BOOK REVIEW

CHEN, Guying !!!, The Yi Commentariesand the Thought of the Schoolsof Daoism !!!!!!"

Beijing !!: Shangwu Yingshuguan !!""!,2007, VII+318 pages

GUAN Ping

Published online: 17 July 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

As the title makes explicit, CHEN Guying’s book The Yi Commentaries and the Thought ofthe Schools of Daoism takes on a heated scholarly debate in contemporary Yi Jing !!

studies in China. The standard traditional view that the Yi Commentaries (Yi Zhuan !!, theTen Wings of the Yi Jing) were composed by Confucius had hardly been questioned untilthe 20th century, except in the Song Dynasty by OUYANG Xiu !"! (1017–072) and in theQing Dynasty by CUI Shu !! (1740–1816), who nonetheless never doubted the nature ofthe Ten Wings as being the work of Confucian thinkers who lived after Confucius. Chengoes a step further and sets out to prove that although Confucius as the sole author of the YiCommentaries was out of the question, the Yi Commentaries could not have been composedby Confucius’ followers of the pre-Qin !! times either. Rather, the astonishing andleading theme of the sixteen essays of the book, written in the decade from the 1980s to the1990s, is that the entire Yi Commentaries could only have been produced by thinkers of theDaoist schools. Such a claim rejects the traditional view held by the majority of scholarsand pushes the Confucians almost completely out of the picture. In fact, this is the main aimof the book, as Chen states in the “Preface” to the first edition of his book (1993): “Thephilosophical thought in the Yi Commentaries belongs to schools of Daoism, and not to the(pre-Qin) Confucian thinkers” (ii). This challenging view makes the book very intriguingand has drawn much attention and debate. By Daoist schools, Chen refers to three groups ofDaoism in his book: the philosophy of Laozi !" and Zhuangzi !", the thought of theDaoist thinkers of Jixia !", and the thought of Huang-Lao !!. The essays in the bookare structured accordingly. Chen holds that the works of the Jixia Daoists include at leastthirteen essays in the Guan Zi !", and he bases his analysis of the Huang-Lao on theHuang-Lao Bo Shu "!!", generally entitled the Huang Di Si Jing ""!!. He ascribesboth to the mid and late Warring States period as the main stream of thought of the time thatsubsequently had determinative influences on the Ten Wings of the Yi Jing.

Dao (2008) 7:325–328DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9076-7

GUAN Ping (*)Department of Religion, Syracuse University, NY 13244-1170, USAe-mail: guanp@yahoo.com

The book begins with a discussion of the connections of the Tuan Zhuan !!, which isusually considered to be the earliest among the Ten Wings, and the thought of Daoism. Thesix parts of the book are arranged, on the one hand, according to a chronological order ofthe composition of the Yi Commentaries, from the earliest to the latest, which Chen believesto exist, and on the other, according to an underlying order of the development of schoolsof Daoism, from the foundational Lao-Zhuang !! to Jixia Daoists and the teaching ofHuang-Lao. The first part of the book consists of two essays on the Tuan Zhuan: “TuanZhuan and Lao Zhuang (!!#!!),” and “The Daoist Way of Thinking of the Tuan Zhuan(!!!!!!"!").” The next five parts extend from analyses of the essential Daoisttendencies and influences in the Xiang Zhuan !! and Wen Yan "! to discussions of theXi Ci !", Suo Gua "#, Xu Gua ##, and, lastly, the Bo Shu Yi Shuo !"!!, coveringthus not only the Ten Wings (except the Za Gua ##), but also the newly discoveredMawangdui "!! silk manuscript of Yi Jing (Bo Shu Yi Shuo). The main focus of the bookis on the Tuan Zhuan and Xi Ci, which together occupy more than half of the book. Chenregards these two commentaries as the most important, the most philosophical, and thusrepresentative of the Ten Wings, and provides a very systematic analysis of these two. Thecentral claim is that the Yi Commentaries, mostly composed in the mid and late WarringStates period, in general, represent one of the two trends of the philosophical developmentof the Dao of Heaven (tian dao !!) or the Way of Heaven in the pre-Qin times. Since theDao of Heaven, as a pattern of thinking, has its true beginning in the Laozi, the YiCommentaries, like the other trend, the school of Zhuangzi and its followers, also owe thesource of their essential ideas and concepts to the Laozi. Chen argues that the path of thedevelopment of the Dao of Heaven in the pre-Qin times undergoes three stages: it originatesfrom the Zhou Yi !!, is fully formed by Lao-Zhuang, and results in the Yi Commentaries.Therefore, he takes Laozi as the transmitter of the Dao of Heaven, who lies between itssource in the Zhou Yi and a consummating end in the Yi Commentaries. This is the firstlineage that Chen traces in the book. The second lineage is the division of Daoism into twoschools after Laozi: the school of Zhuangzi and its followers, and the school of JixiaDaoists and the Huang-Lao teaching that came out of it. Thus, Chen makes the case that theHuang-Lao teaching, the Zhuangzi, the Laozi and the Yi Commentaries are different stagesof the Dao of Heaven that had its ultimate source in the Zhou Yi. The Zhou Yi and the YiCommentaries are in this way identified with the Daoist schools, with the Dao of Heaven astheir most distinctive feature and framework. In this light Chen holds that the YiCommentaries as a whole, with its ontology, cosmology, and naturalism, is at its coreDaoist. He finds that the main concepts of the Tuan Zhuan, Xi Ci, and the rest of the YiCommentaries have their roots in the texts of the Laozi, Zhuangzi, Jixia Daoists, andHuang-Lao teaching. The sections of each of the essays of the book largely mirror thisguiding principle.

To take the first essay on the Tuan Zhuan, for example, its four sections are entitled: (1)The Dao of Heaven in the Tuan Zhuan as essentially Daoist; (2) The main ideas in the TuanZhuan and their relations to the thought of Laozi; (3) The Common points between thecosmology of the Tuan Zhuan and Zhuangzi; (4) Tuan Zhuan as produced by Southernersor Jixia members. In this essay, Chen argues that the main ideas of the Tuan Zhuan such asthe origin of all things, the cyclical changes of nature, the transformation of things throughthe yin and yang, the complementarity of the soft and strong, and the oneness of heaven,earth, and humans all are primarily influenced by the Laozi and have their sources in theLaozi and Zhuangzi. None of these ideas are Confucian. In particular, the pattern ofthinking is represented by the Dao of Heaven. The rest of the book employs the samemethod of interpretation. Chen’s argument is that the key notions of the Yi Commentaries,

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such as “timeliness (shi #),” “position (wei "),” “centrality (zhong $),” “way (dao !),”“virtue (de #),” and “gods (shen ")” all share the same sense of meaning with those in theLao-Zhuang philosophy, the Lao-Zhuang influenced Jixia Daoism and the Huang-Laotradition, whereas the ideas that are prominently Confucian in the Ten Wings do not play animportant role. One of the strengths of the book is a fairly comprehensive list of theoccurrences of the same or similar concepts in the above-mentioned Daoist texts and theTen Wings, followed by discussions at length of the correspondences between them.However, sometimes the correspondences are overstretched and the similarities are insistedupon at the risk of ignoring the real differences between the terms within their owncontexts.

What makes the book very intriguing is the pervasive argument in it with regard tothe Daoist and non-Confucian nature of each of the Yi Commentaries, including theMawangdui silk manuscript of Yi Jing. However, it is also this pervasiveness of theargument that appears to be the weak point of the book, which makes it less convincing. Itis at best a tenuous case to claim that “In the pre-Qin times, the pattern of thinking from theDao of Heaven down to the ways of the humans is the unique way of thinking of Daoism”(49) and that only after it was created by the Daoists was it “widely accepted by the schoolsof Confucianism and other schools after Qin ! and became a special way of thinking ofancient Chinese philosophy” (21). In the first place, it is difficult to see why the notion ofthe Way of Heaven in the Book of Documents (!") and the Book of Poetry (Shi Jing #!)cannot be considered earlier or, at least not later than that in the Lao-Zhuang texts, and alsowhy the notion of the Way of Heaven is denied to the Analects and the pre-Qin Confuciantraditions as a whole, for which these two classics are a part of the central texts foreducation. In the second place, there exists no textual or historical evidence to supportChen’s point that “Confucius was very likely influenced by Laozi in his fondness of theYi ! in his late years” (72). Chen infers from the well-known story of Confucius’ visit toLaozi found in the Zhuangzi and other texts of still later times that Confucius must haveconsulted Laozi on the Yi and that “Lao Zi was more influenced by the Zhou Yi thanConfucius” (71). This is coupled with his argument that Laozi is the first philosopher in thehistory of China and “the book Laozi for the first time established a systematic andcomplete metaphysics” (71) and a naturalism that then became the main stream of thephilosophical thought of the Yi Commentaries.

Throughout the book, Chen relegates Confucianism to a mere system of ethics, whichdoes not have concern for the Dao of Heaven due to its focus on the human world; further,Confucians like Mencius and Xunzi "" are subjugated to the influence of the JixiaDaoists, and so are the Da Xue "# (The Great Learning) and the Zhong Yong $$ (TheBook of the Mean) (61), two Confucian texts which are similar in style and content to theXici and other Yi Commentaries. Placing Confucius and his followers under the influence ofLaozi and Jixia Daoists, Chen maintains that the Confucian influence on the YiCommentaries is limited only to the insignificant ethical and political realms of thesetexts, including some “inferior parts” (85) such as the ranks of ruler and subjects, husbandand wife. On the last point the author contradicts himself, for in other places of the book,the notion of ranks is considered to be positive evidence of influence from the Huang-Laoteaching, for instance, in the last part of the book where passages from the silk manuscriptof Yi Jing, such as “Yi Zhi Yi !%!” and “Yao !” are discussed.

Chen attempts to overturn the conventional view that started with SIMA Qian $"" (145-ca.86 BCE) of the Han ! Dynasty, which attributed the Ten Wings to Confucius. Yet Chen’sown arguments, though systematic and consistent throughout, are not unproblematic. It isquestionable to assume that the Dao of Heaven is unique to the Laozi and Daoism and that

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the Yi Commentaries must have appeared later, in oral or written forms, than not only theZhuangzi but also the works of Jixia Daoists and Huang-Lao tradition as a whole. In addition,whether Huang-Lao thought can be regarded as a proper extension of Lao-Zhuang Daoism inview of its synthetic nature is uncertain. However, given the gap of books and inadequacy ofdocuments passed down from the pre-Qin times, the timeline of these texts remains anunresolved issue, and Chen’s claim remains an intriguing argument that invites furtherstudies.

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