Studies In Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature 0791404498, 0791404501

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Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature A. C. Graham

Studies In Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature

A. C. Graham

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

SllNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, editors

First published in 1986 by Institute of East Asian Philosophies Published by State University of New York Press, Albany @

1990

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 except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham, A. C. (Angus Charles) Studies in Chinese philosophy and philosophical literature / A.C. Graham. p. cm. - (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture) Originally published: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7914-0449-8. - ISBN 0-7914-0450-1 (pbk.) 1. Philosophy, Chinese. 2. Philosophical literature-China. I. Title II. Series. BI26.G72 1990 90- 30958 IHI '.1l-dc20 CIP

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION THE BACKGROUND OF THE MENCIAN THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE. Preface Part 1. The problem of human nature before Mencius 1/1 The concept of hsing ·tt 'nature' outside Confuam~

The Confucian controversy about human nature before Mencius 1/3 Kao-tzu %'1' and the Chieh A chapter of Kuan-tzu f"'f Part 2. Mencius 2/ I The Mencian theory of human nature 2/2 The debate between Mencius and Kao-tzu 2/3 Ku #:. 'appeal to precedent' and chih' t" 'cleverness' 2/4 The spheres of Heaven and Man in Mencius and Hsiin-tzu 2/5 Conclusion Appendix: The meaning of ch'ing ·tt Finding List

7 7 9 9

1/2

THE NUNG-CHIA ,l *= "SCHOOL OF THE TILLERS" AND THE ORIGINS OF PEASANT UTOPIANISM IN CHINA. I. Hsii Hsing ;iHt, the Tillers, and the legend of Shen-nung :#,l 2. Shen-nung in the Legalist Shang-tzu ~ '1'

18 22

26 26 42

49 54 57 59 66

67 67 7I

.1. TIlt.' realm of Shen-nung as the Tillers' Utopia 4. The Tillers' version of the legend of Po Yi 1tJJl and

Shu Ch'i~'" 5. The Utopias of the Tillers and the Taoists (I. Shen-nung and the Yellow Emperor 7. The social background of the Tillers THE ORIGINS OF THE LEGEND OF LAO TAN

86

90 94 100

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THREE STUDIES OF KUNG-SUN LUNG ~.JUt. (i) THE COMPOSITION OF THE KUNG-SUN LUNG TZU ~-l+-"l-t. Introduction Part 1. Differences between ch. 2 and 3 and ch. 4-6 A. General differences B. Linguistic criteria Part 2. Sources of ch. 4-6 A. The Mohist Canons B. Three paradoxes Part 3. External evidence for dating the two parts of the Kung-sun Lung tzu A. The Kung-sun Lung tzu in the Sui (589-618) and T'ang (618-907) dynasties and later B. External evidence before the Sui dynasty; the White Hoyse and the Meanings and Things C. External evidence before the Sui dynasty; Understanding Change, Hard and White, and Names and Actualities D. The evidence of Lu Sheng ·t·~ Part 4. Conclusion (ii)

(III)

A FIRST READING OF THE "WHITE HORSE". 1 The order of the writing strips. 2 Evidence in the introductory chapter for the order of the strips. .1 The number of characters on each strip. 4 The argument of the "White Horse" dialogue. S Reconstructed text, translation and notes.

I II

125 12(j

I26 I26 126 129

137 137 145 149

149 156

159 162 163

169 171 174 17H 185

K lJN< ;-SUN LUNC'S DISCOURSE RE-READ AS AIU ;UMENT ABOUT WHOLE AND PART.

193

Preface Part 1. The "Left and right" dialogue Part 2. The "White horse" Part 3. "Pointing things out" THE DATE AND COMPOSITION OF LIEH- TZU J'B-. Part 1. Introduction 1/1 The controversy over the date of Lieh-tzu 1/2 The Chang Chan ~;A- preface and the Liu Hsiang "J f,;J report Part 2. Passages shared by Lieh-tzu and other texts. 2/1 Introduction and list of parallels 2/2 Mo-tzu "'T 2/3 Chuang-tzu it T 2/4 Lii-shih ch'un-ch';u g t\:t.:fk 2/5 Other pre-Han and Former Han texts 2/6 Huan T'an ~1f 2/7 Mu t';en-tzu chuan fJ~ T14 2/8 Explicit quotations in Lieh-tzu Part ]. Linguistic evidence of date. 3/1 Personal pronouns 3/2 K'o "f

* -c-

3/3 Fu 3/4 Wang 3/5 Tu~

3/6 Yen Ij 3/7 Hsiang l!l 3/8 Ch'jeh II 3/9 Chu

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3/10 Inversion of the pronoun object

Part 4. The composition of Lieh-tzu 4/1 Unknown sources 4/2 The Fatalist and Hedonist chapters 4/3 Conclusion HOW MUCH OF CHUANG- TZU ~l-t DID CHUANG-TZU WRITE?

193 194 196 210 216 216 216 220 225 225 229 230 235 237 241 242 245 248 249 251 252 254 257 25 8 259 260 262 263 265 265 273 2S1

"IIUN ~{"T "how many?" and shu It "Ilumber".

322 322

323 323

324 326 326 327 329 329 33 I 33 I

334 343 351 357

360 360 367 373 378 380 380

385

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390 39 2

4/2 Questions relating things 4/2/ I Ho 1ur "what?" and kan ying ~J!!. "excitation and response". 4/2/2 Wu-hu .~.-t "whence/where/whither?" and tao 'it "path". 4/2/3 Ho yi 1url'A "by what means?" and yung IfJ "using": ho wei 1ur b9 "for the sake of what?" and chih .to "intent". 5· Conclusion.

WHAT WAS NEW IN THE CH'ENG-CHU lL*- THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE?

J()5 396 400

40 4 407

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INTRODUCTION

There can be many motives for studying Chinese philosophy, from its practical indispensability as a tool for understanding Chinese culture in general to the hope of personal salvation through Taoism or Zen. The dominant motive at the back of the outwardly dissimilar inquiries in the present book is the attraction of entering an entirely different conceptual universe, of having to uncover and break free from one's own unconscious preconceptions. A Westerner drawn by this interest to the Chinese philosophical tradition, of all the remotest from his own, does not expect to find ideas he can pluck out of their context and import into the West; even when he comes on an apparently familiar issue, such as the goodness or badness of human nature, he is as alert to distinctions as to similarities. He values the expanded perspective of moving between two of the world's most developed world-pictures for its own sake, and for the insights when the shaking of a preconception opens up a new angle of approach to a Western problem. But whatever his ambitions a serious inquirer into Chinese philosophy finds himself distracted at every stage by textual, linguistic and historical problems, into which, if he finds them as I do fascinating in themselves, he may sink never to fly again. The papers assembled in this volume illustrate a considerable range of the issues which confront him on the sinological as well as the philosophical level. It hardly needs saying that a Westerner can never be as fully at home in the traditional Chinese world-picture as in his own. However far he penetrates he never ceases to impose Western presuppositions, and from time to time awaken to one of them with an astonished "How could I have failed to see that?". At the start perhaps he is disappointed to find that the "ideographic" script (not yet recognised as logographic) makes abstract thought impossible, that the language is irremediably vague (hasn't any

"'I'll I )11'.\ IN (:IIINI'SL !'llIll )"lll'IIY

~I'allllllar, has it?), all argumentation muddled, the few pitiful examples of ( ~hil\l'sl' "Io~il"" vitiated by childish fallacies, so that there seems no hope of arrivin~ anywhere by this path unless it leads out of the mist into a world SII alien that even the laws oflogic reveal themselves as Western and culturebound. Later, as he finds his bearings, he comes to appreciate that if in his own tradition there seem to be arguments with no missing links or grounds it is because he and the philosopher ask the same questions from the same unspoken assumptions, and that in Chinese arguments too the gaps fill in when the questions and assumptions are rightly identified. In one style of Chinese discourse, the Taoist, there is deliberate paradox to smash through logical dichotomies; but in discourse which is designed to persuade, there is nothing fundamentally alien to us either in the logic or in the rhetoric. One learns to distrust any interpreta.tion which credits the Chinese with too obvious a fallacy. The concepts are different, perhaps even the categories behind them, but the implicit logic is the same. Among these papers, the newly published Kung-sun Lung's discourse re-read as argument about whole and part proposes that if we rethink the sophist's arguments in terms not of class and member but of whole and part, all his three genuine essays, which seemed inconsequential when not down-right illogical, turn out, by this switch of viewpoint, to be consecutive and coherent. The background oj the Mendan theory oj human nature (1967) argues that to make a simple identification even of the Chinese concept of hsing 'Ii and the Western of human nature blinds us to an underlying analogy between man's hsing as predisposing him to good and as laying down the term of life proper to his species. It is an example of that uncovering of unnoticed analogies which in illuminating an alien concept also brings to the surface the unnoticed analogies behind our own. Two other papers, "Being" in Western philosophy compared with shihlfei and yu/wu in Chinese philosophy (1l)60) and Relating categories to question forms in pre-Han thought (1985) seek access to a level still nearer to the foundations of thought than the metaphors at the roots of conceptualisation, the effects of the syntactic differences between Chinese and the Indo-European languages. The Western tradition has gellerally assumed that behind the multifarious usages of the verb "to hc" thcn: is a "concept of Being" which is central to philosophy. A Western philosopher is likely to suppose that thinkers in languages without a verb "to be" must be seriously handicapped in their efforts to grasp this crucially important concept. Yet to anyone familiar with Chinese, as with most other languagt's outside the Indo-European family, it makes no more sense to say that Chinl'sc lacks a verb "to be" than that English lacks the verbs yu ;ij' and wu fti., the IIl'gative copulafei .1t-, the final particle yeh t...; one takes it as a

INTRl)1 )U( :TI()N

3

matter of course that the many different functions of the Indo-European verb are likely in other language families to be performed by different words and constructions which themselves have a variety of other functions. Taoists sometimes appear in translation to identify the Tao with "Non-being" or to declare that it transcends the distinction between Being and Non-being; but it would be absurd to ask how they succeeded in grasping our concept without our word, the question is how far their concept of yu resembles and differs from ours of Being. The centrality of Being in Western metaphysics makes this one of the deepest issues in comparative philosophy. This paper also appeared in a form for readers without Chinese as "Being" in Classical Chinese in Tire verb "he" and its synonyms, edited by John W.M. Verhaar, Foundations of language Supplementary series, Dordrecht, Holland, v.l(1967), followed in V.5(1972) by "Being" in philosophy and linguistics, on the beneficial effects on Western ontology of its Mediaeval passage through another language which "lacks a verb 'to be"', Arabic. Another fundamental problem is raised by the question forms of Chinese. Since every philosophical answer is shaped by the posing of the question. it may be suspected that the categories within which we think correspond to the basic words available in the language for asking the questions, for example the categories time and place to "When?" and "Where?". In the case of Greek this correspondence shows up very clearly in the Categories of Aristotle. Classical Chinese has a rich variety of interrogative substitutes. but we find no exact equivalents even for "When?" and "Where?". Can we use the interrogative words to trace differences between Chinese and Western categories i Here inquiry is hindered by our relative ignorance of Classical Chinese syntax. At the time when the earliest of these papers were written in their original form. there were great sinologists still alive who did hold that Classical Chinese has no grammar, and that one simply learns by experience to intuit the overall sense of groups of ideograms. There has been considerable progress since, but in preparing Relating categories and question forms it proved necessary to start from a purely grammatical inquiry into the still imperfectly distinguished interrogative pronouns and adverbs. Another subsidiary discipline with which we cannot dispense is textual criticism. The understanding of KUI1~-sun Lung tzu is considerably hampered if one fails to notice that the latter half of the text really is nonsense, forged some 600 years later than the rest with the help of misunderstood scraps of the Mohist Canons. The composition of the Kung-slm Lung tzu (1955) and The date and composition of Lieh-tzu (1960) apply to two relatively short texts methods even now more familiar in Classical and Biblical studies than in sinology. where for most of the literature we have hardly advanced beyond accepting

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STUDIES IN CHINESE PI IILOSOPIIY

or rejecting a book as a whole by such simple tests as historical references and pn'sl'nce or absence in the bibliographies of the dynastic histories. Both papl'rs seck criteria not only for dating the final composition of the book but for identifying older material preserved within it. Kung-sun Lung tzu and Ut'h-tzu are late forgeries, but we can rescue from them documents important for pre-Han philosophy, the opening questions of Tang ~ and the dialogue of Yang Chu ~>f.. and Ch'in Ku-li *1f~ in Lieh-tzu, and the genuine essays of Kung-sun Lung. How much oJ"Chuang-tzu" did Chuangtzu write? (1980) applies the same methods to distinguishing the strata in a much longer and more heterogeneous text, but only to hack a path for future explorers to widen. Compared with the other two textual studies it is no more than a pile of notes; more satisfying results will require closer analysis by more rigorous criteria. The analysis of different layers in Chuang-tzu is important for distinguishing currents of thought which later came to be assimilated as "Taoist". One of our major difficulties in dealing with the tendencies which died out by the early Han is that many of them are known to us directly only through the criticisms of their more successful rivals, but are likely to have left remains in heterogeneous collections such as Chuang-tzu and Kuantzu, not to mention the overtly eclectic Lu-shih ch'un-ch'iu and Huai-nantzu, our reading of which will be distorted until we can separate out the conflicting viewpoints. Thus until recently there was no choice but to take the word of the hostile Confucian Mencius for the doctrines of Yang Chu, ofKao-tzu %-'t and ofHsii Hsing -;1'th. The supposed egoist Yang Chu has come to look quite' different since scholars identified as "Yangist" whole chapters of CJHlallg-tzu and the Ui-shih ch'llIl-ch'iu. The background 4 tire MCI/(ial/ theory 4 hilI/WI/ ,wtllYI' identities a "Kaoist" chapter in Kllall-tzll, which enables us to take a new look at the familiar debate between KaotZll and Mencius from the viewpoints of both sides. In the case ofHsii Hsing, thl' one known spokesman of the Tillers (Nung-cllia t~) on the far Left of the pre-Han political spectrum, we have a single but very valuable clue; the schools tended to distinguish themselves by their preferences among the anciellt sage emperors, and the Tillers were unique in exalting the legendary ill VClltor of agriculturc Shell-BulIg it t. Tht' NII/lg-chia " School of the Tillers" (1(J7I of Oril'll til I 'l/Id Africall StlJdies 42/1 (1971) 'The Nung-

STUDIES IN CHINESE PI III.( lS( ll'IIY

rhia "School of the Tillers" and the origins of peasant Utopianism in China' j(lurnai of the American Academy of Religious 47/3 (1979) 'How much of (:hua"~-tzu did Chuang-tzii write?' Kuo-chi Han-hsiieh hui-yi lun-wen chi 1Il~)1.-"t-~~:t.#.- Taipei 1981, 'The origins of the leg'end of Lao Tan' Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism, edited Wing-tsit Chan, Honolulu 1986, 'What was new in the Ch'eng-Chu theory of human nature?' Philosophy East and West 36/2 (1986), 'Kung-sun Lung's discourse re-read as argument about whole and part'.

THE BACKGROUND OF THE MENCIAN THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE

PREFACE The word hsing 'Ii is one of the few in Chinese philosophical terminology which has a very close English equivalent. It is commonly translated 'nature', and a Chinese thinker does in fact discuss the hsing of a man, of a horse, of water, in very much the same contexts in which we would talk of its nature. (Of course we also use 'nature' without reference to a specific thing, where a Chinese thinker would say tzu-jan, .*: 'spontaneity', literally 'being so of itself, and 'Nature' written with a capital letter where he would say T'ien :k 'Heaven', the power which is responsible for everything outside human control). There is even a similarity in etymology; Greek phusis 'nature' comes from phuo '1 grow', Latin natura from nascor 'I am born', Chinese hSing/*S!ENG is derived from sheng/*SENG 1. 'be born, live' (causatively, 'generate, give birth to') and written with its character as phonetic - a derivation which was always recognised, as in Kao-tzu's definition. "It is sheng which is meant by "hsing'." (1.Z1fBi)1 However in one respect the etymological resemblance may be misleading. Because of the derivation from nascor 'I am born' we tend to think of 'nature' as well as the 'innate' as what is present in us from birth, in spite of the fact that we do not hesitate, for example, to use 'natural' and 'innate' of the sexual instinct, an appetite which almost everyone before Freud supposed to emerge long after birth. (We do not think of Greek phusis, since its English derivative 'physics' has assumed a different meaning). Consequently we are

a

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STU illES IN CHINESE I'HII.O'OI'IIY

tcmptcd to assume that hsing is derived from sheng 'be born', although 'be horn', 'grow', 'live' are hardly even distinguishable senses of the Chinese word, rather translation devices suitable to different contexts. Thus Waley says that" hsing (nature) meant in ordinary parlance the qualities that a thing has to start with",2 and I have myself in previous publications translated the definition 1: