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The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China
Compiled by scholars at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, in the second century B.C.E, "The Huainanzi" is a tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han philosophy and statecraft. Outlining "all that a modern monarch needs to know," the text emphasizes rigorous self-cultivation and mental discipline, brilliantly synthesizing for readers past and present the full spectrum of early Chinese thought.
"The Huainanzi" locates the key to successful rule in a balance of broad knowledge, diligent application, and the penetrating wisdom of a sage. It is a unique and creative synthesis of Daoist classics, such as the "Laozi" and the "Zhuangzi"; works associated with the Confucian tradition, such as the "Changes," the "Odes," and the "Documents"; and a wide range of other foundational philosophical and literary texts from the "Mozi" to the "Hanfeizi."
The product of twelve years of scholarship, this remarkable translation preserves "The Huainanzi"'s special rhetorical features, such as parallel prose and verse, and showcases a compositional technique that conveys the work's powerful philosophical appeal. This path-breaking volume will have a transformative impact on the field of early Chinese intellectual history and will be of great interest to scholars and students alike.
"The Huainanzi" locates the key to successful rule in a balance of broad knowledge, diligent application, and the penetrating wisdom of a sage. It is a unique and creative synthesis of Daoist classics, such as the "Laozi" and the "Zhuangzi"; works associated with the Confucian tradition, such as the "Changes," the "Odes," and the "Documents"; and a wide range of other foundational philosophical and literary texts from the "Mozi" to the "Hanfeizi."
The product of twelve years of scholarship, this remarkable translation preserves "The Huainanzi"'s special rhetorical features, such as parallel prose and verse, and showcases a compositional technique that conveys the work's powerful philosophical appeal. This path-breaking volume will have a transformative impact on the field of early Chinese intellectual history and will be of great interest to scholars and students alike.
988 pages, Hardcover
First published November 20, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 18, 2018
This is a compendium of debates presented to the Emperor, attempting to persuade him to adopt a more laissez-faire style of governing that allowed for diversity in the habits and customs of people in the empire. It has a primarily daoist metaphysics, but is ultimately a syncretic text, incorporating ideas from various religions, ideologies, and philosophies of the time. It covers an incredible range of issues about human life and governance, from explaining a cosmology, to talking about crop management, to discussing military strategies. A really interesting look into Chinese leadership mindsets at the time.
But how the heck do you rate a text like this?! This text was my first major foray into Chinese philosophy, so it was a very floundering, solitary, hopefully-enlightening experience. Some of the chapters were wild and definitely showed an ancient way of thinking (Seasonal Rules and Celestial Patterns come to mind), and some were surprisingly current (Activating the Genuine and Terrestrial Forms). I wrote a paper on how it frames and answer the State of Nature issue, so I really enjoyed how it grappled with the natural state of humanity and corruption as we see it today. I also enjoyed exploring the daoism it presents and recognizing some of its parallels with the Christian religion -- similar ideas, very different framing. I enjoyed most of it, and think it's a thrilling text to have in the history of ideas.
But how the heck do you rate a text like this?! This text was my first major foray into Chinese philosophy, so it was a very floundering, solitary, hopefully-enlightening experience. Some of the chapters were wild and definitely showed an ancient way of thinking (Seasonal Rules and Celestial Patterns come to mind), and some were surprisingly current (Activating the Genuine and Terrestrial Forms). I wrote a paper on how it frames and answer the State of Nature issue, so I really enjoyed how it grappled with the natural state of humanity and corruption as we see it today. I also enjoyed exploring the daoism it presents and recognizing some of its parallels with the Christian religion -- similar ideas, very different framing. I enjoyed most of it, and think it's a thrilling text to have in the history of ideas.
April 27, 2012
This is the first complete English translation of this huge 2nd century bc collection of Chinese philosophical texts. The texts blend Daoist, Confucian and Legalist theories on life, the universe, commerce, war, leadership and much more. I particularly enjoyed the first two chapters called Yuandao (Searching out Dao) and Chuzhen (Beginning of Reality), both based on the ideas of Laozi and Zhuagzi. Each chapter is translated by well known scholars in the field, such as John S Major and Harold D Roth and comes with individual chapter introductions and extensive commentarial notes. Excellent book from start to finish.
