Wang Bi

Wang Bi read the Laozi as a book about wu, which is usually translated as nothingness or non being and in his hands means something more precise: whatever is determinate is limited by being that thing rather than another, so the ground of all determinate things cannot itself be determinate. What has no shape can give rise to every shape. What has no preference can support everything. The Way is not a very great thing among things; it is the absence out of which things are what they are, and to name it at all is already to have missed.

From that follows a politics. A ruler who acts on a preference organises the world around his preference and generates the resistance that goes with it, while a ruler who holds to wu leaves the ten thousand things to order themselves, which is what the term non action means in this commentary and it is not passivity. The reading has a famous edge to it. Asked why Confucius, who never discusses wu, was the greater sage, Wang Bi is reported to have answered that Confucius embodied it and therefore did not need to speak of it, whereas Laozi and Zhuangzi were still on the side of what they lacked and talked about it constantly. That answer let a Daoist metaphysics be held by people whose public commitments were Confucian, which is what the Dark Learning of the third century was doing.

His commentary on the Book of Changes made an argument about how to read that has organised the field ever since. There are three levels: the words, the images, and the meaning. Words exist to explain the images and images exist to hold the meaning, so once the meaning is grasped the image can be let go, exactly as a fish trap is forgotten once the fish is caught and a snare once the rabbit is taken. Anyone who keeps hold of the image has kept the trap and lost the fish.

The target was specific. The Han specialists, Jing Fang above all, had built an enormous apparatus of correspondences attaching hexagram lines to calendar periods, heavenly stems, earthly branches and directions, and Wang Bi cleared it away as machinery that had stopped serving what it was built for. The consequence is that Chinese readings of the Changes divide into two lineages, one concerned with meaning and pattern and descending from him, the other with image and number and reconstructing what he discarded, and the division still structures scholarship on the text. He argued all this and was dead at twenty three, which is among the more striking facts in the history of Chinese philosophy.

His commentary also settled the physical text. The version he wrote on became the received arrangement, with the judgement and the image placed under each hexagram rather than the appendices being kept separate at the end, and that layout is what nearly every printed edition and translation has followed since. A commentary telling its readers to discard the apparatus ended by supplying the frame through which the classic is still read.