Reading the Zhuangzi in the Tang Dynasty:

The Commentary of Cheng Xuanying (fl. 631-652)

 

余石屹

（清华大学外语系，北京，100084）

 

In this book I plan to examine the Zhuangzi and its reading in the cultural milieu of the Tang dynasty, with a focus on the commentary by Cheng Xuanying成玄英（ca. 600-ca. 660）, an ordained Taoist master writing in the early years of the Tang. The choice of the focus was largely based upon the availability of the writings on the Zhuangzi composed during this period of time, of which Cheng Xuanying’s Zhuangzi shu 庄子疏 is the most extensive commentary, one that does not solely devote itself to philological exegesis as does Lu Te-ming’s 陆德明（556-627）Zhuangzi yinyi 庄子音义. It is this characteristic of Cheng Xuanying’s Zhuangzi shu that makes it possible to observe on a considerable scale how the Zhuangzi was embraced by the Buddho-Taoist culture of the early Tang period.

What is also significant in this instance is that the Zhuangzi was read by an ordained Taoist master at the start of a period when Taoism was favored over other schools of thought and had changed in much of its tenor since Zhuangzi’s time. The Zhuangzi indubitably contained an important message for medieval Taoism; as early as the late Han (ca. 200), the major part of the book began to be incorporated into the so-called religious Taoism in many different ways, one of which, it seems clear, was that its diction and ideas pertaining to the Taoist pursuit of immortality and perfection were adopted in a number of Taoist scriptures that were newly revealed or composed. But so far as we are informed of the Zhuangzi scholarship in medieval times, Cheng Xuanying’s Zhuangzi shu exemplifies the earliest Taoist endeavor extant to write a full-length commentary to the book. Given the radical reshuffling of cultural codes and rules at the time, we can safely assume that to some extent Cheng Xuanying’s reading of the Zhuangzi refashioned the Zhuangzi itself and called into question most of the previous readings, the most widely received one being Kuo Xiang’s 郭象（?-312）Zhuangzi zhu庄子注.

My inquiry will be focused on Cheng Xuanying’s reading in a varied cultural context, of which the commentarial tradition of the Zhuangzi and the Lao-tzu, the growing interest of the reading public in the “Three Mysteries” since the Wei-Jin period (220-420), and the rapid spread of Buddhism and the revival of the Three Treatise School in the Liang-Chen period (502-589) are the most crucial areas to examine. Since Buddhism has been recognized as mainly responsible for the changes that were recasting the medieval Chinese culture, and Cheng Xuanying’s Zhuangzi shu is notoriously filled with Buddhist ideas, Buddhism and its influence on Cheng Xuanying’s reading will be closely examined throughout the study. In spite of this, I wish to point out that, compared with the Wei-Jin period, when Buddhism was to a great extent susceptible to the Chinese way of thinking, the Sui-Tang period witnessed both a separation going back around two hundred years and a coming together under the names of a few new Buddhist sects arising at the time and with the shift of emphasis within medieval Taoism. The revival of the Three Treatise School in the Liang-Chen period and its diffusion into these new sects in the Sui-Tang, in particular, renewed the connection between Buddhism and the Chinese indigenous thought represented by the “Three Mysteries” on a different level, and heralded a more fruitful era to come for Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese thinking in the tradition of the “Three Mysteries.”

Cheng Xuanying’s reading of the Zhuangzi provides unique testimony to this complex contact between classical Taoism, medieval Taoism, and Buddhism. On the one hand, Cheng Xuanying was writing in the tradition of Kuo Xiang, trying to interpret the Zhuangzi within the discourse of the School of Mystery in the Wei-Jin, but on the other, as an ordained Taoist master, he was not a Taoist-minded philosopher like Kuo Xiang, but rather a Taoist believer, practicing a Taoism that was not only largely different from that of Zhuangzi’s time, but also from what had been meaningful to Taoist-minded philosophers in the Wei-Jin. His application of Buddhist concepts to the Zhuangzi is open and intrepid, which has resulted in criticism of him either as misinterpreting the Zhuangzi or as succumbing to non Chinese influence.

The complexity of the case demands that we carefully comb through a large number of historical documents and make a close analysis of the texts involved. As a preliminary study of Zhuangzi’s experience in medieval times, I intend the first chapter of the project to partake more of a historico-linguistical character so that, by examining as much textual evidence as possible, I hope to sketch a picture of how the Zhuangzi was catalogued, debated, taught, and studied from the Han up to the Tang.

The second chapter is a reconstruction of Cheng Xuanying’s life, based on the biographical note added to his works by some historians in the Song dynasty. I hope that the materials I garner in the chapter will shed light on the culture of the time at large and provide modern readers with some information on how this medieval Taoist adept was educated, what a Buddho-Taoist culture meant to him specifically, and what kind of audience Cheng Xuanying’s commentary to the Zhuangzi might appeal to at the time.

In the third chapter I try to make a close examination of how the “double mystery,” a central concept in medieval Taoism, is interpreted by Cheng Xuanying on the Zhuangzi. Cheng Xuanying’s commentary in this respect appears most innovative, since he is working simultaneously with three different traditions, the Laozi and medieval Taoism, Buddhism, and the Zhuangzi. How he utilized the Zhuangzi to accommodate the difference among the three thus becomes an interesting vantage point from which to descry what was the nature of the change that was happening at the time, and how this change came along.

In chapter four my discussion will be focused on Cheng Xuanying’s detailed comments on the experience of the perfected recorded in the Zhuangzi. By drawing attention to the notion of the void and how Cheng specifies it in his commentary, I want to show how Cheng Xuanying conceives of the Taoist quest for transcendence both as a personal experience and an act that has some social consequences.

In the fifth chapter my attempt is to show, by placing his commentary in the context of Taoist/Buddhist debates of his time, how he uses the Zhuangzi to argue for medieval Taoism. To some extent, Cheng Xuanying’s commentary is a splendid array of the major concepts in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, ranging from the three emptinesses to causes and conditions, from the Two Truths to the Tetralemma, and so on. It seems clear that since the introduction of Nagarjuna’s teachings, the central philosophy of Buddhism, at the turn of the fifth century, the Zhuangzi was having more challenges from Buddhist scholars trained in Madhyamika Buddhism. Both the challenge and Cheng Xuanying’s reply given in the context of the Zhuangzi provide a good chance to observe specifically how Chinese religious scholars at the time handled some general issues about the foundation of their beliefs. I conclude this study with chapter six, in which I extend my investigation to two other areas where Cheng Xuanying, as an eminent religious thinker and scholar in medieval China, played an equally remarkable role. But since his view in the second area, that is, his relationship with medieval Taoism, will not be clearly grasped as a whole without referring to his other writings, I will leave the major part of that topic for another occasion.

As with many other ancient texts, there have been disputes over the authorship and authenticity of the text of the Zhuangzi, going back at least to Han Yu韩愈 (768-824) and Su Shi苏轼(1036-1101). Here we can legitimately avoid discussing the issue of authorship, for in the Tang period, particularly to Cheng Xuanying and other commentators, this was not a major problem regarding the book. They basically accepted the book as it was edited by Kuo Xiang, and believed it was composed, each and every chapter, by Zhuangzi. Among modern editions of the text, the first I consulted was Liu Wendian’s刘文典Zhuangzi bu zheng庄子补正，whose unequivocal annotations alerted me to textual variations and the fallibility of commentarial judgment; among other editions I have consulted are those by Zhang Taiyan章太炎（1867-1936）, Wang Shumin王叔岷， Qian Mu钱穆, Wang Xiaoyu王孝鱼，and Chen Guying, 陈鼓应. For this study, however, the base-text I use is Kuo Qingfan’s郭庆藩(1844-1897) Zhuangzi jishi庄子集释，edited by Wang Xiaoyu.

There are quite a few English translations of the Zhuangzi in circulation at present, but for this study I basically use A.C. Graham’s Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, and I also refer to Burton Watson’s The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, wherever it is necessary.