August 20, 2023
I am actually still in the process of reading this, but a particularly rich passage drove me to leave a review. I am going to handle this briefly, but methodically. First I'll state what the Huainanzi is, & I'll tell you what kind of a reader I am and my motivations behind acquiring and reading this book. Then, I'll tell you how this book does or doesn't fit my 1. Idea of what a book in translation like this *should* be and 2. How it fits my specific aims as a reader. Then I'll summarize my review, and include a selection from the passage that led me here. I'm going to do my best to keep this brief; someday I'll write a thorough review of this work with suggestions for further reading.
(Description of book and reviewer) The Huainanzi is described by the inside cover as a book compiled by scholars in the second century B.C.E at the court of Liu An (刘安), King of Huainan. It's a "tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han Philosophy and Statecraft." So it is. Specifically, the cultural and intellectual elements of pre-han and early Han China are presented systematically here. It is written to give a king an overarching view of every subject seen as important to rulership. Naturally, the sovereignty of the rule is given a metaphysical basis. We could (perhaps ill-advisedly) imagine that just as feudalism and monarchy functioned on a principle of "sovereignty under God," so too did Chinese statecraft posit the divine as the granter or withholder of sovereignty. This is of course an oversimplification; the text makes it clear that a ruler is to use an understanding of subjects ranging from metaphysics to the study of human nature will allow the ruler to maintain elemental or transformative harmony by acting in conference with this celestial and terrestrial patterns. I am of course skimming over many important details, some which drastically distinguish the world-view espoused here from the plethora of medieval and ancient worldview the west has deemed its "canon." Others seem to provide a rich, systematic perspective on elements of world-view and philosophy of "western-canon" that, while in the "canon" still embody wildly different worldviews than the modern one.
Here, you can see Confucian and Daoist principals intermingling in a tentative harmony. This book especially includes a lot of great material related to Daoism at a time where the Philosophy of the dao was being reintegrated into religious worldviews, and it's terminology being lent to a far more systematic treatment of the nature of the universe than the Zhuangzi or Daodejing would ever permit. The birth of the Han and post-Han daoist movements is on full display here.
Further, while my first engagements with Daoism didn't include much of a political reading (and I still believe this; statecraft, I think, is not the main subject of say the daodejing etc. although there may be comments pertinent to statecraft; this on the other hand manages to fuse many of the actual themes of the daodejing etc. with aspects of natural science (yin/yang, wuxing, astronomy) and finally make an explicit statement on how a daoist system might actually recommend certain configurations of statecraft. It's important to note the confucian was still heavily present; perhaps this a re-merging of 2 philosophies that were not always so different (as they might have seemed, even then, 2,000 years ago.) So for fans of Chinese philosophy who have consumed all of the classics, who want to see how these philosophies came together to form an actual world-view, and enrich re-readings, I don't know if there is a better book.
(Me:) you may have been able to glean that I am an absolute nerd for this sh**. I've been deeply passionate about philosophy for a decade, and it must be going on seven or eight years that I have been savoring that first taste of the Dao I got from a Barnes and Noble Somewhere in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Midwest, USA. While I love philosophy as a living subject as well as a deeply rich history of ideas, my absolute favorites were always those like the pre-socratics, the epicureans, and the stoics. I also love history, particularly ancient and medieval history and literature.
My particular interest in philosophy is ethics, theory of mind/consciousness, and metaphysics. I have a solid basis on psychology. Despite my intent as a human being to study philosophy in whatever way it occurs, I will always be an existentialist at heart. Somehow books like this check all the boxes.
My final relevant lens is as a beginning student of Chinese (Mandarin and Classic.) This means I want the most basic and most important stuff presented with Chinese characters and with some discussion as to the linguistic difficulties in translating. Hell, even without this specific lean (which I've only had for a couple of months,) acknowledging the potential ambiguity in ANY translation and addressing it by presenting the language and the ambiguity--allowing the reader to understand, from the most likely possible interpretations, what is being said on their own terms.
I'll use this as a Segway for my next section.
