Huang Lao Thought and the Huainanzi

Extract

The Huainanzi is a corporate work which was compiled at the court of the king of Huainan, being first presented to the imperial throne in 139 B.C., and possibly receiving certain additions between then and 122 B.C. For various reasons, however, the book did not meet with the same type of acclaim that had accompanied other texts. By the eleventh century at least, the comments of Xu Shen (c. 55–149) and Gao You (c. 168–212) had been fused together into a single set of notes. The book attracted the critical attention of Su Song (1020–1101), and then that of some of the most notable scholars of the Qing period, such as Wang Niansun (1744–1832), Huang Peilie (1763–1825) and Gu Guangqi (1776–1835). In the early days of western sinology the work evaded the attention of scholars such as Legge and Couvreur who necessarily followed the lead of their Chinese masters and fastened on what they regarded as the basic texts of traditional learning, i.e. mainly the classical texts and the Confucian teachers, and the Daode jing. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that western scholars have felt ready to examine, appraise and translate parts of the Huainanzi, and the results may be seen in the writings of Eva Kraft (1957–58), Benjamin Wallacker (1962), Roger Ames (1983), Charles Le Blanc (1985), Hal Roth (1992), Claude Larre (1993) and now John Major. Further research in the future will be immeasurably improved and brought to new standards thanks to the publication of the concordance to the text by D. C. Lau (1992).