you gift from a snake he saved; the earliest extant reference to the story is found in the “Yielding a Throne” chapter of Zhuangzi, who mocks the notion of using a “Pearl of Sui” as a sling‑stone with which to go bird hunting. It is a treasure one holds in reserve, and does not put out for common usage. Given that the word quan is usually associated also with Zhuangzi, and his picture of the external substance of language, there is a strong implication that the “Mysterious Trap” here is, whatever its physical form, an embodiment of the same reticence that sacred language is supposed to exhibit.

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Besides this rather odd appropriation of the fish‑trap, there are also a few other examples of traditional arche‑semiotic statements being reworked in the Declarations. For example, the famous dictum of the Classic of Changes, that “words do not exhaust the meaning,” is transformed into the following statement of juan 8: Outside there is a name of considering dao; inside there are a hundred worries which arrive. This is enough to exhaust one’s years as the galloping thought at last returns to the body through the three organs. If a fast is not solely for enlightenment, then it is of no use. This can be called, “the meaning does not exhaust the words”! So if one would practice the true breath, one should spit out three and receive four, ride seven and swallow nine.44 This is a transposition which leaves the original usage far behind—Yang Xi is clearly not talking about hermeneutics. It preserves the idea of a mismatch between word and meaning, but meaning is withered rather than superabundant. The problem is one of false teachings: they call themselves followers of the Dao, but are not liberated from their cares, and practice the forms of discipline without enlightenment. In such sad cases, the “meaning”—that is, the true internal state of the soul—cannot hope to exhaust the mysteries contained by the word “dao.” An even looser adaptation of traditional arche‑semiotics occurs in the opening juan: Each had been seated for some time when the Perfected Con‑ sort of Purple Clarity said, “I wish once more to trouble my discerning lord’s hand and brush to write something, so I can express my thoughts and forget speech. [散意忘言]. Would that be all right?” I spread paper again and waited for her instruction. Then the Perfected Consort, speaking slowly and in a low voice, instructed me, saying, “I am the youngest daughter of the Primal Lord, the beloved child of Lady Li of Grand Vacuity . . .”45 This is a free rewriting of the moral following Zhuangzi’s fish‑trap allegory: “one gets the meaning and forgets the words [得意而忘言]”; the change in

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diction supports a more remarkable change in meaning. In original context, the statement was a hope for a dialogue partner with whom one did not even need to speak, understanding was so complete. This is a statement that figures revelation almost as a sort of burden which the divinity longs to shrug off. But the most interesting expression of arche‑semiotic interests in the Declarations of the Perfected is a long passage in the first juan, where the deified Wei Huacun is explaining to Yang Xi why there is a need for new revelations. Insofar as the passage describes a primordial origin of writing, there is obvious influence from similar statements of textual evolution, dat‑ ing back to the “Appended Words” section of the Classic of Changes (itself cited in the passage). However, other than this, there are no clear citations of previous arche‑semiotic sentiments; the passage is highly original (as is most of the bizarre Declarations) and it stands on its own. Though lengthy, it is worth citing in full: Lady [Wang] then ordered me back to my seat and immedi‑ ately revealed her teaching. She commanded that I write this, and in her reply she said, “No we plunge our Lights into the dark of the void, where there is no road by which they can be followed, and our words spring forth into the vault of space, where no creature can trace them. Drifting about and riding on gusts, they slip away changing and never stagnate. Both of these lines [of words and Lights] undulate into the gloom and subside, [or] speedily rise, sparkling and silent. For this reason, we scatter them freely into the fordless [expanse], then let the gusting wind steer them. We place them in empty boats, and they just go. Hence they are emptiness within substance, Being within emptiness, ‘Imagelessness’ within Being. “As for the revelation of our written traces, when we wave forms onto paper and wooden tablets, the grain of their patterns is brightly concentrated, the [degree of ] coarseness and fineness outwardly apparent, the mystic brushwork quite iridescent. But it is the modeled substance that is shown, the darkened words that are expressed, as the forms are conveyed to the [world of ] dust and mire. If [the original forms] were to be carelessly revealed to creatures with skeletons and made to join with the world’s thrust and pull, that would besmirch the hymns of the superior Perfected above and fail the prohibitions on keeping separate

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below. Truly this is what my kind does not do, and what the numinous laws do not permit. “Today I am asked to set out the root‑origin of writing, the very beginning of the creation of patterns. This occurred when the five colors first sprouted and patterned emblems were marked out and fixed. Interactions among people blossomed forth as the division of yin and yang was distinguished. Then there appeared the calligraphy of the Three Primes and the Eightfold Ensemble, which flies in the heavens of all regions. There also appeared the Eight Dragons’ cloud‑seals, which are brightly rayed emblems. “After that came the era of the Two Sovereigns, who elaborated the patterns of the Eightfold Ensemble into the dragon‑and‑phoenix emblems and compressed and contracted the traces of the cloud‑seals to make them follow the forms of Brahmanic script, [thus] splitting apart [the original scripts] into two ways. They spoiled the Perfected [forms] for the sake of ease and paired off or separated the roots and branches, thus making sixty‑four kinds of script. Then they spread these throughout the thirty‑six heavens and the ten directions—above and below. Each of these adopted its own compositional form, differenti‑ ated it, and put it to use. Although the rules on pronunciation remained the same, the proliferating [written] traces separated and became different. “I shall compare and discuss these [forms of writing]. The script of the Eightfold Ensemble is the most perfect of scripts, the ancestor that establishes patterns and emblems. The bright rays of the cloud‑seals spring from their root and progenitor; they are from the beginning of the scripts. Today the script of the Three Primes and Eightfold Ensemble is used by their majesties the high Perfected and pure immortals of the Grant Ultimate. As for the brightly rayed emblems of the cloud‑seals, they are the characters you see now in the divine numinas’ talismanic script. “You see, then, that this superficial, decadent age spawns fabrications and disorders the truth, and that all join together in creating clever trifles, taking shortcut paths to inferior scripts that are all in the muddy writing of errand death‑bringers, in characters of license and perversion. They put aside the root to imitate the false. These are the dead traces of tumult and filth, nothing more.

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“Now why would Perfected, immortal people cast aside their own patterned traces and write with their hands the infe‑ rior characters of license and disorder? Indeed, those who are able to become Perfected attain Perfection in everything. Why should they alone take mediocre, decadent, coarse techniques and licentious, superficial, corrupt works and preserve them without change, dabble in them without alteration? “Now if a person of the world who first has skill in cal‑ ligraphy conducts his affairs well, then on the day he attains Perfected immortality the change in his exoteric calligraphy will suddenly follow that of his body, and it will revert [to the primal forms] spontaneously. One for whom all the Perfected affairs are close by does not yet abandon the muddy script he has already learned, for only then does he also receive instruc‑ tion in the superior writings, but later he will gain duplicate knowledge of the Perfected script versions. In the demonic way it is also like this, but with only minor differences in the script and characters. “Moreover, with our numinous brushes and Perfected hands, we have not dared from the beginning to go down and traffic with fleshly humans. Although at times there are people who are about to attain the Way but have not yet bodily transcended the world, we still don’t dare to lower our hands, spread the ink of our calligraphy [before them], and be revealed through our characters’ traces. As for the divine compositions in talismanic script, which [those persons] seek and wear at the hip, they were created only by return unto the beginning. That is why, for such things, worldly people are stubbornly unable to understand their source—which also enables my kind not to place any taboo of concealment on them. In mystic darkness one freely takes part in their interpretation! The esoteric and exoteric are naturally connected! “Furthermore, in the Sworn Code of the Four Poles the lofty and higher prohibitions are onerous, and naturally they don’t let my kind do the common calligraphy of the world again. Even if I were to lower my hand [to write something], you still wouldn’t understand, and what indeed would be the point of creating a surfeit of trouble for both of us? This would also obscure what’s permissible or not—it’s hardly worth complaining about. The

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thoughts in your heart lack fluidity and openness. All these are the reasons why we don’t circulate what we ourselves write.”46 The Declarations is well known as a difficult work, and this is a par‑ ticularly difficult and obscure passage. It is clear in general terms that this passage is supposed to refer to talismanic writing, some forms of which may actually have been reproduced by Yang Xi, and other forms of which may have been presumed to reside in heaven. There is much here that can only be guessed at, since we have no way to match these names for various scripts to any surviving text. But despite the hermeneutical knots here, it is possible to discern a more or less clear theology of textuality. There were originally completely pure texts in heaven, which slightly later in primordial history split and gave rise to multiple subsidiary, but still heavenly, textual traditions. Of these, one evolved into the Sanskrit texts of Buddhism in a form that may originally have been still a valuable guide to truth. However, almost immediately afterward, both Buddhist and Daoist texts have been multiplying endlessly in more and more corrupted forms, to the point where earthly calligraphy is untrustworthy, a gross and dead materiality of ink and paper. The Lady Wei, while on earth, began to receive restored versions of the more primordial texts, but only now, as a spirit, will she finish her rev‑ elations, and is explaining the typology of divine writing styles to Yang Xi. Obviously, Yang’s is a self‑serving textual genealogy, intended to demonstrate that all other avenues to enlightenment are based on false and corrupted texts, and that he alone is the conduit for truth. Since we know that he received significant and continued patronage in exchange for his revelations, he seems to have been quite successful in converting this narrative of primordial textuality into job security. However, even if one attaches the most cynical of motives to Yang, the passage remains of serious intellectual interest because of the terms in which he frames his narrative of textual decline and apostolic renewal. The contextualization goes far beyond the mere establishment of Yang’s authority, to offer a theory of representation that can explain the mechanics of this corruption and renewal. The passage begins by theorizing the spoken word: like the setting sun, it flies off somewhere into space, not to be tracked or traced. Yang writes with a lyricism that is hard to translate and oddly different from mainstream style of the period—it seems the language of an autodidact, whose faults and felicities have never been beaten out of him—and the weirdness of his diction here is a nice complement to the sense: words are uncontrolled, they go whither they will, signifying without ever being. And this is itself

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a sign of the paradox of being as described by a mixture of familiar Bud‑ dhist and Daoist rhetoric.47 In contrast to the ephemeral spoken word, the following sentences outline the fate of the written text. It is something for display, for glory, for the accumulation of worldly favor, and is therefore not to be trusted. In Derridean terms, this would appear to be a fairly straightforward logo‑ centrism—the written is the outer, the mere show that necessarily loses its source. Physicality is morally corrupting. And yet, while there is no way around the suspicion of gross materialism, it is not exactly accurate to say that Yang Xi is simply denigrating the written as a decay from originally oral revelation. What is prohibited is not writing, but publication: the world is not to know the secrets, they are to be reserved for the elect. But writing, in fact, is not unholy: in the beginning, in the purity of heaven, there was already writing. Writing is not the dangerous supplement to speech; it does not derive from nor relate to speech, but is created out of the wholly visual evolution of the universe into a place with distinct colors, distinct light and dark. Visual patterns coalesce into the original scriptures without any hint of speech. Indeed, insofar as they fly across the sky, roaming where they will, they seem to be offering a pattern imperfectly reflected by the spoken word flying off with the sun. The narrative of writing’s evolutionary decline that follows is thus the historical counterpart to the structural theory of writing that has been outlined. Writing itself is heavenly; it is the making‑public that corrupts. As the forms of writing evolved, reaching different publics through an expand‑ ing variety of genres and sites of circulation, they became more diffuse, less trustworthy. Sometimes this is deliberate—the Perfected apparently sometimes deliberately produce erroneous texts, to prevent the transmission of truth to those unqualified to receive it. But whether intended by the divinities, or simply rolled out of human frailty, the process of textual corruption is also a spiritual corruption. The result is—as for Derrida’s bêtes noires—a vision of the dead letter, dregs and corpses of texts. But the life and the spirit is not the oral logos, it is the text in its original, in a scribeless heaven with no possibility of miscopies. Finally, it should be noted that the passage, having thus legitimized writing, takes an unusual interest in its actual visual qualities. Writing is sometimes referred to as literary pieces (wenzhang) or works (pian), but for the most part it is identified as itself, writing (shu): one is confronted by the fact of the brushstroke, the ink on the paper or bamboo strip. Words are “drawn” (hua) onto their surfaces, perhaps well or perhaps badly, but

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always leaving a visible “trace” (ji). There is no text without the visible mark, not even in the time before history where there was presumably no diachronic act of writing. Could one tell from the visual qualities of the trace alone which works were genuine, and which not? Not necessarily—the gold standard for authenticity is the source, Wei Huacun as mediated by Yang Xi. Yet, there are hints—such as when the passage speaks of “coarse arts” (cushu) or “inferior characters” (xiazi)—that perhaps authenticity has its own visual quality. Thus, the passage above is unusual for three things: (1) the extravagant diction and terminology in which it offers its otherwise‑familiar prehistory of writing; (2) its assertion of the originally written form of texts, that they had a purer written form in remote antiquity, rather than a pure oral form; and (3) a clear interest in the actual appearance of words, and the suggestion that this might have something to do with the recognition of authenticity. These facts, together with the recognition and naming of various different forms of writing, strongly suggest the influence, in popular religion, of a new art, which had already become of considerable importance in elite culture: calligraphy. And, in fact, we know that calligraphy was central to the compilation of the Declarations. Yang Xi’s editor, Tao Hongjing, was considered perhaps the lead‑ ing calligraphic stylist of his day, and extant rubbings of his works confirm this traditional judgment. Moreover, Tao is said to have made his editorial judgments about which writings attributed to Yang Xi were authentic, based on his inspection of the style of the words (Yang was also supposed to have been an excellent calligrapher, though no examples in his hand are extant). Unfortunately, there is no space here to delve into Tao’s work and the important developments in the calligraphic tradition that were occurring at this time. But the bare fact of the connection is proof enough that something is different with these Shangqing texts: just as they describe themselves in the revelations to Yang Xi, these texts intend to be beautiful. They want to have luxurious surfaces, written in ornate and expensive materials using the most artistically accomplished brushstrokes. This is a bizarro form of quasi‑semiotic “matching” in itself: not of idea to sign, but of sign to physi‑ cal form, in which the standard is aesthetic propriety, not proper expression. The problems of semiotics per se are downplayed, perhaps because of Yang Xi’s need to sell his texts to his patrons and the larger circle of adherents which they eventually attracted: one does not sell a secret key to salvation that is also somehow inadequate for perfect understanding. We do not know much about the private lives of Yang Xi or the Xu family, or other early Shangqing adherents, certainly not enough to construct

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a vision of their own subjective self‑understanding and the relation of that subjectivity to arche‑semiotics. But the issue of divine revelation through these texts makes for an interesting point of comparison with the Levinas‑Derrida debate. In these texts we are told of literal encounters between Yang Xi and the divine: he does indeed look into the face of a supreme Other. The result is not an ethical egalitarianism in which one sees the claim of a supreme sole divinity reflected in human faces, but an erecting of new hierarchies. By the time that the Shangqing had received official sanction and support under the Tang, the church had codified progressively higher levels of initiation into secrets; at each step up in the hierarchy, access to new scriptures was granted. The textual system was not so formalized in the Declarations of the Perfected, but the basic impulse to viewing textuality as a ground of social division was already there. And, although the nature of that ground is hardly Derridean, it does oddly resonate with the critique of Levinas offered in “Violence and Metaphysics”: relation itself is a function of language, and the flaws in ethical possibility are structured by textuality. The notion of a “revelation” is, simultaneously, an arche‑semiotic relation‑ ship and a power relationship: truths are made known in signs, and the making‑known establishes a relationship of superior to subordinate.

Signs of Power (II) In the centuries between Yang Xi’s original revelations, and Tao Hongjing’s redaction of them, there arose the third great school of medieval religious Daoism, the Lingbao. Early Lingbao Daoism is associated generally with two characteristics: its manifestation of influences from Buddhism, and its invention of one of the oddest forms of Chinese textuality, which has persisted to present‑day religious practice, the magical talisman. These talismans are bizarre distortions of seal‑script calligraphy, some resembling actual characters and others devolving into little more than divinely inspired scribbling. Our information about the original uses of these talismans in the early years of the Lingbao is scant, but in succeeding centuries they clearly took on a number of medicinal and apotrophaic uses, being pinned to the clothing or pasted on the walls, burnt at funerals, and swallowed whole or compounded into medicines. Without eyewitness accounts by conveniently placed anthropologists, it is impossible to know if the early Lingbao shamans were as confident in assuming authority as Lévi‑Strauss’s Nambikwara band leader. But in general terms we can see that, at least with

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the earlier Shangqing revelations to Yang Xi, a precedent had been established by which writing, in its full physical presence, created with rich materials and an elegant calligraphic style, was used as a means to claim authority. Just as Derrida shows in his deconstruction of Lévi‑Strauss and Rousseau, authority is not born with vulgar writing—the much more orally present community of the Celestial Masters was at least as hierarchical as the early Shangqing sect. But this does not alter the fact that the materiality of the textual sign (whether feared, engaged alchemically, or exalted as the trace of divine presence) is a focal point for early Daoist faiths, and is associated with the whole spectrum of problems that beset the bifurcated spirit and flesh of religious practice. Anxieties often lurk in the interstices of social practices, inchoate, half‑realized by their participants. The presence of an object of sufficient numinous authority can focus such anxieties; even the absence of an object can be enough of a “presence,” once realized through naming and the consciousness of possibility, to focus them. In the formative early‑medieval period of religious Daoism, texts (both complex divine revelations and simple ethical traces of the individual believer) grew into such a focus. One can read this heightened sensitivity to the presence or absence or transmuta‑ tion of the material sign as a kind of instauration of the power politics of hierarchized communities. (At the very least, it is hard not to see Yang Xi as a huckster, sincere or cynical, who like the Nambikwara leader, found a way to establish a position through his ridiculous texts.) But if that, it was also a means for the coalescing of communities that were not nightmares of oppression. One does not have to rediscover a Rousseauvian primitivism in order to note that these texts represented popular religious movements which did call for ethical behavior and did gain willing adherents. These were at least partially Levinasian communities, in which texts became the locus of mutual recognition. The great irony, that they could do so only by a quasi‑alchemical transmutation of the original Lao‑Zhuang preference for silence into one for revelation upon revelation, is why these movements have always been recognized as a very different Daoism than the version of so many centuries previous, which had seemingly positioned itself in opposition to the space of the “ethical” within the pre‑Qin context.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sign, Translation, Enlightenment

Translation as an Ethics of Debt In Walter Benjamin’s classic formulation, “The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which pro‑ duces in that language the echo of the original.”1 But this summary from Benjamin obscures by its quotability what is most interesting in Benjamin’s theory of translation: the notion of the “pure language” hiding behind the words of the source text, which the translator’s text must reperform—and in reperforming, demonstrate identity with it. The “pure language” formulation seems to be at first read the ancient ontological naïveté: there is a stable meaning clothed in one language, which can be stripped bare and then reclothed in another. But close rereading shows Benjamin’s perceiving meaning as a verb, and not a noun: though he makes no clear gestures toward his phenomenological contemporaries, it is a reconceiving of translation that is at least parallel to the phenomenological recasting of ontology. Meaning is not a thing; it is a directional process of becoming‑into‑words of an intent with no origin point. Hence, translation is not a carrying‑over of a thing from one realm to another, but a reperformance in another language of intentionality’s shaping of a first. Insofar as translation is possible, it should be a direct challenge to a radically contingent semiotics. One might grant that the words we use to name this act are bizarre: how could there be a quasi‑physical meaning‑thing to be borne over (translation) or led over (traduction) or set over (Überset‑ zung) or even turned over (翻譯)? And yet there can’t be a pure Nothing there, alone inseparable from the words: we have the empirical experience of seeing translation “work,” create harmonies of understanding across linguistic divides. Across several scattered writings on translation, Derrida acknowledges this simultaneous necessity and impossibility of translation,

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but he does not care to explain what it could mean for the mechanics of the expression of meaning within a given set of signs. Instead, he transforms a technical question into an ethical one: How can this self‑contradictory position, this always‑failing orientation toward another, be lived—by the translator, by the text? He begins from Benjamin: The title also says, from its first word, the task (Aufgabe), the mission to which one is destined (always by the other), com‑ mitment, duty, debt, responsibility. Already at stake is a law, an injunction for which the translator is answerable. He must also acquit himself, and of something that implies perhaps a fault, a fall, an error, or even a crime. . . . The translator is indebted, he appears to himself as translator in a situation of debt; and his task is to render, to render that which must have been given.2 This focus on the task as a debt, perhaps a crime, is conceived in the wake of a meditation on the myth of Babel, which turns out to be more than a simple failure of structure—it is a crime that destroys the harmony of a society intent on founding a name for itself. The name Babel remains undivided (as untranslatable as the name God), but in the division of lan‑ guage from language, which is mocked by the untranslatability of proper names, there is the birth of conflict, and hence of ethics. Later, in his essay “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation? [Qu’est‑ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’?],” Derrida deepens the ethical and theological resonances of his conception of the translator’s task. The debt of the translation to its source text is the terrible debt to Shylock, unfulfillable under law. But just as Portia claims that “mercy seasons justice,” the “relevant” translation “seasons” [relever] its original in the act of departing from it.3 The frame of the ethical is here used to odd effect. Is it no longer necessarily a debt of one human to another? Derrida, in following Benja‑ min’s lead, deemphasizes any relation between the translator and the original author. But if the debt is that of one text to another, or even one language to another as instantiated in two parallel texts, is this truly the ethical? Or is it the structural, “translated” into Levinasian language? Would real humans who do the writing and the reading be effaced in an attempt to lend moral consequence to texts, and if so, is not this a kind of debt whose need for grace is left unacknowledged? And then again, even taken in its own terms in which texts can be ethical actors, does not the language of the debt and the gift unfairly reduce

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the network of responsibility in which a text exists? Benjamin was anxious to stress that the translation does not exist for the reader (mere communication being irrelevant to literature), and hence the task of the translator is defined backward, toward his source. Derrida follows on the track of this initial impulse and treats the debt of translation as solely something owed to (or forgiven by) the source text. But most debtors do not owe their substance to a single lender, and translated texts do not owe theirs to a single source text. The target language is not simply a set of clothes, pregiven, in which one dresses up a received meaning: the historical resonances of the target language, as expressed in a vast fund of literary and religious texts, are also a point of reference, which could also be viewed as making a quasi‑ethical claim upon the translator‑debtor. There may even be different streams of tradition within the target language, capable of putting forward competing and irreconcilable claims upon the new text the translator is shepherding through customs. Moreover, what if the to‑be‑translated is not a speaking presence, but a silent absence? This is a possibility that Derrida, working immersed in the logocentrism of European religion, did not acknowledge. Instead, to him the claim of the sacred text on a translation is that which seems to be most straightforward, a sacred duty for the transmission of an intact revelation prior to and higher than any given language: The to‑be‑translated of the sacred text, its pure translatability, that is what would give at the limit the ideal measure for all translation. The sacred text assigns his task to the translator— and it is sacred inasmuch as it announces itself as translatable, simply translatable, to‑be‑translated, which does not always mean immediately transferable, in the common sense that was dismissed from the start. Perhaps it is necessary to distinguish here between the translatable and the transferable. Translatability pure and simple is that of the sacred text in which meaning and literality are no longer discernible as they form the body of a unique, irreplaceable, and untransferable event, “materially the truth.” Call for translation: the debt, the task, the assignation are never more imperious.4 And yet, what if the truth to be translated is not a presence but an absence, the revelation that there is no revelation possible from within language? Such a sacred text could not possibly claim the same sort of

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ethical debt from a target language—there is no “thing” of meaning to be handed over. Indeed, there would not even be the quasi‑phenomenological becoming‑text of Benjamin’s “pure language”; but somehow the opposite, an alien shying‑away‑from‑text of the religion that demands a search for truth outside of language. In this case, the translator’s “debt” would have to be reconceived: no longer the faithful remittance of something given over, it would have to be an obligation to announce—while calling off—a grand search for something withheld. This is the conundrum with which one must approach an ethics of early Chinese translation. Founded upon the need to import and nativize Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and Pali, asked to provide sacred scriptures for the rapidly growing ranks of the faithful, early Chinese translator‑monks found themselves at a loss as to how to translate Buddhism’s aspiration toward negative transcendence. The native terminological tradition that could lay the most direct claim upon this suspicion of being was the Daoist tradition—but Daoism was a spiritual system that many monks had left behind in their own arcs of belief, and it remained a system in vigorous competition with Buddhism. The result is a complex web of debts, with Buddhist and Daoist versions of Chinese borrowing from each other, in the strange attempt to render Nothing‑not‑even‑Nothingness the language due to it.

Seng Zhao and the Buddhification of Lao‑Zhuang Arche‑Semiotics Arche‑semiotically inclined Daoists obsess over the meaning of the word dao; historians of Daoism follow their subject matter by extending the confusion to the meaning of the word Daoist. It is, to put it mildly, a term with a wide range of usages and meanings, some originating in the various periods and authors who claimed the title; others imposed by retrospective historiography; still others terms of convenience that are used by default, such as for any otherwise‑uncategorizable forms of popular religion. As explained in the Introduction, this work is interested primarily in a certain set of arche‑semiotic modes, identifiable by the way they were theorized in traditional China; it is not an attempt to track down the dif‑ ferent arche‑semiotic beliefs of people identified as Daoists. In other words, it is an attempt to track this discourse directly, rather than via biographical categorizations. Once this is granted, it becomes obvious that any serious attempt to deal with Daoist arche‑semiotics in the fourth and fifth centuries

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must address the contributions of the great Buddhist monks of the period. The rise of Buddhism is the great intellectual‑historical movement of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and the growing religion was absolutely fraught with arche‑semiotic concerns—how was one to translate the San‑ skrit and Pali scriptures into Chinese, a language with essentially no prior experience of written translation, and to what extent could the familiar terminology of Lao‑Zhuang thought be appropriated for Buddhism? In traditional hagiography, the most common story of the importation of the faith is that Emperor Ming of the Later Han (28–75 CE) dreamed of a flying sun‑god, and that upon having this interpreted to him as the new Indian “Buddha” he ordered a mission to India to collect scriptures.5 As nonsense goes, this is fairly reasonable nonsense, because there is more reliable textual and archaeological evidence to suggest that Buddhism did first gain a foothold in China during the Later Han, probably arriving independently by the Silk Road in the northwest, and by sea routes in the southeast. As the dynasty was dying in the mid‑second century, the first clearly historical mission was established in the capital, Luoyang, by the Parthian An Shigao, who also undertook the first known translations of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. However, there is little evidence that the faith attained significant numbers of converts or influence during the second and third centuries; certainly, state sponsorship (in both the north and south) only began to be granted during the fourth century. Insofar as there were large‑scale flights into religion during the chaos of the third century, the beneficiaries were primarily quasi‑Daoist cults, such as the Celestial Masters, which had already been firmly established, and which grew out of Han‑era popular movements. During this period, initial efforts at spreading the Buddhist faith in China tended to lean heavily on the established terminologies of Confucian‑ ism and Daoism. Translations such as those of An Shigao and those of the generations following him were extremely free renderings of their Sanskrit and Pali sources, and there is evidence that popular preaching in this early period was eager to frame the imported faith in the terms of Daoism in particular. By the fourth century, this process of “matching” Buddhist con‑ cepts to Daoist terminology was even accorded its own technical name, geyi (格義), or “squaring meanings.” The term is attributed to a monk, Faya, about whom little is known apart from his entry in the Lives of Eminent Monks (高僧傳), an important sixth‑century hagiography: Faya, from Hejian, was of an upright and tolerant nature. When young he was good at secular studies, and when grown arrived at

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the meaning of Buddhism. [Secular] scholars all came to receive instruction of him . . . so Ya, together with Kang Falang and others, matched the affairs of the scriptures to secular books, as examples to explain the unfamiliar; and this he called, “squaring meanings.” So Pifu, Xiangtan, and others also discoursed with squared meanings to teach their disciples. Ya was elegant and carefree, and he was good at grasping the essentials; secular books and Buddhist scriptures he addressed by turns. With Daoan and Fa‑tai, every time they opened up interpretations and gathered their questions, together they would exhaust the essentials of the scriptures.6 The importance of the final sentence will be discussed below; for now, it is sufficient to note that in this period of growth Buddhism was still seen as a very new import, and there was still a considerable need to “sinicize” Buddhist doctrine by providing it with direct matches in the native tradition. Ironically, though, this creation of a technical name, geyi, for a tendency that had been operative since the Eastern Han, occurred just as Buddhist culture was coming into its own and sensing that it was ready to preach its doctrine in its own terms. This new self‑confidence was related to a wave of more accurate trans‑ lation that was about to begin. The turning point was the fall of the Jin in the north, and its reestablishment along very different lines in the Yangtze River watershed. As already described, central imperial authority had been seriously compromised in the north, resulting in a series of internecine wars which had led to the move southward; after this, power was largely devolved unto a feudal system. Without an imperially imposed ideology suppressing it, Buddhism was able to find local support from pious converts among the aristocracy, and an archipelago of small temples was established. In the north itself, things were much more straightforward: the non‑Han peoples who drove out the Jin were themselves already largely converts to Buddhism. In taking control over the resources of the north, these new dynasties were not only able to give the Buddhist sangha significant financial support, and special legal status; but their attempts to sinicize their own rule gave impetus to the conversion of Han Chinese to the new faith, with a massive expansion of temple building and popular religious iconography. (This period in northern China is widely recognized as one of the high water marks of Buddhist art.) Since religious services and education cannot

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proceed with iconography alone, there was also a massive effort to translate relevant scriptures into Chinese. Although the height of northern Buddhism is associated with the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) of the Tuoba people, the foundational work in translation and philosophy was initiated under the much smaller, more chaotic states of the Sixteen Kingdoms. In particular, the impetus for this intellectual contribution can be credited to the emperor Yao Xing (366–416) of the Later Qin dynasty (384–417), which controlled Chang’an and the surrounding region. In particular, Yao Xing was important for the sponsorship of a large‑scale translation project overseen by the monk Kumārajīva (344–413), born in the kingdom of Kucha (located in what is now western Xinjiang province). After early training in the Theravādan Sarvāstivāda School, in Kashmir, Kumārajīva later became a convert to Mahāyāna Buddhism while in Kashgar, and brought Mahāyāna texts back to Kucha, where he became its leading exponent, converting his own for‑ mer Sarvāstivādan teacher.7 His fame grew throughout the international Buddhist community, and eventually, after Kucha was overcome by armies of the Earlier Qin, Kumārajīva was brought to the capital at Changan by military escort, given a full staff of translators, and tasked with translating into Chinese the Mahāyāna scriptures. In particular, Kumārajīva translated a large body of Mādhyamika (“middle path”) scriptures, thus enabling the first foundation of a Chinese version of the school (usually called the Sanlun, or Three‑Treatise School). Kumārajīva is one of the seminal figures in Chinese Buddhism, not least because his translation style tended to break away from earlier traditions of using Daoist vocabulary, matched inexactly to the Buddhist concepts. Part of his legacy is the development of a more recognizably independent Buddhist vocabulary, and it is probably not coincidental that the following centuries were to see clearer social divisions drawn between Daoists and Buddhists, along with polemics and purges. But at the beginning of that trend, at the turn of the fifth century, the task of de‑Dao‑ifying the Bud‑ dhist lexicon was not doctrinaire, nor universally applied. It could not be: Buddhist converts were apparently coming largely from Daoism, and it is a near‑standard feature of period hagiographies that they mention monks’ early interest in Daoism before a final conversion to Buddhism. Kumārajīva’s own lexically independent translation project was itself headquartered in an imperial property known as the “Gardens of Free‑Roaming” (Xiaoyao Yuan), named after the first chapter of the Zhuangzi.