(What a book like this in translation SHOULD be:) as stated above, a book in translation like this needs to admit where alternative translations are likely (if not simply possible,) should provide notes that elucidate the text where a modern reader may not have the same base-line assumptions as it's intended audience (to a reasonable extent; this modern reader should have a strong historical and ideological grasp before reading this,) it should hit the perfect medium between fidelity and readability (too much of one or the other, your eyes dry out or the point is missed altogether,) and finally it should avoid making extremely careless mistakes or equivocations in order to drill the points worth questioning across.
(For my specific purposes:) Chinese characters including pinyin is ideal (which it does w/o inflection markers.) I can't be sure every potentially tricky term is translated, but so far I'm very satisfied with the dispersion of these types of glosses, contained both in footnotes and in the detailed appendices in the back. These appendices, it should be noted, tend to systematize information that is otherwise underlying most sections of the book. So for me, someone who has just begun to take note of aspects of the wuxing (to name one), these appendices provide a great overview and (more importantly) the means for me to systematically study how the idea and basic premises & schema of wuxing fit together. It gives enough I can further research the linguistic bits on my own and get the orthographic basis to encounter them in other texts. Without making this into a 2k+ page book and including Chinese characters of whatever manuscript they used for a side-by-side, this is the best way they could have handled it.
Extra props for not goofily translating ancient Chinese names into speculative "meaningful names." Apropos Liu An's name 刘安, the second character 安 (ān) means "peace, tranquil," etc. and is the family name of the Tang Dynasty usurper An Lushan. If we followed the nomenclature of, say, a Hinton (not Hinton's biggest problem) or a Watson (Watson's only true sin as a translator) An Lushan's name would mean something like "tranquil mountain of prosperity." The problem? He staged a rebellion that ended the golden age of the Tang Dynasty. Still, many translators choose to translate all Chinese names into english-equivalents, implying names are *always* meaningful. I don't expect that in a relatively academic book like this, but I sure still am relieved when it hasn't been done.
As noted, from that perspective where history, philosophy, and broader culture align, this book is an absolute gem. I don't know if I would read this or the book "early daoist scriptures" first, bit whatever order you read then in, this will undoubtedly fill in a lot of the confusing gap between the philosophy of Laozi & the religious daoists of the 2nd century AD (whence come a later yet still natal influence for the type of daoists depicted in "Romance of the 3 Kingdoms".) Frankly, this is probably a better first step, it's just that the other book I mentioned isn't as freaking expensive as this one.
Someday I'll encounter this text (or at least portions) in Chinese. Until then, this book contains the sauce.
To sum it up, this gives you a basis with which to better engage with ancient and early medieval Chinese culture. Study of disparate, broad philosophic schools that characterizes the initial study of Chinese philosophy gives way to an amazingly textured worldview that is only concerned with wisdom—albeit a wisdom that was defined in the very special temporal-relational context of a society much further distant in time to us than it is in space.
"When heaven and earth was yet informed, all was
Ascending and flying,
Diving and delving.
"Thus it was called the 'Grand Inception.'
The Grand Inception produced the Nebulous void.
The Nebulous Void produced Space-Time**;
Space-Time produced the original qi (chi in W.G.)
A boundary [divided] the original qi
That which was pure and bright spread out to form heaven,
That which was heavy and turbid congealed to form earth."
**This is the foot-note justifying the use of "Space-Time": "conventionally translated as 'cosmos' or 'universe,' yuzhou (宇宙)... means "process enduring in time" or "matter extending is space"...[hence] Space-Time, a term borrowed from modern physics, captures the idea very well."
Here are relevant passages from my copy of the Kroll SCM dictionary that are relevant:
""a) 宇宙 yǔzhòu, eaves and ridgepole, euph. for celestial or cosmic edifice; also, space and time, heaven and earth > universe, cosmos.
宇 - area under the eaves; habitation, dwelling; grounds, precincts, domain. (This gives the idea of "space" in a daoistic sense; space within an edifice is after all the place of habitation.)
宙 - 1 ridgepole, central beam; structural mainstay.
a) 宇宙 yǔzhòu, eaves and ridgepole, euph. for celestial or cosmic edifice; also space and time, heaven and earth > universe, cosmos.
2 gen. term for time; all time.""
