The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

More sharply in opposition was a group in the provinces, gathered around
the prince of Huai Nan (in the south below the Yangtze), in a collateral branch
of the imperial family which resisted the move toward bureaucratic centrali-
zation. Prince Liu An patronized thousands of scholars and magicians, who
produced an encyclopedic treatise, the Huai-nan Tzu, covering metaphysics,
astronomy, government, the army, and every area of extant knowledge. Chuang
Tzu’s paradoxes and nature mysticism were turned into a cosmological se-
quence. Vacuity gave rise to tao, which gave rise to space and time, which in
turn gave rise to material force, and then to the manifestations of the material
universe. There was a time before yin and yang, Heaven and Earth (i.e., the
received cosmological categories), and even before non-being—thus going back
beyond the Tao Te Ching as well. This was not yet religious Taoism; the Huai
Nan group attacked meditation and reinterpreted “non-action” as “no action
contrary to nature.” Earlier traditions of mystical quietism and political with-
drawal were turned in the direction of political activism. When the prince of
Huai Nan rose in rebellion in 122 b.c.e., it was put down by an army led by
a disciple of Tung Chung-shu (Woo, 1932: 30–31).
The intellectual-religious identity of an anti-Confucian opposition persist-
ed, even as Confucian hegemony at the centralized court was established.
“Taoism” gradually crystallized as a distinctive collection of texts, outside the
Confucian classics and their official commentaries. The Chuang Tzu was also
compiled at this time, including its late syncretist chapters, perhaps at the Huai
Nan court itself, perhaps in the oppositional group at the Han court around
Ssu-ma T’an (Roth, 1991: 86–93; Graham, 1991: 280–283). The Chuang Tzu
remained somewhat to the side, since its anti-political stance and its idiosyn-
cratic attitude about death did not fit with either the activist stance of the
Huai-nan Tzu or the religious cult of immortals which became the center of
popular Taoist religion.
The most important identity was simply negative, an anti-Confucian oppo-
sition. Eventually “Taoism” became a bibliographic collection which took
under its wing all the surviving bits of rival philosophies. By 300 c.e., Mo Tzu
was listed as a minor Taoist immortal, and his book was included in the Taoist
Canon, along with such disparate figures as the Legalist Han Fei Tzu and (in
a late forgery) Kung-sun Lung (Graham, 1978: 65–66). This was syncretism
of the most external sort, with no effort to assert intellectual similarities beyond
the common property of being outside the official Confucian fold.
After the defeat of the Huai Nan rebellion, what intellectual action there
was took the form of a split within Confucian ranks. In opposition to the
Confucian religion, an Old Text school arose, initially a bibliographical move-
ment critiquing the newer occultist commentaries (the so-called New Text
school) and demanding a return to the original texts as they were before the
burning of the books. The most prominent leader of the Old Text school was


Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^157
Free download pdf