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Kumārajīva had several disciples who were of major importance in their own right to the history of Chinese Buddhism; of these, the one who has the most to say about arche‑semiotics was Seng Zhao (僧肇, 378–413).8 Like many of his contemporaries mentioned in the Lives of Eminent Monks, Zhao is described as progressing from Daoist inclinations to complete sat‑ isfaction in Buddhism. However, much more than others, Zhao brought his Daoist reading along with him into Buddhism—not in the way of a syncretist seeking to fuse the two, but as a philosophical translator trying to communicate, across matched vocabularies, the unreality of representation. He was, in fact, a disciple of Kumārajīva while still in western Xinjiang, and followed him to Chang’an where he became part of the senior staff working on the translation project; he may well have played the role of a “native informant,” assisting the non‑Chinese elder monk with shaping the Chinese prose of the translations. Although it is not clear how the transla‑ tion work itself was organized, from the Lives it is clear that Kumārajīva recognized the native speaker’s superior expressive ability in Chinese: “After the publication of the 25,000‑Stanza Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, Zhao wrote his Treatise on Prajna Lacking Dichotomizing Knowledge, in 2,000‑odd characters, and presented it to Kumārajīva. Kumārajīva read it and called it good, saying to Zhao, ‘My comprehension does not lag yours, but in phrasing, I must yield to you.’ ”9 Zhao’s influence on the history of Chinese Buddhism is probably greatest through his work on the translation project. Many of those trans‑ lations, most notably the Lotus Sutra, became the standard versions in Chinese for later readers and devotees, and he obviously had a major role in Kumārajīva’s workshop. However, because that was a collaborative pro‑ ject, the background processes of which cannot be reconstructed, Zhao as an individual contributor to Buddhist history is more known for his Zhao Treatises (肇論), a set of four essays on epistemological topics. Because they were well received in the south as well as the north, these essays had an outsized influence on the intellectual climate up until the Tang; because they were trying in part to negotiate a clearly Buddhist position with respect to Daoist rhetoric and influences, they both furthered and altered the legacy of Lao‑Zhuang arche‑semiotics.10 The first of the Zhao Treatises, “On the Immobility of Objects [物 不遷論],” seems a wholesale contradiction of Daoism, in that it argues for the impossibility of change—the only constant, in Lao‑Zhuang philosophy. Ultimately deployed on behalf of the notion that karma is fixed, unsuscep‑ tible to decay, Zhao’s argument is that objects do not “move” from one

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instant to the next: the essence of a thing at any moment is locked inside that moment, as if in a single still frame of film; no object in the present has moved here from the past, and all will be replaced in their turn by the objects of future moments. But if this notion contradicts Daoism, it only contradicts it in the way that Daoism contradicts itself: the title is an allu‑ sion to the fifth chapter of the Zhuangzi, in which a model is praised for “see[ing] clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things.”11 The Zhuangzi context is different, an exhortation to unchanging behavior in a world that is changing—but this is the point: this and other citations from Zhuangzi are transformed by Zhao in his self‑conscious appropriation of the terminology for Buddhist use. A similar pattern is evident as well in the next essay, “On Emptiness of the Unreal [不真空論],” where Zhao writes, “So we know: things are not real, they are just symbols. That is why the Ch’eng‑chü (Sūtra) maintains that names are artificially applied to things, and Yüan‑lin [Zhuangzi] uses the similes of the finger and the horse. So, profound doctrines may be found anywhere.”)12 Or, without any direct reference, the recognizably Zhuangzian passage: Compare a thing with a thing, then both may prove to be identical; compare a thing with a non‑thing (a name), then both cannot be identical. For neither do things share the ver‑ ity of names nor names the actuality of things. Therefore it is impossible to teach Absolute Truth (paramartha satya) by means of definitions. Then how can it be made the subject of writing? (It cannot). But I also cannot remain silent. In spite of (what I have just said) I shall state my opinion in speech and try to make it clear.13 There is no sentiment here that is not locatable in the Sanskrit anteced‑ ents that are Zhao’s main intellectual concern; but the rhetoric, with its frustrated‑playful distortion of words through multiple parts of speech, its assertion of a need to try to address the inadequacies of language through language, are drawn from the intellectual milieu of elite Daoism. This local rhetorical borrowing makes sense in the context of the essay’s overarching structure. It is dedicated to explaining how the recognition of arche‑semiotic slippage is not the same as ontological enlightenment (i.e., the falsity of the word existence does not demonstrate the truth of the word nonexistence, and vice versa: because the words are unreliable, the propriety of names must be a different order of inquiry than the actuality of being or nonbeing)—and

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for this logically complex level of ontological inquiry one finds no antecedent in the more poetic and intuitive Lao‑Zhuang corpus. This is new wine in old wineskins: the older, native vocabulary is indeed being used to contain an imported line of inquiry. The most striking evidence for the nature of Daoist arche‑semiotics in Zhao is in the fourth treatise, On the Namelessness of Nirvana (般若無 名論). Arranged as a series of questions and responses between Zhao and a fictional interlocutor, the topics covered are heterogeneous and technical, and seem to be adumbrated as a way of staking a position in an ongoing factional debate within the northwestern sangha. However, the varied details of this division of opinion, and the more minute points of dispute atten‑ dant on them, do grow out of the basic question of whether nirvana is the sort of epistemological object that can be usefully described by language. The fictional interlocutor relies on references in the sutras to nirvanas with or without “residue,” and argues that such distinctions drawn within the texts point to the possibility of nirvana being a state with knowable, and describable characteristics. Zhao responds, Then he who gives it a name does not understand its real nature; he who presumes to know it mistakes it for something common, because it looks “simple;” he who takes it for existent misunderstands the peculiarity of its existence; he who takes it for non‑existent does injustice to its substantiality. That is why Sākyamuni was silent (before turning the Wheel‑of‑the‑Law) at Magadha; why Vimalakīrti refused to answer at Vaisālā; why “Subhūti preached the Law without words, and Indra and Brahma, though they heard nothing, rained flowers.” In all these cases words were unnecessary because (the preacher and the assembly) were in spiritual contact. These were silent sermons on that which cannot be expressed in words.14 From the standpoint of the history of Daoist philosophy, the historical evidence invoked by Zhao is certainly more disturbing than the principle itself: it proposes a fairly simple mystical union of minds as an alternative to speech. But the opening sentence is telling, proceeding to the more classically Buddhist dichotomy of existence and nonexistence from a strongly Daoist emphasis on unsayability. And the unsayability is directly derived from an arche‑semiotically centered linguistics: “Speech originates in words, words articulate definitions, definitions presuppose definable things. Where there

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are no definitions there are no words. No words no speech. No speech no learning. A Sūtra says: ‘Nirvān.a is neither dharma nor non‑dharma. It cannot be learned, it cannot be thought. It is not an object of reasoning.’ How dare I describe it so that you might be able to learn it, (as subjects in a textbook are learned)?”15 Precisely because the only way to correctly analyze nirvana is by the classical Buddhist tetralemma (neither existent nor void, neither nonexistent nor non‑void), it is well suited to the rhetoric of frustrated arche‑semiotics originally developed by and for the Daoist tradition. Words (whether attached to the existent or nonexistent) can only ever describe the dharmas of this world; nirvana is of a realm where words have no purchase. In deriving one aspect of Chan (Zen) linguistic skepti‑ cism from the Zhuangzi, Youru Wang has argued that the Chan interpret‑ ation of “dependent arising” (pratītyasamutpāda) as applying to speech and silence may pass through Zhao: “Speech and silence no longer have their self‑identity, for one always functions in relation to the other, and always has its absent presence in the other. Sengzhao’s saying—‘Speech always has something unspoken’—might be a good footnote to the Chan notion of the speech‑silence relation. Chan masters might add one more point to Sengzhao’s saying: silence always speaks.”16 It would probably be too much to say that the belief in a pratītyasamutpāda of speech and silence, which Wang finds in Chan, is also present in Zhao (as Wang does not aver), but there is at least the strong hint here of a relation—not far off from the Derridean “strange dialogue of speech and silence.” Despite the striking suitability of the Daoist rhetoric to the expos‑ ition of nirvana, though, the most interesting way in which the rhetoric is deployed is in establishing the social context of the discussion, in the introductory dedication to the emperor. For in fact, the entirety of the treatise is formulated as an exposition of an offhand theological speculation of the emperor; Zhao credits him with originating the titular assertion, that “Nirvana is without name,” and Zhao figures himself as attempting, with some trepidation, to explicate the abstruse wisdom of the emperor for the benefit of the larger Buddhist community. In this dedication, various allusions and tropes of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism are all used in praise of the sage‑king; but the first and most prominent are those of Daoism: Seng-chao says: I have learned that “Heaven reaches Oneness by being pure, Earth reaches Oneness by ruling the World.” [Laozi 39] Bowing before your Majesty’s wisdom and sagacity, (I say): Tao harmonizes with your spirit. Mysteriously you act (without

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acting) in complete conformity (with the Order of Nature), as does the “centre of the circle” (which enables the gate to turn freely on its hinges, itself being unmoved). [Zhuangzi 2, 27] You manage your thousand affairs as easily as “a master‑butcher wields his knife” [Zhuangzi 3] (and yet you have time to) propagate the Tao all day. You shield your people. Your written statements become laws (for your subjects). So it is said: “In the Universe there are four things that are great, and Royalty is one of them.”17 The final quotation is from Laozi 25, the same quote that had been of great importance to Wang Bi; slightly later in this opening, he alludes again to the Zhuangzi in describing the friendship between Kumārajīva and the emperor; the effect is to amalgamate the power of the state with the mastery of the just‑departed religious authority, and, by the very act of explicating a cryptic statement, to elevate both in authority as those deserving explication. The laconic nature of the ruler’s statement on nirvana associates him with nirvana, even as it downgrades the value of the explication, by a familiarly Daoist equation: those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak. Doubtless, Zhao intended to use Daoist rhetoric instrumentally, as a means of making clear the ineffability of Nirvana with a philosophical lan‑ guage most familiar to the Chinese community. At a minimum, we can say that the growing Buddhist preference to break away from Daoist language had not yet become determinative, but this does not in itself equate to a deliberate arche‑semiotic program. Again, though, this is beside the point— the habitual is more revealing than the programmatic. In this case, Zhao is clearly taking the basic structure of the ineffability of Dao and mapping that directly onto the concept of Nirvana. The denial of the “residue” of Nirvana that structures much of the dialogue in the fourth essay is, in effect, a way of hitching arche‑semiotics onto ontology. If the sign is a word in the world, made up of stuff, and the realm of Nirvana is utterly immaterial, there can be nothing in such a referent onto which a sign could stick. This is an opposite arche‑semiotic impulse to that of Ge Hong, who had sought to explain the sign as a refinement into wen of the merely physical object; Zhao, dealing with a much more mysterious referent, can only place the sign itself within the realm of the hopelessly physical. And the hinge between these two worlds is the emperor. As Chinese emperors go, Yao Xing was notably not a master of the physical realm: he is remembered as a capable ruler, but the Later Qin was never in a very strong position. Zhao’s “read‑ ing” of him as expressed in this fourth treatise is a brilliant bit of flattery,

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figuring the emperor as almost a half‑immaterial presence, mysterious and in need of explication to the merely human intellectual community; putting this figuration in recognizably Daoist terms accords him a sort of honorary Han identity (the dynasty was in fact established by the Qiang ethnicity), legitimizing him in comparison with the Later Qin’s non‑Chinese competi‑ tors among the post‑Jin northern kingdoms. In this regard, it is a rhetorical move akin to both Wang Bi’s Daoist praise of Confucian authority, and the Celestial Masters’ devotion to a not‑quite‑there Laozi. Although the above passages are perhaps most useful in explicating the centrality of arche‑semiotics and its political context to Zhao, it is the third of the four treatises, “On Prajñã’s Lacking Knowledge,” that is the most useful in tracing how such ideals spread out and circulated more broadly, in the south as well as in Chang’an. For an appendix to the treatise contains a letter with several questions by the devout southern layman Liu Yimin, as well as Zhao’s response. From the correspondence, we can know that the treatise was brought south by Zhao’s colleague Zhu Daosheng and shared with the most important southern Buddhist center, at Mt. Lu. Much more will be said below about the nature of these connections, and how they helped spread certain arche‑semiotic ideas within mainstream southern literary culture. For now it is sufficient to ask, If this third treatise is the primary example of textual exchange between the northern and southern Buddhist communities, what exactly were the arche‑semiotic attitudes that the text carried south, and what were the reactions to these attitudes on Mt. Lu? The basic content of the treatise is to address a traditional epistemological issue that already had a long history in Sanskrit texts, and which Zhao had learned from Kumarajiva. In that tradition, prajñã, variously translated as “wisdom,” “understanding,” “cognition,” etc., is the sort of correct insight into the nature of reality that is possessed by the enlightened. However, there is a problem: Of what objects could such wisdom be considered knowledge? For all acts of cognition do seem to have to have objects that are realized; yet in standard Buddhist ontologies, any given object would be illusory; attempting to “know” such objects (even negative objects such as “nothingness,” which are also illusory) would, it seems, merely corrupt the act of knowing. But if understanding is of nothing (not even “nothingness”), then is not this simply to say that the highest wisdom is unconsciousness? Throughout the treatise, Zhao insists that prajñã is a real kind of cognition, which nevertheless involves no knowledge of objects. This traditional Buddhist epistemological debate is often couched in the terms of Daoist arche‑emiotics, from the opening lines, where Zhao tells

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of Kumarajiva’s struggle with the issue in India, “He alone rose above the surface of words and symbols; in a mysterious way he entered the ‘plain region beyond the senses’18 [獨拔於言象之表 , 妙契於希夷之境。].”19 How‑ ever, it is important to realize that this is more than simply an essentially ontological debate which is occasionally being couched in arche‑semiotic terms; the problems of arche‑semiotics condition which kind of answers can be given. Consider the second objection raised by the fictional interlocutor after the main exposition, and Zhao’s response in his own voice: Opponent: Because things fail to reveal their nature by them‑ selves, names are used for this purpose. The names are not the things but certainly there are things that can be named, and which agree with their names. That is why things cannot hide if they are called by their proper names. But you said that the Mind of the Sage “is not cognizant” and that “there is nothing that it does not cognize.” These two statement[s] repudiate each other. We are told this by the Rationalists. [mingjiao] Besides, it is a fundamental principle in logic. You propose that such contradictory attributes be applied to the Mind of the Sage, notwithstanding its oneness. But as soon as we try them out, they appear to be inappropriate . . .  Author: A Sūtra says: “Prajñā means an unnameable, undefinable, not existent, not non‑existent, not real, not unreal (entity) which, though a blank, is (filled) with phenomena which it reflects, and that, though it reflects, is a blank.” It is a nameless dharma, therefore not definable in speech. Though this is so, speech is a necessity if we want to preach it. Thus the Sages always speak and never speak, and I too shall try to expound (this paradox) to you in my inadequate language . . .  (Substantially) unfathomable, without content—, impossible to maintain: it exists. In application, exhibiting constantly (varying forms)—, impossible to maintain that it does not exist. (It follows that) The cognition of the Sage does exist, Though it is not a subject of rational thinking.20 The relevance of this passage is even greater than appears from Liebenthal’s translation—with which there are no serious problems, except for a lack of interest in the more literary‑critical aspects of the text, and an over‑fondness

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for European categories. He translates as “Rationalists” and “rational” the phrase, mingjiao, which of course, as discussed in chapter 3, refers to the stale and politicized version of Confucianism prominent during the last decades of the Han, rather than anything even faintly akin to Descartes. A statement of needing to search behind the letter of the text (wen) to find the reality behind it (shi) is likewise simplified and flattened into “as soon as we try them out.” Nonetheless, despite these more obscure points, the text is inescapably about the relationship of the name to the object, and whether that relationship is a reliable one, especially when one begins to speak of abstract notions. Zhao’s basic position is that there can be a prajñā that operates without objects of knowledge, precisely because the names given to the terms in this debate (such as “existence” or “nonexistence”) are not adequate vehicles for understanding those things they purport to represent. If the names can be detached from the objects they appear to represent, then the quasi‑structuralist argument against non‑object‑oriented wisdom falls apart. What gets transmitted to the south ultimately seems to be a strong statement of the alliance of arche‑semiotic scepticism to Buddhist ontological realism. If the physical world is inferior to the spiritual world, and the latter has a reality to it that simply cannot ever be adequately described by the physical stuff of linguistic signs, then the correct path for knowing truth must be nondiscursive. Consider his final admonition to Liu Yimin and the other monks of Mt. Lu: Words like footprints are not the same as what produced them. Sometimes words contain more than they say; footprints suggest more than just footprints. A master of words looks for what is behind them. The initial principle, the Unfathomable behind the phenomena, as soon as one begins reasoning (about it) one is already on the wrong track, far more so if one goes on to talking. I wonder whether my exposition is sufficiently clear, and only hope that you profound‑minded gentlemen will be able to supplement what I could not express in script.21 The footprint (or, the “trace”) is, like language, an impression in the physical of something otherwise absent. This is a practical literary‑critical problem: how does one understand that which lies outside the text (wen wai)? But it is also a structuring problem, one cannot separate the arche‑semiotic from the ontological, because as soon as one tries, using language, to imitate in

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the mind the mysteries of being, one must necessarily go astray. Hence, enlightenment is not achieved by the learning of true propositions, but by the shifting of consciousness. It is a powerful thought, and one that would ultimately support the development of the notion of sudden enlighten‑ ment, which was to be such a major hallmark in the evolution of Chinese Buddhism. That development was not about arche‑semiotics: but certain arche‑semiotic issues had to be cleared away before it could happen, and the southern circulation of this northern text seems to have helped prepare the grounds for this evolution. As one should be able to glean from the above examples, the technical sophistication of early Chinese Buddhist philosophy was considerable. The focus on ontology and its relation to language was not entirely new to the Chinese tradition. As mentioned in the Introduction, the School of Names had already broached such subjects; the Laozi and Zhuangzi reacted against those debates with their own more poetic takes on ontology; and Wang Bi and other Obscurist writers returned to them again in somewhat different ways. But Zhao was largely taking terms and metaphors from that native discursive history to explain his position within a much more systematized set of debates inherited from Sanskrit and Pali texts, as well as in‑person debates within the Buddhist clergy. It is not quite as large a disruption as if one had suddenly borrowed Chinese Daoist terminology to translate the concepts of medieval European debates over realism and nominalism, but we should not be lulled into complacence by the familiarity of Daoist termin‑ ology in these texts. There was a consciousness on the part of all involved that Buddhist philosophy represented a set of ideas that were very new, and which one had to carefully match to a language in which there had been resonant discourses, but no extended technical debates on the same topics. Curiously, though, the Buddhist sutras espoused doctrines unusually open to translation (even if confoundingly difficult to translate in practice). Unlike the Abrahamic sacred texts with which Derrida was primarily con‑ cerned (or, for that matter, the Shangqing scriptures), it is more difficult to univocally say that for the South Asian schools of Buddhism, their texts contained a “unique, irreplaceable, and untransferable event.”22 The histor‑ ical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, was never quite unique: Buddhahood was something to be achieved, though the method of achieving it was one of the most hotly debated topics in the religion. And, similarly, the boundaries around canonical sacred scriptures—while sacred!—were never quite as universally defined or policed as those appertaining to the Bible or the Quran. There was certainly no equation of the Buddha with the logos

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incarnate. Hence, translation was difficult, but never adjacent to heresy: the ethical responsibility of Chinese Buddhist translators was never quite to the text itself. Eventually, the relative ambivalence of the Buddhist tradition to the material language of its own scriptures may have encouraged these translators to realize new theologies through their consciousness of linguistic disparity. When, through translation, one has the sudden sense of “getting it,” one must also come to a faith in an “it” beyond language. They were not necessarily correct: it may be that the Daoist discursive wineskins into which they were pouring Buddhist conceptual wine changed its character considerably. But the felt arche‑semiotic experience of matching idea to word (and of failing to match them) may have heightened the perception of a possible enlightenment waiting somewhere very nearby. In order to see the effects of that feeling, it is necessary to trace the path of translation and doctrine south, into the dynasties still controlled by ethnically Chinese houses.

North‑South Arche‑Semiotics: Daoan, Huiyuan, and Zhu Daosheng Zhao’s use of Buddhist philosophy and Daoist rhetoric to flatter the royal house does fit in well with the standard narrative of period Buddhism: unlike in the south, where monasteries and temples were supported by the regional aristocracy and therefore maintained both social and intellectual independence, the northern sangha is known for having been integrated with the organs of central state power. And the political divisions between north and south have not merely been incorporated into academic Buddhology, but have severed the approaches of other disciplines as well. Art history has always been more interested in the iconographic statuary of the north; while literary history, almost completely lacking northern texts and evidence of northern literary culture, has always written off the northern dynasties and focused exclusively on the south. These foci are justified by what is extant: one cannot study that which has not been left behind. But one should not make the mistake of assum‑ ing that therefore the truth of intellectual history is that the northern and southern dynasties were hermetically sealed worlds. The southern movement of the Jin was not complete, even among elites, and Tuoba rule over the north did not eradicate the local Chinese population any more than would that of the Mongols or Manchus centuries later. Family ties, trade routes,

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and religious networks continued to span the north‑south divide; and if such motions were reduced, they were nonetheless still robust enough to support the real circulation of intellectual influence. In fact, we have records of multiple sets of correspondence between the northern and southern sangha, in particular the Chang’an community, and the most important southern Buddhist center, at Mount Lu. And it is worth tracing the unfolding of this influence, because it was largely effected by three generations of monks whose interests in (and struggles with) translation helped keep alive the issue of arche‑semiotics and bring it from the translation efforts in Chang’an into the mainstream of southern literary culture. This intellectual north‑south trade begins before the establishment of Chang’an as a center of translation. Shi Daoan (釋道安, 312–385) was born in northern China, in what is now Hebei province; he was apprenticed at a young age to a local Buddhist monk. After several years of simple farm work, it was discovered that Daoan had an aptitude for learning, and he was sent to the city of Yecheng, in modern Henan, to study under the central Asian monk Fo Tuteng, (佛圖澄, traditionally dated 232–348!), who had regional fame and had served at the royal court for a period. Among Tuteng’s other students was Faya, the coiner of the phrase geyi, and as appears in the passage cited previously, Daoan and Faya seemed to be close discussion partners; in this early period, at least, Daoan does also seem to have been a fan of geyi exegetical methods. He began an intense study of both the prajñā and dhyāna traditions, and wrote a series of commentaries on the dhyāna translations of An Shigao. These works were some of the earliest translations of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, and were heavily laden with terminology drawn from Confucian and Daoist classics; by the fourth century, when other, more complete information on Buddhism was available in China, those earlier editions were very much in need of the commentary that Daoan provided. His commentaries spread his fame; when political turmoil arose, he fled south across the border into the Jin, and stayed at Xiangyang, where he attracted a large following, essentially starting his own temple school there. When the Former Qin dynasty (351–394) attacked and wrested Xiangyang from the Jin in 379, Daoan’s students mostly scattered farther south, but he himself was brought as a sort of spiritual war booty back to the northern capital at Chang’an. There, he worked until his death on bibliographical and translation projects that had been started in Xiangyang, and prepared the way for the translation project that Kumarajiva would begin fifteen years later. As Daoan was being carried north, one of his favored disciples traveled south into the heart of Jin‑controlled territory. Shi Huiyuan (334–416),

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originally from the northwest, had had a thorough education in both Confu‑ cian and Daoist traditions; as in many other hagiographies, he is presented as progressing upward from Confucianism, to Daoism, and then finally to true enlightenment with Buddhism, upon his hearing the preaching of Daoan. After the fall of Xiangyang, he had intended to go the far south, in modern Guangdong, and live there as a mountain hermit; however, he met up with another former student of Daoan who had settled at Mt. Lu, in northern Jiangxi, and also took up residence there. They established the famous Eastern Grove Monastery, and Huiyuan began to attract his own disciples. The exact process by which Huiyuan gained a reputation and a following in the Jin is not exactly clear; however, because his wide learning in Confucian and Daoist traditions is often stressed, as is that of some of his most prominent disciples, he seems to have been a particularly effective voice for Buddhism within the “secular” circles of the Jin. Certainly, one of his most famous writings is the treatise, “On Monks’ Not Respecting of Kings [沙門不敬王者論],” a thoroughgoing defense of the sangha against proposed regulation by the state, and it helped establish the independence of the clergy in the south for the rest of the Southern Dynasties. In any case, the community that gathered about him at Mt. Lu is remembered as one of the most famous in Chinese Buddhism: in 402, Huiyuan and a group of 123 disciples took a collective vow of dedication to the Amitabha Buddha, with an intent to be reborn in the paradise of the west. Later ages (falsely) asserted that this group of 123 called themselves the “White Lotus Society,” a name later applied to various other secret societies; in addition, the later denomination of Pure Land Buddhism traced their origin to this vow, and named Huiyuan as its first patriarch (though he certainly did not intend to found a new sect). Throughout the imperial period, Mt. Lu remained one of the centers of Chinese Buddhism, largely on the strength of this initial impulse. In 404, the Eastern Jin tried to establish a sort of détente with the Later Qin dynasty, which was then in control of the area around Chang’an, and as part of their warming relations, religious exchanges were established between the southern and northern monasteries. Huiyuan began exchanging letters with Kumarajiva on the nature of dharma; in addition, he sent one of his own favorite disciples, Zhu Daosheng, to join Kumarajiva’s transla‑ tion project. Daosheng (道生, ca. 360–434), also from a northern family, but raised in the south, had entered the monastic life as a boy. At first, he was a disciple of Zhu Fatai, the monk who had been a fellow student of Daoan and Faya under Fo Tuteng;23 he only joined Huiyuan’s community at Mt. Lu as a mature adult, in 397. Daosheng was in Chang’an for only

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a few years, from 405 or 406 until 409. However, while there he was an active participant in the translation of the Lotus Sutra, and when he left Chang’an for the south, and the Jin capital of Jiankang (modern Nanjing), he brought with him Zhao’s On the Namelessness of Nirvana, and was the conduit for that work’s influence in the south. (One of the appendices to the treatise is Zhao’s response to certain queries raised by Daosheng and his co‑religionists at Mt. Lu.) Daosheng stayed in the capital for two decades, until made unwelcome by an unorthodox stance on the issue of universal salvation (see below); he then returned to Mt. Lu, where he was to die. Thus, over three generations, we have a clear pattern emerge of north‑south exchange. Daoan, a northerner, moves south as his fame grows, and sends his disciples farther south even as he goes back north to Chang’an and helps set the stage for Kumarajiva and the great translation project of the first years of the fifth century. Huiyuan, his student, maintains contact with Kumarajiva on the issue of essences and Buddha‑nature, and how they should be represented. And then Huiyuan’s student Daosheng works together in that same translation studio as Zhao, and brings his own arche‑­ semiotic speculations back to the Jin capital—the perfect place for them to be absorbed into the court literati culture. The clear reality of north‑south intellectual exchange over the three generations outlined above does contradict the assumptions of standard literary historiography. With a few isolated exceptions, there is little extant literature of note from the Northern dynasties, if one thinks of literature in terms of literati poetry and belles‑lettres. Those were the product of aristo‑ cratic elites and courtiers, who largely accompanied the dynastic household in its flight south—and among those who remained behind, there were few institutions interested in or able to preserve their writings through the frequent upheavals and dynastic changes of the fourth- and fifth‑century north. However, Buddhist monasteries were able and willing to preserve the record of their own intellectual achievements through the period—and of course, these north‑south exchanges of texts assisted in the preservation. And this was a period in which Chinese Buddhism was first beginning to think how to correctly make sense of a jumble of imports, and thus to ser‑ iously grapple with issues of translation and textual circulation. Thus, even without literature, the north had its own “literary” criticism. The problems of arche‑semiotics are not the only feature of this literary criticism, nor the most prominent—but the arche‑semiotic habits and assumptions developed out of this north-south axis did clearly spill over into the mainstream of southern literary history.

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So, then—What are these arche‑semiotic habits? Apart from his commentaries, little remains extant of Daoan’s writings, except for his prefaces to several editions found during his bibliographical labors. As a genre, prefaces are not a good place for finding extensive dis‑ quisitions on a given topic, but they are excellent for understanding basic assumptions and attitudes. In the case of Daoan, at least in his early career, before he grew dissatisfied with the geyi technique, it is clear that he is still assuming an audience accustomed to Daoist rhetoric: According to their thusness [tathātā, 真如], to roam that which is darkly without name in the dharma‑essence—this is the inner chamber of wisdom. To dream from afar of names and systems [名教], this is a thatched hut of wisdom. Thus, all those who get stuck on evidence stare at the vanity of their lives and are bewildered. Those who get stuck on traces, all are angered at the swirling dark, and slander it. When the Way moves, it must return [道動必反]: superior and inferior manifest their differences; are not dazzlement and slander appropriate to them?24 The overall impression of this passage is strikingly of the style of xuanxue, and not merely in its dismissal of mingjiao; in case one misses the effect, Daoan includes a very slightly altered text of Laozi—the whole brief chapter 40 is of relevance: Turning back is how the way moves; [反者道之動] Weakness is the means the way employs. The myriad creatures in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing.25 The context, grounding existence in nonexistence, is surely what brought the quotation to mind; otherwise, there is nothing particular in these sentiments concerned with returning motions. And it is clear that this Buddhist version of xuanxue is obsessed with the materiality of perception and its destruc‑ tive potential—and that the mistrust of names grows out of this antipathy for the material substance out of which names are made. This is essentially the same stance as can be found in more depth in the Zhao Treatises, as discussed above; Daoan’s presence in Chang’an before the period of Zhao’s activity at least raises the possibility that he was a source for the later monk’s arche‑semiotic approaches. As at the end of the third treatise, we here even

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have the comparison of language with the “trace,” ji.26 This trace is of course not Derrida’s playful absence‑of‑presence; as with the Celestial Masters, it is simple physical presence, naively obscuring the absence where enlightenment is found. Names, evidences, traces, worldly honors, life itself—these are all marks of hopeless devotion to the material realm, the place where one gets stuck. There are few elaborated theories of arche‑semiotics to be found in this period, but there are clear stances of arche‑semiotic mistrust, which grow organically out of the spiritual temperament of the times. However, Daoan’s arche‑semiotics are more complex than this. Granted that in several places in his writing there is a clear association of the sign with a materiality to be transcended, there are also seemingly contradictory formulations. The preface to the Sutra of Explication of the Ten Dharmas starts with conventional suspicion of the world of samsara, and then becomes stranger when it delves into arche‑semiotics: That which stimulates desire, is the mass of change and transform‑ ation; when this flounders about and becomes a teaching, how could one find an end [to take hold of ]? Thus, right perception is moved by the mind, and this is named, “a sutra.” The cessa‑ tion of what is bent is named, “right”; the cessation of chaos is named “settled.” Square or round follow from the vessel. . . . If the one follows the vessel, then the name is established from its substance.  .  .  .  When in establishing a name, there is no constant name, then one has the divine way.27 This is terribly confusing with respect to the substantiality of the sign‑referent relation. We start with a strong statement of a Buddhist idealist position, the need for thought to guide perception rather than the other way around; and the acts of naming that follow seem to confirm the priority of the noema: the name sutra (or classic) is derived from an abstract process;28 while rightness and settledness are named out of the absence of other abstractions. However, Daoan then offers an act of naming from an unspecified but clearly material vessel, named square or round depending on its substance; and then this act of naming the material is mysteriously subverted with the clearly Daoist formulation, “in establishing a name there is no constant name.” This passage seems to be more of a congeries of habitual ways of talk‑ ing about names, rather than a coherent semiotic theory—which, of course, Daoan had no intention of writing. It is quite impossible to determine from

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the above passage whether or not names “ought” to be attached to a stable referent (be that a physical object or an abstraction); the early confidence in acts of naming is undercut by the Daoist truism at the end. However, granted that one ought not to be looking for a theory of semiotics here, it is possible to note a basic arche‑semiotic orientation: namely, that the name is not here treated as the merely physical manifestation that must be overcome in order to access spiritual truth. Whatever the physical status of any given referent might be, there is no bias (as in the previous example, as well as in the Zhao Treatises) against the sign as necessarily occupying the space of physical manifestation. Fuller and more consequential expressions of the same set of competing arche‑semiotic impulses, along with further complications, can be seen in his annotation of An Shigao texts. Daoan opens one such text, the Preface to the Land of the Way Sutra, with an overtly Daoist description of nirvana, including traditional Daoist suspicion of language: The Land of the Way is the mysterious hall of answering‑to‑truth, the inner chambers of ascending to immortal‑hood. The ram‑ parts of no‑origin are obscure and hard to scale; the walls of non‑action are lofty and hard to cross, and through the subtle gates and miraculous doors few can espy the rooms inside. Is there a vessel equal to the sea? In using it, one could draw daily from it and not exhaust it; in returning its essence, one could pour back infinitely without filling it. Its appearance is vast and at rest, continuing ever on, silent and unspeaking; how many can discourse on it?29 From there, Daoan goes on to describe the death of the Buddha, and the shock of the cutting off of his teaching; however, the gathered disciples col‑ lected various odds and ends of his teachings and compiled them into such a book. Then the preface turns to the entrance of the book into China: There was a Bodhisattva named Shigao, who was prince of Par‑ thia. He abdicated his throne . . . changed his countenance and practiced the Way, crossing the borders to spread his teaching, and accustomed himself to this country, and the instruction he passed was subtle and profound. He excerpted seven chapters of this anthology and translated it into Chinese. The tones were

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elegant and substantial, sincere in its simplicity; some of the text changed the substance to follow the [needs of the] prose, other parts of it were only based on the substance with no ornamen‑ tation. Great was Shigao’s examination of the other meanings!30 One can almost feel the hagiographic weight here. The sacrifice of An Shigao, like that of Shakyamuni himself in giving up his own kingdom, leads to effusive praise of a translation that, if one reads between the lines, seems to have been recognized as not very good. The text is simple (as one might expect from a second‑language learner’s composition); it is “sincere” (dun) in the fashion of a bad bit of verse. And the translation is inconsistent, sometimes changing the meaning for the sake of the text, and sometimes presenting an accurate text without much style. Apart from the interest one might attach to this rare bit of translation criticism, there is a more important change from the previously cited preface. There, language belonged to the realm of the physical, and hence was suspect in its ability to signify spiritual meanings. Here, however, meaning is substantial zhi, in comparison to the decorative wen. Despite the Daoist opening, this is a much more Confucian mode of conceiving the relationship of meaning to expression. It is not possible to give a simple resolution to these contradictory impulses: we must simply admit that Daoan did not have a unified per‑ spective on arche‑semiotics. Sometimes he believed in a physical sign to be transcended via Daoist‑flavored Buddhist enlightenment; at other times, he took a physical world at face value, and used traditional literary critical language describing the need to match style to substance. Perhaps, if there were a more stable way to date Daoan’s writings, it would be possible to trace some sort of development in his arche‑semiotic thought. However, without that ordering, all that it is possible to say is that Daoan was a tran‑ sitional figure, clearly rooted in traditional rhetoric of representation while also learning to adapt that rhetoric to the needs of Buddhist epistemology. When one turns from Daoan to his student Huiyuan, there is some‑ what more clarity in the endorsement of an arche‑semiotics of transcendence, sublimating the physicality of the sign into inexpressible meaning. So, one can find interesting hints scattered throughout his writings. In a very Buddhist vein, he writes, “If a mirror is polished, dust will not stick to it, and one’s image can be seen; looking deeply, one’s understanding pierces to the subtleties, and name and reality are equally mysterious.”31 Or again, he writes in a more clearly literary‑critical mode in a letter to Liu Yimin (the layman for whose questions regarding his third treatise Seng Zhao

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wrote lengthy explanations): “If one takes up brush to compose, one can entrust his inspiration to this; though words are born from insufficiency, yet without words one has nothing with which to make clear the level of one’s feeling.”32 This is a common enough sentiment; but the phrasing, “born from insufficiency,” is odd enough to suggest a hint of ontology behind the traditional declaration of the failure of representation. And the fact that the letter opened with a praise of Lao‑Zhuang as having helped him realize the vacuity of mingjiao Confucianism adds to the sense that there is a deeply embedded influence of Daoist arche‑semiotics here as well. But the most important, and also most suggestive, source for under‑ standing Huiyuan’s arche‑semiotics is in his most important work, On Monks’ Not Respecting of Kings. This is not what one might expect: the work concerns a topic, church‑state relations, that one might naturally assume to be relentlessly political, if not entirely free from metaphysical speculation. There is nothing in any of the five chapters that could be called a theory of semiotics. But there is an intellectual predilection that does bleed over into arche‑semiotic suggestions in Huiyuan’s work, as in that of his con‑ temporaries: the core Buddhist preference for the spiritual over the physical realm is translated first into a lesson in the limits of perception, and from there into an analysis of intellectual history: Question: “In looking over previous history, since the former emperors, whoever has been on the throne in the place of his ancestors, has never altered from this origin. Origins cannot be double; thus all the classics of all the ages are unified in the principle that “Only heaven is great, and only Yao measures it.” Thus, it is not that wisdom does not cover something, but that there is nothing outside it to be covered; it is not that principle have something that cannot be exhausted, but that there is no principle to be exhausted. Extrapolating on from this, beyond vision and hearing, there is no place in which one could lodge  .  .  .  Answer: The obscure guards the vastnesses, the divine way is essential and subtle; it can be sought by principle, but is hard to be investigated by worldly affairs. Since you have touched on religion, the standard must be what is of the age, although it answers to the vision of the age, there are myriad differences in excellence and inferiority. . . . Therefore, “Those who spoke of the Great Way in ancient times could count to five in the

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sequence [described above] and pick out ‘forms and names,’ or count to nine and discuss ‘rewards and punishments’33 [是以古 之語大道者 , 五變而形名可舉 , 九變而賞罰可言].” But these are just differences among what is inside, and if they could still not be arranged in order, then what of what lay beyond them?34 The key word in the above passage is wai, the external: though not used to discuss arche‑semiotics, its own arche‑semiotic slippage bridges the concepts of externality to the physical world, externality to perception, externality to Chinese intellectual history, and externality to the Chinese social order as embodied by the Jin state. The same issues that for his teacher, Daoan, and his student, Daosheng, would be a function of translation (bringing the realm of pure, Sanskrit and Pali meaning‑without‑presence, into the recalcitrantly physical structures of Chinese) is here expressed as a political formulation. And (assuming that the interlocutor is not merely a fictional straw man, but has some basis in the actual objections raised to the political status of the southern sangha) it is noteworthy that the basic dichotomies are accepted by both sides in this debate. China is the place, “here,” where sagely wisdom has examined all that is; to go out “there,” beyond the bor‑ ders of that tradition, would necessarily entail going beyond the physical world. The structure of arche‑semiotics, already mapped onto ontology by Daoan and Zhao, is here also mapped on to the boundaries of ethnicity and translation. Monks are not subordinate to the king ultimately because they are subjects of another ontology’s kingdom, and the words and titles of the Jin royalty have no appropriate reference out there. Huiyuan’s polite defiance of secular authority was not replicated in his student Daosheng. A telling anecdote from the Lives of Eminent Monks is reminiscent of Western Jin literati’s willingness to use the expansiveness of verbal signs for political accommodation. Later, Emperor Taizu [of the Liu‑Song] had a banquet, and he himself sat together with the assembled monks on the ground. The food was long in coming, and they all were afraid that the day was getting late; but the emperor said, “It’s just noon now.” Sheng said, “The white sun is attached to heaven; if heaven says it is just noon, how could it not be noon?” And thereupon he picked up his bowl and ate, and all followed him; and none but sighed at his critical accommodation.35

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However, the main arche‑semiotic issues that arise in examination of Daosheng do pick up on, and clearly extend, Huiyuan’s interest in translation. No doubt this is related to Daosheng’s actual participation in the translation project of Kumarajiva, and his frustrations with the process of translation. Consider another, undated anecdote from the GSZ biography, where Daosheng has recourse to the trap analogy of Zhuangzi: Sheng pondered long in private until he awoke to “what is beyond words.” He sighed deeply and said, “Forms exist to reveal their meaning. When the meaning is clear, words can be discarded. Words are used to convey the principle. When the principle is clear, all words cease. Now, ever since these sutras came east, translators have been hampered by obstacles. Most of them stick to the literal meaning, and few ever see the complete meaning. However, it is only when one can drop the trap and grab the fish that one can finally speak of the [D]ao.”36 Here, as Whalen Lai notes, Daosheng is following Wang Bi’s version of the metaphor, rather than Zhuangzi directly. It is not that words are of use in getting to the meaning, and can then be forgotten; but that words are actually a hindrance to understanding. Translators have been hung up on the words of the text; they have become stumbling blocks to enlightenment. One should simply put the trap to one side, grab the fish of meaning directly. This attitude of mistrusting translation to the point where he was willing to simply discard the letter of the text, lay at the root of the controversy that ultimately saw Daosheng expelled from his monastery in Jiankang in 429. During this period, two translations of the Mahayana version of the Nirvana Sutra were made in the north: an abbreviated one by Faxian (the 大般尼元經) and a fuller one by Dharmakshema (the 大 般涅磐經). The first of these translations was reached the southern capital first, and seemed to suggest in one passage that salvation was denied to the reprobate, the icchantikas (一闡提); based upon his understanding of Mahayana doctrine as asserting the universal possession of Budda‑nature, Daosheng would not accept this reading. He argued forcefully that this must be an error, and that even the icchantikas were capable of enlighten‑ ment, challenging what seemed to be the plain meaning of a text attributed directly to Shakyamuni. Perhaps too argumentative for his own good, he was expelled from his monastery in the capital, and went back to Mt.

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Lu—but was vindicated when the Dharmakshema translation reached the south shortly afterward. Most curious of all, though, is that this arche‑semiotic mistrust seems to have affected the way in which Daosheng formulated his theory of sud‑ den enlightenment. In the history of Chinese Buddhism, it is this aspect of his thought for which he is most remembered, because it places him squarely as an antecedent of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Whalen Lai has argued convincingly that Daosheng’s formulation is directly related to Kumarajiva’s explanation of the one‑vehicle doctrine of the Lotus Sutra. This doctrine, of course, comes from the famous parable of the burning house, in which a father tricks his sons into salvation by promising them that three different play‑carts are outside; when they rush out, they discover only one type of cart. Lai cites Daosheng’s own commentary to the sutra: The three vehicles follow external form, the manifestations of which run contrary to the essential principle. Those who are captivated with mere words and who choose to go contrary to the real, hidden intention are naturally taken aback by this Mahayana hymn. The Buddha, when he was about to reveal the Lotus of the True Law, first led people by a gentle discourse on its infinite meanings. For those people who have long kept to outer manifesta‑ tions, suddenly hearing that there are not in truth three vehicles all at once contradicts what they are fond of. Thus they are like those people who, though catching a glimpse of the promised shore, decide to turn back, thereby losing the great way. For that reason, the gradual is necessary.37 In its original form, the parable is known as a sort of ecumenical reassurance: there are multiple practices associated with the various sects of Buddhism, but these are all (if incomplete realizations of the truth) capable of leading toward salvation. But Daosheng’s commentary focuses not so much on the meaning of the parable as on its reception—that there are those offended by the notion that the Buddha could be deceptive. They can be offended only because they “have long kept to outer manifestations”—thinking that the offered outer image might be something reliable, they are not in the habit of going straight for truth, without regard for words. Gradualism in salvation is necessary to allow those attached to external appearance to

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accustom themselves to truth—but in fact if one can learn to bypass the outer signs of things, there is no obstacle to sudden enlightenment. Reading (especially possibly corrupt texts of dubious translations) takes time; thought without words would be instantaneous. From Daoan, to Huiyuan, to Daosheng, it is possible to trace a development in arche‑semiotic theological impulses as they changed under the constant contact with translation. A mix of various arche‑semiotic impulses in Daoan, Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist, is evident with no discernible order, but among which one can see the first evidence of a Buddhist distaste for the materiality of the sign. This concept was fur‑ ther developed by Seng Zhao, as described in the previous section, and elaborated upon in detail; while Huiyuan, resident at Mt. Lu, started his own associations of the materiality of the sign with the local conditions of the translator’s target language. But the arche‑semiotics of translation was most influential in the writing of Daosheng, who was the key conduit for translation in the north‑south axis, and to whom the need to avoid getting stuck on the merely physical letter of the text ultimately expanded out in his thought to suggest the possibility of sudden enlightenment. Thus, this important stream of Buddhist thought was, like Ge Hong, obsessed with the materiality of the sign—but ultimately provided a different solution to southern literary culture. Rather than positing the literary sign as a refined, sublimated version of the merely physical world, the monks tended to see the sign as itself a physical necessity to be transcended. All of them continued to express these sentiments in Daoist rhetorical tropes, despite the general assumption in casual religious historiography that the methods of geyi were being abandoned. But it is perhaps still fair to say that this Daoist rhetoric was only being used instrumentally, the poor verbal vessels into which one was obligated to squeeze Nirvana. The historicity of these arche‑semiotic impulses within the larger project of Buddhist translation should be obvious, even though these writers were themselves not “historicist.” The relevance of the “subjective premise” posited in the Introduction might seem at first less relevant than the “historical” premise here, but in fact the subjectivity of arche‑semiotics is quite parallel to its historicity. Unlike writers such as Ji Kang and Ruan Ji, who felt intensely their own personal struggles against a hostile social realm, these Buddhist translators would have been theologically committed to the negation of their own self‑identities. However, even those who deny themselves exist within certain models of subjectivity, just as a­ntihistoricists exist within history.

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Repeatedly in the texts quoted above, these three monks reference subjec‑ tivity through processes of perception and judgment, differentiate certain modes of seeing and knowing from others, and ultimately imply that these processes can divide certain kinds of people (ripe for enlightenment) from others (more liable to confusion). And the objects on which these subject‑ ive processes work are, by and large, signs. These signs are not outward manifestations of the self: they are representations of doctrine, or truth, or Buddha‑nature—and in that they find especially useful prior discursive traditions around the unrepresentability of the dao. However, even though it is not the self that is the object of (non-)representation, the need of readers (and translators) to make judgments based on interpretation of the outward forms of sutras is assumed to cause different subjective positionings with respect to Buddhahood. Again, it should be clear how different the semiotics of these transla‑ tors looks from that which might be predicted by comparative philosophy. Heidegger’s Orientalist vision of existence happening from within language might be consonant with the monks’ vision, but with the value structure reversed: they are suspicious of language because they are also suspicious of existence! On the other hand, the Levinas‑Derrida dialogue would seem to predict a debate over theological language in which the primacy of the ethical relation (or the primacy of that relation’s linguistic substrate) is at question; but for the Buddhist translators, questions of ethics per se are far subsidiary to questions of ontology. Here, Derrida’s desire to escape the charge of negative theology may come closest to the Buddhist translators’ predicament, since the tetralemma requires the denial of simple nonexistence. Nonetheless, the ending point of their evolution, Daosheng’s faith in an enlightenment that can happen outside of language, is structurally closer to what Derrida would have called logocentrism (albeit without any logos). However, the way in which these frequent Western comparator texts fail to capture the Buddhist translators’ use of Daoist arche‑semiotic discourse is itself instructive. It reminds us that Western ontological (and anti‑ontological) speculation, and the semiotics that were attendant upon it, were carried on in a context of Judeo‑Christian theism (and Judeo‑Christian atheism): even in twentieth‑century phenomenology one can see the clear traces of medi‑ eval Aristotelianism. Chinese Buddhists had inherited an ontological system just as sophisticated in its delineation, but constructed around different assumptions. The arche‑semiotics echo, because human cognition requires consciousness of signs, but they do not rhyme.

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From Arche‑Semiotics to Poetry: Xie Lingyun Xie Lingyun (謝靈運, 385–433), one of the greatest and most influential of pre‑Tang poets, was the clearest conduit of Buddhist idealism into the liter‑ ary world at the end of the Jin and the beginning of the Liu Song dynasty (420–479). Xie was not merely a devout layman and elite court literatus, he was a devotee and friend of Huiyuan, and a strong supporter of Daosheng on the question of sudden enlightenment. He is listed as a co‑translator of the Dharmakshema version of the Nirvana Sutra which circulated in the south, and probably is responsible for elevating the style into proper literary Chinese.38 Moreover, he is an integral part of the traditional Chinese poetic canon—partly because of his establishment of landscape poetry as a genre that was to come to full fruition under the Tang, but also because of his difficult and innovative lyric style, building up his landscapes out of odd, allusive diction concatenated in unexpected ways. It is an arche‑semiotically playful poetry, which depends upon a consciousness of words as detach‑ able from their ostensible objects of representation. And, even in English scholarship, it has long been recognized that the peculiar qualities of Xie’s difficult lyric style may have something to do with his agreement with Daoist suspicions of names.39 However, Xie was receiving a contextualized Daoism. The significance of some of his allusions can be understood directly from the texts of the Laozi and Zhuangzi, but given Xie’s extensive engagement with the eminent monks of Mt. Lu, it is reasonable to ask to what degree their own traditions of antimaterialist arche‑semiotics may have influenced Xie’s own theories, as well as his poetic practice. Xie was born into a prominent aristocratic Jin family, which possessed the small duchy of Kangle; his grandfather, Xie Xuan (謝玄, 343–388) was a top general of the Jin during its border wars with the Later Qin. Although Lingyun would never wield as much influence as his grandfather; the clan was still on the rise: Cynthia Chennault has shown that among all the branches of the Xie family, Lingyun was in the generation that had the most success in achieving positions of influence within the imperial bureaucracy.40 Xie Lingyun himself joined the Jin civil service in 406, serving first as a military attaché, before moving into a position as a palace secretary several years later. When Liu Yu first announced the establishment of the Song dynasty in 419, Xie Lingyun quickly went over to him, and took a post as a royal steward; nonetheless, because of Liu’s suspicions of the Xie family, his title was reduced from Duke to Baron, and his career advancement ground to

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a halt. He did leave the capital to take up a post as a local governor, but left it after only a year, withdrawing into private life. With the ascension of the new emperor Wen (Liu Yilong 劉義隆, 407–453), Xie was recalled to the capital to take a new post. However, while honored at court as one of the leading writers of the age, and given projects such as the compilation of a History of Jin, Xie was never given any real governance responsibilities, and retired again two years later. After being suspected of plotting against the emperor, Xie was first exiled to the far south (modern Guangzhou), and finally executed in 433. If one wishes to approach question of Xie’s intellectual relation to contemporary Buddhist thought, there is only one place to start: his Treatise on Distinguishing Traditions (與諸道人辯宗論). The work is known to reli‑ gious history as a sort of companion work to Daosheng’s own writings in favor of sudden enlightenment; Xie defends the former’s position vigorously, though a postscript letter from Daosheng makes clear that the two were not in total agreement on the details. However, the ethnic identification of modes of enlightenment is clearly picked up from Daosheng; in responding to a question from an interlocutor on the difference between Buddhism and Confucianism, Xie writes, That which is unalike about the two teachings, is that they are responding to different things in the places they attempt to transform. To compare them broadly, it is the people one must observe. Chinese people can easily see principles, but have diffi‑ culty receiving instruction; thus long study is closed off from us, but the spiritual realms are open. Barbarians receive instruction easily, but have difficulty understanding principle; thus the sudden is closed off from them, but gradual enlightenment is open.41 Even in the ethnocentric terms of ancient China, this dichotomy should have seemed nonsensical: the centrality of study to Confucianism and to the social system of the elites should have been almost as obvious in the fifth century as it appears in retrospect. Clearly, the identification of intellectual with linguistic boundaries, manifested in Huiyuan’s and Daosheng’s writings, is overpowering Xie’s common sense. Unlike them, he does not link those ethnic divisions to arche‑semiotics. However, when he does address arche‑semiotic issues elsewhere in the Treatise, the confluence of Xie’s thinking with that of the monks is apparent: while not bringing ethnic politics into the question of textual meaning, he does adopt a similar

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stance toward the necessary transcendence of text. At the end of the work, for example, he briefly matches Daosheng’s distaste for the letter of the text with an ancient native critical nostrum: Lingyun says, “As soon as one awakes to a principle, it must be asked of the sutras”—this can be called a vulgar saying. For it is an old saying that “the text does not exhaust the thought.” Secluded, and with nothing to do, to for a while search the hard of things with fellow travellers, to pile up embarrassing difficulties, parse words and analyze principles, all of it perfectly exacting—in this way one can search throughout the whole day, and still be as glad as if one had just stopped to chat.42 Such is a fairly gentle, offhand mixing of intellectual streams; by amalgamat‑ ing the current debate over the proper use of sutras to the native tradition, Xie is of course decreasing the consequentiality of the thought. But there is a more deliberate take on arche‑semiotics offered earlier in the work. As one might gather from the above citation of the conclusion, the work is an actual record of debate with real, named interlocutors; in the second part, Xie attempts to answer an objection from the monk Shi Huilin (釋慧琳, ?–?): Buddhists speak of having gradual [salvation], but certainly this is their self‑conception; the Confucians speak of lacking the gradual [in goodness], but certainly this is their self‑description. How can one know that this is really so? [After all,] Confucians’ teaching is that those in the middle can address their superiors, and by long practice can move their natures; Buddhists’ song is that gathering in the yard of the Way, there are no stages of the ten realms. If this issue of “the gradual” is cut off from their writings, and from these two sages’ detailed words, how can it be that only the barbarians are constrained by teachings, while Chinese are bound by principle? . . . Your treatise says, “The way is different from the vulgar; their origins do not touch, so if one forces them together by authority, then one saves the material at the cost of opposing the [Way’s] origin.” I ask: that which authority makes use of—the phenomenal—is not this in the end also as an anxiety? The day of awakening and the sutras’ principles of sunyata, are these mutually exclusive? If they must always turn their backs on “empty sunyata talk,” then it turns

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into groundless blather; but if they support each other from beginning to end, then can they arrive by following a teaching, or not? [為曉悟之日與經之空理 , 都自反邪？若其永背空談 , 翻 為末說 , 若始終相扶 , 可循教而至不？] Xie replied, Though Confucius spoke to his superiors, in speaking of the Classics there are no class distinctions. Buddhists only speak of gathering, but also say that objects have Buddha‑nature. If objects have Buddha‑nature, then there that to which their Way returns, and that which is to be doubted is the gradual teaching. In the [Confucian] sages’ lack of levels, this principle can be valued, and what is to be doubted is virtue. How can these two sages’ different paths be made so by their different lands? Contradictory difficulties, start from this possession’s presence; a long worded essay, is that not but a horned bow? You object saying, “If that forever turns back on empty talk, it turns into end of theories; if they support each other from beginning to end, then one can arrive by following teaching.” This can be called the rhetoric of Gongsun Longzi, a sty for debaters! Wisdom is the root of authority, authority is the use of wisdom. Now if we take the meaning of the sages, this is wisdom, if we come to the words of the sutras then we have authority. If we rely on authority for our examination, then the three vehicles are all snares and traps; since the thought is what is used to adhere to tradition, thus prajna is a fish or hare. Certainly it is because of the stupidity of the people, that the teaching is lengthy. If people all could get the idea, then what would be more valuable than grasping enlightenment?43 This is difficult, dense argumentation on both sides, and it does not help interpretation that neither Huilin nor Xie Lingyun is being entirely logically consistent. Huilin’s basic stance is to argue with Xie’s conception of the truth as something actually opposed to the text. This is, of course, a fundamental pillar of the way in which both he and Daosheng have argued for sudden enlightenment—true enlightenment requires one to go beyond the physical form of the text. For Daosheng, the text can become a hindrance if relied upon without reference to the overall composite of

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Mahayana teachings; Xie Lingyun is somewhat more radical in his rhet‑ oric, and had seemed to suggest that the text of the sutras is necessarily a hindrance to enlightenment. Huilin is, overall, simply trying to argue for a more orthodox attitude with regard to textuality, rather than actively trying to refute Xie’s subitist position on enlightenment. Therefore, he begins by partially conceding the possibility of something akin to sudden enlightenment in Buddhism, as a way of aggressively deconstructing Xie’s weird ethnic essentialism that the letter of the text is for docile Indians only. In the case of both Confucians and Buddhists, the truth of sudden versus gradual enlightenment is more complex than what can be discovered by their explicit statements; hence one cannot ethnically divide textuality, and presumably the question of how to read must be determined from the act of reading itself, rather than by stereotyping. But, Huilin notes, Xie’s statements on the act of reading are also unsatisfactory. He has proposed a schema in which the authoritative interpreter must not try to make the text lucid to the commoner; this simply ruins it by drawing it away from its source in the Way. Huilin’s objection is that the object on which the authoritative interpreter must work, namely, the text, is of course a physical object, which would, by his own theory, presumably be as polluting to the truth as anything the unwashed masses could do. And then Huilin offers a pun: are the sutras which speak of sunyata (kong) just “empty talk” (kong tan) which has nothing to do with enlightenment? Or must enlightenment somehow relate to sunyata, in which case oughtn’t one to be able to reach it via the vanity of the text? Xie is not at all amused by the pun, and denounces it as the argu‑ mentation of Gongsun Longzi. It is relatively surprising to see Gongsun invoked at this late date, but the nature of the invocation is not: Gongsun has become a byword for the kind of logic‑chopping that had been satirized in the Zhuangzi’s critique. Here, Xie’s main objection is that the authority of the interpreter is not an independent faculty that comes to the text to be vitiated by it; rather, it is a name for wisdom in its non‑vitiating encounter with a text. (Presumably, wisdom itself is grounded in the Way; in any case, it assumes an idealist knowledge.) And then Xie comes around to the old Zhuangzian image of the trap and the fish—Buddhified, of course, with a cross‑reference to the parable of the burning house. All three of the “vehi‑ cles” of Buddhist tradition are merely instrumental means to enlightenment, and text is merely an instrumental means toward meaning. And these two dichotomies are, in fact, the same thing: tradition/text is merely a means to achieving enlightenment/meaning. Hence, when one has the latter (fish

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or rabbit), one can discard the former (trap or snare). The very existence of lengthy doctrinal essays (if not the sutras themselves?) proves that the people must be stupid; for why else would they put up with such a bulk of instruction, given that achieving enlightenment/meaning is possible without it? Having examined the context of his engagement with the issue of Buddhist enlightenment, it is important to return to Xie’s poetry, to see in detail how it is structured by that context. It is probably for the best that the classism and ethnocentrism of Xie’s arche‑semiotic habits of thought never really made it into his poetry. However, his focus on the physicality of the sign, and the importance of transcending it, not only appears in his poetry, but is important to understanding the roots of his innovative style. The landscape poetry for which Xie is most famous is inherently contradictory, deriving much of its power from an ambivalence between the landscapes themselves and the ideological formations he brings to them. Donald Holzman perfectly captured this contradictory nature of the landscape poems: “[O]ne could even make a case for considering Xie Lingyun as the first landscape poet to have written great lines of ‘pure,’ unmetaphysical landscape verse, in spite of the enormous debt he owes to the fourth‑century poets and in spite of the fact that he was himself deeply interested in Buddhist metaphysics and that his poetry is filled with allusions to the Taoist philosophers.”44 Fortunately, this ambivalence is highly useful in thinking through Xie’s arche‑semiotics, because it requires the basic practice of matching texts to referents that drives much of Chinese arche‑semiotic practice. One of the best poems with which to investigate how Xie’s arche‑semiotic practice translates into poetic text is his “Entering Huazi Hill, the third valley of Hemp Stream [入華子崗是麻源第三谷].” The suitability of this particular poem comes not merely from the content, nor the style, but also because it has already been examined at some length by Stephen Owen, in an article which has already gone a long way toward saying what needs to be said about Xie’s poetic methods. In “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Lanscapes,” Owen’s purpose is to go beyond erudite if tedious allusion hunting and ask what sort of relationship Xie’s allusive style creates between the poet, the landscapes he is purporting to describe, and the literary antecedents that are often at least as present to him as the objects in front of him. Unlike other poets who use allusion for a demonstration of erudition, or simply as a substitute for the actual experience of a place, Owen argues that Xie’s literary antecedents are something like an organic part of his experience of place—sometimes finding confirmation in the scene and other times disap‑ pointing him. “Entering Huazi Hill” begins with what seems like a strong

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affirmation of the truth of the “Far Roaming [遠遊]” of the Lyrics of Chu (楚辭), but then becomes more hesitant. In Owen’s translation: The Southland is truly of the Fiery Humour, with cassia trees rising over wintry mountains. Bronze Mound shines by an emerald torrent, stone stairs spill over with a reddish spring. It once diverted the course of a recluse, gave roost to a worthy man fled into hiding. Perilous paths not to be fathomed and gauged, Heaven’s roads are no ordinary streets. Then I mounted to the highest of many peaks, so far I seemed mounting the clouds and mists. Of the feathered folk, not the least semblance, Cinnabar Hill is only the empty fish‑trap. Maps and documents have furthermore disappeared, who has heard of stone or wooden inscriptions transmitted? None can make out [the traces] after a hundred generations, who can know of what was here a thousand years before? For a while I indulge my intention to go off alone, in moonlight I amuse myself by the bubbling waters. Constantly it serves to fulfill use for the moment, but how could it be so in past and present?45 Owen places this as an example of the imitation poem (ni, 擬), and perhaps also of a physical retracing (niji, 擬跡): the Yuanyou describes a journey to the fiery south and its cassia trees; Xie opens by admitting it is “truly” fiery. The Yuanyou speaks of a trip to Cinnabar Hill to find the “feathered folk,” and Xie goes to another Cinnabar Hill of his own, and finds them absent. This absence is of course expressed in an allusion to the same passage in Zhuangzi which has figured prominently in this study: the empty fish‑trap. The feathered folk are not there on the Cinnabar hill, as promised; and it is an open question whether the meaning of the Yuanyou has fled as well—were they ever there, as truly as the southland is hot? The poem devolves into disappeared traces, and open questionings, an ending that Owen correctly reads as an unresolved act of doubting the commensur‑ ability of the literary tradition with the lived experience of the landscape. What needs to be added to Owen’s analysis is an understanding of the association of this particular metaphor with questions of the materiality

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of the sign, and larger questions of temporality, as seen in the Essay on Distinguishing Traditions. This is not a “Buddhist poem,” at least not by the standards of the Liu‑Song; and forcing this into the form of a gatha meant to expound Xie’s views on sudden enlightenment would be silly. But there is no reason not to use Xie’s thoughts on the relation between the sign and enlightenment to fill out gaps in the interpretation of a complex poem. Suppose this poem is indeed not merely an example of the literary imitation (ni) but also of the traveler’s retracing (niji): it would be worth asking whether the physical “trace” on the landscape is perhaps of the same physical order as the written text, subject to corruption? It is an unanswer‑ able question on the level of keywords, for of course ji does not appear in the poem. But since, as shown, this is Xie’s attitude toward the physical realm, adopted from Huiyuan and Daosheng, one might as well begin a reading of the poem with this suspicion in mind. The first half of the poem is primarily governed by the affirmation of the Yuanyou, that the southern landscape is “truly” as it has been represented; this is thrown into doubt by a logical turn mid‑poem, when Xie mounts to the very highest of the peaks—and finds nothing there. Alluding to the Zhuangzian empty fish‑trap at this point seems, on casual perusal, to express simple disappointment: the meaningful part of the journey, an encounter with the “feathered folk” (in this case, Huazi Qi, the mountain’s namesake) is fled, and only the empty vessel of a physical landscape is left behind. The original textual attestation of mystical presence in the Yuanyou would seem to be the vaunted “meaning”; if one were to stop here, one might well assume that Xie is simply living in a world of allusions, that the bookishness he brings to his landscapes is in fact a lost ideal for which he is searching in the physical world. However, for all his erudition, this is simply not how Xie thinks of ancient texts. They are not the source of meaning; they are a physical obstacle to meaning, which may have to be transcended, even forgotten. The invocation of Zhuangzi’s fish‑trap is telling: this metaphor is simply never used to affirm ancient textuality; as has been shown repeatedly, it is always used to weaken the importance of text, whether as a simple instrument of meaning, or as an actual obstacle to it. Accordingly, Xie immediately pro‑ gresses from this revelation on the heights of Cinnabar Hill, to a meditation on the uselessness of text: Maps and documents have furthermore disappeared, who has heard of stone or wooden inscriptions transmitted? None can make out [the traces] after a hundred generations, who can know of what was here a thousand years before?46

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This is not exactly what one would expect if one were counting on Xie’s internal knowledge of textual tradition to be fundamental to the structuring of his experience of the landscape. Instead, we are presented with an image of the unavailability and uselessness of text—exactly as one would expect to follow a reference to the fish‑trap. Instead of relying on the text, or moping over its lack of fulfillment, Xie then chooses simply to go beyond it, ignore it, and satisfy himself. He enjoys the landscape; he splashes about in the moonlight. This is not a moment of sudden enlightenment—after all, he doesn’t go off to live with Huazi Qi—but it is at least a determination to live “in the moment” (e qing), when one need not bother mourning over the lack of fulfillment of the received text of the Yuanyou or other legends of Huazi Qi. Or, as he puts it more directly in, “Roaming Redrock Mountain and Advancing to Sail the Sea”: “Looking for a name, insufficient in the Way,/ If one suits oneself, objects can be ignored.”47 Owen’s translation of the final line of the poem seems to assume a truly open question: How would one know the truth of how to be, either about the past or the present? This assumes that the final ran is being used adverbially, as “so,” referring to the penultimate line; but it is at least as likely that ran is here simply a final emphatic particle. With such an alternate reading, the line would no longer be an open question about the place of meaning, but a rhetorical question dismissing the importance of received textuality: “How can this be [a question of ] ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’?” The ending turns out to be a careful final turn to a logically crafted poem, which starts by seeming to affirm ancient texts, moves on to a discovery of their emptiness in the present, and then finally demonstrates that it is not that ancient reliable texts are superior to a present physical word, but that ancient texts and modern landscape are equally empty. It is not a question of ancient versus modern, but of the physical trace versus the self‑derived ideal. The best one can do is to suit oneself in the moment, follow one’s own inclination. Obviously, not all of Xie’s poems are dedicated to this theme; but the theme of this one poem does provide a key to Xie’s stylistic choices across his oeuvre. As already mentioned, serious analysis of Xie Lingyun has to deal with the fact that he is a founding father of landscape poetry who does not seem to take the landscape very seriously: the fact of the physical objects in front of him is always being threatened with contortion by his unusual diction and constant intertextual gestures. Normally, these two principles are held in some tension, and it is the job of the interpreter to decide how the tension is operating, and what meaning is created out of it. But it is perhaps better not to view landscape and text as held together in tension;

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rather, Xie is rather naturally mixing them because he sees no necessary tension. Text and landscape are both of the same order, the physical; they are things that perhaps one cannot quite do without, but they are both likely hindrances to truth, entanglements for the mind. If one must make text, then the text should point away from itself. The oddness and the stylistic difficulty of Xie’s lyric is perhaps conceivable as a parallel solution to the oddities of Zhuangzi: calling attention to the unreality of text is a clue to the reader to look beyond the words, to the inexpressible Something, which has left its trace. This is a wholly different version of poetry than the one the late Heidegger had been enraptured about, and a comparison with his praise of Stefan George, discussed in chapter 1, is instructive. Heidegger had elabor‑ ated the whole essay, “The Nature of Language” out of George’s assertion that “Where word breaks off no thing may be”; here, as in his other late writing on poetry, he imagines poetic language as the holistic space where real being happens. Ontology yields to phenomenology because there is no way to identify a space of Being that lies outside of experience and the language by which experience is conceptually processed. But this holistic vision is nearly opposite to the way that Xie experiences poetry—his own and that of his literary antecedents. The point of the poem is to explicitly contrast landscape with literary representations of it: the question is not resolved into a proposition, but the possibility of disjunction between world and text is foregrounded, and the tension between the two is the central theme of the poem. For Xie’s understanding of landscapes, just as for his understanding of Buddhist soteriology, it may be precisely the case that things only really “are” once the words have broken off. And there is a sense in which we find the poet’s subjectivity only there, in the arche‑semiotic gap. Within the field of possible positionings open to Xie given the prior history of Chinese poetics, “Entering Huazi Hill” is not particularly fraught with emotion or loudly voiced subjective intent. But we do inescapably meet in the poem a quiet questioner who is speaking to us: the questions about the possible incommensurability of the real with the poetic landscape are questions asked from his stance as a thoughtful reader. Indeed, it is the asking of the questions, to a presumed audience also composed of readers, which figures Xie as a certain kind of reader, and a certain kind of rambler: a disquieted one, not a holistically fulfilled ideal out of Heideggerian Orientalist fantasy. And this statement of an anxiety, rather than a proposition of a model, is all that we can ask from an arche‑semiotics here. Xie’s use of Daoist discursive turns in this poem

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is certainly not a theoretical declaration; it is merely an apt appropriation used to express deep doubts about representation, in the language that the tradition made most freely available to him.

Translation as the Face of the Other A concern with the materiality of the sign is not necessarily something that the translators of the fourth and fifth centuries took from the various religious Daoist movements with which many of them had initial contact before converting to Buddhism. Suspicions of the material world were at least as strong, and far more systematically theorized, in the Indian source materials to which they were committed. There is considerable obvious bor‑ rowing from the classical texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi in their attempts to make their case for a Chinese Buddhism; there are no comparable references to the sacred texts of the various Daoist sects of the previous two centuries. Recognizing the overdetermination of rhetorical influence is all that one can hope to do in such a situation, but it is a solution of which these translators would be pleased. No other group of intellectuals during this period took quite as seriously Zhuangzi’s parable of the trap and snare, as no other group was quite so brilliantly naive about the possibility of tran‑ scending language. It was natural that they be so—the act of translation forces one to be a naïf. A perfectly historical language, one in which the inscribed trace was truly everything, including the intent toward which it seems to gesture, would also be a perfectly untranslatable language, one in which there were no significant inside to re‑clothe. As translators who had been given the task of importing a new religious system into a civilization that lacked the linguistic infrastructure to support it, they could have done nothing without the assumption, driven by the universalism of Buddhist faith, that equally soteric consciousnesses were possible for all humans (and even, in some cases, for nonhumans!)—hence, meaning had to be something transmissible across the infinite gap between mutually exclusive sign‑systems. If the Daoist arche‑semiotic tradition is at its most naive among this group of translators, it is also at its most purely arche‑semiotic. Unlike the other writers examined in this study, the Buddhist intellectuals of the age were engaged in extended and technical philosophical speculation on the relationship between language and reality. Their questioning of the value of names was not limited to the question of how one represents an unrepre‑ sentable Dao (or Buddha‑nature), nor did it expand only so far as to include

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the socially significant, but also tried to determine in the abstract the nature of relations between words and everyday objects. They had no named disci‑ pline of “semiotics”—but the traditions of logical precision inherited from post‑Vedic philosophy were strong enough that they were self‑conscious about the epistemological and ontological bases of language, and could have named such a discipline had they felt the need to do so. If any subset of period arche‑semiotics could be discussed ahistorically, this would be it—both because the discourse itself was dominated by conscious philosophical debate rather than poetic assumptions, and because those debates themselves tended to end by denying the authority of the material substance of history. If one is to argue not merely that the text is but an inessential carrier of meaning, but also that it might simply be one more material obstacle to true enlight‑ enment, one is already committed to the notion that history (a system of texts as well as a cycle of reincarnation) is something to be escaped. And yet, the historical remains a necessary hermeneutical context because the texts call out to history, despite themselves. The bare existence of this discourse is due to a world‑historical encounter of civilizations, and the details of the debates over language all start and end in questions of cultural comparison so stark as to veer into outright racism. Can geyi translation technique make true Buddhist doctrine assimilable to a Chinese audience, or must the native language be changed to accommodate transliterated terms? If no translation is possible, does this mean that the nature of the Indian mind is different than that of the Chinese mind? In asking such questions, the very thoroughness with which these writers dissect the dissociation of word from idea becomes a bridge for the historical to return to the heart of the discourse. The space between the physical sign and the transcendent concept becomes itself a kind of representation of the distance between Sinitic and barbarian kingdoms: the physical Sanskrit words were given to them, since they are slow learners and need the gradual assistance of the material; but for us, who cannot access those physical signs, there is access to enlightenment without signs: we must leave the trap to get the fish. It is with such sentiments that we must return to Derrida, and through him, to Levinas. Comparative philosophy can get wrong the face of the Other, as we would do if we were to be too Heideggerian in our approach to Xie Lingyun, for example. However, the perception of civilizational difference is internal, and central, to the process by which Buddhism was introduced into China—as Xie’s own “Orientalizing” of Indian learning styles demonstrates. Translation as an ethical duty takes on new resonances in an epoch that saw China’s first real consciousness of civilizational difference

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and its first fears of foreign contamination. Insofar as we can still identify an ethical duty of one text to another, to render account for that which has been given to it, the criss‑crossing network of debts between texts is more complex than the binary of original and translation. When Seng Zhao borrows from Zhuangzi’s characteristic self‑negation in order to explicate the Sanskrit tetralemma, who owes what debt to whom? When Huiyuan, in the south, comes up with a version of translation that sees the linguistic sign as something to be transmuted, is his responsibility to the sutras received from Kumarajiva’s workshop, or to the quasi‑alchemical criticism that Ge Hong found in his own southern turn? Or when Daosheng and Xie Lingyun move from the suspicion of incorrect translations to the actual espousing of an active contradiction of the letter of the sacred text, who could be the giver of meaning to whom they are rendering account? And yet such questions, which seem to point toward the Western bias of Derrida’s conception of the task of the translator, do not remove the question of ethics from the process of translation in medieval Buddhism. They merely remove it from the bloodless realm of texts, in which ethics can only be a metaphor, and put it back into the realm of humans, where it belongs. The question of translation to these writers is inseparable from the question of Buddhism’s ethnic origins as a “barbarian” faith—especially as the translated texts move from the Tuoba kingdoms of the northwest to the properly Chinese empire of the southeast. In this period, one normally associates virulent anti‑Indian polemic with various streams of Daoism, eager to defend their turf against the encroachment of the foreign faith. But it is also a characteristic of the distinctly southern Buddhism of Daosheng, and his leanings toward intuition of meaning rather than study of texts, and sudden enlightenment rather than the accumulation of merit. The slow path was for Indians, because they were barbarous; the swift one is for the more intelligent Chinese. This is a negative testament to Levinasian ethics. The ethnic Other, from whom these texts were ultimately received, was long absent. Seng Zhao worked directly with the Parthian Kumarajiva, looked him in the face, and seems to have seen him as a real human, capable of making real claims upon him. Daosheng and Xie Lingyun received the foreign texts from a Chinese master who received them from a Chinese master who received them from the northern translation workshop, and they had no Other to look in the face. All they had was traces of an Other, inscribed in a dubious text—and they found these traces wanting, something to be transcended without respect for the persons who had carried a gift of enlightenment.

CHAPTER SIX

The Arche‑Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons

The Text as Debt, and the Textuality of Ethics One of the most anthologized writings of Derrida is his “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” both because it directly addresses the question of “What is decon‑ struction?” (the obviously necessary answer: “Nothing, of course!”),1 but also because it is relatively direct and nontechnical, and hence conducive to introductory surveys of theory. But the seeming amenability of this text to pedagogical packaging, plucking out the “content” of his thought, makes Derrida the least Derridean he can be. It is better to approach the letter through its epistolary form. The text declares itself a letter. To a friend. Who is Japanese. This title immediately places the content within the realm of the interpersonal and intercultural. It may even be exaggerating the social depth of what follows (if Derrida were labeling Toshihiko Izutsu as a friend out of more than academic courtesy, why address him as “Professor”? If this were fully private correspondence rather than a philosophical epistle, why publish?). But there is a core of the social that cannot be erased here, for the letter in its first sentence declares its being to be the continuation of an oral discussion which the two shared on how to translate “deconstruction” into Japanese. The letter came originally to Izutsu as a supplement to their original meeting; for the rest of us, it arrives as a “dangerous supplement” akin to that which Derrida found in Rousseau: the text that intends to extend the oral but ends by supplanting it. This is not a loss for theoretical readers: the original conversation is not reported in detail in the letter, nor celebrated, and there is no reason for us to think that there was some logocentric kismet in the meeting of two great thinkers that is lost in the sad translation into graphemes. The letter is not a report of what is lost to us: it is certainly more interesting for us 243

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as a theoretical statement than a transcript of their meeting would have been. We can celebrate its supplanting. Yet this motion, from the conversation to the letter, does not equate to a desocialization of the encounter between the scholars: it is not the conversion of an oral social occasion into the content of a written expli‑ cation. The original meeting was perhaps social; but the letter is ethical, the fulfillment of an obligation: “At our last meeting I promised you some schematic and preliminary reflections on the word, ‘deconstruction.’ ”2 The letter is the payment of a debt, one that, contra Levinas, can only be paid in the absence of the Other. It is an obligation that must exist textually—just as the “ethical” debt which comprises the task of the Benjaminian trans‑ lator must exist textually, as the target language simultaneously incurs and fulfills its debts to the original. And this is as it should be, since the debt Derrida occurred was in the service of translation: What would a Japanese translation of “deconstruction” owe to déconstruction? If, as Derrida writes, “the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation,”3 does this mean that the task of the deconstructor is also charged with a kind of debt? And when Derrida takes the opportunity of the debt as a perfect chance to deconstruct deconstruction, with all the playfulness of a Zhuangzi hinting at the “thisness” of his “thats,” is this a fulfillment of his debt, or a flaunting of his inability to pay? Certainly the content of the letter cannot have been any practical help in converting the French to datsu kōchiku (脱構築). Curiously, however, this text also demonstrates the multipolar nature of translation as textual debt that was argued for in the previous chapter. Whether or not Derrida’s obligations to Izutsu are fulfilled, his letter also exists in debt to Heidegger. The parallelism of dialogue with “the Japanese intellectual” is obvious; and Derrida foregrounds his own debt to Heideg‑ ger by revealing that his original stimulus for the use of déconstruction was as an attempt “to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian words Destruktion or Abbau.”4 And as if these hints are not enough to put one in mind of Heidegger’s own dialogue, Derrida ends his letter, “When I speak of this writing of the other that will be more beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the same risk and chance as the poem. How to translate ‘poem’? a ‘poem’? . . .”5 This is the same question that animates Heidegger’s version of his own dialogue with Tezuka, and the same deference to the possible superiority of the Japanese expression. Yet also, Derrida’s obvious debts to Heidegger are similarly questionably fulfilled by

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this particular performance of “dialogue with the Japanese.” For Derrida’s letter deconstructs Heidegger’s dialogue, by translating it into the terms of anti‑logocentrism. Formally, Heidegger’s dialogue is an attempt to represent the oral—and by doing so, both supplements and supplants it, creating and celebrating a deeply idealized version of a conversation, which Tezuka made clear was a much more practical discussion of translation. Derrida’s letter also supplements and supplants his conversation with Izutsu, but in a way that more frankly acknowledges that the center of interest in this dialogue is in the written text it presents as a partial solution to the inadequacy of their former conversation. And the same difference is played out in the arguments of the two texts: Heidegger finds something more essential in Japanese language, which (he thinks) acknowledges both poetry and world as a process of becoming; Derrida makes clear that there can be no essence of deconstruction to translate. If we follow through the motions of Derrida’s own logic, here and elsewhere, we must concede that this is a social text. Not merely a text that plays out in a social setting, but a text which is the medium of a social debt—a direct response owed to Izutsu, and that this proto‑ethical relation operates in parallel motion to the debts of translation (for a word, for a cross‑cultural encounter) owed to Heidegger. It is impossible, in this case, to separate the textual from the social, because the social is already‑always textualized, and the text is always‑already social. In light of the previous chapters, this might not seem to be remarkable: the object of this book has been to argue for the necessity of finding the social situation of any given arche‑semiotic text. The previous three chapters have demonstrated that three movements in Chinese medieval arche‑semi‑ otics have been indebted to and driven by certain impulses derived from their historical contexts. But, for simplicity and clarity’s sake in narrating a complex and distant history, those chapters have treated “the social” and “the arche‑semiotic” as if they are empirically separable realms that necessarily interact and hence must be read in tandem. I do strongly believe in the necessity and validity of (bracketed) empirical readings—language would not be language if it always and only gestured toward itself. However, in this closing chapter, I would like to go a step farther, and radicalize the relationship between social and semiotic as something more fundamental than one of the joining of discrete realms. What does the innate textuality of social relations have to say about the way in which “the social” is created in ostensible discussions of text?

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The Nothingness outside the Text Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to the word, outside of writing in general. . . . There is nothing outside the text . . . in what one calls the real life of these existences “of flesh and bone,” beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau’s text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invoca‑ tion of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like “real mother” name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.6 This famous passage comes from “. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ,” the chapter in Of Grammatology where Derrida deconstructs Rousseau’s notion that writing is merely a supplement added on to originary speech, and links this rhetoric to Rousseau’s anxieties over masturbation. The brief and uncharacteristic turn toward psychoanalytic reading is what inspires the subsection on methodology in which the above quote appears. It is a justification of a reading he knows to appear “exorbitant,” not only to classical readings of Rousseau, but also toward the psychoanalytic tradition itself, since it is a reading not content to bracket the literary text itself in the pursuit of a psychological core. Derrida’s debts to Lacan here are well known—and it is important to note that the bleeding‑over of Lacanian structures of endless substitution, which animate the above semiotic passage, are put into motion by his need to analyze Rousseau’s substitutions, letter for speech and hand for woman. The result is another kind of substitu‑ tion—methodological reflection for direct reading—and one that implicates Derrida in the awkward social situation of advancing an unexpected set of claims: about Rousseau, about writing. All published writing lays a claim to

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a reader, but this excursus highlights the possibility of widespread rejection and misunderstanding, which did actually play out. As so often with Derrida, this formal turn enacts his argument. How could there be nothing beyond the text? The much‑maligned statement was, through the polemics of the eighties, mistaken as a statement of radical skepticism, a disbelief in the physical. A more careful reading makes clear that he is primarily critiquing the assumption of a category of the social, the “flesh and bone” supposedly prior to language. Insofar as categories such as Nature are bracketed, these are Husserlian brackets, which foreground the relationship of the ego to the world perceived—and it is the phenomenological space that results which is always‑already textual. Though he never mentions Husserl in this section, nor any other avowed phenomenologist, the rhetoric of the “always‑already” which pervades the whole makes clear that he is working through a phenomenological theory of text in his attempt to justify a principle of reading. One can’t exactly call Derrida a phenomenologist—he is more and less than that—but he repeats the familiar phenomenological turn, subsuming Levinasian ethical relations into writing, just as Levinas had subsumed Heideggerian object relations into ethics, and Heidegger subsumed Husserlian intentionality into object relations. And if one imagines deconstructive practice as a means of imagining a grammatological phenomenology, the social valences of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau take on more depth. In the second section of “. . . That Danger‑ ous Supplement . . . ,” Derrida makes an astonishing series of correlations, using Rousseau’s explicit and implicit logic across his oeuvre: the relation of the supplement to a lost original is the relation of writing to speech, the nursemaid to the mother, the necessary evil of Culture to the goodness of unadulterated nature, of masturbatory fantasy to in‑person lovemaking. It is one thing to note the slippery chain of signs, desire sliding from one object to the next, one opposition morphing into another, by an eternal substi‑ tution, but it would be quite another to live it. Normally, these processes are discussed in opposition to Saussure, but with all his objectivity, as if they could be isolated as an object of study that does not implicate the act of their theorization. But if Derrida is right that writing is not simply one half of a series of supplements, but haunts the heart of Rousseau’s process and his perception of presence and absence everywhere in the natural and social world, what would have been the characteristics of such a mode of existence? Better yet, leave aside all projection onto poor Jean‑Jacques: What is the position of the generalized subject whose Being is no longer a Being‑Toward the Other, but a Being‑Through text?

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Such a question could perhaps be provisionally answered in a vol‑ ume as ponderous as Sein und Zeit. For now, it is only possible to ask a more limited question: Apart from the question of whether one can (or must) experience one’s own human relationships as a series of ever‑absent supplements to one another, what would a text‑centric phenomenology, if possible, mean for the way one engages with texts? Grant that the interplay between Rousseau and his mother‑substitutes has always‑already been suf‑ fused by the absence at the heart of writing; this does not tell us how we as readers should be‑toward Rousseau. One could say that deconstruction, rather than a method, is a sympathetic being‑toward the very processes of semiotic supplementarity and shift that work obscurely in any given text. It might be better still to recognize that this motive toward recognizing a sympathy inherent in reading is itself a demonstration of the fact that the textualized ethics of the text have “always‑already” laid claim to us. The record of relations between historical persons or fictional characters does not exist to us as an external object of speculation, but it is a web in which we are entangled as soon as we engage with a text. Perhaps the social seems to be absent from our solitary acts of reading, because we have no one before us but text—but if the form of being‑toward the Other is always‑already structured by the absence at the heart of writing, then our acts of reading cannot be asocial merely on account of the obviousness of absence. Il n’y a pas de hors‑texte. Hence, a fortiori, there is no personal outside‑text. Thus described, the continuum between social and textual life begins to seem like a continuous and fluid presence flowing through things, rather than a network connecting discrete nodes, delineating subject from object, ego from Other, this from that. If this is a mystification, it is a Daoist one, which would not recognize the “mystic” as a legitimate category, much less endorse it. This vision of writing as all‑encompassing, at once cosmological and social, is notably similar to one last Chinese text, the Wenxin Diaolong, or, “The Text‑Mind Carving Dragons.”

The Text‑Mind and the Absent Author For this reason, vacancy and tranquility are important in the development of literary thinking: the achievement of this state of vacancy and tranquility entails the cleansing of the five vis‑ cera and the purification of the spirit. One has also to acquire learning in order to maintain a store of precious information,

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and to contemplate the nature of reason so as to enrich his tal‑ ents; he must search deeply and experience widely in order that he may exhaustively evoke the source of light; he must master literary traditions in order to make his expressions felicitous and smooth. It is only then that he commissions the “mys‑ terious butcher” . . . to write in accord with musical patterns; and it is then that he sets the incomparably brilliant “master wheelwright” . . . to wield the ax in harmony with his intuitive insight. This, in short, is the first step in the art of writing, and the main principle employed in the planning of a literary piece.7 Butcher Ding and Wheelwright Pian are justly famous characters from the Zhuangzi, the protagonists of two of that work’s most famous parables, but there is something odd about enlisting them in the service of this Ars Literaria. It is not that they are not literati—Wheelwright Pian appears in an allegory of reading, and Butcher Ding, while less specifically literary, is a master of a skill akin to reading, recognition of the natural patterns that flow through the visible. More important than their occupations is their orientation toward the world—they are laborers who produce things, but they are not, in their Zhuangzian context, producers. Instead, they are analysts, whose cutting‑up and cutting‑away proceeds as automatic implementation of an intuited knowledge of the object. Ding feels the joints and the grain of the muscles, and cuts along them; Pian knows the right feel the wheel should have, and imparts it. Neither would “plan” their work. And Pian, at least, would never be caught writing: his entrance into literary history is owed to his remonstrance of Duke Huan, for reading the classics: he maintains a radical skepticism toward the written word and its ability to communicate the substance of thought, since even his own oral attempts to teach his son the basic principles of wheelmaking have gone nowhere. The experience of this chapter as a whole would seem to lend per‑ suasiveness to Pian’s position; for even if written texts are not ultimately unreadable, the Zhuangzi does seem to have been badly misread by Liu Xie (劉勰, 465?–520?), China’s most famous classical literary theorist. Influence of the earlier text is particularly heavy in this chapter, entitled, “Divine Thought” (shen si): even in the above passage, there is yet another reference to the Zhuangzi to be found in a first‑line reference to the potter’s wheel (invisible in Shih’s translation), key to the Zhuangzi’s definition of its own compositional methods.8 More noticeably, the chapter opens with a quo‑ tation from the Zhuangzi, a citation notorious for its having been ripped

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badly out of context: “An Ancient said, ‘One may be on the rivers and sea in body, but his mind remains at the palace gate.’ This is what I mean by shen‑ssu, or spiritual thought or imagination. One who is engaged in literary thought travels far in spirit.”9 The great problem with such sentiments is that they have nothing to do with the original usage of the phrase, in the “Yielding a Kingship” chapter of the Zhuangzi, where it actually refers to the difficulty of even hermits’ attempts to relinquish worldly ambition. As Stephen Owen has written of this allusive misfire, “Chuang‑tzu was less interested in the movements of mind and empirical circumstance than he was in the haunting compulsion of ambition”;10 one could add that, even at the more generous level of archetype rather than intellectual content, Liu Xie has things exactly backward from the Zhuangzi, intending as he does for thought to proceed from the human and worldly into the wilds of the obscure. This misreading must be taken as a caution, for Liu Xie is almost wholly absent from his own masterwork. The Text‑Mind does have a “Postface of Intention” (序志), but as Antje Richter has argued, that text refuses autobiography in a way that seems to highlight his desire not to be known.11 From other sources, few details of his life are clear, since to his contemporaries he was probably seen as a minor writer in the orbit of the aristocrat and writer Shen Yue, rather than as the greatest literary theorist of the Chinese tradition, as he is now often considered. We do know a few basic facts: Liu was descended from a northern émigré family which had collapsed by the time of his birth; he was raised in a monastery school, he rose to secure office with the help of Shen Yue (perhaps on the strength of the Wenxin Diaolong), and eventually Liu retired from government to take monastic orders himself. There are enough additional details to work out intriguing biograph‑ ical interpretations of the Wenxin Diaolong, but the fact remains that in the extremely lively and creative literary period of the brief Liang dynasty, Liu Xie is arguably the least‑understood major writer, and this is arguably the major work that resists historicization the most. Moreover, to the extent that we can draw solid inferences from his biography, and from the intellectual positions he takes, it seems that Liu Xie was an odd figure, not easily categorized. He is often labeled Buddhist because of his own late assumption of monastic orders, but his writing shows deep affinity for stereotypically Confucian and Daoist ideals as well, and he seems to have acted professionally in capacities that bridged these ideological divides. This fact of the work’s resistance to easy historicization has perhaps been a boon

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to Chinese literary criticism: the decontextualization of this work has been a major boon to abstract speculation on literary‑critical first principles, and more recently has almost been a source of national pride among some Chi‑ nese scholars, capable of representing Chinese critical genius to the world of globalized theory. I would like to make different use of its decontextualization. In the prior three chapters, my engagement with Chinese impulses to arche‑semi‑ otics has been to illuminate the empirical mechanisms by which those arche‑semiotics interacted with their social contexts. Here, I am running away with the Text‑Mind, and using it as a dangerous supplement to Derrida. The natural motions of this artificial text accidentally propose something like the textual phenomenology whose possibility was broached above. To Liu Xie, wen is everywhere, living through the social and the cosmological without any resort to discrete structures. The odd socio‑cosmological use of wen is not new to Liu Xie; it dates back to scattered commentary in the Confucian classics, and was expanded upon at length by Dong Zhongshu in the Han. What is new in his usage is the scope, and the systemic vision, which casts cosmological wen as a continuity with specifically literary textual production. This is a long work by prior critical standards, the first systematic literary critical treatise in Chinese, and it is remarkable how, over fifty chapters, Liu first expands and unpacks all the possible permutations of literary expression known to his contemporary genre system, and then attempts to cover all possible issues in the system of writing and reading. The expansiveness of his vision complements the cosmological resonances of the underlying concept: an exhaustive listing of the generic forms and styles of writing is necessary for the comprehensive representation of all things, and all ways of being among them. More important still than the universality of Liu Xie’s vision of wen is his description of it as nondiscrete, continuous. This does represent a fairly radical break with what we would normally consider “semiotics,” even larger than that required by the relatively unsystematic arche‑semiotic impulses examined in previous chapters. For here, text is usually treated as one ongoing and undifferentiated “sign” of an equally unarticulated reality. It is not that he proposes a semiotics without structure, but his structures are akin to those described by fluid mechanics, in which meaning is created across a continuum. Surface textuality is treated as a continuous whole, not just gesturing toward an external reality, but actually continuous with it, that portion of reality which self‑manifests—not in the sense of a divine logos bringing the fullness of meaning into a text, but as a mashup of the

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universe with its own markings. If this holistic arche‑semiotics is conceivable as a field, then the opening chapter of the Literary Mind is one of the most important documents in the Chinese tradition. It is worth citing extensively from the opening: I. On Dao, the Source Wen, or pattern, is a very great power indeed. It is born together with heaven and earth. Why do we say this? Because all color‑pat‑ terns are mixed of black and yellow, and all shape‑patterns are differentiated by round and square. The sun and moon like two pieces of jade manifest the pattern of heaven; mountains and rivers in their beauty display the pattern of earth. These are, in fact, the wen of Tao itself. And as one sees above the sparkling heavenly bodies, and below the manifold forms of earth, there is established a difference between high and low estate, giving rise to the two archetypal Forms. Man, and man alone, forms with these the Great Trinity, and he does so because he alone is endowed with spirituality. He is the refined essence of the five elements—indeed, the mind of the universe. Now with the emergence of mind, language is created, and when language is created, writing appears. This is natural. When we extend our observations, we find that all things, both animals and plants, have patterns of their own. Dragons and phoenixes portend wondrous events through the picturesqueness of their appearance, and tigers and leopards recall the individuality of virtuous men in their striped and spotted variegation. The sculp‑ tured colors of clouds surpass paintings in their beauty, and the blossoms of plants depend on no embroiderers for their marvelous grace. Can these features be due to external adornment? No, they are all natural. Furthermore, the sounds of the forest wind blend to produce melody comparable to that of a reed pipe or lute, and the music created when a spring strikes upon a rock is as melodious as the ringing tone of a jade instrument or bell. Therefore, just as when nature expresses itself in physical bodies there is plastic pattern, so also, when it expresses itself in sound, there is musical pattern. Now if things which are devoid of con‑ sciousness express themselves so extremely decoratively, can that which is endowed with mind lack a pattern proper to itself?12

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As one might expect from a chapter titled, “On Dao, the Source” (yuan dao), this is a text utterly suffused with both Daoist ideas and Daoist rhetoric. Some of this Daoism is late, religious Daoism, such as the reference to the same five‑elements cosmology which was a major influence on Shen Yue; some of it is early, echoes of the pre‑Daoist Classic of Changes, which had been assimilated into Daoism by the xuanxue movement. However, most of this is drawn more directly from Lao‑Zhuang thought. The opening line about wen is strongly reminiscent of how Laozi describes the Dao itself (“There is something confusedly formed, born before heaven and earth. . . . I know not its name, So I style it ‘the way.’ ”)13 However, the line is actually taken directly from the Discourse on Making Things Equal: it is how Zhuangzi describes himself—and in that original context, it is used to question the possibility of language: Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me. We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can’t tell where we’ll end, much less an ordinary man.14 Wen is not language, it is a category, “pattern,” that includes language. More to the point, though, it is not simply a surplus added on to the ten thousand things, nor is it a simple monad, but rather it is the inevitable product of binaries—light and dark, round and square, sun and moon, mountains and rivers. Or, simply, “heaven and earth.” To say that wen is born together with heaven and earth is simply to describe the nature of existence as something perceptible by the ontic’s innate contraries. They combine to form wen; but they also combine to form humanity—as Zhuangzi had put it, we are born together with heaven and earth. We occupy the position of “mind,” and are the corollary of wen: there is the pattern, and that which makes sense of it, and transforms it: we create language, and language is the brightest form of wen. This is the Dao of nature, the self‑thus. As a theory of textual representation of the world, this essay needs to be taken seriously, and not simply for the sublimity of the scope it invokes, or its grounding of text in a certain kind of cosmology. There are two important features of wen as described by Liu Xie that challenge conventional notions

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of semiotics: its continuity and its contiguity. First, wen is continuous: it expresses dao, and like dao seems to have neither beginning nor ending. Nor is it constituted of discrete units, phonemes or graphemes: it is a liquid phenomenon, and it flows. Secondly, wen is contiguous with the reality out of which it springs. There is no mimetic function here; wen does not “represent” the Dao, or physical objects. Rather, insofar as nature presents itself to mind, the form it takes is wen; insofar as mind re‑expresses that nature, the form it must take is also wen. It is as if Liu Xie is deliberately proposing the overly literal reading of the Derridean line, “There is noth‑ ing outside the text,” which was mistakenly used to tar Derrida. Liu isn’t exactly proposing a pure idealism; yet if we take his explanation seriously, how could anything possibly be outside the text, when textuality is at its basis the world as it exists as phenomena? This is an influential position, the apparent basis for Zhou Dunyi’s (周 敦頤, 1017–1073) later formulation in the Song Dynasty that “Wen is used to carry dao [文所以載道也].” However, within the context of the Qi‑Liang, Liu Xie’s formulation is strikingly new. Because of the supreme influence of Liu Xie, at least in the modern period when histories of criticism began to be written, and because of the prominence of this sentiment in the opening chapter of the Literary Mind, it has taken on the character of a natural and expected statement. If the Literary Mind is the great systematic treatise flowering up out of Six Dynasties literary thought, then ought not such statements be taken as representative? Yet of course it is not representative: after the extensive history of prior Daoist arche‑semiotics given so far, it should be clear that Liu’s concerns are entirely different. From its origins in Laozi’s first line, the history of Daoist arche‑semiotics has been centered around whether or not nature in general, and the dao in particular, can be represented by discrete names. The answer has been, in general, no, through various formulations: a pre‑Qin ethics of nonactive experience, a Wei‑Jin practice of cloudy allegor‑ ism, an alchemical subtilization of the world, a perceived need on the part of translators to transcend the physical stuff of the individual, localized sign. But to all of these various possibilities springing out from Daoist arche‑semiotics, the clearest alternative possibility to the failure of representation was always the possibility of representation, the Confucian notion that one could and should “get the names right” (zheng ming). No previous writer had spoken of arche‑semiotics as if representation was irrelevant because the individual, localized unit of the name was not paramount to understanding. How could meaning be, if there is no separation of signs, but only a continuity of signage? From a traditional semiotic approach, this would

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make no sense; even a Derridean perspective one has to start from the prior assumption of discrete signs, which flee away from the reader’s vision, hiding behind each others’ echoes. But Liu Xie’s discussion of wen, expanding out into his genre theory and literary history, seems to assume a theory of signs that could be modeled by the most visceral resonances of the English word expression. A given meaning is not matched to a given sign: it is a process of undifferentiated squeezing‑out, like a long trail of toothpaste. There is no theory in the Text‑Mind that delineates in detail how this could work, but it is a mentality that seems to animate most of the basic topics of literary concern which Liu is taking up, or broaching for the first time. It should be noted that this basic concern with problems of textual representation does not mean that Liu Xie is in any sense a committed “Daoist,” or even that his version of arche‑semiotics is wholly consonant with that of the Laozi and Zhuangzi. Influences from those texts (and to others influenced by them, such as Wang Bi,15 or the Buddhist traditions referenced in the last chapter)16 are common throughout the Text‑Mind, both in explicit quotation and in more subtle ways. Yet it would be odd to posit this work as radically skeptical of language along the same lines as the Lao‑Zhuang mainstream. The text is usually thought of as having much more to say about stylistics than semiotics, but much of what it does say seems to imply a conservative version of stylistics, perhaps vaguely identifi‑ able as “Confucian” insofar as it seems to have a faith in propriety, the possibility of a literary version of the “rectification of names.” Liu devotes considerable attention to demonstrating that literary texts are composed of matter and form, and that both must be excellent and evenly matched. This isn’t semiotics, but the notion that one can even determine what the “mat‑ ter” of a literary work is betrays a basic faith in the possibility of a reliable semiotics. As a result, much critical response to the Text‑Mind has focused on explicating the method behind this stylistics in ways that accentuate its conservatism. For example, Marie Bizais very cleverly takes this approach in assessing one of Liu’s many invocations of Zhuangzi, arguing that cita‑ tions of the “Webbed Fingers” (駢拇) chapter on grotesque excrescences are recuperated to support a vision of textual decorum.17 There is no reason to argue against such readings, which are quite correct in their assessment of Liu’s overall orientation; and what follows, by viewing Liu Xie through the lens of the Daoist arche‑semiotic tradition, is not intended to overturn common readings of his text. However, the Text‑Mind, even in promoting a certain vision of lit‑ erary decorum, relies on a faith in the possibility of matching ideas to

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words, matter to ornament. That faith is not a naive certainty in the ease of matching, but a critique that depends on a historical record of frequent failures in expression. Literary criticism can only posit its ideals against a background of frequent infelicities of expression, and Liu Xie, through vari‑ ous permutations of matching inner to outer, is constantly aware of where arche‑semiotics fail. The deep penetration into the literary culture of the Lao‑Zhuang critique of language means that Liu Xie was constantly using that rhetoric of possible arche‑semiotic failure, even when he was ultimately working in the service of a more hopeful stylistics. In order to see how these appropriations of Daoist semiotics played out across the Text‑Mind, it is best to ignore Liu’s own chapter divisions, and instead take a horizontal view of four topics: the source of meaning, the relationship of substance and ornament, the relationship of style to individual temperament, and literary history. Only the first would seem at first glance to be “arche‑semiotic”; yet Liu’s rhetoric across these disparate issues unites them, making the broadest historical trace of wen across dynasties the same process as the expression of an individual phrase.

The Source of Meaning from Chapter 2, Evidence from the Sage The fact that profound ideas may be obscure will not mean that the language is not accurate; and the fact that the subtlety of a thing’s expression may merely connote or imply meaning will not mean that the essential element is not stressed: the essen‑ tial element and the subtlety of the expression will be achieved together; and accurate language and profound ideas will coexist. We may observe these literary accomplishments in the works of the sages. Yen Ho spoke of Confucius as “decorating feathers by painting them; futilely employing florid language.” But in his deprecation of the Sage he fails. The literary works of the Sage owe their grace and beauty to the fact that they are full of both flowers and fruits.18 from Chapter 40, The Recondite and the Conspicuous The movement of our thought reaches remote distances, and literary feeling develops from deeply buried sources. A source

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which is profound permits growth in many directions, and vigorous roots foster conspicuous branches. In the case of the beauty of a literary composition, it too has both conspicuous and recondite elements. The recondite elements are the weighty ideas beyond the expressions, and the conspicuous the startling excellencies in the piece. . . .19 The recondite, as a form, suggests ideas which are beyond linguistic expression and are comprehended indirectly through abstruse overtones, which unobtrusively reveal hidden beauty. This creation of meaning may be compared to the practice of forming a new hexagram by realigning the lines of another, or recalling how rivers contain pearls and jade. The realignment of the lines of a hexagram gives birth to the “four images,” and the pearls and jade in the depths of the water cause the formation of square and round waves. . . .20 In the Chinese tradition, much of the hermeneutical brilliance of classical exegetes can be attributed to the assumption of a sagely wise Confucius serving as redactor and editor of the Five Classics. The driving assumption of “classical studies” (jingxue), until relatively late in the imperial period, was that there were substantial moral judgments underlying the particular ways in which these texts had been redacted—Confucius was not assumed as the author of most of these texts, yet his editorial imprimatur guaranteed the notion of edifying substance underneath them. Liu Xie, in defending him, is taking a noncontroversial position. But he is reacting to a bizarre critique, voiced by “Yan He,” a character who appears in several Zhuangzi anecdotes: few would think of Confucius as a mere effete stylist. In the original context of the Zhuangzi passage (in the “Lie Yukou” chapter), it seems that Yan He is probably referring to what he sees as the misguided Confucian focus on ritual. Immediately following the passage cited by Liu, Yan He goes on to slam Confucius for “mistaking side issues for the crux” (literally, taking branches [zhi] as principles [zhi],以支為旨);21 but Liu appropriates this metaphor and uses it for his own pro‑Confucius judgment: the sage has both blossom and fruit (華實) in a complete and undivided organic whole. The metaphor is only slightly altered in the fortieth chapter, where there is still a tree, but the organic relation is between the branch and the root: the one is visible and the other is hidden, but how could one say that root and branch are in binary opposition, when they are in fact the same organism? Liu is con‑

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necting with a very old and rudimentary arche‑semiotic tradition in positing meaning as something deeply hidden beneath the dazzling exterior of a text. What is unusual is his formulation, the necessary connection between these two, so that finding the recondite does not require any special genius, but is simply a matter of tracing the flowering back to the origins from which it is drawing its life. Similarly, the metaphor of precious objects submerged in a river causing certain patterns of surface ripples implies the natural con‑ ditioning of the appearance by the source. The reference to the manipulation of the trigrams of the Classic of Changes suggests the ancient provenance of this discovery of meaning through the tracing of signs; and yet it represents a departure from that source even as it acknowledges it. The Changes is a text that is rigorously structuralist in its arche‑semiotics, founded upon the repetition of binary divisions. As the “Appended Commentary” (繫辭傳) puts it, “Those with regular tendencies gather according to kind, and things divide up according to group; so it is that fortune and misfortune occur. . . . In Heaven this [process] creates images [在天成象], and on Earth it creates physical forms; this is how change and transformation manifest themselves.”22 Manipulation of the hexagrams to create each out of the other, as described by Liu Xie, may have evolved as a later hermeneutical practice, but the fungibility of signs and their interreferentiality is not at all an assumption of the Classic of Changes itself: Liu is characterizing division as continuity.

Matter and Ornament from Chapter 28, The Wind and the Bone The Book of Poetry contains six elements, and of these feng, or wind, stands at the head of the list. It is the source of transform‑ ation, and the correlate of emotion and vitality. He who would express mournful emotions must begin with the wind, and to organize his linguistic elements he must above all emphasize the bone. Literary expressions are conditioned by the bone in much the same way as the standing posture of a body is conditioned by its skeleton; feeling gives form to the wind very much as a physical form envelops the vitality which animates it. . . .23 If a literary piece has nothing but rich and brilliant colors, without wind and bone to keep it air‑borne, then one shaking

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is enough to destroy its splendor, lacking as it does the vigor which can justify fame. Therefore, a condition for organizing one’s thought and planning one’s composition is to develop to the full one’s vitality; for when one is strong and whole, he will shine with fresh brilliance. The concept here applied to literary composition is enriched by comparison with our observation of the use of wings by a bird of prey.24 from Chapter 31, Emotion and Literary Expression The literary writings of the sages and worthy men are summed up under the phrase wen‑chang, or literary pattern. What is this, if it is not literary decorativeness? Water by nature is plas‑ tic, allowing the formation of ripples; and it is of the essential nature of trees to be solid, supporting flowers on their calyxes. The ornamental pattern of a thing is of necessity conditioned by its essential nature. On the other hand, tigers and leopards, deprived of their patterns, would have the same kind of hide as dogs and sheep; and rhinoceros skins require red varnish [when they are made into armor]. The essential nature of a thing also depends on its ornamental patterns.25 For the depiction of our inner spirits, or the description of physical objects, the contents of the mind are inscribed in “the markings of birds” [that is, in writing] and in the literary expres‑ sions woven on “fish nets” [that is, paper]. Brilliance achieved in this way we call literary decorativeness. . . .26 It is because Laotzu hates hypocrisy that he says, “Beautiful words are not trustworthy,” although his own “five thousand words” are refined and wonderful; he never sacrifices beauty. Chuang Chou speaks of “eloquence carving likenesses of the ten thousand things.” This apparently refers to literary decorative‑ ness. And Han Fei speaks of “enchanting appeal in argument and discussion,” meaning embroidered beauty. But to achieve a merely embroidered beauty by grafting enchanting appeal upon one’s argument, and to effect mere literary decorativeness by the image‑carving of eloquence are examples of an extreme decline in literary tendency. A careful study of the Book of Filial Piety

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and the Laotzu shows us that both their rhetoric and content are conditioned by inner feeling and emotion, while a study of the Chuangtzu and Han‑fei‑tzu reveals to us that they indulged in language far more flowery than necessary to express the facts.  .  .  .  Cosmetics are used to beautify the complexion, but the enchanting appeal in the look is born of natural beauty; similarly the function of literary decorativeness is to adorn discourse, and beauty of eloquence is based on real emotion.27 from Chapter 46, The Physical World Recently, literary writers have emphasized realism in description. They pierce through to the inner structure of a landscape and penetrate the appearances of plants. Whatever their theme, they usually succeed in expressing something deep and profound in their poetry. To achieve perfection in the description of things depends on an intimate knowledge of the fitness of terms for certain specific descriptive purposes. This perfect aptness of the happy expression to the form of things may be likened to the relation between a seal and the seal ink paste, for the impression made reproduces the seal exactly to the minutest detail without further carving and cutting. Because of such skill, we are able to see the appearances of things through the descriptive words, or to experience the season through the diction.28 The matter‑ornament dichotomy is an alternate form of the meaning‑language dichotomy—and a broader one. It cannot, in modern terms, be considered “semiotics,” because it does not discuss the relation of sign to meaning. And yet, within the Chinese rhetorical and critical context in which Liu is working, this issue of ornament is inseparable from the issue of signs per se. They are two different ways of conceiving the same binary opposition, between internal “content” and external “display.” When Confucius advised that the gentleman must be evenly matched in patterning (wen) and sub‑ stance (zhi) (文質彬彬), it was not a statement of textual arche‑semiotics but a description of character; and yet the distinction bled over into textu‑ ality easily enough, especially once there was the development of a literary tradition in which one learned to identify with particular named historical authors of composition. The zhi underlying a wen could become the dead personality that had once flowered forth into literary composition. And

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then, of course, when critics became accustomed to speaking of the pattern of a text in opposition to the matter of the text, the matter was as often as not reconceived as the matter of the world, the substance of the liter‑ ary mimesis. In the case of the chapter on “wind and bone,” the bone can be understood as something else entirely, the logical structure of the work as opposed to the diction with which it is colored. The composition that lacks internal structure just won’t fly, “lacking as it does the vigor which can justify fame [負聲無力].”29 This is itself an oblique reference to the allegory that opens the Zhuangzi, where the great bird peng must fly at a prodigious height because air is not dense, and hence at low elevations: “If wind is not piled up deep enough, it won’t have the strength to bear up great wings [風之積也不厚則其負大翼也無力].”30 It is perhaps an awkward appropriation—the bird must support rather than being supported—but the context of the original reference to the peng does suggest the necessity of grand structure for true greatness. But of course—bone is not separable from plumage in a bird that wishes to fly; they must be an organic whole. As the passage from the thirty‑first chapter says, this is not true merely of birds, but of all life—tigers need their spots lest they become dogs—and true of all literature. The substance on a thing waits upon its patterning (質待文), just as the patterning must cleave to the substance (文附質). In his translation, Shi makes an understandable mistake in assuming that the “fish nets” refer to paper; the metaphor is a mildly altered version of the Zhuangzian fish‑trap, and refers to the form in which one arran‑ ges one’s words. Again, as with Liu’s other uses of the metaphor, they are nonstandard, going against the grain of both the original context and the history of the allusion’s invocation: the stress here is on the necessity of the net, not on its disposability. And this formalist attitude clearly is affecting his reading of Laozi and Zhuangzi: though they are both doctrinally set against words, yet somehow their own literary skill must be counted as a sort of proof that they were not truly suspicious of language itself, merely of its abuse. This is a surprisingly close parallel to the reception of Plato in the European critical tradition—the stylistic skill with which he demanded that poets be banished from the commonwealth was considered proof that he did not mean to disparage poetry itself, only those practitioners of poetry who meant to use it for immoral ends. Lao‑Zhuang thought in general is not quite as central to the Chinese literary critical tradition as is that of Plato to the Western, and certainly this particular issue is much less prominent. But the fact that Liu Xie feels the need to justify his approach, to reconcile Lao and Zhuang to a pro‑ornamental stance shows (1) their

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authority in arche‑semiotics, and the influence of their rhetoric, to the point where they cannot simply be contradicted outright; (2) the evolution of the age’s interests (stylistic) away from those of Laozi and Zhuangzi (mimetic); and (3) the fact that those stylistic concerns were nonetheless interpreted (via the dichotomy of substance/pattern) as indistinguishable from the rep‑ resentational—despite large changes in context, we are still in the realm of what might as well be called arche‑semiotics. It may be that the turn to landscape poetry, which began with Xie Lingyun and his contemporaries, promoted this association. The excerpt from chapter 46, above, suggests that description of the natural world as a motive for poetry is a powerful motive to consciousness of choices of diction. The point is brought home by the physicality of the seal‑metaphor: pattern is ideally the product of physical impression, which produces exactness rather than representation. It is a point that leads quite directly into the relation between the external world, the poet, and the poem, the question of the stimulus to poetry, which Liu Xie is also reworking.

Individual Temperaments and Literary Output from Chapter 6, An Exegesis of Poetry Although the form of poetry has a universal norm, the workings of poets’ minds are never stereotyped. Each writes according to his own nature and gifts, and few are able to encompass all the good qualities.31 People are born with feelings, With instincts to hum and sing. The stream of poetry took its rise during the time of ancient emperors, And forks of it appear in the two “Nan.” Poetry is in harmony with both the spirit and the reason, And develops in accord with historical circumstances. Glorious and rich, It is a splendid spectacle for all time.32 from Chapter 27, Style and Nature When the emotions are moved, they express themselves in words; and when reason is born, it emerges in a pattern. For we start

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with the imperceptible and, follow through to the revealed, and on the basis of inner realities seek external realities in harmony with them. However, people differ in talent; in physical vitality, in scholarship, and in manner: in talent some are mediocre and some brilliant; in physical vitality some are strong and some weak; in scholarship some are superficial and some profound; in manner some are graceful and some vulgar. All these are partly the outcome of temperament and nature, and partly the result of a process of training. For this reason, we find in the domain of the brush forest various grotesque forms taking shape like rolling clouds; and in the garden of literature different activities burgeon forth as waves surge upon waves. Thus, in the use of language and in the grasp of content, a man is destined to be either mediocre or brilliant, and no one can make him what is contrary to his talent; in temper and disposition, he is destined to be either vital, or spiritless, and no one can change the degree of his physical vitality; in his reactions to things and grasp of meanings, he is destined to be either superficial or profound, and no one has ever heard of achievement out of proportion to a man’s scholarship; and in style and form, he is destined to be either graceful or vulgar, and few can be what is contrary to their training. Each follows the way he cherishes in his heart, and people’s hearts differ as much as their faces.33 Again, we have another binary opposition between inside and outside that is not really “semiotic,” but might be labeled “arche‑semiotic” in that it presupposes the subjectivity that has been a major theme of earlier chapters. Meanings are the intent, held inside one’s own personality; the external form of these is writing. Here, that seems to be framed primarily in terms of stylistics rather than semiotics—but, again, these are, in original context, not differentiable sets of oppositions. The association of poets’ personalities with their style is ancient; as Zhengrong Li has pointed out, the last excerpt refreshes that tradition by framing the expression of personality specifically on the “exterior of signs” (fu wai).34 Most of the Classic of Odes poems are anonymous, but the baroque style of the Lyrics of Chu was always associated with the lugubrious personality of the banished Qu Yuan—and from there it was easy enough for the early Han writers, enamored with Chu‑style fu, to begin to associate literary form with personality‑style. Nonetheless, it must be said that the classification of writers by personality types picked up considerably during the Six Dynasties period—first with Cao Pi, in his

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“Essay on Literature” (論文) in the Canonical Essays (典論); and then in great detail just after the Literary Mind, with Zhong Rong’s Gradation of the Poets (詩品). Again, in this as well, Liu Xie cannot be credited with a new conception of how literature works; he is building upon extant models. But Liu does contribute by offering a more complete theory of how the differing kinds of literature result from different personalities. Individual differences in ability and temperament begin in the randomness of natural gifts; these may or may not be reinforced or realigned by training, but by the end of some process of maturation, a person is formed, and thus set, and only able to express himself well or badly, in the mode appropriate to whom he has become. This grows out of the individual mind (or heart) which is the hidden corollary of the face—but also and more importantly of the written text. Individuation of the text grows out of the immutability of the mature individual. This vision is not relativist. Liu Xie claims that there is a human universal to be found in the motive to song in the first place. This is as it should be, as it was discussed in the previous section: “People are born with feelings,/With instincts to hum and sing.” But this common instinctual nature is shaped in local and temporary conditions (i.e., history), which results in necessary differentiations. This sentiment, if not the most profound thing that Liu has to say, is nonetheless an important twist in the history of personal arche‑semiotics. There are many, many archaic works that posit that we carry about with us face‑like signs of what lurks in our hearts; and the proper expression of one’s own signs, and proper reading of others’, is a concern that has been present in Chinese literary civilization since the Book of Odes. But Liu Xie has transformed this issue of personal arche‑semiotics from a question of truth into a question of style. Individual differentiation is a matter of artistic qualities and accomplishment, not of moral or political status. Hence, one assumes, the only historiography of interest would be an aesthetic one. How has the flow of wen changed in its manifestations?

Literary History from Chapter 29, Flexible Adaptability When one has to endure his thirst because the well rope is too short, or give up the road because his legs are tired, it is not

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because he has exhausted the applicability of literary principles, but because he is inexperienced in the art of flexible adaptability.35 Literature may be looked at as very much like grasses and plants: their roots and trunks, which are attached to the soil, are all of the same nature; their smells and tastes, which are exposed to the sun, differ from individual to individual.36 from Chapter 45, Literary Development and Time As time has passed and as dynasties have risen and fallen, litera‑ ture has developed from the simple to the more ornate in form as well as in content. It is possible to trace this development of feeling and ideas from the earliest times to the present. . . .37 Metaphysical discussion was emphasized during the early Chin, and reached its height in the Eastern Chin. Such discussions left their influence upon the literary trends of the time. For this reason, although the time was a time of turmoil, its literature is characterized by calm and serenity in both its language and its thought. In poetry, Laotzu’s philosophy became the inevitable theme, and in fu, it was Chuangtzu’s ideas that furnished the content. It illustrates for us how deeply literary development is influenced by the course of worldly events, and how directly the rise and fall of political powers bear on the trends of literature. If we adopt the method of determining a given outcome by establishing the source from which it developed, it is not dif‑ ficult to tell what the development will be even in the distant future, one hundred generations hence. . . .38 Against the background of ten dynasties, Literary trends have changed nine times. Once initiated at the central pivot, The process of transformation circles endlessly. [樞中所動 , 環流無倦]39 Literary subject matter and the form in which it is treated are conditioned by the needs of the times, But whether a certain subject matter or a certain form is emphasized

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or overlooked depends on the choice made by the writers. Antiquity, however remote, Can be made to display itself before us like a human face.40 The “historical premise” of the Introduction was never an assertion of self‑conscious historiographical concern, and this difference from the embed‑ dedness in history of Levinas and Derrida was stressed again at the end of chapter 3. Nonetheless, with Liu Xie, we cannot escape the fact that, unlike most of the writers examined in prior chapters, a literary‑historical narrative itself has become important to describing modes of representation. Literary history was not new, by the time of Liu Xie; nevertheless, it is new to have a robust and detailed literary history intermeshed with a full theory of literature. The relative importance of literary historiography in the work is well known; Liu’s historicist method has sometimes led to his being labeled a “classicist,” though it is best to only apply such a label with caution:41 he was certainly not an advocate of returning to a lost ancient style, as for example the guwen movement of Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, and the Song prose masters would later prove to be. Without reducing him to an ideological stylist, we can say that in his literary historiography, Liu structures his conception of literature: the first half of the work is devoted to the adumbration of various literary genres, some of them quite minor, and while they are introduced in structuralist fashion, each chapter goes on to tell the history of its own genre, often describing the origins of each genre in a particular social or political need. But the theory also structures the history—Liu offers a vision of necessary evolution in which style and substance change together (質文代變), flowing along with the times (質文沿 時). Moreover, this seems to be a fairly sophisticated historicism: though in places, Liu like other literary historians finds the character of an age directly expressed in its literary productions, yet in others, such as the description of Jin‑era xuanxue, above, literature is understood as facilitating a social need for stability and otherworldliness in the midst of chaos—essentially, the same judgment in precis that is still a standard description of the early Jin. While, of course, declining to state any necessary laws of literary develop‑ ment, Liu goes so far as to hint that they might exist—a stance similar to the historical determinism of the early development of comparative literature in the late nineteenth century. Elsewhere, as in the selection from chapter 29, there is no assumption of necessary historical development; as historical situations change, writers do not necessarily change, for they have the option of simple repetition of past

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models, and failure. This is probably an example of a simple contradiction in the Literary Mind—of which one can find many, as Stephen Owen has demonstrated, when one bores down into the details of Liu’s argument.42 But the problem of whether Liu really believes in a deterministic or a nondeterministic historicism is of less immediate relevance than his percep‑ tion that substance and pattern, social and literary history at least ought to be moving in concert through their processes of endless transformation. Again, it is hard to fit this history quite into the contemporary definition of “semiotics”: it is not really about the relation of signs to meanings. But the opposition that is historicized in the above passages, subject matter versus form, is functionally indistinguishable within its context from the oppositions we would be more inclined to consider “real” semiotics. The issue of matter versus form is, for Liu Xie, virtually synonymous with that between meaning and sign, because it is a binary structured at a deep level of assumption. There are things, and then there are representations of those things, and there is a history to how the patterns of representations change. This is what one gets when one combines a sensitivity to history with a replacement of individualized traumas, anxieties of the arche‑semiotic self, by the natural outworking of style according to temperament. There is still room for individuality in this theory, as the metaphor of the trees putting forward different flowers and fruits argues. Liu Xie has certainly internalized what I have called the “subjective premise.” But since he is now more conscious than others have been of literary history, he is able to consider subjectivity itself as a historically determined formation, and not strictly a concern of individuals. There are patterns that shift from age to age. Just as in his metaphor, presumably the character of forests would differ as one travels from age to age, oak and linden here, birch and pine there; for it is not just individuals that are read anymore, but the ages themselves. Text used to be a sign of the individual mind, as distinctive as a face; now it is the face of an age, presumably gesturing to the mind of an age. The fact that the nature and style of text undergoes, along with history, a series of ceaseless transformations, suggests that wen is no longer simply a collective name for a pattern of choices by individuals trying to represent themselves. It is its own thing, a continuity, something that mutates without consciousness of divisions or limits—something which looks a great deal like the Way itself. Throughout these topics, which would seem to be quite distinct categories, there is a unity of vision, a vision of continuity of universal expression. Signage, the process, replaces signs, the objects. There are still

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nameable divisions between “referent” (meaning/matter/individual genius/ historical conditions) and “sign” (the word/ornament/individual style/genre development), but these are inherited conceptual differences, different ways of naming a unified process. For in each case the ideal of this arche‑semiotics is of a wholly organic continuum, in which the particular form is the natural outgrowth of the underlying conditions, no ontic division existing in the outgrowth of fruit and flower from seed. There is a “Daoism” in this wholly different from the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi. The holistic and organic vision of a cosmological continuum, rolling through a series of changes and flowing through new forms as water into a new channel—this is deeply indebted to the Lao‑Zhuang vision of the cosmos. In the realm of arche‑semiotics, though, there is no deep skepticism as to the ability of names to express: the constant Way would naturally make itself known, through names or any other manifestation. Words do not have to be toyed with to reveal the impossibility of actually working with them, because one can work with them. It is nevertheless still not the Confucian impulse, that ideas can and must be matched to the proper words, with moral and political danger arising from failure to do so, because it does not recognize the tendency of expression to go wrong. Liu Xie would probably have acknowledged the possibility of misunderstanding individual words; he certainly did make clear that there is such a thing as mistakes in literary style. But these are not particularly troublesome or dif‑ ficult to fix, because the consonance of the expressed with the expression is “natural,” as he puts it in the first essay. The category of the natural lies at the heart of Derrida’s critique of Rousseau: it is culture, writing, in a word, wen, which was seen by that primitivist as a dangerous supplement, and it is this writing that Derrida showed cannot be excised from the heart of nature. By this standard, the holistic arche‑semiotics of Liu Xie sounds like naive logocentrism, but is perhaps closer to Derrida’s own vision. Nature is valorized; but nature is always‑already culture. Wen is not matched to substance, it accompanies it, from the origin‑less first, through its processes of becoming‑through‑change. This is not a perfect analogy: one cannot have Derridean grammata uncolored by the tones of absence, slippage, misprision; and the Text‑Mind is simply happier than this, not very concerned with failures of expression. But the characteristics of its solutions are amenable to positing a phenomenology of text, because it identifies an arche‑semiotics which is, like Derrida’s, constantly in motion. Classical Western or Chinese arche‑semiotics, which posit meaning as a thing that can be given over to language, another thing,

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are obviated here by an assumption that expression is not a thing to begin with, but a process. Classical Chinese has no gerund form, but Liu Xie’s usage has a beguilingly gerundic flavor to it. Wen is a Becoming.

The Dangerous Supplement, Always‑Already the Source It is this active character of Liu’s version of text that draws it close to Derrida’s, and draws out something in it. The deconstruction of language was important in its releasing the hold of modernist models, all those nice clean straight lines linking up this node to that in huge manageable edifices. Thinking past that was important, but perhaps not as important as the turn from subjects to predicates in the construction of meaning. Both classical models of arche‑semiotics and Saussurean structuralism were alike in think‑ ing of language as static; the noun was the paradigmatic word. In the age of poststructuralism, we instead are more likely to ask what language does than what it is; for Derrida, all language takes on the character of the verb, in a quasi‑Daoist cast of unceasing movement and change. Things are not usually put this way, but the basic idea is hardly new: the necessity of diachronic perspective is what motivated the neologism of différance. Meaning can only exist as it moves off from us in time, and one cannot catch the thing and make it stay in some instant’s perfect jail. This was perhaps shocking in 1967, and Of Grammatology still reads with the negative energy of a thesis that knows itself radical in its context. In the five decades since, the idea has been tamed and trained, its nearly libidinal energies first being harnessed by liberatory political criticism, and then later settling down into the comfortable status of a well‑worn game. The absence always already lurking, hidden in the dark heart of the sign, is no longer an existential crisis: it is fun. And if one is used to it, there is no reason why a grammatological encounter with the world should not be positively happy. Who would want a world of static texts, fixed answers that did nothing, embalmed words? The classical conception of a perfect sign, in which Truth would lie there in its physical receptacle, is a ligature to death. It is much better to enjoy the process by which literature (and the oral literature of daily life) plays out, always spooling on and away. Reading Derrida, one can get into the habit of speaking of différance as if it were a constant falling‑away, a necessary sin one might enjoy but could not idealize. It is just as (in)valid to use any other metaphor of motion: a falling‑up, a mounting‑toward, a chase.

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However one might phrase it, some accommodation to the positive possibilities of a phenomenology of expression would be necessary for any neo‑Daoist critique. The solutions of Laozi and Zhuangzi, to retreat into silence, or to self‑satirize and allegorize, might still be possible for the hermit or the novelist, but they do not work in an academic setting. The way in which Liu Xie has transformed Daoist habits of thought into an arche‑semiotics of ever‑mutating, expanding, and active textuality, is a much more practical mode of seeing past the distinctions drawn across the face of the world. This is not the place to elaborate a phenomenology of textuality. However, informed both by Liu Xie’s perspective, and the lessons from prior chapters, I would like to offer a sketch of what such an orientation, if possible, might mean for reading practices. First, a more generous ethics of the “author.” The Author has been dead for a very, very long time. One did not have to wait for Derrida, nor Barthes, nor the Foucauldian concept of the author‑function to kill him/her, nor even the intentional fallacy of the New Critical generation: Zhuangzi’s Wheelwright Pian had realized by the Warring States period that texts simply cannot bring to us a disembodied mind. There is no authorial presence in the text, and this is an immutable fact—so long as one identifies the “author” as a presence with a given biological lifespan, ontologically distinct from the texts which s/he produces. But if social life has always‑already been textualized, if the swift absconding at the heart of writing has always infected the space between the Self and the Other, then the written text produced by any given author is the author, a supplement to the Nature of the biological organism, which never was actually separable from that author. The Cartesian association of being and thought has been rightly out of favor in its own terms—in which thought is the guarantee of a stable thinking subject founded upon divinity. But what if one were to rephrase: I think that which I am? The thinking‑in‑text (via internal mono‑ logue or published classic) is what one is. This is a simple acknowledgment of the analytical philosopher’s classic case against Descartes, that the act of thought proves only the existence of the act of thought present to itself, not a subject behind it. But, so long as one is free to name names, one might just as well identify subjecthood as the process of the thinking of the Self. If personhood is always‑already textualized, then texts are always‑already personified. It is impossible to do away with the impression of a speaking subject not because this is an illusion, nor because the speaking subject has taken his or her disembodied thoughts and placed them into the receptacle

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of the text, but because the text is the accessible face of the subject. Whether or not it carves dragons, the text is always already a text‑mind: if one could prove a grammatological phenomenology, the quasi‑Daoist orientation sug‑ gested by Liu Xie would call one to see the text as undifferentiable from any other portion of the subject, whose “is” exists only in its expression. In that case, the encounter with the text would be the preeminent example of Levinasian encounter with the face of the Other. Of course, one reads texts much more often than one locks long gazes with the various Others in one’s life. But the power of Levinas’s master‑metaphor is deepened by an assumption of the integrity of expression—which, after all, no face can lack (expressionlessness being itself a sign). This is more than a pun of convenience: the rhetoric in Liu Xie that has motivated my choice of the word here is deeply imbued with the extremely personal arche‑semiotics that have been present all through the early Chinese tradition, and which have been discussed at length in earlier chapters. From the earliest allegoreses of the Classic of Odes, arche‑semiotic speculation assumed that the text was the face of the person: to read the text is to understand the mind behind it. And facial expression is an excellent parallel to a possible expressive subjectivity: for the facial expressions one wears are not signs of the “real person” floating in the brain, they are the person, as it moves in the face, the neurochemical motions which are the body of emotion being inseparable from those which jerk the muscles of the brow and the lip. If all this were to be granted, then there might be a Levinasian ethics of reading. The encounter with the expression of the other might make the same claims upon one, regardless of whether that expression was manifested on a literal face or a textual one. With this assumption of the inherently textual character of the face, nearly demanded by the Chinese tradition, the Derridean critique of Levinas would become virtually irrelevant. I am not sure I would like to acknowledge the claim of a book upon me, much less a library. But we all live in a multipolar network of debt, and it might be better to acknowledge that something is owed. That which is owed? Not a conservative reading, an antidote to deconstructive “abuse” of the text. But a reading (if the text seems to desire it) that seeks the text’s permission in its own abuse, and a willingness to let one’s own thought be abused in turn. Sadomasochism, and not rape. The question of reading would then be the question of determining consent, in the absence of safe words. If this were possible, better discrimination between healthy and unhealthy deconstruc‑ tive acts might be possible, protecting some from unwanted violence while liberating others to new versions of jouissance.

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Second, a historicism that does not yield to “time.” The textualization of history is already itself a familiar history, having long since been pushed along from the side of literary studies by Stephen Greenblatt, and from the side of history by Hayden White and Michel de Certeau. But both sides of this analytically healthy development are founded in negative ontologies, rather than positive phenomenologies. From the historians’ side, the recogni‑ tion that historiography is necessarily a narrative construction, which cannot ever capture the full actuality of the that‑which‑was, is a powerful critique of the hope for an ultimate, true tome. And the New Historicist method of tracing the interplay of texts in their rhetorical specificity, and for their own pleasant sake, has thoroughly put down any lingering Romanticism about the possibility of a nebulous “Spirit of the Age” being reanimated from its literary corpus. What both movements seem to give away, in their attempts to make clear what is unknowable, is the possibility of an “actual” history—forever lost—that lived its life alongside of texts, and logically prior to them. Even at their most radical, when both streams of critique seem to doubt that actual history, it is characterized as an ontologically dubious entity that, indescribable outside of texts, never really lived a definable life from which its logically posterior texts nevertheless sprung. But if the absence of texts has always already inhabited the presence of speech, if the wen is indivisible from its material bases, the expression that carries them with it, because it is them in a different phase of becoming, then the texts that are handed down to us are themselves the bit of history which still echoes. The old Augustinian dilemma of when “this instant” becomes “just then” is replicated in historical imagination: When does “our present” become “the recent past”? To put it in New Historical terms: When did the Elizabethan era end? If by “era” one means something more than the agglomeration of human bodies inhabiting England between November 17, 1558 and March 24, 1603, then the best answer is that the Elizabethan era never ended (though it has, of course, grown much quieter). If one views the relationship between life and text phenomenologically, rather than ontologically, than the old claims for immortality through verse were somewhat more than a hackneyed conceit. For example, as Shakespeare most feelingly personates his beloved, in sonnet 81: And tongues‑to‑be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.43

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The reanimation from written to oral text (in addition to being a curious note on expectations regarding oral recitation of poetry) is an acknowledgment in the simplest empirical terms of the reversible logic of the supplement. Writing and speech are always implicit in each other, and death inseparable from life. This view does not need one to go all treacly and opine insuffer‑ ably about Shakespeare’s beloved, how s/he must, oh! really, truly live on in us. It is enough to acknowledge that social life, existing textually, does not have an end date if it is able to structure readers’ orientations toward the supposed author, or her/his own surrounding social networks. A strong political objection to this line of thought might be raised: it grants immortality only to those privileged to write, and thus firmly establishes the Being of wealthy men upon a foundation of the utter nothingness of everyone else. Methodologically, this is not quite true, of course—there are texts by women and by nonelite classes, ethnic and sexual minorities, which can be, have been, and should continue to be recovered to live among us. But insofar as the privileged will always be overrepresented in the Nachleben of texts—this is unfortunately true, but it is a protest best directed at the way in which a given age lived itself into text, rather than at those who are left behind to receive what they can. Fortunately, a social phenomenology in which no difference between the lived and the textual could be firmly grounded would liberate politi‑ cal critique from the specter of the “real.” In part, this means a much less cramped justification of theory to praxis (which, it must be said, is offered by voluble theory much more frequently than demanded by reticent praxis). If the life of the text is integrated with economic and political life in ways that make it impossible to ground an ontologically real distinction, then revolutionary critique is neither a substitute, supplement, inspiration, nor guide for actual revolution: it is actual revolution. But also a textual phenomenology would offer new ways of thinking through the old Marxian dichotomy of base and superstructure. Marx’s conception of culture as a mere epiphenomenon of the actual, determining economic structures of society has been habitually depressing to, and hence revised by, culture workers of all kinds—perhaps as frequently rewritten by leftist writers as were Plato’s strictures against poetry rewritten by poets. In its original context, Marx was offering a necessary corrective to the Young Hegelians’ insistence on intellectual enlightenment leading necessarily to changes in economic relations. But Marx’s solution of reversing this dichotomy, while leaving it intact, was proved a bad model by the twentieth century: whatever one’s politics, it would be hard not to accept the intimacy of social structure and ideology, whether explicit or obscured.

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Text is both the way in which oppression becomes expression and the way in which it is read, recognized for what it is: more than the violent action of one physical body against another, a system of control. Liberation is also expression: not merely the temporary absence of physical violence, but the concomitant realization of stable, reliable systematic bulwarks against the fearsome. Hence, the liberation of texts (through the prying‑open of canons, and canonical modes of reading) is itself one face of human liberation. These possibilities of reading are speculative, dependent on the firm establishment of a truly comprehensive textual phenomenology—which this chapter is obviously not. An ability to speak and write the world from such a phenomenology might preclude one from attempting the sort of well‑structured, systematic, and probably very heavy book that inevitably results from attempts at comprehensive phenomenologies. As Laozi put it, “One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.”44 However, the absence of the formal recording of such an approach ought not to matter too much. If it could exist and perform truth well, any such book would always already structure the possibilities of extant text‑life, even in its as‑yet‑unwritten state. The trick then would be to read without any instructions, as one lives without any, getting on in whatever Way one does.

Abbreviations

GSZ

Gao Seng Zhuan, Hui Jiao

JS

Jin Shu, Fang Xuanling

LSCQ

Lü Shi Chun Qiu, ed. Bi Yuan

QJW

Quan Jin Wen, ed. Yan Kejun

QSGW

Quan San Guo Wen, ed. Yan Kejun

SJ

Shi Ji, Sima Qian

WX

Liu Chen Zhu Wen Xuan, ed. Li Shan

275

Notes

Preface  1. Herrlee Glessner Creel, What Is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1.  2. Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1.

Introduction   1.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “semiotics, n.” http://www.oed. com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/view/Entry/175724?redirectedFrom=semiotics; accessed June 3, 2017.   2.  1454b. Aristotle, Poetics. ed. D. W. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 25.   3.  Charles S. Peirce. Collected Papers 5 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 448.   4.  Jacques Derrida, De La Grammatologie. Collection “Critique” (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 227.   5.  Philip Sidney, Selections, ed. Katherine Duncan‑Jones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 152.   6.  Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).   7.  It would be inappropriate to reference their many works on the subject here, though a representative sample of relevant works of each can be found in the bibliography.   8.  A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978).   9.  Chad Hansen, Language and Logic in Ancient China (Ann Arbor: Uni‑ versity of Michigan Press, 1983).

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10.  As per Sima Tan’s “On The Essential Points of the Six Schools” [論六家 要指] SJ j. 130. For a discussion of Sima Tan’s role in creating the notion of these

schools, see Kidder Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, Legalism, et cetera,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003): 129–56. JSTOR Journals. EBSCOhost; accessed June 3, 2017. 11.  Graham wrote of the Later Mohists, writing in a similar vein to the Gongsun Longzi, that the “distinction [between word and sentence], which Western logic could take for granted from the beginning, was the last and most difficult of the Mohist discoveries” (Later Mohist Logic, 25). There is a real sense in which the grammar of classical Chinese made certain types of logical relations much more difficult to discover; on the other hand, the lack of a nominalizable copula saved Chinese philosophy from much mischief over Being. 12. 應言 LSCQ j. 18. The same text’s versions of the encounters in Zhao are in 審應覽 j. 18 and 聽言 j. 13. 13.  Kai‑yu Hsu and John K. Roth, “Gongsun Longzi,” World Philosophers & Their Works (February 2000), Literary Reference Center, EBSCOHost. http://login. ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tr ue&db=lfh&AN=103331PHI13130265100085&site=eds-live&scope=site; accessed June 3, 2017. 14.  For that matter, Chung‑ying Cheng has identified in the Gongsun Longzi a “two‑level approach to reality and language,” which could “give the Aristote‑ lian project a starting point and a ground in human experience and perception” (Chung‑ying Cheng, “Reinterpreting Gongsun Longzi and Critical Comments on Other Interpretations.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34, no. 4 [2007]: 541). It is a valuable reminder that the historical fact of the Gongsun Longzi being read through Aristotle in the modern era should not be equated with a logically prior status for Greek over Chinese philosophy. 15.  In the notes to his own translation, Johnston compiles a list of Mozi passages on names related to those in the Gongsun Longzi, and finds the two texts’ conclusions to be broadly similar. Ian Johnston, “The Gongsun Longzi: A Transla‑ tion and an Analysis of Its Relationship to Later Mohist Writings (English),” J.Chin. Philos. 31, no. 2 (2004): 282–83. 16.  Graham, Later Mohist Logic, 40–44. 17.  Several scholars since a 1959 article by Graham have suspected that this essay is a later addition to the Gongsun Longzi. Even if true, this would not affect the conclusions of this section, which are intended to demonstrate certain arche‑semiotic principles at play in early texts, an issue separate from that of authenticity. See A. C. Graham, “The Composition of the Gong Suen Long Tzyy,” Asia Major 7, no. 1–2 (1959): 79–112. 18.  The Zhi Wu Lun 指物論 essay from the text has attracted more general interest as having important things to say about logic and semiotics, probably cor‑ rectly so. Discussion of that text is omitted here because it would require more

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technical analysis, and be less useful in pointing out the subjective and historical implications of early Chinese arche‑semiotics. 19.  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: Gate‑ way Regnery, 1956). 20.  Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 34–50. 21.  Bo Mou potentially solves this problem in his proposition of a doubled semantic/pragmatic referent. However, he admits freely that this is an interpreta‑ tion of the text for a contemporary context, and should not imply that such a level of technical precision could have been intended by the author. Bo Mou, “A Double‑Reference Account: Gongsun Long’s “white‑horse‑not‑horse” Thesis,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34, no. 4 (Dec. 2007): 493–513. http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6253.2007.00436.x/abstract. 22.  Johnston, “Gongsun Longzi,” 272. 23.  See Indraccolo for an account of how the Gongsun Longzi understands the conversion of physical objects into cognized objects, particularly as described in the Zhi Wu Lun. Lisa Indraccolo, “Inner and Outer Worlds: On the Nature of Things, Matter, and the Mind in the Gongsun Lngzi,” Problemos/Problems (2016): 51–64. 24.  To my knowledge, the first to give the Gongsun Longzi a Saussurean reading was Chi‑ching Chan, although Chan identifies different vocabulary from the Zhi Wu Lun as being equivalents of signifier and signified. Chi‑ching Chan, “The Rhetorical and the Grammatical in Early Chinese Logic,” Tamkang Review 28, no. 3 (1997): 45. 25.  Johnston, “Gongsun Longzi,” 292. 26.  Ibid., 292. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid., 293.

Chapter One. Ways through Language  1. All translations of the Laozi, unless otherwise noted, will be those of D. C. Lau. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching. trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Classics, 1963).   2.  For the sake of simplicity in explicating a narrative, and because this is not a work that can engage in extended textual criticism, the traditional narrative of the Laozi appearing before the Zhuangzi in a school named “Daoism” will be used throughout. It is now fairly clear that there was no such Daoist “school” until named retrospectively in the Western Han. In addition, there have been numerous critics who have suggested that the Laozi as currently known was published after the Zhuangzi. Graham (A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989], 215ff.) is an influential example;

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Kim offers an important update on the thesis (Kim Hongkyung and Laozi, The Old Master: A Syncretic Reading of the Laozi from the Mawangdui Text A Onward. [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012]).   3.  Often read in highly mystical senses by casual readers, this and similar lines will be treated in this book primarily as statements of a quasi‑philosophical position. However, it should be noted that there are good sinological reasons to read the text mystically: I take seriously Roth’s work on mystical experience in early texts, and in particular his connection of these sentiments to similar ones in the “Inward Training” cannot be ignored. Harold Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei‑Yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 146.  4. Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 82. Note that an almost identical formula‑ tion to 1.25 is given as the opening statement of the Guodian bamboo‑strip text.  5. Ibid., 102.  6. In Chan’s commentary, this is identified as one of the primary distin‑ guishing characteristics of the text within its context: “[W]hen names arise, that is, when the simple oneness of Tao is split up into individual things with names, it is time to stop” (97).   7.  Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May 1998. Vol. 5. (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2000), 158–59.   8.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 58.   9.  Ibid., 143. 10.  My thanks are due to Ariel Zhang, who has persuaded me on this point. 11.  SJ j. 63. 12. Ibid. 13.  Lau, trans. Tao Te Ching, 102. 14.  Michel Foucault. Language, Counter‑Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 15.  That said, there has been plenty of speech on the topic. There are very few Western Sinologists ready to admit the Laozi was composed by a historical Laozi; for a good summary of the more diverse (and conservative) range of Chinese opinion, see the appendix to Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters. Vol. 65. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994. 16. “perhaps I’m a little like that old sage, P’eng [竊比於我老彭].” David Hinton, Analects (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014), 57. Sometimes, lao, translated by Hinton as “old,” is taken instead as referring to Laozi. 17. Chief among these is 15.5: “The Master said: ‘If anyone has managed to rule by doing nothing, surely it was Shun’ [無為而指著 , 其瞬也與？]” (ibid., 120). The concept of non‑action is of course forever associated with Laozi, though the proper question here would be whether it was so only after canonization of

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separate philosophical streams, or actually to Confucius himself. A more reasonable understanding of this passage, however, is simply that the Analects, rather than the Laozi, is the true first source of the concept of non‑action. See Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu‑Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 18.  On this basis, Graham argues that the story of the encounter was origi‑ nally a Confucian one, later appropriated and changed by Daoists looking for a representative who could be made to seem superior in knowledge to Confucius. A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 111–24. 19.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 147–48. 20. For a good recent introduction to the Guodian texts in particular, see Kenneth Holloway, Guodian: the Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 21.  “In Lao-tzy [sic] there is not so much as a suggestion of this boundless self‑reflection [of the tragic Western subject], of this movement which (in contrast to perfect peace in the Tao) never ceases in time; he lacks this self‑clarification, this dialogue with oneself, this eternal process of dispelling the self‑deceptions and mystifications and distortions which never cease to beset us.” Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, Volume 2: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao‑Tzu, Nagarjuna (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 415. 22.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 76–77. 23.  Insofar as this text is traditionally ascribed to a “Laozi,” that author was certainly conceived of as male. However, the text also encourages one to “keep to the role of the female [守其雌]” (ibid., 85), so that the gender of this (non-)subject is an open question. 24.  Ibid., 132. 25.  That is, literary realism (Balzac) rather than philosophical (Plato). 26. In fact, the Laozi may have been aimed as a critique of Mohists, or (as per Graham) it could have been a politicized adaptation of certain aspects of Zhuangzi (Graham, Disputers, 217). But because to later tradition the most prominent biographical statements about Laozi were all apocryphal accounts of Laozi‑Confucius debates, both in the Records of the Historian and in the later strata of the Zhuangzi, there is a tendency for later exegetes to identify the arguments of the Laozi as anti‑Confucian. 27.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 99. 28.  Not to be confused with the Primitivists identified in the Zhuangzi by A. C. Graham, Chuang‑Tzuˇ: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-Tzuˇ (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981). 29.  The story of Heidegger’s influence in Japan is not merely one of textual reception; after Nishida Kitaro and the development of the Kyoto school, Japa‑ nese philosophy students flocked to Germany, some studying alongside him, and

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many later under him. For an English‑language introduction to this history, see Yasuo Yuasa, “The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy with Heidegger,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), 155–74. 30.  Articles on Husserlian phenomenology had begun appearing in Chinese during the 1920s, and there were at least two Chinese students in Heidegger’s lec‑ tures during the 1930s, Shen Youding (沈有鼎) and Xiong Wei (熊偉). However, the development of Chinese scholarship on phenomenology largely began with the 1987 publication of the first translation of Sein und Zeit, by Xiong Wei’s students Chen Jiaying (陳嘉映) and Wang Qingjie (王慶杰). For a useful history of both the early and later encounters with Heidegger, see Xiping Jin and Qiang Li, “Heidegger Studies in China [Haidegeer Yanjiu zai Zhongguo],” World Philosophy [Shijie Zhexue] 4 (2009): 8–31. CNKI; accessed June 3, 2017. 31.  According to the CNKI database, articles in Chinese on Heidegger are now running at roughly 150 per year; in comparison, the multilingual Philosopher’s Index shows approximately two hundred Western‑language articles yearly. 32. Otto Pöggeler, “West‑East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao‑tzu,” in Hei‑ degger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), 52. 33. Katrin Froese, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Daoist Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 34.  Steven Burik, The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Compara‑ tive Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 35.  Reprinted as Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” trans. C.V. Solomon, in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. Roderick M. Chisholm (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 118–28. 36. Dahlstrom also suggests that this and other ways in which Heidegger distinguished himself from Husserl are based on very partial readings of Husserl’s texts. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore J. Kisiel and John Van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 239. 37.  The method used is strongly consonant with the redefinition Heidegger gives to “phenomenology” in Being and Time Introduction.II.7, where the word is the letting‑be‑seen of phenomenal Being. Similarity with the essays on Hölderlin and Trakl is also noticeable: here, it is the wisdom of an alien language that leads one back to the unconcealed. The dialogue climaxes in an etymology of kotoba (言葉, words), which (like his etymologies from Greek) are virtually a throwback to Renaissance quasi‑magical modes of philosophy, fetishizing roots as uniquely revelatory, albeit without any need to lay claim to Edenic origins. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971), 1–54.

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38. It is hard to know if Hertz intended his translation of the normal “Ostasiatische” to be a Germanism, an orientalism, or a comment on a perceived German orientalism. 39.  Originally published in the Japanese translation of Heidegger’s complete works, the essay is available in English translation in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, trans. Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 59–64. 40.  Heidegger, “Dialogue,” 53–54. 41. Parkes, Heidegger, 98. 42. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 60. 43.  Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni‑ versity Press, 2002), 63. 44.  Adorno once labeled this type of rhetoric, “the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit,” arguing that the language of Heidegger and related thinkers seems to strip language of its instrumental character while actually imposing a mechanistic formula on the realm of the human. Theodore W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 17. 45. Heidegger, Poetry, 92. 46.  J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought (London: Routledge, 2000), 174–75. 47. Parkes, Heidegger, 66. 48.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 7. 49.  It is an open question whether Zhuang Zhou was actually a disciple of Laozi in any meaningful sense. But he was a real, historical human, and he was really read by later tradition as a disciple of Laozi.

Chapter Two. Ways beyond Language  1. Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 75–76.   2.  Lisa Raphals, “On Hui Shi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 143–62.  3. Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 152–53.  4. The chapter is one classified by Liu Xiaogan (Classifying, 129–30) as Huang-Lao (which presumably has borrowed a Legalist’s respect for Dukes) and by A. C. Graham (Chuang‑tzu) as Syncretist (which would presume an overabundance of textual influences).  5. SJ j. 63.  6. There has been one influential and much‑debated contemporary study, by Chad Hansen, which denies that Zhuangzi takes an antilanguage position at all.

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It is impossible to address Hansen’s complex and thought‑provoking claims here, other than to say that, like many, I admire his work without fully agreeing with all of its conclusions. For present purposes, it is enough to note that, apart from Hansen, the description I offer here of Zhuangzi as a language skeptic is largely uncontroversial. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).   7.  There is good reason to suspect that this incident is intended to reflect the class differences between Confucian and Mohist schools. Although Confucianism had not triumphed as a state ideology, it was probably becoming strongly associ‑ ated with the classics by the period of the Zhuangzi’s composition. And the Mozi contains several references to the work of wheelwrights. Nonetheless, the sentiments expressed by Pian here are certainly not Mohist.   8.  Since the rightly respected Eugene Eoyang once harshly criticized Ming Dong Gu for a similar assertion, a note of explanation is in order: as with other comparisons in this study, similarities are not intended as statements of identity. To the extent that Eoyang (largely through his uncompromising tone) may have intended to suggest a complete separation between the concerns of Zhuangzi and Barthes, he would be wrong: Wheelwright Pian’s own tale of frustration in handing on his trade makes clear that the issue here is not limited to literally dead authors. In fact, I would endorse Eoyang’s statement, “Zhuangzi’s indictment is not so much of reading and interpretation as a reminder of the ephemerality of language and the inadequacy of words, spoken or written” (Eugene Eoyang, “On Tigers and Tiger Balm: The Perils of Casual Comparison,” YCGL 52 [2005–06]: 178. Project MUSE; accessed June 4, 2017), and merely add that it would seem impossible to keep the implications of Barthes’s essay completely confined within the realm of literary hermeneutics. The most striking difference here is not one of philosophical content, but literary thematic: Wheelwright Pian’s tone is resigned and unworldly, while Barthes’s has the jubilance of the victorious revolutionary. See also Ming Dong Gu, “The Perils of Scholarly Inquisition—A Response to Professor Eoyang’s Review Article,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature (2009): 320–32. Project MUSE; accessed June 4, 2017.  9. SJ j. 63. 10. For the most part, that is; as will be discussed below, there is also a complex evolution that lies behind the extant text of the Zhuangzi, with many interpolations; and some of the material that was incorporated therein is, in fact, gnomic verse. 11. Chris Jochim has forcefully argued against this common reading, but by radicalizing it, saying that Zhuangzi was not arguing against a concept of the self as distinct from the Other because there was no such concept in early China. I do not find this position perfectly persuasive, and much of what follows will discuss subjectivity in familiar terms, but a milder version of Jochim’s argument, that subjectivity is constructed, will be echoed in this and following chapters. See

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Chris Jochim, “Just Say No to ‘No Self ’ in the Zhuangzi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 35–74. 12. Stanley Fish, “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Ter‑ rible Things About It?” in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 68–96. 13. Exactly which period—Spring and Autumn, or Warring States—is still a matter of dispute. I find Liu Xiaogan’s argument persuasive on the matter of the verse resembling that of the Classic of Odes, but not his assumption that this guarantees a sixth‑century‑BCE date. Liu, Classifying, 174–86. 14. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 44–45. 15. Kuang‑ming Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 56. 16.  Remembering, of course, that who “Zhuangzi” is, as an author‑function, is largely defined as the author of the inner chapters generally, and of the Qiwu Lun in particular. 17. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 39–40. 18.  Eske Møllgaard, “Storytelling in Zhuangzi, Wu, and Plato,” in China‑West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang‑Ming’s Thinking, ed. Jay Goulding (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008), 210. 19.  Steve Coutinho, Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy: Vagueness, Trans‑ formation, and Paradox (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004). 20.  Eske Møllgaard, An Introduction to Daoist Thought: Action, Language, and Ethics In Zhuangzi (London: Routledge, 2007), 70–71. 21.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 103. 22. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 43. 23.  Ibid., 49. 24.  Ibid., 189. 25. Although there are far too many relevant works to list here, a good collection of recent work is available in Roger T. Ames and Takahiro Nakajima, eds., Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015). 26.  Though not the normal way to ask about physical location, an is com‑ monly used as a close parallel to the modern Mandarin nali in expressing a question of modality. Compare also English “whence.” This point was raised by Graham (Chuang‑tzu) and has since been followed up upon by Hansen and Teng (see Ames and Nakajima, Happy Fish, 50–77 and 130–40, respectively). 27.  The later Heidegger, envisioning language as a neighborly relation rather than an indicative system, may have had more appreciation for the notion that one knows by being‑here. 28.  In fact, the first article to address Derrida’s relationship to comparative Chinese studies was written in 1980 by Donald Wesling, but that piece was largely aimed at introducing Derrida to a Sinological audience, and speculating on the

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possible usefulness of deconstruction in Chinese studies, rather than to asserting parallels with the Chinese tradition. Donald Wesling, “Methodological Implication of the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida for Comparative Literature: The Opposition East‑West and several Other Oppositions,” in Chinese‑Western Comparative Literature Theory and Strategy, ed. John Deeney, Horst Frenz, and A. Owen Aldridge (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), 79–111. 29.  Michelle Yeh, “The Deconstructive Way: A Comparative Study of Der‑ rida and Chuang Tzu,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy (Dordrecht, Netherlands) 2 (June 1983): 95–126. 30. Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1984). 31. Graham, Disputers, 228. 32. Longxi Zhang, “The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 3 (1985): 394. The translation here is Zhang’s own. 33. See Hans‑Georg Moeller, “Zhuangzi’s Fishnet Allegory: A Text‑Critical Analysis,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27, no. 4 (2000): 489–502. 34.  James J. Y. Liu, and Richard John Lynn. Language‑Paradox‑Poetics (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 23. 35.  Longxi Zhang, “Review of Language‑Paradox‑Poetics, by James J. Y. Liu,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 10, no. 1/2 (1988): 190–94. 36.  “Perhaps we may say that Zhuangzi, by using words as ‘non‑words,’ also recognized this ironic pattern, offering philosophers an excuse to recuperate writing, a license to proliferate writing even to infinity, because Zhuangzi’s use of ‘non‑words’ can be understood as essentially a move to reclaim language and to acknowledge the inevitable metaphoricity of all philosophical discourse.” Longxi Zhang, The Tao and the Logos (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 41. 37.  At the center of the critique of Zhuangzi’s logocentrism, Zhang offers as context two sources: a definition from the dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, and a line from the “Appended Words” (Xici zhuan) commentary to the Classic of Changes. While the Changes were highly influential to later Daoists such as the Wei‑Jin xuanxue school, the commentary in question is usually identified, with reason, as a Confu‑ cian exegesis. Zhang, Tao, 29. 38. Peide Zha, “Logocentrism and Traditional Chinese Poetics,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparée 19, no. 3 (1992): 377–94. 39.  Shaobo Xie and John (Zhong) M. Chen, “Jacques Derrida and Chuang Tzu: Some Analogies in their Deconstructionist Discourse on Language and Truth,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparée 19, no. 3 (1992): 363–76. 40.  Mark Berkson, “Language: The Guest of Reality‑Zhuangzi and Derrida on Language, Reality, and Skillfulness,” in Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics

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in the Zhuangzi, ed. Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press), 97–126. 41.  Timothy Nulty, “A Critical Response to Zhang Longxi,” Asian Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2002): 141–46. 42.  These limitations have been often recognized to various degrees by schol‑ ars (including those cited above, and others) participating in these debates, even if the fashion of addressing them used in the present study is somewhat different. 43. See Graham’s Later Mohist Logic for the best philosophical glossary of the technical vocabulary inherited (but often disputed or ignored) by the Zhuangzi. 44.  Hongchu Fu, “Deconstruction and Taoism: Comparisons Reconsidered,” Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 3 (1992a): 318. 45. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 25. 46.  Since Levinas denies that this is via either logical or dialectical necessity, call the self a product of structural necessity. 47. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 73. 48.  Ibid., 76. 49. The grip of the notion of domesticity over Levinas is strong enough that he decides very unfortunately to figure these internal sedentary spaces as essentially feminine. Ibid., 154–56. 50.  Ibid., 178. 51.  Ibid., 206–207. 52.  Compare with Aristotle’s esti leukos anthropos: the primary interest of the phrase may lie in Aristotle’s declination of race, but even if one ignores his erasure of the melas anthropos, the anonymous white person who is his referent is reduced by this grammar to objective status. Early Chinese semiotics of personhood usually retain subjectivity. 53. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 90–91. 54.  Ibid., 99. 55. Ibid. 56.  Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 145–46. 57.  Ibid., 167. 58.  Ibid., 184–86. 59. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 40. 60. Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 1: 176. 61.  Simon Critchley, “ ‘Bois’‑Derrida’s Final Word on Levinas,” in Re‑Reading Levinas. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 162–89. http://dx.doi.org.login.ezproxy. library.ualberta.ca/10.5040/9781472547354.ch-010; accessed June 4, 2017.

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62.  Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Psyche, ed. Kamuf and Rottenberg 2, 152. 63.  Ibid., 153–54. 64.  Ibid., 163. 65. Shira Wolosky, “An ‘Other’ Negative Theology: On Derrida’s ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.’ Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (1998): 261–80. http://www.jstor. org/stable/1773442; accessed April 21, 2017. 66.  Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale‑Anne Brault and Micahel Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 1–2. 67.  Ibid., 6. 68.  Ibid., 11. 69. This ending resonates with the main theme of “A Word of Welcome,” which foregrounds the guest‑host relationship as the founding condition of the subject, rather than as something later‑added. As François Raffoul wrote of his position in that essay, “The subject is not a freedom, but a receptivity.” This also encapsulates Derrida’s attitude toward Levinas in the Adieu. François Raffoul, “The Subject of the Welcome: On Jacques Derrida’s Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought 2, no. 2 (1998): 219. 70. Roth, Original Tao.

Chapter Three. Tracing the Obscure  1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 61.   2.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xvii–xviii.  3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994).   4.  Richard John Lynn, trans. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 31.  5. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 302.   6.  Moeller’s point is well taken that Wang is invoking Zhuangzi instrumentally and uncritically, rather than explicating the fishnet metaphor. Moeller, “Fishnet,” 492.  7. Lynn, Changes, 31–32.   8.  Keyang Dou, “ ‘Speech, Image, Meaning’ and Ingarden’s Theory of Tex‑ tual Layers” [Yan, Xiang, Yi, yu Yingjiadeng de Benwen Cengci Lilun], Fujian Luntan 2008, no. 10, 36. CNKI; accessed June 4, 2017.  9. Plato, Phaedrus. trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 68. 10.  Original text from He Shao 何邵, “Biography of Wang Bi.” Translation (including bracketed phrases but omitting sections of Chinese text) taken from

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Rudolph G. Wagner, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 129. 11. It is unfortunate that he did not take this position more seriously; He Yan (along with his entire family) was eventually executed by Sima Yi after the latter’s palace coup of 249. Wang, Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nan Bei Chao Shi (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1979) 1: 135. 12.  難何晏聖人無喜怒哀樂論 QSGW j. 44. 13.  無名論 QSGW j. 39. 14.  Rudolf G. Wagner, Laozi, and Bi Wang, A Chinese Reading of the Daode‑ jing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 128. 15.  Ibid., 129. 16.  Ibid., 139–40. 17. Cf. zhang 14, 18, 32, and 44. 18. Wagner, Daodejing, 201–203. 19.  Yiqing Liu, Shi shuo xin yu hui jiao ji zhu, ed. Xiaobiao Liu and Zhuyu Zhu. (Shanghai: Shanghai gu ji chu ban she, 2002), 609. 20. Qiang Tong, Ji Kang Ping Zhuan (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2011), 62–63. 21.  Ibid., 64. 22.  Ibid., 71. 23.  Ibid., 71–75. 24.  For details on the sordid events that led to this outcome, see Robert G. Henricks, Philosophy and Argumentation in Third‑Century China: The Essays of Hsi K’ang (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 8–9. 25.  Ibid., 107–108. 26.  Mingyang Dai, ed., Ji Kang Ji Jiao Zhu (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chu‑ banshe, 1962), 40. 27.  養生論 QSGW j. 48. 28. Whether or not the piece was merely “reflecting” a prior consensus that occurred during “pure talk” sessions, this particular piece has retrospectively been one of the primary sources for scholarly reconstruction of Obscurist views on nature. 29.  難嵇叔夜養生論 QJW j. 72. 30. Henricks, Hsi K’ang, 32. 31.  Ibid., 34. 32.  答向子期難養生論 QSGW j. 48. 33. Henricks, Hsi K’ang, 38–39. 34.  Bojun Chen, ed., Ruan Ji Ji Jiao Zhu (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju: 2014), 88. 35.  Ibid., 92. 36.  Ibid., 106. 37.  Ibid., 115. 38.  Ibid., 125–26.

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39. Holzman, Donald., Poetry and Politics: The Life and Works of Juan Chi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 108. 40.  Ibid., 102. 41.  Ibid., 108. 42.  Xiang Yin and Quanzhi Guo, Ji Kang Ji Zhu (Hefei: Huang Shan Shu She, 1986), 92. 43. Chen, Ruan Ji, 253. 44.  It has been suggested by Jiang Shiyao that the direction is an allegorical reference to Ruan’s own hometown of Chenliu (陳留), modern Kaifeng, in the south‑ east of Jin. Jie Huang, Huang Jie Zhu Han Wei Liu Chao Shi Liu Zhong (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 2008), 504. It is an assertion common to comments on any reference to the southeast in the Songs of My Cares. 45.  It is tempting to recall here Ji Kang’s fatal letter to Shan Tao, but even if it is relevant (and there is so little to go on here) would Ruan be commemorating that missive, or trying to avoid repeating its error? 46. The choice of bird is another allusion, to the poem, “Yellow Bird,” in the Classic of Songs. The intention of the allusion, however, is debatable. 47.  David R. Knechtges, trans., Wen Xuan: Or, Selections of Refined Literature, Vol. 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 169. 48.  JS j. 82. 49.  JS j. 29. 50.  JS j. 82. 51.  贈山濤 WX j. 24. 52. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Min‑ nesota Press, 1983), 187–228.

Chapter Four. Traces of Transcendence   1.  As quoted in Derrida, Grammatology, 125–26.  2. Ibid., 140.   3.  For a detailed discussion in English of the Taipingjing’s origins and dating, see Barbara Hendrischke’s translation and analysis, in particular her introduction from 38 ff. and the appendix. The passages cited below are taken from Barbara Hendrischke, The Scripture on Great Peace: The Taiping Jing and the Beginnings of Daoism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost; accessed May 14, 2017.  4. Hendrischke, Great Peace, 123.  5. The best introduction to the text is in Stephen R. Bokenkamp and Peter S. Nickerson, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 28–77; it should be noted, however, that the Japanese scholars Kobayashi

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Masayoshi and Mugitani Kunio have argued for a fifth‑century date. See Barbara Hendrichke, “Early Daoist Movements,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 146.  6. Bokenkamp, Scriptures, 96–97.  7. Ibid., 122–23.  8. Ibid., 149–85.  9. Ibid., 151. 10.  Ibid., 182. 11.  “What characters point to are not themselves characters; to understand them you have to know what they mean.” Livia Kohn, Taoist Mystical Philosophy: The Scripture of Western Ascension (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 238. 12.  Ibid., 235. 13.  Ibid., 240–41. 14.  Ibid., 243. 15.  Ibid., 235. 16.  Ibid., 244–45. 17. Cf. Laozi 12 with the Western Ascension, “You may want to look at it and cannot see it; you may want to listen to it and cannot hear it; you may want to speak of it and cannot phrase it; you may want to eat it and cannot taste it.” Ibid., 248. 18.  Ibid., 244. 19.  Ibid., 242. 20.  Ibid., 255–56. 21.  An alternate death date, 364, is also frequently cited; however, given that Ge spent decades working with and presumably ingesting mercury compounds, one might suspect a lifespan of eighty years to be the less likely option. 22. Mingzhao Yang, Baopuzi Waipian Jiao Jian (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1991), 698. 23.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 82. 24.  Ming Wang, Baopuzi Neipian Jiao Shi, (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2007), 170. 25.  For a full description of Ge Hong’s processes, see Joseph Needham and Dieter Kuhn, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 5.3: 81ff. 26. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 178. 27. Yang, Waipian, 106. 28.  Ibid., 108–109. 29. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 302. 30.  Matthew V. Wells, To Die and Not Decay: Autobiography and the Pursuit of Immortality In Early China, (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2009), 125. 31. “The defense of his character through recourse to eremitism and other tropes provide him with the ingredients for his own alchemy of self‑presentation.

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As with Ge Hong’s own alchemical practice, the success of the adept rested on a solid foundation of the most important Confucian virtues; only then could an eso‑ teric recipe succeed. Ge Hong blends as many socially significant virtues as he can, hoping in this way to be a transcendent being in text as well as deed.” Ibid., 124. 32.  JS, j. 41. 33. Reading 經 as associated with 徑, as is common. Cong Du and Chaozhong Zhang, Huangtingjing Zhuyi. Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi Zhuyi (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2004), 27–28. In his free translation, Cong seems to take the initial attributes (玄冥, 常在, 龍曜) as names rather than adjectives, but this does not seem warranted by the original. 34.  Precisely, the point is to be able to visualize the location of where divini‑ ties manifest themselves within the body, so as to regulate their spiritual function through meditation. See Fabrizio Pregadio, “Early Daoist Meditation and the Origins of Inner Alchemy,” in Daoism In History: Essays In Honour of Liu Ts’un‑Yan, ed. Benjamin Penny (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 121–58. 35. Taking 匪 as 非. 36. Du, Huangtingjing, 56–57. 37.  Ibid., 71. It is also possible to understand the second two lines cited as referring to the Yellow Boy, rather than to the texts, which are a necessary substitute for his hard‑to‑hear voice. 38.  Ibid., 92–93. 39.  Stephen Bokenkamp, “Declarations of the Perfected,” in Religions of China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 177. Bokenkamp has only translated a brief extract of the work; Thomas E. Smith is preparing a complete translation, though at the time of this writing only juan 1–4 have been published. Selections used below from those initial fascicles will be cited from Smith’s translation; all other translations of the Declarations that follow are my own, based on the Yoshikawa Tadao edition of the original. 40.  There were other early revelations to Yang Xi; in comparison with these, Robinet has argued that “the Zhengao was intended to reach a wider audience.” Isabelle Robinet, “Zhengao,” in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio (London: Routledge, 2008), 1249. 41.  Yoshikawa Tadao and Mugitani Kunio, eds., Zhengao Jiaozhu, trans. Zhu Yueli (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2006), 376. 42.  Thomas E. Smith, Declarations of the Perfected, Part One (St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2013), 111–12. 43.  Ibid., 122. 44.  Ibid., 254. 45.  Ibid., 65. 46.  Ibid., 49–53. 47. It is common to attribute Buddhist influence to the Lingbao school, but not to the Shangqing, and this is generally true. However, in this passage the

Notes to Chapter Five

293

reference to Sanskrit texts as well as to the play on kong, and the usage of fa in the following sentences, makes Buddhism hard to ignore.

Chapter Five. Sign, Translation, Enlightenment   1.  Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004), 1: 258.  2. Derrida, Psyche, 1: 200.  3. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200.  4. Derrida, Psyche, 1: 223.   5.  The story first appears in the Essay on Principle and Confusion (理惑論) of Mouzi (170–?). As Kenneth Ch’en pointed out, it is a narrative that doesn’t even work in its own terms: if this is the first introduction of Buddhism to China, how could the dream interpreter have known about the Buddha? Kenneth K. Chen, Bud‑ dhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 30.  6. GSZ j. 4.  7. The story attributed to Kumārajīva in this conversion narrative is pos‑ sibly related to Arabic antecedents for Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” See Ch’en, Buddhism, 82.   8.  In addition to taking new given names, monks during this period generally also took a Buddhist surname, such as Seng (“Monk”) or Shi (“Shakyamuni”); but these surnames are inconsistently referred to in the scholarly literature. For clarity’s sake, the surname will be given on first mention only.  9. GSZ j. 6. 10. Explicit recognition of Zhao’s reliance on the language of Daoism to introduce the concepts of Buddhism to a Chinese readership has been made since at least the Tang dynasty. See Tan Mingran, “Emptiness, Being, and Non‑Being: Sengzhao’s Reinterpretation of the ‘Laozi’ and ‘Zhuangzi’ in a Buddhist Context,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7, no. 2 (2008): 196. 11. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 68. 12. Walter Liebenthal, The Book of Chao (Peiping: Catholic University of Peking, 1948), 66. Note that Zhao seems not to understand that the argument of fingers and horses was originally that of Gongsun Long. 13.  Ibid., 59–60. 14.  Ibid., 116–117. 15.  Ibid., 129–30. 16. Youru Wang, Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Bud‑ dhism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 117. Wang’s focus on the “liminology” of Chan language and its relation to Zhuangzi’s strategies is saying the unsayable is

294

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particularly helpful, even if the main focus of his work lies with texts from after the period addressed in this study. 17. Liebenthal, Chao, 110. 18. Ibid., 68. The language here is an allusion to Laozi 14, “What cannot be seen is called evanescent; [夷] What cannot be heard is called rarefied [希].” Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 70. 19. Zhang, Chunbo, ed. Zhao Lun Jiao Shi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2010), 63. 20. Liebenthal, Chao, 77–78. 21.  Ibid., 109. 22. Derrida, Psyche, 1: 203. 23.  It is impossible to know whether Fatai and Daoan were personally closer than other monks apprenticed to the same master, but there is an extant letter from the former to the latter in the terms of secular friendship, the most striking such example among period Buddhist writers: 每憶敷上人 , 周旋如昨。逝波奄復多年 , 與 其清談之日 , 未嘗不相憶 , 思得與君共覆疏其美 , 豈圖一旦永為異世 , 痛恨之深 , 何能 忘情！其義理所得 , 披尋之功 , 信難可圖矣。GSZ j. 5. The persistence of qingtan as

an ideal is noteworthy. 24.  道行般若多羅蜜經序 QJW j. 158. 25.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 101. 26.  The two characters used for ji, 跡 and 迹, are functionally interchangeable. 27.  十法句義經序 QJW j. 158. 28.  The logic here seems to follow an old pseudo‑etymology that equates jing 經 with jing 徑, i.e., a path (or dao!) meant to guide behavior. The equivalence is common in Han‑era discussion of the Confucian Classics. 29.  道地經序 QJW j. 158. 30. Ibid. 31.  大智论鈔序 QJW j. 162. 32.  與隐士劉遺民等書 QJW j. 161. 33.  This sentence is quoted from Zhuangzi, “The Way of Heaven,” transla‑ tion here from Watson, Chuang Tzu, 147. It is not clear here how Huiyuan is understanding the line he cites—the original itself is unclear, and rarely cited in the later tradition. 34.  沙門不敬王者論 QJW j. 161. 35.  GSZ j. 7. 36.  Whalen Lai, “Tao‑sheng’s Theory of Sudden Enlightenment Re‑examined,” in Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), 171. 37.  Ibid., 183. 38. A seventh‑century‑commentator on the Book of Chao wrote, “writes, “Hsieh Ling‑yün’s literary style was elegant and developed and surpassed that of both ancient and modern times. For example, where the Nirvana‑sutra in its unrevised

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state was crude or rough and originally read, ‘Hands grasping and feet stepping, we get to reach the Other Shore,’ Hsieh revised it to read, ‘Plying the hands and moving the feet, we stem the tide and cross over,’ ” cited in Richard Mather, “The Landscape Buddhism of the Fifth‑Century Poet Hsieh Ling‑Yün,” The Journal of Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1958): 71. 39. A first brief mention of this possibility can be found in Francis West‑ brook, “Landscape Transformation in the Poetry of Hsieh Ling‑Yün,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 100, no. 3 (1980): 239. 40. Cynthia L. Chennault, “Lofty Gates or Solitary Impoverishment? Xie Family Members of the Southern Dynasties,” T’oung Pao 85, no. 5 (1999): 253ff. 41.  Shaobo Gu, ed., Xie Lingyun Ji Jiao Zhu (Taibei: Li Ren Shuju), 286. 42.  Ibid., 426. 43.  Ibid., 421. 44.  Donald Holzman, “Landscape Appreciation in Ancient and Early Medi‑ eval China: The Birth of Landscape Poetry,” in Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 157. 45. Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Land‑ scapes,” Early Medieval China 2004, no. 1 (2004): 207–208. 46. Ibid. 47. Gu, Xie Lingyun, 115.

Chapter Six. The Arche‑Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons  1. Derrida, Psyche, 2: 6.   2.  Ibid., 1.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid., 2.  5. Ibid., 6.  6. Derrida, Grammatology, 158–59.   7. Youzhong Shi, trans., The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: A Study of Thought and Pattern in Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959], 155.  8. See Daniel Fried, “A Never‑Stable Word: Zhuangzi’s Zhiyan 卮言 and ‘Tipping‑Vessel’ Irrigation,” Early China 31 (2007): 145–70.  9. Shi, Mind, 154. 10.  Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 610, n. 72. 11.  Antje Richter, “Empty Dreams and Other Omissions: Liu Xie’s Wenxin Diaolong Preface,” Asia Major 25, no. 1 (2012). 83–110. 12. Shi, Mind, 8–9.

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13.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 82. 14. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 43. 15.  Richard John Lynn has performed a careful analysis of Wang Bi’s influence on the Wenxin Diaolong, and found that semiotic issues seem to be most prominent in that influence. According to Lynn, the Text‑Mind seems to have replicated Wang Bi’s medial position in regard to how much skepticism is warranted with respect to language’s signifying function: “The embodiment of ontological reality in language might be the most elusive of enterprises, but, for Liu, it is an ideal to which every serious writer should aspire.” Richard John Lynn, “Wang Bi and Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong: Terms and Concepts, Influences and Affiliations,” in A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong, ed. Zong‑qi Cai (Stan‑ ford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 98. 16.  The possibility of Buddhist influence on the text has been the subject of extensive debate, especially in Chinese‑language sources. The best introduction to that debate is by Mair, who ultimately sides with the proponents of influence, and finds that influence primarily in the work’s structure and approach. Victor Mair, “Buddhism in the Literary Mind and Ornate Rhetoric,” in A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong, ed. Zong‑qi Cai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 63–81. 17.  “La construction du texte révèle donc un jeu entre les doublets modeler / tailler, double doigt / tumeur, nature / forme, idées et émotions / mode d’ex‑ pression. L’image des tumeurs et excroissances du Zhuangzi est une métaphore des travers de l’excès dans l’écriture, mais elle participe également de la logique, y compris rythmique, du texte, même si la compatibilité des logiques de Liu Xie et de Zhuangzi a ses limites : l’auteur peut intervenir sur son texte pour éviter l’excès, l’homme le peut‑il dans la même mesure sur son corps ?” Marie Bizais, “Formes signifiantes dans le Wenxin Diaolong 文心雕龍 de Liu Xie 劉勰,” Études Chinoises (Jan. 1, 2005), 266. 18. Shi, Mind, 16. 19.  Ibid., 214–15. 20.  Ibid., 215. 21. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 357. 22. Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching As Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost; accessed May 27, 2017. Lynn’s translation is “through” Wang Bi’s commentary, but this is appropriate here, as the same commentary would have most likely been Liu Xie’s primary edition of the Classic of Changes. 23. Shi, Mind, 162. 24. Ibid. 25.  Ibid., 174. 26.  Ibid., 174–75.

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27.  Ibid., 175–76. 28.  Ibid., 248. 29.  Ibid., 162. 30. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 30. 31. Shi, Text‑Mind, 38. 32.  Ibid., 38. 33.  Ibid., 158–59. 34. Li Zhengrong, “ ‘Wenxin Diaolong’ de Yuyan Fuhaoxue Sixiang Yanjiu Chulun,” in Wenxin Diaolong” yu 21 Shiji Wenlun Yanjiu: Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lun‑ wenji, ed. Zhongguo Wenxin Diaolong Xuehui (Beijing: Xueyuan, 2009), 594–610. 35.  The short well‑rope is a reference to the “Perfect Happiness” chapter of Zhuangzi: “With a short well‑rope, one cannot reach the depths [綆短者不可以汲深].” 36. Shi, Mind 166. 37.  Ibid., 233. 38.  Ibid., 242–43. 39.  Just as it sounds, this couplet is an invocation of Zhuangzi’s “Discourse on Making Things Equal”: “When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly [樞始得其環中以應無窮].” Watson, Chuang Tzu, 40. 40. Shi, Mind, 244–45. 41. A good example of an essay that discusses Liu’s “classicism” with the proper caution is Oldrich Král, “Tradition and Change (the Nature of Classicism in Wen Hsin Tiao Lung),” Archív Orientální 59 (1991): 181–89. 42. Stephen Owen, “Liu Xie and the Discourse Machine,” in A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong, ed. Zong‑qi Cai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 175–91. 43. William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Bur‑ row (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 543. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost; accessed May 28, 2017. 44.  Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching, 117.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 283n44 Analects: authorship of, 38 and the concept of non-action, 280–281n17 and the notion of “correcting names” (zheng ming), 13–14 reference to someone who might be Laozi in, 34–35 relation to Wang Bi, 117–118 arche-ological peace of silence, 92 arche-semiotics: Chinese Buddhist mixing of Sanskrit and Pali texts with those of Daoists, 7 definition of, xi, 5–7 and Dong Zhongshu’s universal vision of wen, 252–254 and the historical parameters of this study of, ix, 6–7 historical premise of, 6, 32 and the Buddhist project of translation, 202–203, 227–228 and the Celestial Masters, 172 and the departure of Daoist discourse from Derrida, 98–99 and différance, 32 and the Laozi, 40–41 Liu Xie’s internalization of, 266–267

and social anxieties, 18 and Wang Bing’s distinguishing of the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao, 129–131 and Ruan Ji’s narrative of the Changes as a Confucian rightingof-names (zhengming), 139–140 and southern literary culture, 25, 175, 211, 214–218 See also Daoan; Daosheng; Ge Hong; Huiyuan subjective premise of, 5–6 and the falsity of the face, 59–60, 81, 84–87 and the Gongsun Longzi, 13–15 and Wang Bing’s distinguishing of the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao, 129–131 and Wheelwright Pian’s assertions about the failure of books of the sages, 61 See also matching of signs to ideas wei (“agrees with”) used to express correspondence between signs and references in the Gongsun Longzi, 11–12 See also Daoist arche-semiotics

307

308

Index

Aristotle: esti leukos anthropos, 287n52 and the Gongsun Longzi, 10–11, 278n14 Poetics: on the inferiority of recognition “according to signs,” 2–3 and Western reception of the Gongsun Longzi, 10–11 the “White Horse Discourse” in light of, 10–11 the “author”: of the Analects, 38 death of, 270, 284n8 ethics of, 270 of the Gongsun Long, 15–16 Laozi as. See Laozi (the man) “Zhuangzi” as. See Zhuang Zhou Barthes, Roland, 61, 284n8 Benjamin, Water, 199–202, 244 Berkson, Mark., 78 Bizais, Marie, 255 Bo Mou, 279n21 Bokenkamp, Stephen R., 165, 292n39 Brentano, Franz, 44 Buddhism: Buddha-nature: and the dao, 228, 239 Liu Xie on, 232 representation of, 218 and Liu Xie, 232, 250 Text-Mind, 255, 296 “matching Buddhist concepts with Daoist terminology. See geyi (“squaring meanings”) technical philosophical speculation on the relationship between language and reality, 239–240 See also Chan (Zen) Buddhism Buddhist arche-semiotics: of Daoan, 219–222

of Daosheng, 225 of Huiyuan, 223–224 and the larger project of Buddhist translation, 202–203, 227–228 Burik, Steven, 42, 78–79 Cao house: Cao Cao: control of northern China, 132 court of, 133 Ji Kang’s father’s service to, 134 Zhang Lu’s allegiance to, 161 Cao Fang (son of Cao Rui), 133, 174 Cao Pi (second son of Cao Cao, Emperor Wen of Wei): “Essay on Literature,” 264 feud with Sima Zhao, 139 Han aristocrats in service to, 133, 139 Wei dynasty established by, 132 Cao Rui (third Wei emperor), 132–133, 136 Cao Zhi (third son of Cao Cao), poems by, 146 “Roving Immortal” (you shan) poem, 136 Ji Kang’s marriage alliance to, 135 power struggles with the Sima house, 139, 141, 155, 166 Celestial Masters (aka “Five Pecks of Rice” movement): founding by Zhang Daoling, 161 Huang-Lao Daoism invoked by the Yellow Turbans movement, 161 individual masters. See Wei Huacun; Zhang Lu and material signs: and the admonition to “cut off one’s traces,” 25 as an instauration of the power politics of hierarchized communities, 197

Index renunciation of desire advocated by Ji Kang compared with practices of, 138 texts of, Scripture of the Yellow Court, 183–186 Celestial Masters, heavenly titles used by pirate Zhang Bolu, 161 Chan (Zen) Buddhism: and Daosheng’s arche-semiotic mistrust of translation, 226 the “liminology” of Chan language and its relation to Zhuangzi’s strategies, 209, 293n16 Chan, Chi-ching, 42, 280n6 Saussurean reading of the Gongsun Longzi, 279n24 Cheng, Chung-ying, 8, 278n14 Ch‘en, Kenneth K., 293n5 Chennault, Cynthia L., 229 Clarke, J. J., 51 Classic of Changes (Yi jing): Ruan Ji’s methodology to outline the theory of, 139–141 jiyan (“sending of words”) compared with yuyan (“entrusted words”), 147 and Wang Bi: his exegetical fame associated with it, 116, 117, 119, 121 on the relationship of hexagrams to commentaries on them, 118–121 Classic of Odes: and Chu-style-fu, 263–264 “Southeast Flies the Peacock,” 147 “Yellow Bird,” 147, 290n46 Classsic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing), 128–129 Confucianism: Dong Zhongshu’s promotion of, 174 global recognition of, 8 overview of, 27–28

309

prescriptive ethico-politics of “humaneness,” 75, 86 See also Analects Confucian standards: and the critique offered by the Laozi, 38–41 Daoist protest against, 24 ritualism of, 38 Confucius: advice offered by pseudo-Confucius to Yan Hui in the Zhuangzi, 102–104, 105 Gongsun Long’s story about, 17–18 Kong Qiu as his proper name, 38 Coutinho, Steve, 69 Creel, Herrlee Glessner, 4 Critchley, Simon, 95 Dahlstron, Daniel O., 46, 282n36 dao: and the relation of the face to humans, 57–58, 72 81 ineffable always-present fullness of, 32 and Buddha Nature, 228, 239 as logos: Heideggers’s overreading of it as, 49–51 and Zhang Longxi’s dispute with James Liu, 77–78 name as a foil for it in the Laozi, 30–31 as an onto-theologically null term, 76 and the opening declaration of the Laozi (Dao De Jing), 29–30 viewed as “negative theology,” 98 Wang Bi’s distinguishing of the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao, 127–130 of Zhuangzi, 87

310

Index

Daoan: arche-semiotics of, 219–222 biographical information about, 216–217 and Daoist discomfort with the materiality of the sign, 25 and geyi exegetical methods, 216, 219 preface to the Sutra of Explication of the Ten Sharmas, 220 Daoism, “philosophical Daoism” (daojia sixiang), x ideal of “non-action,” 118, 221, 280–281n17 See also Daoist arche-semiotics; Daoist language Daoism, “religious Daoism” (daojia), x arche-semiotics of, 25 Daoist arche-semiotics: of the Celestial Masters: and the admonition to “cut off one’s traces,” 25 Derridean critique of logocentrism in light of forms of heavenly writing, 25 and the textuality of the Scripture of the Yellow Court, 183–185 and Wei Huacun’s revelation of texts to Yang Xi, 190–196 and the contributions of Buddhist monks, 202–203 and early medieval China, xi, 18–19, 22, 25, 55, 92, 98, 99–100, 173 and Liu Xie’s Text Mind, 255 poststructuralist semiotics contrasted with, 20–21 and reclusion, 20–21 the need for personal refusal, 144 reclusive lifestyles likened to, 165–166

reluctance to make or acknowledge signs associated with, x–xi, 7, 18–20, 143 and Levinas’s critique of withdrawing from signs. See Levinas, Emmanuel, and the horror of silence the logical terminology of the Gongsun Long contrasted with, 18–19 signs associated with matter, 25, 173 and skepticism about the efficacy and perfectibility of names, and the Obscure Learning school, 24 as a way of representing the dao and the self or avoiding representing them, 98–101 Daoist language: and human relations, 75, 98–99 and the ideas of poststructuralism and discourse analysis, 19–20 as a potential ideological threat in early medieval China, 20–21 and Seng Zhao’s introduction of the concepts of Buddhism to a Chinese readership, 206–212, 227, 293n10 and water imagery, 88 and Liu Xie, 257, 259, 268 See also Daoist arche-semiotics Daosheng (Zhu Daosheng): arche-semiotic mistrust of translation, 225–226 commentary on the Lotus Sutra, 226 and Kumārajīva, 217, 225 Declarations of the Perfected: and the calligraphic tradition, 195 compilation by Tao Hongjing, 187, 195

Index English translations of, 188, 292n39 arche-semiotic statements reworked in: and the “Appended Words” section of the Classic of Changes, 190–195 “words do not exhaust the meaning” from the Classic of Changes, 189 and Zhuangzi’s fish-trap metaphor, 187–188 and Zhuangzi’s fish-trap metaphor’s moral, 189–190 de Man, Paul, 11, 155 Derrida, Jacques, 23 his critical assessment of his relationship to Daoism, 76 his critique of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, 89–90 and the peace of utter silence, 106 his critique of logocentrism, 4–5 différance contrasted with, 21, 25 and his concept of “arche-writing,” xi, 5, 159 and his notion that “there is nothing outside the text” (il n’ya pas de hors-texte), 3 his deconstruction of Lévi-Straus, 158–159, 197 his deconstruction of Rousseau, 26, 159, 197 and negative theology, 89, 97–98, 228 trace concept of, as a précis of his method, 114 zhiyan (rhetorical mode) compared with his way of writing sous rature, 65 See also différance writing: Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 99–101, 288n69

311

“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” 94 The Gift of Death, 95 “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 96–98 “Letter to a Japanese Friend” by, 243–245, 244 On Grammatology, 88 “Plato’s Pharmacy” of, 81, 122–123 Specters of Marx, 116 “Violence and Metaphysics” by, 106 themes that echo with Daoist   arche-semiotics in it, 96 “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” 200–201 Descartes, 46, 213, 270 différance: and the Dao as an onto-theologically null term, 76 and Derrida’s assertion that language unfolds within time (“history”), 21, 32, 79–80, 92 Derridean critique of logocentrism contrasted with, 21, 25 Dong Zhongshu, 174, 251 Don Quixote, 3 Dou, Keyang, 121 Du, Cong and Chaozhong Zhang, 292 Eoyang, Eugene, 284n8 faces: as related to the dao, 57–58, 72, 81 Levinas’s version of, 84–87, 91, 94, 240, 271 and Liu Xie, 264, 266 as textual in the Chinese tradition, 271 Foucault, Michel: concept of the author-function, 34, 270

312

Index

Foucault, Michel (continued) and the drive toward historicizing the sign, 1, 21, 52 Froese, Katrin, 42, 78–79 Fu, Hongchu, 81 Ge Hong, Baopuzi: “Inner Chapters,” “Essay on the Immortals,” 181–182 “Outer chapters”: autobiographical essay affixed to, 182 Confucian outlook of, 175 practical and social aspects of literary   production and consumption discussed in, 175 renunciation of desire advocated by Ji Kang compared with, 138 on “The Meaning of Dao,” 175– 179 George, Stefan, “The Word,” 49–50, 238 geyi (“squaring meanings”): abandonment of, 227 as an arche-semiotic experience, 215 and Daoan, 204, 216, 219 and the effort to translate Sanskrit words into Chinese, 204–205, 240 and monk Faya, 203–204, 216 Gongsun Long: his “biography” in the Gongsun Longzi, 15 as one of two leaders of a “School of Names,” 8–9 personality of, 16–17 political dialogue with Zhao Sheng, 9, 17–18 Gongsun Longzi: marginality of, 8 and the Mohist tradition, 8–11, 13–14, 29, 278n11, 278n15, 278n17

motivations of Daoist archesemiotics shared with, 19 “On Names and Entities,” 11–14, 16, 278n17 “On White and Horse,” 9–13, 15–16, 73, 293n12 and Aristotelian logic, 10–11 and Monk Zhao’s discussion of Buddhist emptiness, 207, 293n12 “Treasury of Traces,” 15–16 Zhuangzi’s critique of, 8, 18–19 Graham, A. C., 281n26, 285n4, 285n26 on Derridean ideas in the Laozi, 76–77 encounter identified as Confucian by, 281 on the Gongsun Longzi in relation to the Mohist tradition, 8, 11, 278n11, 278n17 Primitivists identified in the Zhuangzi by, 281 on the Zhuangzi in relation to the Laozi, 279n2 Greek philosophical tradition: onto-epistemological foundation of, 86 See also Aristotle; Plato Guo Xiang: as editor of the received Zhuangzi, 60, 105 edits of Xiang Xiu’s commentary on the Zhuangzi, 150 guwen movement, 266 Han Fei, 16, 51 Hansen, Chad, 8, 283–284n6 He Yan: “Discourse on the Nameless” (Wuming Lun), 125 execution by Sima Yi, 289n11 and Wang Bi, 123–124, 125, 153

Index Hegel and Hegelian thought, 1, 107, 108, 273 and mistakes regarding the Chinese character, 77 Heidegger, Martin, 23 and Husserlian phenomenology, 45–46, 75, 282n36 and the Laozi. See Laozi (Dao De Jing) as an influence on Heidegger “The Nature of Language,” 49–50, 238 Heidegger’s engagement with East Asian philosophy, 23, 42 and the development of the Kyoto school, 281n29 his Orientalist vision of, 47–50, 173, 228, 238 and the Zhuangzi, 47 See also Heidegger and his dialog with Tezuka Tomio; Laozi (Dao De Jing) as an influence on Heidegger Heidegger and his dialog with Tezuka Tomio, 47–50, 282n37 Derrida’s “Letter to a Japanese Friend” compared with, 244–245 and “Eastasian” civilisation, 47, 50 Hertz, Peter D., 283n38 Hinton, David, 280n16 Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi, 49 Huang, Jie, 285n44 Huang-Lao Daoism, 37 mention in Ji Kang’s “Roving Immortal” poem, 137 and the Yellow Turban movement, 160 Hui Shi (Huizi): and the fish anecdote in the Zhuangzi, 73–75 as one of two leaders of the School of Names, 18, 58 Zhuangzi’s rebuking of, 57–58, 81, 84, 96

313

Huiyuan: arche-semiotics of, 223 and Daoist discomfort with the materiality of the sign, 25 and Daosheng, 217–218 Husserl, Edmund: and Chinese scholarship on phenomenology, 282n30 phenomenological method of: Brentano as a precursor of, 44 Heidegger’s critique of, 45–46, 75, 282n36 and Heidegger’s discover of the “prior-to,” 44–45, 82–83 and the ontological, 45–46, 82 Iliad, 3 Indraccolo, Lisa, 279n23 Ingarden, Roman, 121 intentionality: and the ethico-political context of pre-Qin Chinese philosophy, 86 Husserl’s concept of, 44 Heidegger’s subsuming of it into object relations, 247 Merleau-Ponty’s “corporeal intentionality,” 85 and the process of translation, 199 Izutsu, Toshihiko, 243–245 Jaspers, Karl, 281n21 Ji Kang: anti-semiotics of, 154 death of, 135, 148 letter to Shan Tao, 290n45 and the Obscure Learning (xuanxue) school, 24 as one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 24, 131 “Roaming Mountain” (you shan) poems, 136 Treatise on Letting Go of Selfishness, 135

314

Index

Ji Kang (continued) Treatise on Taking Care of Life, on the renunciation of desire, 138 and Xiang Xiu: philosophical debate with, 137–138 and Xiu’s “Rhapsody on Recalling Old Friends,” 148–149 Jiang Shiyao, 290n44 Jochim, Chris, 284–285n6 Johnston, Ian, 9–10, 13, 278n15 Kant, 45, 46 Král, Oldrich, 297n41 Kumārajīva: conversion from Sarvāstivādin to Mahāyāna Buddhism, 205, 293n7 and Daoist arche-semiotics, 25, 211–212 and emperor Yao Xing of the Later Qin dynasty, 205, 210 Huiyuan’s translation choices traced possibly to, 241 and Monk Zhao, 25, 206, 211–212, 241 Shi Daoan’s translation work as preparation for, 216, 218 and Zhu Daosheng, 217, 225, 226, 241 Lai, Whalen, 225, 226 Laozi (Dao De Jing): and the ability to speak, 274 as a book with no time, no history, and no subjectivity, 25, 281n21 composition of, 280n15 critique of the realism of Confucius, 38–41, 281nn25–26 and the fundamental character of relation, 75 its opening declaration of the dao, 29–30

universal systemic evolution from simple to complex described in, 71 Laozi (Dao De Jing) as an influence on Heidegger, 43–44, 47 and conceptual patterns of similarity and difference, 51–55 his reading of dao as logos, 49–51 Zhuangzi’s influence on Derrida compared with, 79 Laozi (the man): Confucius’s legendary visit to, 34–35, 60, 69 and gender, 281n23 his historicity compared with that of Zhuang Zi, 61–62 quasi-historical status of, 23, 34–35, 281n26 Sima Qian’s biography of, 32–35, 37, 60, 166 visionary appearance to Zhang Daoling, 161, 183 Later Qin dynasty, détente with the Eastern Jin, 217 Lau, D. C., 35–26 Legalists and Legalism, intellectual following of, 8 Levinas-Derrida debate: and Derrida’s assertion that language unfolds within time (“history”), 92 language as the epiphenomenon of ethics, 89 and the ethico-political context of early Chinese Philosophy, 23–24 language undergirding Levinas’s system of relations, 85–86, 89– 91 and the peace of silence, 89–92, 106, 115

Index Levinas, Emmanuel, 23 critique of withdrawing from signs, 86–87 and Daoist arche-semiotics. Levinas, Emmanuel, and the horror of silence Derrida’s critique of. See LevinasDerrida debate and the phenomenological tradition, 81–83 Levinas, Emmanuel and the horror of silence, 24, 59, 100 and the absence of the Other from his own sign (the face), 84–87 call to peace-within-speech in the relation between self-and Other, 106 and the Daoist world as read by a theist, 86–87page range okay here/ and Wang Bing’s distinguishing of the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao, 129–130 Levinas, Emmanuel on the primacy of the Other, 82–84 and Derridean anti-ethics, 96 the self in relation to, 83–86, 287n46 Li Zhengrong, 262 Lingbao Daoism: arche-semiotic materiality associated with, 173, 196–197 Buddhist influence on, 196, 292–293n47 Liu Bei, Shu Han kingdom of, 132, 161 Liu, James J. Y., 77–78 Liu-Song dynasties: anecdote concerningLiu Daosheng and Emperor Taizu, 224 notion of the “trace” for practicing Daoists of, 137 poets. See Xie Lingyun

315

Liu Xiaogan, 283n4, 285n13, 285n26 Liu Xie: and Buddhism, 232, 250 his internalisation of the “subjective premise” of arche-semiotics, 266–267 universal vision of wen of, 251– 252 Wenxin Diaolong (Text-Mind and the Carving of Dragons): and Derrida’s theory of the supplement, 25–26, 248, 268–269 and literary semiotics at the turn of the sixth century, 23 “Postface of Intention,” 250 on the “Webbed Fingers” (“Pian Mu)” chapter of the Zhuangzi, 255 Liu Yimen, 211, 222–223 Locke, John, 11 Lotus Sutra: one-vehicle doctrine of, 226 translation of, 206, 218, 226 Lynn, Richard John, 296, 296 Lyrics of Chu, 146 “Far Roaming,” 235 Qu Yuan’s personality associated with, 263 McCraw, David R., 104–105 Magliola, Robert R., 76–77 Mair, Victor, 296 Marx and Marxism, 1, 42, 94, 273 matching of signs to ideas: “matching Buddhist concepts with Daoist terminology. See geyi (“squaring meanings”) names as a kind of, 6, 11, 18 and the subjective premise of archesemiotics, 6

316

Index

mingjiao (“teaching on names”): He Yan’s thoughts on, 125 and Wang Bing’s distinguishing of the nameably great king from the unnameably great Dao, 129–130 Moeller, Hans-Georg, 77, 288n6 Mohist school: arche-semiotic ideas found in, 7 debate with Confucians, 79 and the Gongsun Longzi, 8–11, 13–14, 29, 278n11, 278n15, 278n17 Mohist school and its artisinal logic: the Laozi as a critique of, 37, 50–51, 53, 281n26 prescriptive ethico-politics of, 8, 75, 86 Ruan Ji’s critique of the language of, 143, 145 Wheelwright Pian’s sentiments distinguished from, 284n7 and Zhuangzian suspicion of language, 69–71 Møllgaard, Eske, 68, 70 Monk Zhao. See Zhao Treatises (Zhao lun) Mozi: founding of the Mohist school, 69 See also Mohist school Nambikwara people encountered by Lévi Strauss: Celestial Masters’a suspicion of external, material signs compared with, 172 Lévi Strauss’s elucidation of, 158– 159 Lingbao shamans compared with, 196–197 Yang Xi compared with, 197 Northern Wei. See Wei dynasty Nulty, Timothy J., 78

Obscure Learning (xuanxue): early Jin-era practice of cloudy allegorism, 266 figures associated with. See Ji Kang; Ruan Ji; Shan Tao; Wang Bi; Xiang Xiu views on nature, 289n28 Wang Bi’s invention of, 116, 119–120 Owen, Stephen, 234–237, 250, 267 Parkes, Graham, 42 peace of silence. See silence Peirce, Charles S.: early Chinese “semiotics” distinguished from his theoretical systemization, 4, 43, 116, 160 as the first semiotician, xi, 1 philosophical Daoism. See Daoism, “philosophical Daoism” (daojia sixiang) Plato: and Ge Hong on “The Meaning of Dao,” 178 and the genre of modern Platonic dialogue, 48 on the meaning of individual words in Cratylus, 2 ontology and epistemology of, 80 strictures against poetry, 261, 273 “Plato’s Pharmacy.” See under Derrida, Jacques Pöggeler, Otto, 42, 53 poststructuarlism: the settling (ding) function of the sign in light of, 129 See also the “author”; Barthes, Roland; Derrida, Jacques; différance; Foucault, Michel; intentionality Qu Yuan, 263 Raffoul, François, 288n69

Index Raphals, Lisa, 58 religious Daoism. See Celestial Masters; Daoism, “religious Daoism” (daojia) repeated words (chongyan), 65 Richter, Antje, 250 Riffaterre, Michael, 4 Robinet, Isabelle, x, 292n40 Roth, Harold David, 102, 280n3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Derrida’s deconstruction of, 26, 159, 197, 243, 246–248, 268 primitivism of, 1, 49, 197 “Roving Immortal” (you xian) poems, as a “Daoist” poetic subject during the Tang dynasty, 136 Ruan Ji: and the Cao-Sima feud, 139, 141 “Essay on Understanding Zhuang [Da Zhuang Lun],” 142–145 father Ruan Yu, 139 hometown of Chenliu, 290n44 and Ji Kang’s fatal letter to Shan Tao possibly recalled by, 290n45 and the Obscure Learning (xuanxue) school, 24 as one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 24, 131 Songs of My Cares (Yong Huai), xiaoyao (“carefree roaming”) used in, 146 Saussure, Ferdinand de: early Chinese “semiotics” distinguished from his theoretical systemization, 4, 13, 43, 116, 160 as the first semiologist, xi, 1 School of Names: Gongsun Long as one of two leaders of, 8–9 Hui Shi (Huizi) as one of two leaders of, 58

317

prescriptive ethico-politics of, 70, 75, 86 semiotics: as the “science of communication,” 2, 4 See also Derrida, Jacques; Peirce, Charles S.; Saussure, Ferdinand de semiotics in early China: and the Gonsun Longzi’s chapter “On Names and Entities,” 11, 16 semiotic mode of Peirce or Sausure distinguished from, 4, 43, 116, 160 and subjectivity, 287n52 Wagner’s discussion in light of Wang B, 117 See also arche-semiotics semiotics of personhood, subjectivity retained in early Chinese views of, 287n52 Seng Zhao. See Zhao, Monk; Zhao Treatises (Zhao lun) Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian): members of, 131–134 See also Ji Kang; Ruan Ji; Shan Tao; Xiang Xiu motivations for their reformulations of Daoist arche-semiotics, 108 Sima Yan and his sons’ disruption of, 173–174 Shakespeare, William, 272–273 Shan Tao: Ji Kang’s letter to, 290n45 as one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 24, 131 “Poem Sent to Shan Tao” by Sima Biao, 150–152 and the semiotic context of the early Jin, 150

318

Index

Shangqing school: adherents of. See Tao Hongjing; Xu family; Yang Xi Buddhist influence on, 193–194, 292–293n47 emergence of, 25 hierarchical community of, 197 texts of. See Declarations of the Perfected Shangqing school’s emphasis on texts and textuality, 186–187 and the art of calligraphy, 25 and Daoist arche-semiotic materiality, 173 See also Declarations of the Perfected, arche-semiotic statements reworked in Shi Daoan: bibliographical and translation projects of, 216, 218 and Shi Huiyuan, 217–218 Shi Huiyuan: and Kumārajīva, 217 and Shi Daoan, 217–218 Shu Han kingdom, 132 conflict with the Wei, 134 Liu Bei’s establishment of, 132 Sidney, Philip, 4 silence: Chan notion of the speech-silence relation, 209 disruption by language, 89–92, 106 and Daoist arche-semiotics, 143–144 writing as a trace of, 106 See also Levinas, Emmanuel, and the horror of silence Sima Biao: biography in the Jin Shu, 151 compilation of the Xu Han Shu, 150 as a Daoist sympathizer, 150, 152 “Poem Sent to Shan Tao” (Zheng Shan Taol Shi), 150–152

Sima house: power struggles with the Cao house, 125, 139, 155, 166 Sima Yan, 173–174 Sima Yi, 133–134 Sima Zhao’s feud with Cao Pi, 139 Sima Zhon (son of Sima Yan), 174 See also Sima Biao Sima Qian (the Grand Historian): biography of Gongsun Long, 9 biography of Laozi, 32–35, 37, 60, 69 biography of Zhuangzi, 61–62 Sima Tan, 278n20 six schools (liujia): individual schools. See Confucianism; Daoism; Legalists; Mohist school; School of Names Sima Tan on, 278n20 Smith, Thomas E., 188, 292n39 spirit mediums, individuals acting as. See Wei Huacun; Yang Xi Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty, 114–115 Tang dynasty: landscape poetry as a genre during, 229 “Roving Immortal” as a “Daoist”poetic subject during, 136 Shangqing school during, 187, 196 Xiang Xiu commentary, during, 150 Tao Hongjing (third patriarch of the Shangqing School): as a calligraphic stylist, 187, 195 Yang Xi’s Declarations of the Perfected compiled by, 187, 196 Tezuka Tomio, 47–50, 244–245 Three Kingdoms: social and political instability of, 132 See also Wei dynasty

Index traces: Confucius’s counseling of Yan Hui into lose the trace, 102–104, 105 early Jin compulsion to shield themselves from view, 150 of the historical Zhuang Zhou, 104–105 and material signs as an instauration of the power politics of hierarchized community of, 158, 197 reclusive lifestyles likened to Daoist personal arche-semiotics, 166 Wei Huacun’s revelation of texts to Yang Xi, 190–196 translation, Daosheng’s arche-semiotic mistrust of, 225–226 Tuoba. See Wei dynasty Wagner, Rudolf G., 116–118 Wang Bi: commentary on the Classic of Changes, and the relationship of hexagrams to commentaries on them, 118–121 commentary on the Laozi, 124–129 and He Yan’s thoughts on mingjiao, 125 “Spirit of the valley” (or the Dark Female), 126 and He Yan, 123–124, 125, 153 on names: and the arche-semiotic expression of anxiety over subjecthood, 130–131 nameably great king distinguished from the unnameably great Dao by, 127–130 “a name is something to define the shape” (ming yi dingxing), 127, 129

319

and the Obscure Learning (xuanxue) school, 24 read as an ontological-political philosophy by Rudolf Wagner, 117–118 Wang Youru, 209, 293n16 Warring States, chaotic context of, 35 Watson, Burton, 74 Wei dynasty (386–534): Buddhism during, 205, 241 rulers of. See Cao house Tuoba rule, 215 xuanxue during. See Obscure Learning Wei Huacun (aka Lady Wei): biographical information about, 182 divine revelation to Yang Xi, 185–186, 190–196 as the founding matriarch of the Shangqing school, 186 Scripture of the Yellow Court authored by, 183, 186 Wells, Matthew V., 182 wen: Dong Zhongshu’s socio-cosmological use of, 251 Liu Xie’s universal vision of, 251–252 Wesling, Donald, 285–286n28 Western philosophy: its development compared with early Chinese thought, 80 See also Aristotle; Derrida, Jacques; Greek philosophical tradition; Heidegger, Martin; LevinasDerrida debate; Levinas, Emmanuel; Plato Wolosky, Shira, 98 Wu, Guangming, 65 Wu kingdom: conflict with the Wei, 134 enfeoffment of Sun Quan, 132

320

Index

Xiang’er Commentary to Laozi: arche-semiotic assumptions of the Celestial Masters that produced it, 164–166 Dunhuang manuscript of, 163, 164 Zhang Lu’s possible authorship of, 163 Xiang Xiu: commentary on the Zhuangzi, 150 and the Obscure Learning (xuanxue) school, 24 as one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 24, 131 “Rhapsody on Recalling Old Friends,” 148 Xie Lingyun, 229 Xie Lingyun poems, “Entering Huazi Hill,” 234, 238 Xie, Shabo and John (Zhong) M. Chen, 78 Xu family adherents of the Shangqing school, 187, 196–197 xuanxue. See Obscure learning Xunzi, 8 Yang Xi: as a calligraphic stylist, 195 revelations of texts to: compilations of. See Declarations of the Perfected his initiation into the Xu family into these same texts, 187, 196–197 role of the “inner” wife assumed by, 186 and Wei Huacun, 185–186, 190, 195–196 and the Zhengao, 292n40 Yeh, Michelle, 76 Yellow Turban movement of Zhang Jue, concepts of Huang-Lao Daoism invoked by, 160 yin and yang theory. See Classic of Changes (Yi jing)

Young, Julian, 50 Zhang Daoling: encounter with the deified Laozi, 161, 183 hagiographical acounts by Zhang Lu concerning, 161 Zhang, Longxi: on the discursive logocentrism of Zhuangzi, 77–79, 286n36 on the linguistic naïveté of the Zhuangzi, 77, 119 Zhang Lu (grandson of Zhang Daoling): biographical information about, 161 Commands and Admonitions for the Families of the Great Dao attributed to, 165 Xiang’er Commentary to Laozi possibly attributed to, 163 Zhao kingdom, Gongsun Long’s political dialogue with Zhao Sheng, 9, 17 Zhao, Monk (Seng Zhao): Daoist language used to introduce the concepts of Buddhism to a Chinese readership by, 206–212, 227, 293n10, 293n12 and Kumārajīva, 25, 206, 211–212, 241 Zhao Treatises (Zhao lun): first treatise, “On the Immobility of Objects,” 206–207 second treatise, “On Emptiness of the Unreal,” 207–208, 293n10, 293n12 third treatise, On Prajna’s Lacking Knowledge, 206, 211–213 fourth treatise, On the Namelessness of Nirvana, 208–211, 218 author Seng Zhao of. See Zhao, Monk (Seng Zhao) Zha, Peide, 78

Index Zhi Wu Lun, 278–279n18, 279nn23–24 Zhuang Zhou: author-function of, 65–66, 105, 285n6 Derrida compared with: and “deconstructionist discourse” as a label, 78–79 and the framework of contemporary semiotics, 80–81 and historical limitations, 79–80 objections to, 78–79 dream-butterfly threat of “self ”effacement by, 72–73, 105 historicity of, 61–62, 75–76, 283n49 as an individual voice at a particular moment in intellectual history, 72–73 Sima Qian’s biography of, 61–62 Zhuangzi (the man). See Zhuang Zhou Zhuangzi: Butcher Ding, 249 Confucius attacks in, 69 Guo Xiang as editor of the received form of, 60, 105 impulse to return to undefined simplicity in, 163 and Mohist logic, 69–71 a short well rope used as a reference to the “Perfect Happiness” chapter of, 265, 297n35 Wheelwright Pian, 60–61, 169, 180, 249, 284n284 yuyan (“entrusted words”), 65–66 as both the definition and the practice of allegory, 65–66 Ruan Ji’s jiyan (“sending of words”) compared with, 147 and Zhuangzi’s position on language as language, 70 zhiyan (rhetorical mode), 65

321

Zhuangzi, “Inner chapters”: Confucius’s counseling of Yan Hui into lose the trace, 102–104, 105 “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” 71 and the fundamental character of relation, 72–75 Liu Xie’s invocation of, 265, 297n39 Zhuang Zhou’s presumed authentic voice, 66, 75–76 “Zhuangzi” and the “butterfly” in, 72–73, 105 “The Sign of Virtue Complete,” 57–59 Zhuangzi’s rebuke to Hui Shi in, 58, 73–75, 81, 84, 96 Zhuangzi, “mixed chapters” of: attacks on Confucius in, 69 “goblet words” trope in, 65–66, 70 Zhuangzi, “Outer chapters” of: fish anecdote featuring Hui Shi and Zhuang Zhou in, 73–75, 84 “Webbed Fingers” chapter in, 255 Zhuangzi, fish-trap metaphor in: as evidence of linguistic naïveté, 77, 119, 239 and Ge Hong’s proposal of a theory of sign that is nearly opposite to its original usage, 180 original expression of, 187 and Wang Bi on the relationship between hexagrams and commentaries on them, 118–119, 120 and Yang Xi’s “obscure trap” (xuanquan), 187–188 Zhu Daosheng. See Daosheng