See? Pretty neat. Classic Chinese is usually one character, one meaning (thus multiple interpretations like this are all equally possible a.k.a. space-time vs. eave-ridgepole vs. heaven/earth.) In context of what follows, all of these interpretations were probably implicit in the single term (and by expanding in it's possible meanings, creating a cohesion device where this one cosmological outlook [the birth of the world thru yin/yang] is unfolded in all of the possible aspects contained by it's raw words.
2 things are at play here: this idea that in English, one sentence should say one thing (so it is accurate vs. Vague, how culturally relative are these labels?) Vs. A real tendency to pack meaning into simple phrases in classic Chinese. This is further complicated by translators often failing to read accurately, that is, reading too broadly and missing instances where the text is actually pretty precise and in context, only one translation is needing to be acknowledged, vs. Instances of the opposite extreme where one translation is favored and multiple are actually implicit. Since we aren't educated members of the Han elite, it IS genuinely tough to parse at times. However I think what I have shown with this small passage is that the translators did a pretty good job of cutting through the confusion. Because they are skilled and reputable.
So who should buy this? Philosophy students in school or not who insist on a deep understanding of the different philosophies they encounter. Fans of Chinese history who want to see a document that attests to the general intellectual and cultural outlook of very glorious periods of Chinese history. Beginners of classic Chinese translation who need meta-knowledge to assist their repertoire of knowledge concerning ancient texts. People with lay-person interests in daoism and zen who want clarification on some of the overlap--and the great gulf between--zen and daoism (I am among these types, too.)
That inadvertently took up 2 hours of my day. Hopefully this helps someone on the brink of purchasing or not. Final warning, Amazon tends to ship this with 0 packing, so expect it to show up damaged from them. This was a huge drawback, and only my desire to eat this book page by page kept me from returning it.
(Description of book and reviewer) The Huainanzi is described by the inside cover as a book compiled by scholars in the second century B.C.E at the court of Liu An (刘安), King of Huainan. It's a "tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han Philosophy and Statecraft." So it is. Specifically, the cultural and intellectual elements of pre-han and early Han China are presented systematically here. It is written to give a king an overarching view of every subject seen as important to rulership. Naturally, the sovereignty of the rule is given a metaphysical basis. We could (perhaps ill-advisedly) imagine that just as feudalism and monarchy functioned on a principle of "sovereignty under God," so too did Chinese statecraft posit the divine as the granter or withholder of sovereignty. This is of course an oversimplification; the text makes it clear that a ruler is to use an understanding of subjects ranging from metaphysics to the study of human nature will allow the ruler to maintain elemental or transformative harmony by acting in conference with this celestial and terrestrial patterns. I am of course skimming over many important details, some which drastically distinguish the world-view espoused here from the plethora of medieval and ancient worldview the west has deemed its "canon." Others seem to provide a rich, systematic perspective on elements of world-view and philosophy of "western-canon" that, while in the "canon" still embody wildly different worldviews than the modern one.
Here, you can see Confucian and Daoist principals intermingling in a tentative harmony. This book especially includes a lot of great material related to Daoism at a time where the Philosophy of the dao was being reintegrated into religious worldviews, and it's terminology being lent to a far more systematic treatment of the nature of the universe than the Zhuangzi or Daodejing would ever permit. The birth of the Han and post-Han daoist movements is on full display here.
Further, while my first engagements with Daoism didn't include much of a political reading (and I still believe this; statecraft, I think, is not the main subject of say the daodejing etc. although there may be comments pertinent to statecraft; this on the other hand manages to fuse many of the actual themes of the daodejing etc. with aspects of natural science (yin/yang, wuxing, astronomy) and finally make an explicit statement on how a daoist system might actually recommend certain configurations of statecraft. It's important to note the confucian was still heavily present; perhaps this a re-merging of 2 philosophies that were not always so different (as they might have seemed, even then, 2,000 years ago.) So for fans of Chinese philosophy who have consumed all of the classics, who want to see how these philosophies came together to form an actual world-view, and enrich re-readings, I don't know if there is a better book.
(Me:) you may have been able to glean that I am an absolute nerd for this sh**. I've been deeply passionate about philosophy for a decade, and it must be going on seven or eight years that I have been savoring that first taste of the Dao I got from a Barnes and Noble Somewhere in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Midwest, USA. While I love philosophy as a living subject as well as a deeply rich history of ideas, my absolute favorites were always those like the pre-socratics, the epicureans, and the stoics. I also love history, particularly ancient and medieval history and literature.
My particular interest in philosophy is ethics, theory of mind/consciousness, and metaphysics. I have a solid basis on psychology. Despite my intent as a human being to study philosophy in whatever way it occurs, I will always be an existentialist at heart. Somehow books like this check all the boxes.
My final relevant lens is as a beginning student of Chinese (Mandarin and Classic.) This means I want the most basic and most important stuff presented with Chinese characters and with some discussion as to the linguistic difficulties in translating. Hell, even without this specific lean (which I've only had for a couple of months,) acknowledging the potential ambiguity in ANY translation and addressing it by presenting the language and the ambiguity--allowing the reader to understand, from the most likely possible interpretations, what is being said on their own terms.
I'll use this as a Segway for my next section.
(What a book like this in translation SHOULD be:) as stated above, a book in translation like this needs to admit where alternative translations are likely (if not simply possible,) should provide notes that elucidate the text where a modern reader may not have the same base-line assumptions as it's intended audience (to a reasonable extent; this modern reader should have a strong historical and ideological grasp before reading this,) it should hit the perfect medium between fidelity and readability (too much of one or the other, your eyes dry out or the point is missed altogether,) and finally it should avoid making extremely careless mistakes or equivocations in order to drill the points worth questioning across.
(For my specific purposes:) Chinese characters including pinyin is ideal (which it does w/o inflection markers.) I can't be sure every potentially tricky term is translated, but so far I'm very satisfied with the dispersion of these types of glosses, contained both in footnotes and in the detailed appendices in the back. These appendices, it should be noted, tend to systematize information that is otherwise underlying most sections of the book. So for me, someone who has just begun to take note of aspects of the wuxing (to name one), these appendices provide a great overview and (more importantly) the means for me to systematically study how the idea and basic premises & schema of wuxing fit together. It gives enough I can further research the linguistic bits on my own and get the orthographic basis to encounter them in other texts. Without making this into a 2k+ page book and including Chinese characters of whatever manuscript they used for a side-by-side, this is the best way they could have handled it.
Extra props for not goofily translating ancient Chinese names into speculative "meaningful names." Apropos Liu An's name 刘安, the second character 安 (ān) means "peace, tranquil," etc. and is the family name of the Tang Dynasty usurper An Lushan. If we followed the nomenclature of, say, a Hinton (not Hinton's biggest problem) or a Watson (Watson's only true sin as a translator) An Lushan's name would mean something like "tranquil mountain of prosperity." The problem? He staged a rebellion that ended the golden age of the Tang Dynasty. Still, many translators choose to translate all Chinese names into english-equivalents, implying names are *always* meaningful. I don't expect that in a relatively academic book like this, but I sure still am relieved when it hasn't been done.
As noted, from that perspective where history, philosophy, and broader culture align, this book is an absolute gem. I don't know if I would read this or the book "early daoist scriptures" first, bit whatever order you read then in, this will undoubtedly fill in a lot of the confusing gap between the philosophy of Laozi & the religious daoists of the 2nd century AD (whence come a later yet still natal influence for the type of daoists depicted in "Romance of the 3 Kingdoms".) Frankly, this is probably a better first step, it's just that the other book I mentioned isn't as freaking expensive as this one.
Someday I'll encounter this text (or at least portions) in Chinese. Until then, this book contains the sauce.
To sum it up, this gives you a basis with which to better engage with ancient and early medieval Chinese culture. Study of disparate, broad philosophic schools that characterizes the initial study of Chinese philosophy gives way to an amazingly textured worldview that is only concerned with wisdom—albeit a wisdom that was defined in the very special temporal-relational context of a society much further distant in time to us than it is in space.
"When heaven and earth was yet informed, all was
Ascending and flying,
Diving and delving.
"Thus it was called the 'Grand Inception.'
The Grand Inception produced the Nebulous void.
The Nebulous Void produced Space-Time**;
Space-Time produced the original qi (chi in W.G.)
