The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

affairs, and other behavior scandalous to Confucian mores. The notorious Liu
Ling (ca. 221–300) used to go naked in his house. To a shocked Confucian
visitor he retorted, “The world is my house, and these walls are my garments.
What, then, are you doing standing in my pants?” (Fung, 1948: 235). Liu
belonged to the group called the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, members
of the upper gentry who met to drink, write poetry, and appreciate the fleet-
ingness of beauty on their country estates outside the capital, disdaining the
conventional life of the court. In the next generation younger relatives of this
group indulged in a nudist circle as well as in sensual extravagances and
intellectual witticisms. One style-setter would practice ch’ing t’an (pure con-
versation) “while he held in his pale hands a feather-duster with a jade handle,
with which to sweep away, symbolically, the dust of this vile world” (Balazs,
1964: 248–249). Yet these were members of the ruling aristocracy, including
generals, officials, and relatives of the ruling houses.
In intellectual opposition to the Seven Sages was another group which also
drew upon Taoist cultural capital, but made an explicit effort to combine it
with Confucian orthodoxy. The school of Dark (or Mysterious) Learning
(hsüan hsüeh) was a network of Wei state officials. Ho Yen (d. 249), a Wei
minister, synthesized yin-yang cosmology and Taoist ontology, giving a rational
explanation of the paradoxes of the Tao Te Ching. His protégé Wang Pi
(226–249), another Wei minister, wrote influential commentaries on both the
Tao Te Ching and the Yi Ching, bringing together the Taoist sacred text with
the Han Confucians’ divination classic. Wang Pi’s philosophy might be re-
garded as a set of abstractions designed to unify these positions by removing
both from the level of religious practice or particularistic portents onto an
ontological plane in its own right. Wang was not so much a mystic as a
practitioner of metaphysics. With Wang Pi the philosophical community built
to a metaphysical level that had been seldom touched in China, and it was this
which gave such work the reputation of being a “dark” or “mysterious”
learning.
Wang Pi developed in an original fashion a metaphysical interpretation of
Taoist non-being (wu-wei). One cannot put non-being on the same plane as
being, even as its opposite. “The cessation of activity always means quiescence,
but this quiescence is not something opposed to activity. The cessation of
speech means silence, but this silence is not something opposed to speech”
(quoted in Fung, 1952–53: 181). But this original non-being, pen-wu, is not
an emptiness on which a meditator might focus. It is, rather, pure being in the
sense of original substance. Commenting on the Yi Ching and its Confucian
Appendices, Wang Pi argues that the hexagrams represent not concrete objects
of predictions but principles of the multiple things; behind these in turn is a
unity transcending multiplicity, which in a sense may be regarded as the


Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^171
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