A boundary [divided] the original qi
That which was pure and bright spread out to form heaven,
That which was heavy and turbid congealed to form earth."
**This is the foot-note justifying the use of "Space-Time": "conventionally translated as 'cosmos' or 'universe,' yuzhou (宇宙)... means "process enduring in time" or "matter extending is space"...[hence] Space-Time, a term borrowed from modern physics, captures the idea very well."
Here are relevant passages from my copy of the Kroll SCM dictionary that are relevant:
""a) 宇宙 yǔzhòu, eaves and ridgepole, euph. for celestial or cosmic edifice; also, space and time, heaven and earth > universe, cosmos.
宇 - area under the eaves; habitation, dwelling; grounds, precincts, domain. (This gives the idea of "space" in a daoistic sense; space within an edifice is after all the place of habitation.)
宙 - 1 ridgepole, central beam; structural mainstay.
a) 宇宙 yǔzhòu, eaves and ridgepole, euph. for celestial or cosmic edifice; also space and time, heaven and earth > universe, cosmos.
2 gen. term for time; all time.""
See? Pretty neat. Classic Chinese is usually one character, one meaning (thus multiple interpretations like this are all equally possible a.k.a. space-time vs. eave-ridgepole vs. heaven/earth.) In context of what follows, all of these interpretations were probably implicit in the single term (and by expanding in it's possible meanings, creating a cohesion device where this one cosmological outlook [the birth of the world thru yin/yang] is unfolded in all of the possible aspects contained by it's raw words.
2 things are at play here: this idea that in English, one sentence should say one thing (so it is accurate vs. Vague, how culturally relative are these labels?) Vs. A real tendency to pack meaning into simple phrases in classic Chinese. This is further complicated by translators often failing to read accurately, that is, reading too broadly and missing instances where the text is actually pretty precise and in context, only one translation is needing to be acknowledged, vs. Instances of the opposite extreme where one translation is favored and multiple are actually implicit. Since we aren't educated members of the Han elite, it IS genuinely tough to parse at times. However I think what I have shown with this small passage is that the translators did a pretty good job of cutting through the confusion. Because they are skilled and reputable.
So who should buy this? Philosophy students in school or not who insist on a deep understanding of the different philosophies they encounter. Fans of Chinese history who want to see a document that attests to the general intellectual and cultural outlook of very glorious periods of Chinese history. Beginners of classic Chinese translation who need meta-knowledge to assist their repertoire of knowledge concerning ancient texts. People with lay-person interests in daoism and zen who want clarification on some of the overlap--and the great gulf between--zen and daoism (I am among these types, too.)
That inadvertently took up 2 hours of my day. Hopefully this helps someone on the brink of purchasing or not. Final warning, Amazon tends to ship this with 0 packing, so expect it to show up damaged from them. This was a huge drawback, and only my desire to eat this book page by page kept me from returning it.
April 3, 2026
The book was not bound properly, but the words were worth reading. I do take minor issue when they don't have the original Chinese text side by side, but it would have assuredly been impractical and seriously inconvenient here in particular. This is a text very much in the same vein as Lu Buwei's Spring and Autumn Annals and in the same school of thought, albeit, arguably more developed in some fashions, although many of the later chapters do contain some of the assorted list of anecdotes which anyone who is well-read on Chinese literature has read a hundred times before in other pieces that they've read. I do think that many of the allusions and references are more well fitted to the text in this one than in some of the other pieces I've read for the chapters which aren't merely lists of anecdotes.
Wang Bi's notion that the different philosophers were essentially trying to do the same thing feels very much correct. In the Huainanzi in particular, we see what is essentially an attempt to refine and collect what was said prior, and using historical and natural observations, develop a text which is philosophically, spiritually, politically, and morally aligned in a cosmological sense. It's a text where someone can sense the backdrop of things: Yes, laws, but how much laws and for what reason and what nature of laws? Yes, 'non-action', but what does that actually mean? Having other capable men perform specific tasks in which they are experts? Arranging laws and having agents perform tasks within the purview of their responsibilities? Doing what comes naturally? What does that mean? It's a piece that relies on the frequent 'definition by various examples' that is frequent within lots of older Chinese classical texts, the describing principles or things in concrete terms as the Huainanzi puts it.
There are some places where I do think that I personally preferred the organization of Lu Buwei's Spring and Autumn Annals, and in particular, the choice in which pieces of learning to borrow from is something that I think made that text feel more grounded and valuable in some ways, such as specific details on the quality of the grains when properly spacing them and ordering them, and sometimes, I do think that the Huainanzi doesn't do a necessarily good enough job of connecting the principle to the concrete in a meaningful sense for certain things in ways that the Hanfeizi did for example for 'non-action'. I do however, believe that the Daoist principles which are frequently referenced from Zhuangzi and Laozi are much better developed here then they are in those two texts.
A substantial proportion of these texts include suggestions from the scholars studying them that the political position of The King of Huainan or prince is why he supported the political positions he did, wherein a decentralized government in which independent or semi-independent kingdoms would be allowed to exist alongside and within the powerful Empire (hence, encouragements towards non-action from the emperor, everyone performing their prescribed role, references to the ideal of the Zhou system), when we consider the reality of how elite patronage and alternative patronage systems are in fact, the reality of how political pluralism and wider expression of thought and indeed, greater prosperity can be allowed through a reduction of pure extraction to some distant capital, I'm not totally antagonistic towards the project that Liu An sponsored.
Wang Bi's notion that the different philosophers were essentially trying to do the same thing feels very much correct. In the Huainanzi in particular, we see what is essentially an attempt to refine and collect what was said prior, and using historical and natural observations, develop a text which is philosophically, spiritually, politically, and morally aligned in a cosmological sense. It's a text where someone can sense the backdrop of things: Yes, laws, but how much laws and for what reason and what nature of laws? Yes, 'non-action', but what does that actually mean? Having other capable men perform specific tasks in which they are experts? Arranging laws and having agents perform tasks within the purview of their responsibilities? Doing what comes naturally? What does that mean? It's a piece that relies on the frequent 'definition by various examples' that is frequent within lots of older Chinese classical texts, the describing principles or things in concrete terms as the Huainanzi puts it.
There are some places where I do think that I personally preferred the organization of Lu Buwei's Spring and Autumn Annals, and in particular, the choice in which pieces of learning to borrow from is something that I think made that text feel more grounded and valuable in some ways, such as specific details on the quality of the grains when properly spacing them and ordering them, and sometimes, I do think that the Huainanzi doesn't do a necessarily good enough job of connecting the principle to the concrete in a meaningful sense for certain things in ways that the Hanfeizi did for example for 'non-action'. I do however, believe that the Daoist principles which are frequently referenced from Zhuangzi and Laozi are much better developed here then they are in those two texts.
A substantial proportion of these texts include suggestions from the scholars studying them that the political position of The King of Huainan or prince is why he supported the political positions he did, wherein a decentralized government in which independent or semi-independent kingdoms would be allowed to exist alongside and within the powerful Empire (hence, encouragements towards non-action from the emperor, everyone performing their prescribed role, references to the ideal of the Zhou system), when we consider the reality of how elite patronage and alternative patronage systems are in fact, the reality of how political pluralism and wider expression of thought and indeed, greater prosperity can be allowed through a reduction of pure extraction to some distant capital, I'm not totally antagonistic towards the project that Liu An sponsored.
December 25, 2018
A fascinating glimpse into how to run a Chinese Empire, in theory at least.
It was hard going in places.
It was hard going in places.
October 1, 2011
Simply a staggering academic achievement and contribution to discussions of thought and politics in early China. And by that I am only referring to the translation, which took a handful of the finest scholars in Chinese studies over a decade to complete. As for the work itself, it represented a beyond-remarkable attempt to fuse hundreds of years of seemingly irreconcilable strands of thought into a unified system and guide to governance at a pivotal juncture in Han consolidation and rule.
A mindboggling piece of collaborative scholarship on two fronts, first in the teetering kingdom of Huainan in the 2nd century BCE, and 2200 years later in North America.
A mindboggling piece of collaborative scholarship on two fronts, first in the teetering kingdom of Huainan in the 2nd century BCE, and 2200 years later in North America.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews