The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang 0791456617, 0791456625

Table of contents :
The Penumbra Unbound
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I
Introduction
The Classical Chinese Philosophical Background
An Overview of Guo Xiang’s Philosophical Project
The Problem of Spontaneity and Morality in Earlier Xuanxue
Guo’s Solution:The Image of Traces
The Dangers of Traces
Part II
Interactivity Without Traces: “Vanishing (Into) Things”
The Unification of Independence and Interdependence
Part III
Lone-Transformation
The Unity of Activity and Nonactivity
Appendix A
Guo Xiang’s Use of the Term Xing:The Inherency of Change and the Confluence of Chance, Freedom, and Necessity in the Notion of the Self-So
Appendix B
Comparative Notes on Freedom and Determinism
Notes
PART I
PART II
PART III
APPENDICES
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
K
L
M
N
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P
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W
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Citation preview

the penumbra unbound

SUNY series in

C P  C Roger T. Ames, editor

the penumbra unbound THE NEO-TAOIST PHILOSOPHY OF GUO XIANG

BROOK ZIPORYN

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by

     ,  © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ziporyn, Brook Anthony The Penumbra unbound : the neo-Taoist philosophy of Guo Xiang / Brook Ziporyn. p. cm.—(SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5661-7 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-7914-5662-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Taoist. 2. Guo, Xiang, d. 312. I. Title: Neo-Taoist philosophy of Guo Xiang. II. Title. III. Series. BL1920 .Z46 2003 181¢.114—dc21 2002075881 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to my father, Marvin Ziporyn

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

PART I

Introduction 3 The Classical Chinese Philosophical Background 5 An Overview of Guo Xiang’s Philosophical Project 17 The Problem of Spontaneity and Morality in Earlier Xuanxue 23 Guo’s Solution: The Image of Traces 31 The Dangers of Traces 51

PART II

Interactivity Without Traces: “Vanishing (Into) Things” 65 The Unification of Independence and Interdependence 85

PART III

Lone-Transformation 99 The Unity of Activity and Nonactivity 125

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APPENDIX A

Guo Xiang’s Use of the Term Xing: The Inherency of Change and the Confluence of Chance, Freedom, and Necessity in the Notion of the Self-So 143

APPENDIX B

Comparative Notes on Freedom and Determinism 149

Notes 161 Bibliography 179 Index 183

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Shuen-fu Lin for all the time he spent reading the Guo Xiang commentary with me, and the insight he brought to our discussions, many years ago when I was a graduate student. Those readings were the inspiration for this book. I would also like to thank Professor Donald Munro for his continuing support for my work in the field of Chinese philosophy, and the guidance given by his example. Thanks also to Northwestern University and the Fulbright Foundation for giving me the time and financial support to complete the manuscript. And special thanks as well to Joshu Ziporyn, whose father I am proud to be, for his basic overall amazingness and the inferences that makes plausible about existence in general. Readers who would like to comment on or discuss the ideas in this work are welcome to write directly to the author at Northwestern University.

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Introduction

he tradition of thought known (in English) as philosophical Taoism is generally traced back to two central works, the Laozi (Lao-tzu), also known as the Daodejing (Tao-Te-Ching), and the Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu). These two texts were produced between the sixth and third centuries ... in Zhou dynasty China, and their importance to the subsequent development of East Asian thought and culture can hardly be overestimated. Since their “discovery” by the Western world, they have begun to take their place in world philosophy as well. Indeed, it is said that there are more translations of the Laozi than any other text on earth with the sole exception of the Bible.The standard doxa on Taoist thought generally describe it as a mystical and/or naturalist foil to Ruist (“Confucianist”) rationalism and humanism, stressing spontaneity, illogicality, and transmoral naturalness. It is sometimes seen as a Chinese version of the “perennial philosophy,” but also as the spiritual precursor of Chan (Zen) Buddhism (indeed, the latter is sometimes described as no more than Taoism in Buddhist garb), of countercultural and even anticultural crypto-Rousseauian romanticism, of deep environmentalism, of anarchism, of intuitionism, of skepticism, and so on.There is some truth, perhaps, to all these characterizations; at any rate it must be said that both of these works are among the most profoundly ambiguous, indirectly expressed, and open to multiple interpretations of any ever written. Indeed, even in the traditional Chinese context, the Laozi was read by various interpreters as a work on politics, on military strategy, on alchemy, on yogic discipline, on metaphysics, and so on. But Taoism really doesn’t fit neatly into any preexisting philosophical or cultural category. Its uniqueness and importance in a comparative philosophical context can perhaps be more clearly understood and appreciated by bringing a third masterpiece of philosophical Taoism to the English-speaking world: the work generally known as the Guo Xiang commentary to the Zhuangzi, which gets its name from its putative author, Guo Xiang (252?–312).

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For although there are handful of other texts that further develop, interpret, and focus the ideas of the two classical Taoist texts, perhaps none is as single-minded, radical, uncompromising, well-developed, closely argued, and indeed, influential as the Guo Xiang commentary, which became the orthodox commentary attached to the Zhuangzi text in all subsequent Chinese history, and as such was read and studied by nearly every lettered Chinese for over sixteen centuries.1 Indeed, the Zhuangzi became the text known to us today only in connection with the Guo commentary, for Guo Xiang himself is said to have edited it down to its current thirty-three chapters out of an original fifty-five, and to have arranged their order. The commentary attributed to this author contains an extensive and reasonably systematic presentation of many ideas that resonate powerfully with a number of other watersheds in the history of philosophical thought, both Chinese and Western. Like Nietzsche, the author asserts that there is no God, nor a creator of things of any kind, nor any metaphysical reality behind appearances, and that recognition of this fact is the primary premise for all human liberation. Like a Humean skeptic, he raises serious doubts about the concept of causality. But like Spinoza, he holds that all things without exception, even human culture, are natural and necessary. Like an egalitarian political theorist, he asserts the equal value of all. But like an existentialist, he rejects any essence to beings prior to their existence, pointing instead to an invincible spontaneity and freedom that ceaselessly creates itself. Like a Huayan Buddhist or a Neo-Confucian such as Zhu Xi, however, he embraces what sounds like an organicist picture of the interdependence of things. Like a Neo-Confucian such as Wang Yangming, he connects ultimate value to freedom from fixed value conceptions, and finds that this spontaneity expresses itself also in the form of the traditional moral values. Like a Tiantai Buddhist, he views the continuous production of new moments of experience as both free and necessary, as a numinous and inexplicable manifestion at every moment of the entirety of ultimate reality precisely because of their separateness and particularity, such that no ultimate ontological difference pertains to the conditioned and the unconditioned. But like a Chan Buddhist, he invokes a vision of pure immediacy and spontaneity, dismissing the significance of moral and cultural cultivation and effort, and of discursive explanation. But Guo is in none of these camps, although he had an undeniable influence, direct or indirect, on the Chinese Buddhist and Neo-Confucian thinkers mentioned here. He combines these seemingly contradictory propositions in a unique system of his own that derives from his reading of the Zhuangzi, rooted in the world of indigenous (pre-Buddhist) ancient Chinese philosophy.

The Classical Chinese Philosophical Background

lassical Chinese philosophy emerges with the beginning of the breakdown of traditional Zhou dynasty institutions, around the seventh century ...The Zhou ruling clan had overthrown the ruling Shang dynasty by force, sometime toward the end of the twelfth century ..., justifying its seizure and retention of power by means of a religious belief in “the mandate of Heaven.”This belief, in the version that comes down to us in later sources (reflecting to some extent the views of their Ruist—“Confucian”—editors), postulated a semianthropomorphic Heaven or supreme God with a strong interest in human virtue, closely related to—indeed perhaps composed of, but at least closely attended by—those ancestors of the clan who were renowned for their virtue. However, Heaven’s mandate was said to be “inconstant” and played no invariable favorites: the bestowal of power on a particular clan depended entirely on its continued practice of virtue. This practice of virtue was largely defined by a system of clan organization known as ritual propriety ( li), which involved both ritual procedures for serving the ancestors and practical customs for maintaining both a hierarchical relation among members of the clan and at the same time a sense of unity among them based on fellow-feeling, along with fair treatment for the subjects of the realm. The hierarchical aspect focused on the respecting of and deferral to elders within the clan, who presided over the ancestral sacrifices and a set of normative customs allotting privileges, material and otherwise, to them according to their rank in this hierarchy. The measures for maintaining fellow-feeling within the clan, on the other hand, included the collective possession of property among members, obligatory mutual mourning rituals when any member of the clan died, collective festival meals and so on.The two prerequisites of effective rule— internal order within the clan’s chain of command on the one hand, and its

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unity of purpose and sense of identity—were presumably to be maintained by means of these measures, which pertained only to the ruling class.The common people, who tilled the fields and produced the material sustanence for the ruling class, on the other hand, were governed by penal law ( xing). Interestingly, then, Heaven punished and rewarded the ruling clan (rewarding virtue with political power), and the ruling clans punished and rewarded the common people, but in between, the ruling clans maintained order among themselves with the customary and persuasive power of “ritual” and without recourse to direct or explicit punitive strictures. These two classes remained separate and unbridgeable within early Zhou society. However, with the increased productive power brought in the wake of new agricultural techniques, the growth of the population, and the development of trade and private wealth, this strict division between the classes, with their two very different forms of social organization, began to fall apart. Commoners began to receive education in aristocratic lore and ritual, and to take part in governing, while aristocratic families fell from power. One such son of a fallen clan, known to us as Confucius (551–479 ...), looking back nostalgically to the idealized world of the Zhou golden age, which he viewed as free from the war, usurpation, and chaos that characterized his own time, took to the private education of commoners, openly advocating their study and practice of li, and therewith their right to participate in government. The intermixture of the classes opened two alternatives: the universalization of the penal law formerly reserved for commoners, or the universalization of the system of ritual affection, unity, and hierarchy, enforced by custom and persuasion rather than punishment, formerly reserved for the ruling clans. Confucius opted for the latter alternative, making education in the ritual mode of organization open to all interested parties, and with it the qualification to join the ruling class. His ideal called for a maintainence of the hierarchical structure of the clans, with the divisions of rank and privilege that went with it, but began to conceive this as a hierarchy with fixed ranks that could be filled by persons of any class origin. The occupancy of any given rank in this fixed hiearchy, in other words, was to be determined not—or at least not exclusively—by blood, but by merit, conceived mainly as mastery of the ritual and the underlying principle that, in his view, characterized it, which he called ren, sometimes translated as “humanheartedness” or “benevolence.” For the hierarchy of the ruling clans was based on a putatively “natural” relation—the affection and hierarchy existing between the senior and junior members of the same family. As such it combined both a sense of fellow-feeling and solidarity with a necessary division of roles, priority, and privilege.The ruling clans were originally known as ren ( ), persons, while the commoners were generally known as min ( ), the masses.The adjectival form of the noun ren, also pronounced ren ( ), was initially a descriptive term for the accomplished comportment appropriate to a member of the ruling class, one who had mastered and internalized the ritual system as opposed to the penal, who behaved “nobly,” as a noble should, motivated by his fellow-

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feeling with his clanmates to respect the hierarchical roles that embodied their relations with one another. Confucius adopted this term as the essence of his teaching and of the ritual system he hoped to promote, thereby also expanding its meaning. Just as the Buddha adopted terms like “Brahman” and “Aryan” in India, altering their meaning from “a member of the nobility or priesthood” to “noble or holy” in the broad sense, Confucius took ren and made it a universal virtue.2 It remains, in his teaching, closely linked with the prime exemplar of a relation both natural and spontaneous and also necessarily hierarchical, the obedient respect and affection putatively felt by a child for his parents. Hence in the Confucian teaching, filiality is said to be the root of ren as a sense of fellow-feeling combined with respect for proper places and divisions, and this was seen as the real essence of ritual. Of course, a system that works in a limited local context necessarily encounters new problems, and indeed changes in nature, when it is expanded into a new context or universalized, and the ritual ideal of Confucius was no exception. Its universalization quickly met with opposition.The second private school of thought in ancient China, the Mohists, advocated the opposite approach, discarding both the affective and the hierarchical aspect of the ritual system, and instead extending the principle of punishment as a means of social control to all classes. As noted, this was also how Heaven was thought to deal with the ruling clans, and Mohist teaching intensifies the anthropormorphic and punitive conception of God just as Ruist teaching increasingly diminishes it (it still lingers ambiguously in the thought of Confucius and Mencius, but is no longer a focus of primary interest). The Mohists reject ritual as a wasteful holdover from the past, abandoning both the noncoercive and naturally hierarchical nature of the ritual system. In place of ren, which the Ruists saw as rooted in both spontaneous affection and spontaneous hierarchy, the Mohists advocated “universal love” of all equally, as rooted in a system of command (in a sense even more rigidly hierarchical), threat of punishment, and centralized surveillance, prized for its putative utility in generating and distributing material goods rather than its relation to anything spontaneous in human inclinations. Later Ruism splits sharply on the question of the relation between spontaneity and morality. Mencius (371?–289?), focusing on the spontaneity of fellow-feeling, partially in response to proto-Taoist suggestions that the spontaneous of man was morally neutral (to be discussed momentarily), holds that human nature is “good” in the sense of having spontaneous sprouts of inclination that can, if unobstructed and properly nourished, be developed into the full-fledged Ruist virtues; the positive system of ritual is in this case merely a concrete exfoliation of what is natural to man. The inability to stand the suffering of others is the sprout of (a more narrowly conceived) Benevolence; shame and dislike for certain things is the sprout of Righteousness; yielding and deference are the sprout of Ritual; and approval and disapproval are the sprout of Wisdom. Xunzi (298?–238?), on the other hand, focusing on the ritual system

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as a hierarchical way of distributing roles, privileges, and goods so that excessive desire and strife are avoided, held that human nature is evil in the sense of chaotic, and that, although it may possess these inclinations among others, it cannot develop morally unless the ritual system is learned and imposed from without. Ritual for Xunzi no longer has anything to do with customary and persuasive order as opposed to a social order imposed by means of threat and punishment; he adopts the punitive system of the Mohists and grafts it onto the hierarchical distrubution of ranks derived from the ritual system. It is to be noted that both the Mohist and Ruist school focus quite centrally on social and ethical matters. Unlike the first wave of ancient Greek thinking, this tradition was initially almost completely preoccupied with cultural, political and ethical matters; the Analects of Confucius has nothing at all to say about the natural world, and very little to say about the metaphysical realm of gods and spirits, even, arguably, as a metaphysical justification for the ethical practices it hopes to promote—it touches “nature” only in its attention to the spontaneous affection and inclinations of human family members and social groups. Mohist texts, while having more to say about the positive characteristics of the ruling deity, are clearly also ultimately concerned mainly with human ethics and social order. In sharp contrast to this, at least apparently, is the school that comes to be known as Taoism. The earliest known stratum of the Laozi text (as found for example in the Guodian discoveries3), and certain other early sources (e.g., the “Neiye” [“Internal Work”] and “Xinshu” [“Heart/Mind Craft”] chapters of the Guanzi), present an interest in cultivation of the person to make one fit to be a ruler; not the explicit study and practice of ritual, in this case, but a quieting of certain interferences, preconceptions, and desires that are, at this point, viewed as obstacles to the development of the true virtues. At this stage, this cultivation and ataraxy are viewed not only as consistent with the ethical virtues advocated by other schools, but indeed as somehow promoting their flourishing. By the time the Laozi text takes its current shape, however, this situation has changed dramatically. In the interim, the shadowy figure of Yang Zhu (c. 350 ...) had emerged. Yang Zhu is depicted in Ruist texts as a straw man advocating exclusive concern for self and indifference to social and political matters, an archegoist “who would not sacrifice a single hair on his body to benefit the whole world,” but his doctrine was more likely that one should not be willing to trade even a hair of one’s body even if one were to gain possession of the empire by doing it.4 This is a prioritizing of the person, especially the spontaneous, precultural body, as more important than the objects of desire pertaining to the social or ritual network, and a definition of true benefit as belonging to the care and cultivation of the former, not the latter.Yang Zhu’s “egotism” is a way to preserve and maintain one’s bodily existence and health—staying out of dangers caused by ambitions for glory and power, or wearing oneself out in pursuing material gain.The value relation between culture and nature of the Mohist and Xunzian

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positions is powerfully reversed here, and a decisive step has also been taken away from the notion of their contiguity and consistency as held by Confucius, Mencius, and the “proto-Taoist” texts. The final version of the Laozi text carries this line of thought a step further.We now find a across-the-boards rejection of all moral cultivation, a sharpening of the previous reversal of priorities into a virulent critique of all value preconceptions, all deliberate and purposive moral action or cultivation. Benevolence, righteousness, ritual, learning—the primary Ruist virtues—are not only useless, they are actually harmful. Indeed, the received text includes a primitivist and naturalist strain that rejects not only the present forms of society, as the other schools did as well, but also, to some extent, centralized political organization in general, advocating rather a small village society where, just as in the aristocratic clan society of the early Zhou, order was maintained without recourse to punitive laws or preestablished moral strictures, and indeed in this case, in contrast to the aristocratic li, free of any well-defined hierarchy, any complex system of obligations and responsibilities, or any extensive knowledge about the other parts of the realm, as was required for members of the ruling class.The best ruler, if there must be one, is one who interferes the least with this spontaneous ordering. Similarly, the punitive Heaven who rewards virtue is no longer needed; instead, the world as a whole is ordered by the Tao, which does nothing and yet leaves nothing undone, has no deliberate plans or morality, and yet by means of its noninterference allows things to order themselves. It is here that “metaphysical” thinking in China finally begins. The term Tao (“Way”) is initially used by both the Ruists and Mohists to denote their way of doing things, a guiding discourse prescribing a set of practices (e.g., the system of traditional ritual). When these practices are mastered and internalized, one has “attained the Way” in question, and this “attainment” (de) is what is known as “virtue” (de). The term “Tao” is cognate with the term for “to lead or guide,” and can also mean “to speak.” Hence its prescriptive force is particularly pronounced. It is perhaps best translated in this period as “guiding discourse.”The present Laozi text begins with the well-known paradox usually translated as something like, “The Way that can be spoken of is not the Eternal Way,” but in the context of early Chinese thought its original sense is probably something closer to “Guiding ways can be taken as guides, but they are then [no longer] constant [or reliable] guides.”5 Here we have the prescriptive sense of the term pushed to its extreme and thus stood on its head and annulled. This means that the esteeming and commitment to a particular value perspective is precisely what undermines the attainment of the desired value. The idea rests on a wholesale critique of knowledge and valuation, which are seen as inextricably related. For the desired value, in the view developed in this text, is actually part of a whole, and depends also on the rejected antivalue parts of that whole for its existence. If one commits to a value and dedicates oneself to eliminating the conflicting antivalue, one is destroying the roots for the value in question. The justification for this view is both epistemological and metaphysical.

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The text relates valuation to inherently evaluative social and linguistic practices, which have a determining effect on what human consciousness focuses its attention on. Once we have words contrasting the fragrance of the flower, for example, with the stench of the fertilizer, we “look for” the flower and ignore the fertilizer. Failing to see the interdependence of the two, we commit ourselves to the “good”—we try to attain the fragrance without the stench, severing the relation, thereby killing the flower. In this connection, the received Laozi text can be read as distinguishing between two forms of desire, those pertaining to the “stomach” and those pertaining to the “eye.” The former, “stomach” desires, do not depend on a particular conscious image, are not lured forward by deliberate purpose—they arise spontaneously, have no explicit object, and have a natural level of satisfaction: when the stomach is filled, one is no longer hungry for a while (or, in the more vivid imagery of the text, the infant male may have an erection in spite of his ignorance of sexual intercourse, his lack of any mental image of it). A natural periodic cyclicity is implied. The latter, “eye” desires, are based on culturally informed systems of valuation—the ritual system and moral practices of society, on the one hand, and material gain, fame, and power on the other hand. These present a particular image of what is desirable to consciousness, and have no built-in level of satiation; indeed, they lead to ceaseless, unbalanced desire for more and more of the valued thing, more and more pure versions of it, which in fact make the satisfaction of its wholesome, stomach equivalent or substratum (with its necessary association with and periodic collapse into its opposite) impossible. The text notes that all valued things emerge out of nonvalued things, and in general what we regard as “Being” (literally, “having,” as opposed to “not-having”) comes out of Nothing (not-having—also, initially, primarily value terms here). When still part of the spontaneous stomach form of the life process, the two extremes tend to have a cyclical existence, serve as roots for each other, so that when one reaches its extreme, it dissipates and is succeeded by the other. The stability of both the value and the nonvalue depend on maintaining the intrinsic relation between them. In general, “the Tao” is a marker within the divided terms of discourse that points to the spontaneous, nonevaluative side of things, the neglected and negatively valued, from which the valued and the evaluative emerge, and this Tao does indeed take on a metaphysical dimension here. It is: 1) the unseen and unseeable source and end-point of all concrete existences; 2) their course in the sense of this tendency to “return” in a bell-shaped pattern; and 3) the stuff of which they consist in the sense that the raw material of a utensil points to both what is left over when the utensil has been chipped away (the value, that is, from the unhewn, undifferentiated prevalued stated), and also the whole of that unvalued, unhewn stuff itself. The Tao is the “unhewn” in the sense of both “prevalued” and “disvalued.” The disvalued is, as it were, the direct disclosure of the prevalued, the state prior to the evaluative split, or cut. The Tao, then, by directing attention to the neglected disvalued side of any value pair, simultaneously discloses the relation

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between the two sides, and the whole relationship, and their common grounding in the unnamable prevalued substratum of both. It is a word for both one part of the whole (the neglected, disvalued background) and also, thereby, for the entire whole (the prevalued totality of the relationship, the stuff of which both halves are composed, the regularity of reversion between the two). In addition, the Tao retains its prescriptive sense, now in a somewhat unresolved paradoxical sense: it is the course to be followed in handling the course of things. The text as we have it now, read as a whole, seems to recommend a freedom from the desire and knowledge of explicit values as a means by which, paradoxically, to attain them spontaneously in their true, nonpurposive, stomach forms, maintaining the relation of both sides of the value contrast by exalting the prevalued/disvalued side of each apparent value dichotomy. The Zhuangzi was traditionally regarded as the work of Zhuang Zhou (fourth century ...), but is now regarded as the work of many hands, reflecting many distinguishable strains of early Taoist thinking.6 The part of the text thought to come from Zhuang Zhou himself (the “Inner Chapters,” or the first seven of the thirty-three chapters of the present version) takes the next logical step from the earlier Taoist preoccupation with the spontenous bodily life over purposive cultural aims to a critique of the fixed valuation of even the concept of “life” itself, as part of the general critique of valuation and conceptualization in general. This is achieved by means of an intricate epistemological and linguistic agnosticism and perspectivism, rooted in insights into the indexical nature of evaluative knowledge and language, their dependence on perspective, and the unceasing transformation of these perspectives. All knowledge depends on a “this” as opposed to a “that,” the defining of a system of coordinates.These terms are obviously indexical, i.e., their denotation changes depending on what one is pointing to when they are uttered. But this defining of coordinates necessarily involves a value orientation that is equally indexical. Indeed, in ancient Chinese, one of most common words for “this” also “right”, means a fact that Zhuang Zhou exploits extensively in his exposition of this point. Valuations depend on perspective, and perspective is constantly changing. This constant change of perspective is what is truly spontaneous, and its source is unknowable, since all knowledge is posterior to and conditioned by it. But this unknowable emergence of differing perspectives is itself regarded (in a now admittedly and unavoidably biased and temporary evaluative and cognitive perspective) as the Tao, that is, as the source, course, and stuff of all experience.This is embodied in a state of “forgetting,” “mind-fasting,” freedom from a fixed perspective or identity or sense of self, and from any predetermined evaluative standard, allowing one to go along with all the varying value perspectives that emerge from it without cease. Zhuang Zhou calls this state the “pivot of Taos,” “traveling two roads at once,”“the obvious” (ming), or “the torch of chaos and doubt.” The sage, says Zhuang Zhou, uses his mind like a mirror, accepting and reflecting everything (including every value perspective that might arise), but storing nothing. He gives the example of a monkey trainer who offered his monkeys

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three chestnuts in the morning and two in the evening. When the monkeys objected, he reversed the distribution, and they were all delighted, although their total ration remained unchanged. The point is, first of all, that whatever happens, however things are arranged, it is all equally good; we are in the same total world, all is one, all things proceed from the same source, and thus are equally valued, however arranged. Zhuang Zhou describes this as “hiding the world in the world.” But this point falls victim to the perspectivism of its own premises, and so Zhuang Zhou undermines any substantiality to this “oneness.” The ultimate point, rather, is that the emerging of each situation from an unknown source, and establishing itself as the perspective-defining “this,” is the real oneness here, for it is this that is common to all things.The monkeys have their own value perspective, their own “this/that.”The trainer does not inquire into the reasons for it—that would be futile, since he would be gaining knowledge only from his own perspective—or try to change it. He goes along with it, even while maintaining his own aloofness from it; he neither adopts nor rejects their perspective, simply follows along with it as another in a long chain of new perspectives that are always arising, and between which no single objective hierarchy can be discerned. Nor, indeed, does he try to convince them of the folly of their commitment to this one arbitrary perspective, so that they can learn to be free of it like him. He “travels two roads at once,” guided by “the obvious” (the ever changing conflicting perspectives), the “torch of chaos and doubt.” Zhuang Zhou addresses the paradox of his own perspective first by redefining knowledge as the state of mind of the sage, after having dismissed the possibility of reliable objective knowledge (“there is ‘true knowledge’ only when there is a ‘true person’ ”). He goes on to suggest in various ways how this standin for knowledge (this state of mind that is characterized by the following-along with each emergent perspective, this chaos and doubt, this nonknowledge) does all the jobs that knowledge was supposed to do, to the extent that they are possible at all, but better. For example, it allows one maximum success, in terms of any given value perspective that happens to be operative, in human relations, politics, artisanship, the old Taoist ideal of cultivation of bodily life, in governing things, handling things, communing with things, and so on.7 It is notable that the figure of Confucius plays a humorously ironic role in this text, sometimes standing for the arch morality–and knowledge-monger, sometimes as a spokesman for Zhuang Zhou’s own ideas.This ambivalence toward the relation between Taoism and Ruism (perhaps relatable to the two-sided nature of Confucius’s teaching itself, i.e., its equal stress on spontaneous affection and on social hierarchy, which it views as extensions of one another) is another point that will be of great importance to Guo Xiang’s project. The Tao and the spontaneity that is here called Heaven (the incomprehensible process of ever emergent perspectives) are “crossed out” by Zhuang Zhou’s agnosticism, even as he praises them: even “Heaven” versus “man” is another “this/that,” an indexical identification based on a perspective that has emerged from somewhere

    

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unknowable. Zhuang Zhou says, therefore, “How do I know that what I call Heaven is not really man, and vice versa,” and it is this “how do I know?” that is the real “Tao” to which he wants to revert, the torch of chaos and doubt, the constantly shifting perspectives of the obvious.There is no need to unify these appearances into a single consistent system or attach them to an overarching single Tao in a positive sense.The sage’s one is one, and his not-one is also one, says Zhuang Zhou: whether one sees things as one or as not-one, each is just an emergent “this,” coming forth from an unknowable nowhere, and affirming itself, and this self-affirming emergence is as much of a real “one” as he will give us. As we shall see, this idea is picked up and thought through to great effect by Guo Xiang. The later sections of the present Zhuangzi text develop these ideas and sometimes diverge from them. The radicalism of Zhuang Zhou’s relativistic perspectivism is effaced, sometimes in favor a fixed picture of the distinction between benefit and harm, or of the division between the natural and the artificial—the standard fault lines of older Taoism.The text includes both critiques of Ruist values and praises of them, syncretic systems and extremist primitivisms, anarchism and conservatism, “rationalizing” and “irrationalizing” tendencies, all of which stand side by side in the text as a whole as it currently exists. For example, in the chapter “Autumn Floods” (“Qiushui”), characterized by Graham as a “rationalizing” chapter, we find a systematic expansion of the relativism of the Zhuang Zhou writings. Nothing is big or small or good or bad in itself, in this exposition; we call something big when it is bigger than something else, and thus “big” is a predicate that can apply to anything at all, and does not pertain to the thing itself. The same goes for all predicates, even for “existence and non-existence.” Similarly, each thing affirms itself and negates all others, meets its own standard and fails to live up to the standards embodied in other things—an idea derived from the “this/right” conflation in the Zhuang Zhou writings and that was again to bear great fruit in the Guo Xiang commentary. But at the end of this discussion in the “Autumn Floods” version, we are told that these considerations give some real knowledge about how things are (i.e., all things are free of intrinsic characteristics, susceptible to relative valuations and attributions, etc.), and that this knowledge aids a person in living well in the world, in understanding what is truly harmful and beneficial. This is a step back from the Zhuang Zhou writings, a subtle shift that nonetheless alters the significance of this whole line of thought significantly. The text then, in direct contradiction to Zhuang Zhou, sets up a fixed division between the “human” and the “heavenly” (or spontaneous), i.e., the artificial and the natural, as if these could be known in a way that was not purely perspectivedependent.A horse has four feet—that is the natural, the spontaneous, the heavenly.A horse has a saddle on its back and a bit in its mouth—that is the human, the artificial.Where Zhuang Zhou had said,“How do I know that what I really call heaven is not man, and vice versa?” the author of this chapter tells us once and for all what is spontaneous and what not. Where Zhuang Zhou had, after

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suggesting that the human not be allowed to interfere with or try to help along the spontaneous, goes on to describe a state where “neither heaven nor man wins out over the other” (where, indeed, nothing wins out over anything else once and for all), this text stops at the first step without taking the second.This has practical consequences as well. Another set of texts collected in the current Zhuangzi, characterized by Graham as the “primitivist” chapters, adopt a similar definition of the spontaneous and the artificial, buttressed somewhat by some of the anticivilzation riffs in the Laozi, considering all pursuit of objects of conscious knowledge or valuation as disruptions of man’s original spontaneous nature.This applies equally to material gain and to morality, both of which are “external” to man’s true nature. Here the division between “inner” and “outer,” and between “natural” and “artificial,” is regarded as knowable and fixed. Zhuang Zhou had suggested that by following along with the shifting perspectives, the torch of chaos and doubt, one could “do good without getting famous, do evil without getting punished.” By this he meant, it seems, that one might find oneself doing what is defined as good or evil according to some perspective at any given time, but that one would not be committed to any single course of action to the extent that would bring one to the extremes of either fame for goodness or punishment for evil in any case, either of which would require cumulative, extended, consistent behavior according to a particular enduring value perspective. The author of the “primitivist” chapters of the Zhuangzi, on the other hand, tells us that he would be ashamed to commit either good or evil, understood here in the fixed sense of benevolence and righteousness on the one hand and theivery and self-indulgence on the other; both disturb his true, spontaneous nature, identified with the Tao as a metaphysical absolute. From these examples we can see some of the ambiguities involved in the Zhuangzian line of thought, and the variety of conclusions to which it can lead when subtle shifts are made in its premises. The thought of Guo Xiang is available to us entirely in the form of a commentary on this text, the Zhuangzi. Between the composition of the text and its commentary, however, both the philosophical and the sociopolitical scene had changed considerably. China had been reunified under a Legalist regime in the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 ..). Legalism, extending the Mohist/Xunzian attitude toward social order, dispenses with ritual altogether, opting instead for a strict system of punishment and reward, and also dismisses the value of education for the people and the graduated ranks of the ritual system. Now punitive law applies to all equally, with the sole exception of the ruler. After the fall of the Qin, the Han dynasty was founded, initially adopting a version of Taoist political thought, and then a modified version of Ruism. This new Han Ruism extended the application of Ruist ideals to the world of nature that had begun in the commentaries to the Book of Changes, composed toward the end of the pre-Qin period. This was originally a text for prognostication, and it is noteworthy that it comes to play such a central role in later

    

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Chinese intellectual history. The earliest stratum of Chinese history shows no evidence of a founding creation myth, but does show extensive interest in prognostication. Ancient mythology generally consists of stories accounting for the origin of the world as a whole, of mankind, and of the overall human condition. In many ancient cultures, when the veracity or moral wholesomeness of the old myths became susceptible to doubt, these myths were either rejected as false (as in Plato, for example) or efforts were made to reinterpret them in terms as allegorical representations of newer philosophical and moral ideas (Philo and the Christian Fathers treat the Old Testament this way, and the Neo-Platonists do the same for Greek myth). In the Chinese case, these rationalizing energies were devoted not to reinterpreting myth, but to reinterpreting the ancient art of prognostication. We may detect here an interest in particular situations, the ways they emerge and transform, and the optimal human responses to them, rather than objective knowledge about a once-and-for-all “way things are,” and this interest in ever new encountered situations as a form of “ultimate concern” is something we will find both in the Guo Xiang text, and in much of later Chinese thought. In the commentaries to the Book of Changes, man was depicted as a microcosm of natural forces, above all the Yin and the Yang, the receptive and the creative (the dark and the light, the female and the male, the completing and the initiating forces), which combined in various ways to form certain prototypical situations, each of which called for a particular responses from man by which it could be brought to its ideal completion, i.e., could fully manifest the value implicit within it.This value was both moral and utilitarian.The Book of Changes commentaries look upon the ceaseless production of life, or of change as such, the unending generation of new situations and beings, as an ultimate good.This process is a function of the interaction of the forces of Yin and Yang, and man’s moral activity as both rooted in and aimed toward the participation in this process of life. Here the naturalness and spontaneity of Ruism morality—including both “benevolence” and the ritual system—is once again affirmed, but no longer on the basis of human inclinations themselves, but rather in terms of the root and implication of these tendencies within the natural world as a whole; man is a microcosm of the universal process of life.The Han version takes this idea and runs with it in a rather literal-minded manner. Now the particular social and institutional forms presiding in the Han empire are read in toto as direct reflections of the cosmic order, rationalized as built into nature. Heaven recovers some of the anthropomorphic qualities it had lost in pre-Qin Ruist thought here, or at least is said to respond very directly to human improprieties with catastrophic consequences (natural disasters and anomalies), although these are now pictured as built into a universal system of natural forces that includes moral responsiveness.

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An Overview of Guo Xiang’s Philosophical Project

t is after the fall of the Han dynasty, and with it the discrediting of this form of Ruist thought, that the movement known to us as “xuanxue” ( ) or “abstruse learning,” emerges, centering on a rediscovery of the classical Taoist texts (the Laozi and the Zhuangzi) and also of the pre-Han interpretations of the Book of Changes.The Abstruse Learning thinker Wang Bi wrote what became the definitive and “orthodox” commentaries to the Laozi and the Book of Changes, reinterpreting them in terms of his own philosophy, which of course partly derived from them. Guo Xiang is credited with the commentary on the third of the “three abstruse texts” the Zhuangzi. We know very little about Guo’s life.The History of the Jin Dynasty includes a biography of him, which tells us that he was a talented youth with a penchant for the Taoist texts, that he was a skilled and loquacious talker in polite gatherings, and that he served for a time in government. It also records that his commentary to the Zhuangzi is for the most part plagiarized from an earlier work by Xiang Xiu, with the addition of his own commentary to the “Autumn Floods” and “Perfect Happiness” chapters that Xiang Xiu had not annotated, and a revision of the commentary to the “Horses Hooves” chapter, suggesting that he made only minor editorial changes to the rest of Xiang Xiu’s work, and that, because “Guo Xiang was an unconscientious and irresponsible person” (weiren xing bo), he took credit for this revision as his own work.8 Recent scholarship, however, suggests that although Guo’s work is based largely on Xiang’s, his revisions are of crucial philosophical significance. Whoever is to be credited with the commentary that currently goes under Guo’s name, one of its most readily apparent features, as already alluded to, is its emphatic denial of any transcendental essence or metaphysical absolute. Indeed, it goes to great lengths to refute the idea that there is any ground or

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creator of things outside themselves, be it Laozi and Zhuangzi’s Tao,Wang Bi’s Wu ( ) or Non-Being, or a creator in some other form. As Wing-tsit Chan has said, “The major concept [in Guo Xiang] is no longer Tao, as in Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi], but Nature (Tzu-jan) [ziran, self-so]. Things exist and transform themselves spontaneously and there is no other reality or agent to cause them. Heaven is not something behind this process of Nature but is merely its general name. . . . Everything is therefore self-sufficient and there is no need of an overall original reality to combine or govern them, as in the case of Wang Pi [Wang Bi]. . . . While Wang Pi emphasizes the one, Kuo [Guo] emphasizes the many.To Wang Pi, principle transcends things, but to Kuo, it is immanent in them.”9 To borrow Wang Bi’s terminology,10 this means that Guo did not recognize any “substance” apart from “function,” nor any overriding single essence or principle that is expressed through unessential manifestations or phenomena. At the same time, we do find certain pairs of categories in Guo Xiang’s writing that suggest the same kind of relation as that which was usually taken to pertain to substance and function. In particular, as Tang Yijie has pointed out, although Guo’s philosophy “sought to abolish the original substance (benti ) that transcended things themselves,” and “only admitted the concrete existence of each existent thing,” he often employed the concepts of “traces” ( ji, lit. footprints) and “that which leaves the traces” (suoyi ji ) in a sense that superficially suggests a relationship like that between function and substance, for the traces seem to be the expressions of that which leave the traces, while that which leaves the traces is the fundamental essence behind the unessential traces.11 As we shall see below, Guo needs this conception of traces to successfully accomplish one of his central philosophical tasks: to harmonize “Ruism” and “Taoism,” social norms and spontaneity, indeed to unify them even more thoroughgoingly than any of his predecessors had.We can see Guo’s ambition to effect such a unification in fact as a necessary consequence of his antimetaphysical monism and his abolition of the transcendent Tao or NonBeing. For as we shall see, in earlier xuanxue, spontaneity was commonly associated with the transcendental essence or substance, with Non-Being or Tao, while social norms and structures were considered unessential expressions or functions of this substance. Having done away with any self-grounded primary “substance” standing above a subordinate and dependent “function,” unifying the two so that function became the substance of itself, it is natural that he would also have to do away with any self-subsistent “nature” apart from social norms, or social norms conceived as a merely inessential expression of nature, which the latter could do without. Indeed, it is perhaps more likely that the causal sequence between these two sets of ideas should be reversed, i.e., that Guo’s abolition of independent substance was to some extent motivated by his desire to unify Ruism and Taoism more completely. In this work, I will examine Guo’s attempt to accomplish such a unification. We will begin with a brief overview of the history of this problem in earlier xuanxue, followed by an examination of Guo’s utilization of the concept

    ’  

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of traces, and how this concept is to be understood in light of Guo’s rejection of any substance/function dichotomy. To fully comprehend this, and how this concept serves to accomplish Guo’s philosophical aims (as well as to solve his hermeneutical difficulties in dealing with the complex inconsistencies of the Zhuangzi text), we will have to give an epistemological rather than ontological interpretation to the concept of traces and that which leaves them.The difference between the two realms will not be a difference of content, but simply a question of the form under which any given content is viewed. Let us briefly preview the structure of Guo’s thought here, starting with this point. Guo will replace the ontological construction (substance/function, root/branch, etc.) formerly used to relate spontaneity to morality with this new image of traces and what leaves them, thereby radically redefining that relationship. From there we will follow a rather long path of connected ideas that ultimately form the network that make Guo’s notion of traces intelligible. On the course of this path we will see that Guo speaks of all cognition of one thing by another as a function of viewing things according to these traces; he will go on to attribute all that he considers negatively valued to this mode of influence.This will bring us to a discussion of Guo’s general polemic against cognition in general, and how this extends into a polemic against the notion of self as a knowable determinate entity that persists through time, which notion Guo will consider to be merely a special type of trace-cognition. This will allow Guo to give a new set of implications to the term ziran, as that which leaves the traces (and that thereby derives its meaning, its disconfirmability, from its contrast to the notion of traces). Ziran is for Guo, we will find, a word predicated of all things, signifying their spontaneous becoming, which is not motivated by teleological intention to attain an extrinsic goal, is not knowable from outside, is without reference to anything outside itself, not a result of knowing or conscious will, and not comprehensible in terms of cognitive concepts of causality, and hence to be conceived of only as selfsufficient, uncaused, self-so. His notion of ziran will also include a value dimension, signifying the “rightness” (ran ) of each thing to itself, indicated by precisely its lack of reflexive awareness of itself, which awareness Guo will take to be a sign of something that is not “fit” and “comfortable” (shi ), and hence leads to conscious attention to itself as an other, as a trace. This spontaneous fitness, and its accompanying unconsciousness, will be Guo’s new definition of selfhood.This will lead us to Guo’s notion of “dark joining” or “vanishing into” things (ming, lit. darkness, but used as a transitive verb meaning not the darkening of the verb’s object, but one’s own darkening or being absorbed into that object), the psychological state contrasted to concern with traces, just as ziran was descriptively contrasted to traces themselves. This will signify the joining or interaction of things that is not mediated by traces and hence implies a “darkening” of trace-consciousness, and a vanishing of the encounterer into the encountered. Guo will speak of this as “forming one body” with change, or with whatever one encounters. The criterion for this oneness or identity will

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again be the forgetting that occurs, in accordance with Guo’s notion of selfhood as self-forgetfulness.This oneness of things however will not exclude their differences, nor will it involve the assertion of any sort of universal self or substance underlying diverse appearances. On the contrary, it will imply the selfrightness of things in being precisely what they are and none other, and hence the rightness of their being different from one another. In this fit rightness they will interact perfectly, like the various organs of the body, and this perfection and self-rightness of interaction will again be expressed by their total forgetting of each other’s existence. This self-rightness will hence be just the opposite of cognitive valuation, and Guo’s notion of “following” others, and hence forgetting them and remaining different, will be contrasted to the idea of imitation of others, which will be seen as an outgrowth of trace-cognition and severely condemned. From here we will come to understand Guo’s ideas of the relation between self and other and between moment and moment (change), his peculiar idea of limitlessness (wuqiong), as the mutual embracing of opposites, and his value relativism.This will put us in a position to understand Guo’s unification of independence (wudai ) and dependence (youdai ), predicated on his idea of “riding on the self-rightness of things,” the “independent” self defined in this case as this self-rightness itself rather than as some persisting determinate content, and on the idea of dependence as itself a self-so expression of one’s own determinacy of the moment, a function of one’s being what one is and being self-right.This will bring us to the pinnacle of Guo’s thought, the notion of “lone-transformation” or “transformation in solitude” (duhua ).This idea will involve the denial of explicability, the breakdown of the notion of causality, and another application of the notion of self-rightness. This sort of independence will be asserted at the same time to imply the greatest possible interaction. This assertion will be supported in several ways, most crucially by the psychological attitude of following or fitness, which will involve vanishing into things and the forgetting of traces, and assert that these are in fact the most total merging of one thing with another. Mechanical causality will also be criticized, on the grounds that no single cause can account for any single effect, and on the grounds that it explains nothing once teleological causality and intentionality have been extirpated. Moreover, Guo will hold that, since all other things are held to be the conditions of the existence of any given thing, this thing is not dependent on any particular one of them, but rather on any of them, and hence on no thing in particular. Each effect will be conceived of as synthesizing all the causes that condition it, which will be seen as partially analogous to the sage’s forgetting of the otherness of the things he encounters and “follows along with.” Guo will go on to speak of the perfect interaction of things as entailing their mutual forgetting, using the image of parts of a body forgetting each other in the self-rightness of their mutual functions, which will for him imply also the eradication of cognitive valuation.

    ’  

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This will bring us to the point where we can understand Guo’s unification of activity and nonactivity—that is, his assertion that activity is also nonactivity, that following others is also self-so, and that social norms are also spontaneous. This will be possible because of his redefinition of the nonaction of the self-so as getting its meaning from its contrast with traces, rather than with action. Guo will thus be able to define “true activity,” that is, any action that fits one’s own determinacy such as to entail the forgetting of traces, as nonactivity. This will allow him to assert the value of civilization as itself a kind of “true activity,” and hence nonactivity, and to interpret the criticisms of the sages in the Zhuangzi text as referring only to those who later apprehend the sages’ inevitable traces and imitate them. The sages themselves, and even their traces, will remain blameless, so long as these traces are not taken as normative by those who come after them. In the course of this exposition we also hope to find to what extent Guo provides a resolution to the many apparent contradictions in his thought, including not only that between the spontaneous self-so and the adherence to social norms, but also those between autonomy (“lone-transformation,” “independence”) and interdependence (“mutual following,”“merging into whatever one encounters,” “oblique oneness,” etc.), between individuality and unity, and between his “mysticism,”—i.e., his talk of psychological states claimed to have “cosmic” significance and personal attainment of a kind of infinity within finitude—and his antimetaphysical stance.We will also try to comprehend the contradictions Guo confronts in simultaneously calling for the abolition of conscious valuation and at the same time “calling for” anything at all, i.e., offering prescriptive values of his own at all, albeit prescriptions about abolishing value consciousness.We will try to show how these contradictions are in fact necessary outgrowths of Guo’s position, as is the case for many writers on topics such as these, rather than mere sloppy oversights, given his notion of self-so and selfrightness, and the implications he draws from these ideas that involve the unification of various pairs of terms usually considered irreconcilably opposed.

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The Problem of Spontaneity and Morality in Earlier Xuanxue

he relation between spontaneity (ziran, the self-so,“nature”) and morality (mingjiao, “the teaching of names”12) was a central concern of the “abstruse learning” (xuanxue) or metaphysics (i.e., nonempirical studies) that arose during the Wei-Jin period (third through fifth centuries ..). Spontaneity was commonly associated with the teachings of the Laozi and Zhuangzi, while morality, the “teaching of names” (i.e., specifically defined hierarchical social roles and the obligations that go with them) concerned with the ordering of society, was associated with Ruism, which had been the dominant official ideology throughout most of the Han. From its inception the abstruse learning movement placed the unification of the two high on its agenda.Wang Bi (226–249) and He Yan (190–249), considered the intellectual founders of the movement, both wrote commentaries to both the Laozi and Ruist works like the Zhouyi (Book of Changes) and the Analects of Confucius.Wang Bi is moreover credited with the assertion, later to become a standard position among the abstruse learning metaphysicians, that Confucius was a greater sage, with a greater understanding of Wang’s metaphysical Non-being, than Laozi, because Confucius had said nothing about it while Laozi was always talking about it. “The sage [Confucius] embodies Non-being, but Non-being cannot be explicated, and therefore he said nothing [about it]. Laozi was one [who was fettered in] this realm of Being, and thus always talked about that in which he was insufficient,” said Wang.13 This rather unusual line of reasoning was to be greatly influential in subsequent approaches to this problem, including the one that will be the focus of this work. Nonetheless, Wang Bi’s conception of the relation between the two realms, i.e., that of Non-Being and spontaneity (benwu, ziran), and that of Being and its distinctions, and the social norms therein as advocated by the Ruists (mo’you, mingjiao), remained somewhat

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ambiguous. On the one hand, besides introducing the immensely influential dyad of substance and function (ti yong),Wang frequently utilizied the image of root and branch to explicate the relation between Non-Being and Being, thereby stressing the unity of the two. “All things in the world are born of Being. But the beginning of Being takes Non-Being as its root.To bring Being to completion, we must return to Non-being.”14 “Hold to the Mother [NonBeing] to preserve the Sons [Being], value the root to uphold the branch; thus form and name are equally present and imbalance will not occur.”15 Here Being is to be brought to completion and preserved (quan , cun ), not discarded or transcended; it is a necessary reflection of Non-Being, and hence a legitimate part of the totality. On the other hand, Wang sometimes seems to advocate the complete dismissal of Being as the only way to truly realize Non-being, as for example when he says, “The meaning of the Laozi can be almost completely covered in one phrase: It is simply to value the root and extinguish (xi ) the branches.”16 These metaphysical pronouncements had direct implications for the relation between Taoist spontaneity and Ruist morality, since these were equated with “root” and “branch” respectively. The relation between essence and its expression, or between substance and accident, has been a vexing problem for metaphysicians the world over, but the concrete implications of these two poles seem to differ widely among cultures. Whereas a Western theological or even pantheistic thinker would probably equate essence or substance with God or a metaphysical absolute of some kind, and expression or accident with Nature and the imperfection therein, in Chinese metaphysics of this period, the position corresponding to that of essence was given to Spontaneity, exemplified by Nature, and the potentially inessential expression was equated with social morality and purposive human activity of any kind. The problem was not to find a way to relate the Natural sensuous universe of finitude to the infinite metaphysical Absolute Being, and determine the former’s value or legitimacy accordingly, but rather to find what place or value morality had with respect to the spontaneity of Nature, which was taken as the absolute metavalue. Wang’s formulation of this problem remained undecisive, and this allowed his successors to try to solve this problem each in his own way. Xi Kang (223–262) and Ruan Ji (210–263) of the famed “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove” were not hard-core metaphysicians of the stature of Wang Bi, and died only a few years after he did, but their writings and the body of legends about their lives can perhaps be taken as a concrete application to the question of morality of one strain of Wang’s thought. Picking up on the latter attitude toward root and branch, wherein the branch, i.e., Being, Function, Morality, is to be ignored entirely, they were often quite uncompromising in their critique of Ruist exemplars and the virtues they advocated. Instead of prescribing ways to best complete and preserve the realm of Being, or branch, or morality, they directly called for “transcending the teaching of names and following spontaneity.” The metaphysical temper behind this attitude helps us

        

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to understand why Xi Kang for example could combine this antimoralistic stance with an almost ascetic conception of the illegitimacy of human emotions, as something wholly extinguished in the sage (a view not shared by Wang Bi). Both morality and human emotions corresponded to the branches, to function, to Being, which were to be extinguished. Xiang Xiu (c. 227–280), another of the Seven Worthies, who is often considered the real primary author of the commentary that currently goes under the name of Guo Xiang,17 took a more moderate position, attempting to integrate and harmonize spontaneity and morality. Xiang picked up on the other strain in Wang Bi’s thought, and considered human emotions and institutions a necessary and legitimate part of spontaneity, to be regulated with ritual propriety, li .18 Xie Lingyun later characterized Xiang Xiu’s position as a unification of Ruism and Taoism.19 In the Ruist camp, there appeared figures like Yue Guang, who responded to the drunken neglect of propriety and morality by scholars of the day by saying, “Within the teaching of names itself there are naturally pleasurable places; what need is there to act thus?”20 A more philosophically well-developed response came from Pei Wei (263–300), who wrote his Chongyou lun (“Discourse on the Exaltation of Being”) as a full frontal attack on Wang Bi’s conception of Non-Being. While admitting that this doctrine may have had some positive influences, such as encouraging certain passive virtues and discouraging ambition and acquisitiveness, Pei decried the neglect of social norms and propriety that this theory also brought with it. More significantly for our present purposes, he sought to refute the validity of Wang’s notion of Non-Being on philosophical grounds. Pei interpreted Being as the only possible reality, and Non-Being therefore as an absolute nothing, something that does not exist in any sense, a position in some ways reminiscent of that first introduced into Western philosophy by Parmenides. Apparently picking up on some of Xiang Xiu’s ideas concerning selftransformation and self-generation (zihua zisheng ), Pei took the next logical step and did away with the concept of Non-Being altogether, which he considered nonsensical, superfluous, and harmful. “Perfect Non-Being has nothing by which it could generate anything.Therefore whatever is generated is self-generated, and what is self-generated must have its ground (or substance, ti) in Being.”21 Here we see Non-Being dismissed as utterly ineffectual, and replaced in its generative function by Being, or more specifically, the self-generation of all Being, which need depend on nothing outside itself for its generation. Strange to say, this is perhaps the first appearance in Chinese metaphysics of this conception of Being as an independent reality that must forever remain Being, which seems to have been intuitively attractive to the Greeks of Parmenides’ time.The first reference to the abstracted concepts of Being and Non-Being in the Chinese tradition occurs in the works of the pre-Qin Taoists, where the two are always depicted as producing and changing into one another. There is never a conception of Being that is simply Being and remains so forever, nor

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of Non-Being that does not change into Being or at least perpetually produce it. Such ideas do not even occur as positions to be refuted, to which the Taoists were responding. Hence it would seem that the original sense of Being and Non-Being in philosophical usage in China, the meaning of these terms that was in some sense most immediately intuitive, was of a dialectically related pair, one of which emerged from the other, not as two static and mutually exclusive substances. Not until Pei Wei does anyone suggest that they could mean anything else. It is after this strange breakthrough that Guo Xiang steps onto the scene. Adopting Pei Wei’s notion of Being and likewise doing away with all remnants of any transcendent Non-Being, Guo nonetheless does not advocate a fullfledged return to Ruist purposivity as the ultimate value as Pei had, but rather remains radically committed to the value ultimacy of spontaneity. Pei for example denies the value of “nonactivity” and “nonknowing” as part of his denial of “Non-Being,” whereas these values are stressed most emphatically by Guo Xiang.22 Guo adopts Xiang Xiu’s notions of self-generation, adapting them however by doing away with Xiang’s residual transcendent ungenerated generator, which remains in some sense prior to concrete existence.23 Moreover, he takes Xiang’s harmonization of Ruism and Taoism a step further; Guo attempts to identify spontaneity with purposivity completely, not merely harmonize them or allow a place for each. As Tang Yijie has aptly put it, “If we may say that Xiang Xiu harmonized the teaching of names and spontaneity, still he merely viewed the two as not being antagonistic; the teaching of names could complement ‘the principle of spontaneity,’ could harmonize with ‘the spontaneous nature.’ It was not necessary to ‘transcend the teaching of names and follow spontaneity,’ but nonetheless here spontaneity is still spontaneity and the teaching of names is still the teaching of names. Ruism and Taoism are still two separate practices. Guo Xiang, on the other hand, viewed the teaching of names as itself being spontaneous.To be ‘in the mountain forests [i.e. to be a hermit]’ is precisely to be ‘in the official court,’ he who is truly ‘outwardly a king’ must necessarily be ‘inwardly a sage.’ Ruism and Taoism are here fundamentally one and yet two, two and yet one.”24 In Tang’s view, Guo Xiang represents a kind of culmination of the development of ideas in this period concerning the relation of purposivity to spontaneity, of Ruism to Taoism; in him a kind of total identification has been reached. There is a certain ironic sense in which we might consider Guo Xiang a sort of inverse version of Han State Ruism, like a mirror image that is at the same time the precise opposite and the precise reflection of its other. For in the Han universe, society and nature were unified in that both were purposive, conscious, and teleological; this gave the social norms a legitimate place within nature. This conception was chipped away at by skeptics like Wang Chong and Wang Fu, who asserted that nature was purposeless, unconscious, and nonteleological, while still holding that man and his society were, and should be, purposive. We might say that the early Wei-Jin metaphysicians picked up on this assumption to some extent, but with a new

        



value assignation.The Han orthodoxy had collapsed, and the legitimacy of the prevailing social and political norms had been undermined.The metaphysicians were able to widen the disunity between nature and society by accepting that the former was purposeless, and assigning value to this purposelessness; what made human beings and societies inferior to the Tao was precisely that they were purposive, teleological, and so on. The difference between the two was preserved. But Guo Xiang eliminated this difference; for him, nature was indeed purposeless, unconscious, and nonteleological, but the same was ultimately true of every human society and every human being, indeed of every human action. As in the old Han days, heaven and man shared the same basic traits; it was simply that they shared a completely different set of traits, in fact precisely the opposite traits. Hence Guo Xiang seems to have resolved the dilemma of social legitimization and the union of heaven and man, by taking the original skeptical claims that had toppled the old orthodox legitimization to their extremest possible conclusion. To do this he incorporated in his system elements from very disparate trends in the thought of his day, from both the Ruist and Taoist camps, coming up with a complex synthesis that he attempted to make harmonious and stable.Whether or not it can genuinely be intelligibly read as such will be a topic for further discussion. At the moment however, another related problem comes to mind. Guo Xiang’s philosophy is known to us almost exclusively through his commentary on the Zhuangzi, a text which, as we have noted, most scholars believe to be the product of many hands, and to include within it many quite disparate trends of thought. Among these there are certainly some that could be easily read to support a unity of Ruism and Taoism, of moral purposivity and spontaneity, of the kind suggested above, if one were inclined to read in this way. But there is also a great deal of material that would seem to present tremendous problems to such an interpretation. In particular, the Zhuangzi contains many ardent polemics against Ruist moral activity and ideals, as well as blunt and scathing insults of all the most exalted Ruist exemplars, from the sage kings down to Confucius. As a commentator, Guo Xiang was faced with two daunting challenges: one is that faced by any commentator on the Zhuangzi, that is, to bring a consistent interpretation to the many disparate trends found in the text. For like most commentators, Guo regarded this work as the product of one man, and thus had to conceive of it as somehow forming one coherent whole, or at least the expression of one totality of thought as it existed in the mind of a single thinker.25 Part of the value of the commentator is that he must bring all the parts of the text to reflect upon one another, interpret them each in terms of the whole; whereas the Zhuangzi text itself does not have to do anything to justify its inconsistencies, the commentator who accepts it as the work of a single man must, at least implicitly. Thus Guo Xiang must interpret the antiRuist polemics with the rest of the text in mind, and may call into play concepts from any part of the text as a means of understanding any other part, even if the passage in question makes no reference to such ideas and even if, in the

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view of modern interpreters, it was probably written by another author with another cast of mind altogether. This was the first, more general problem Guo faced.The second, more specific problem was how to understand the anti-Ruist polemics in the text as somehow consistent with or even expressive of Guo’s own conception of the identity of Ruist moral and social purposivity and Taoist spontaneity. This tension is mirrored by the metaphysical inconsistency of the Zhuangzi, considered as a whole, with respect to the objective reality of the Tao mentioned above: is there some real metaphysical absolute called the Tao, which can be known and thus can serve as a standard of behavior, or is this just a way of describing the sage’s state of mind? Guo is faced with a similar challenge in this domain. He opts for the latter, anti-substantialist interpretation, which is easily defended in the Zhuang Zhou writings, but presents other difficulties in the case of the more substantialist claims found in the rest of the text. In interpreting the anti-substantialist view into the substantialist claims, he develops and expands its meaning and implications quite extensively. On the most general level, Guo here faces what we may call his version of “the problem of evil.” Both of these tasks involved Guo in finding an explanation for the existence of anything worthy of criticism; for there is a strong tendency in Guo Xiang to assert that all is exactly as it should be, all reality is reasonable, and everything is exactly right in being exactly what it is:“The principle of things is inherently right, and cannot be avoided. Man, in being born, is never mistakenly born, and whatever there is in his life is not there senselessly ( fei wang you ). . . . Thus whatever is not encountered cannot be encountered, and whatever is encountered cannot not be encontered; whatever is not done cannot be done and whatever is done cannot be not done; thus we give all things over to their self-rightness (zidang ).”26 The Zhuangzi text, on the other hand, often criticizes and complains about the way things are; many passages imply that something has gone awry in the world, that things are not precisely as they should be, that human beings have distorted their original nature, perverted themselves, and that nowadays everything has gone all to hell. Having so forcefully abolished any conception of substance apart from function, Guo Xiang had a problem here, in that he could not assert that the function had somehow deviated from the originally pure or good substance, hence causing these difficulties. Given his assertion that everything without exception, included even moral norms, are self-so, and that what is self-so, according to Guo’s new interpretation of the meaning of this term, is necessarily “right” (ran) by definition, and that this rightness resides not in being expressions of some substance which is itself right but has gone awry somehow, but rather in actually comfortably and self-forgetfully being just whatever it happens to be being and nothing else, how does he account for the implication in the Zhuangzi that something has gone wrong? How can anything go wrong? The first step Guo takes to resolve this interpretive difficulty is to invoke rather explicitly the principle of parable.The stories in the Zhuangzi that insult

        



27 Confucius and the sage-kings are merely parables ( jiyen ), he says, not to be taken literally.With this hermeneutical device in hand, he is in a position to interpret away anything that is discordant with his own view. In all fairness, however, it must be said that one can scarcely think of any text that lends itself to such freedom of interpretation as readily as the Zhuangzi; for indeed, it not only presents stories with fantastic and deliberately self-contradictory elements, but also uses the same characters with opposite valences in different places, sometimes as models and sometimes as objects of ridicule.28 As Guo points out, the text does not even spare Zhuangzi himself; while he is usually presented as a speaker of wisdom, getting the last word in debates with Huizi and others, he is also sometimes depicted as a fool, as in the story of his attempt to catch the magpie in chapter 20. Guo comments on this story: “Zhuangzi equalized all in the world, and thus each time he uses parables ( jiyen) to express his meaning [he does not hesitate to] insult Confucius, debase Lao Tan, above attack the Three August Ones, below sharply find fault with even himself.”29 Elsewhere he remarks, “Zhuangzi’s words cannot be interrogated [i.e., interpreted] in only one way; sometimes he uses the Yellow Thearch’s traces to wear the hair off Yao and Shun’s calves;30 how could it be [that in this passage where he compares Yu unfavorably to Yao] that he esteems Yao and looks down on Yu? Thus we must do away with [forget] the story in which [his meaning] is lodged [ ji; i.e. the parable itself ], and remember its meaning: the idea of cutting off sageliness and discarding wisdom.”31 Guo has recourse to this notion of parable, jiyen, whenever he comes to a difficult passage, or one that seems too outrageous to be taken literally. Almost all the reproaches of Confucius and the sage-kings fall into this category. Guo takes them as an ironic literary device of Zhuangzi’s, wherein his real meaning is usually just the opposite of what he seems to be saying. Hence when the Zhuangzi has Confucius compare himself unfavorably to those who roam “outside the realm” (or outside rules), calling himself one who is able only to roam within this realm of social norms—inside and outside this realm of course corresponding to the domains of what we above called morality and spontaneity respectively—Guo remarks:

At the point where principle reaches its ultimate, outside and inside [the realm of social rules] vanish32 into one another; there has never been one who roams outside [i.e., in spontaneity] who does not at the same time vanish into the inside [i.e., morality]. Thus the sage constantly roams outside the realm to vanish into what is inside it, following along with existence with no deliberate mind, and hence although his body is waving about all day long, his spirit and breath remain unchanged, looking above and below along with ten thousand different circumstances, and yet calmly constant and selflike. But the world is constantly fettered by seeing [and understanding only] the bodily form but not the spirit. Thus they see him moving along with the various things, but are unable to realize that he has discarded things and left mankind; they see him embodying change and responding to duties, but are unable to realize

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that at the same time he is sitting and forgetting, and self-realizing. Nor do they merely say this of the sage himself; they necessarily go on to say that perfect principle cannot have this [coexistence of spontaneity and morality]. For this reason, Zhuangzi wanted to show the main principles of the true tradition, so that the world might be awakened; if he had merely praised Confucius’s being thus [i.e., being perfectly spontaneous and at peace although involved in worldly duties, thus harmonizing inside and outside the realm of rules], some might have rejected it on the basis of the visible situation [i.e., the fact that Confucius was apparently labored by worldly affairs]; thus he transcended the sage’s traces within [the realm] and lodged [his meaning] in these philosophers residing outside the realm. We should forget that in which the meaning is lodged and seek the overall meaning of the story, and then the way of wandering outside the realm while vanishing into what is within it will become clear of itself; it is for this reason that Zhuangzi’s book can penetrate the common realm and cover the whole world.33

Here we see Guo’s attitude in a nutshell: Zhuangzi actually intended to praise Confucius as the perfect sage who could harmonize spontaneity and morality, who could remain spiritually lofty and free while at the same time participating in worldly affairs. But something called “the traces that the sage leaves within the realm” cause people to misunderstand and think him unfree, unspontaneous, and thus to think that the two principles are incompatible or mutually exclusive. To remedy this situation, Zhuangzi had recourse to parables, wherein he lodged his meaning in stories that contradicted his actual meaning, letting the strange antisocial hermits from beyond the realm do his talking for him although actually he disapproved of them, lest his readers be confused by the unspontaneous “traces” of Confucius. The idea seems to be that if Confucius himself were allowed to speak of these mysteries from beyond the realm of rules, some might discard these teachings, on the assumption that Confucius appeared to the world as someone who was not accomplished in the arts of beyond the realm, and thus was not to be trusted on this topic.This is a rather strange argument, in that Confucius was of course respected as an authority at almost all times and almost universally; we would expect a writer to put his ideas into the sage’s mouth in order to attract attention to his words and lend them credence, not that the name of Confucius would obstruct a receptive reading. This is of course one of the places where Guo most obviously is willing to totally twist the apparent meaning of the Zhuangzi and defend his interpretation with outrageous sophisms for the sake of his polemic. As a general hermenuetic device, this use of the notion of parable is Guo’s solution to the conflict between what the text says and what he wants it to say.

Guo’s Solution: The Image of Traces

t still remained for Guo to consistently develop his own interpretation of the text, and find a way within his own thinking to work out this posited harmony between spontaneity and morality. In the above quotation, Guo mentions the sage’s “traces within the realm” (neiji ), which Zhuangzi had to put aside for the moment, lest they confuse people. This introduces the concept and image that allow Guo to offer his original solution to the problems he had inherited, the relation between spontaneity and morality, how one could arise from the other, and if they are in fact one, whence the illusion that they are disparate arises: Guo’s solution hinges on the image of “traces” (ji, lit. footprints). Not surprisingly, the inspiration for this idea seems to come from the Zhuangzi itself. In the fourteenth chapter, Lao Dan (Laozı¯) says to Confucius, “The Six Classics are the stale traces (chenji ) of the former kings. How could they be that which left the traces (suoyi ji)? What you are expounding is also just traces.Traces (lit. footprints) are that which issue from walking— but how could the footprints be the walking?”34 Guo comments:“That which leaves the traces is the true nature/determinacy (zhenxing ); the traces of letting the true nature of things [take their course] are the Six Classics. . . . The self-so is the walking, the Six Classics are the traces.”35 The Zhuangzi itself never gives a systematic development to this notion of traces, nor does it become a standard or often used term in the text. The Huainanzi in one place does use this image in a similar way: “The parrot can speak and yet cannot be made a master [of its own words]. And why? Because it has attained the speaking but not that by means of which the speaking occurs (suoyi yen). Thus to follow traces is not the same as being able to produce those traces.”36 This connection between traces and imitation, as suggested by the image of the parrot, was to be central to Guo Xiang’s use of this term as well.We might also be reminded in this connection of Analects 11:19: “Zizhang asked about the way of the good man” (shanren). The Master said, “He doesn’t tread on the footprints

I

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

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( ji) [of others], but he also does not enter into the inner chamber [i.e., he is not quite a sage].” In all these usages the term has something of the sense of the teachings and practices that others have left behind. But Guo Xiang developed the implications and uses of this term far more extensively and explicitly than any of these former occurrences have suggested, and indeed made it one of the centerpieces of his conception of cognition, of the way the self-so manifests itself, and how it can be perverted while still being in some sense the same self-so and having no other source, at the same time avoiding a fixed relation of substance and function. Like the Zhuangzi passage that apparently inspired him to use this image, Guo applies this term to all the cultural and social institutions and objectifications that had been the target of scorn or dismissal of the more radical Taoists and metaphysicians of the day, what had been the “branches” or “function” for Wang Bi, and to the “teaching of names” (social morality) in general. The distinction between the traces and what leaves them allows him to be quite scathing about these institutions without having to admit anything negative about their creators. Guo says, “The songs [in the Book of Poetry] and the rites are the stale traces of the former kings. If one is not the right person for them, the way [expounded in them] will not be practiced on its own, without the right practitioner.37 Thus among the Ruists there are those who use them to commit atrocities. Hence [we know] that traces are not worth depending on.”38 The image of traces allows Guo to make this rebuke without also calling for the destruction of these objectified institutions, nor the devaluing of their creators. “Laws,” he says, for example, “are the traces of marvelous events [miao shi ]; why should we refrain from proclaiming these marvelous events, simply because their traces are coarse?”39 This image is one of Guo’s main weapons for dealing with the problem of the relation between spontaneity and morality, which in turn is inseparable from his solution to the problem of the relation between self and other in general, between the self-so subjectivity of each individual entity, which Guo asserts to be absolutely selfsufficient, independent, and inviolable, and the undeniable mutual interaction and interdependence of things, socially, cognitively, and otherwise. By gaining a grasp of what is implied by this image of trace, we may comprehend the conceptual structures that enable Guo to make such statements. As in much Chinese discourse, the structural image itself is as crucial for an understanding of what is intended here as any discursive explication or logical exegesis, if not more so. As Donald Munro, from whom I have adopted the term “structural image,” has written of images used in the philosophical discourse of the Sung dynasty, “Pictorial images perform a number of functions for the theoretician. One of these is simply to clarify for his audience the structural relations among facts to which his theories apply; without the image, the reader might fail to note that the facts in question are related at all. In the process of providing this clarification, the image can highlight or call attention to certain features of the relationships that are deemed especially important.”40

’ :    



This is true also of Guo Xiang’s use of the image of footprints or traces; it is a way of telling us something about the structure of the relationship between these traces and that which leaves them. Let us now try to understand what is implied by this image. Guo tells us: “Yao” and “Shun,” the names of the emperors, are merely their traces; the self [wo] lodges in [ji] these traces, but the traces are not the self. Thus the world is terrified by its own doing, [not that of the sages]; the more terrified the world is, the coarser [the sage’s] traces will be. The coarseness or excellence [of the traces, lit. footprints] merely depends on the roughness or smoothness of the road; how could it be that the traveler has changed his feet? Thus the sages are one, and yet there is the difference between Yao, Shun, Tang, and Wu.41

A detailed understanding of the specific meaning of this passage will become possible after passing through all the discussions below; for the moment, let us simply observe the use to which Guo here puts the image of traces, footprints. First, not surprisingly, the image gives us to understand not only that the traces are something other than what leaves them, but also that there is never any intention to leave them, or any deliberate modeling of the prints by the feet; they are an inadvertant by-product of walking. This absence of teleological intentionality is of great importance to Guo Xiang; for him it is to be applicable not only to nature but to man as well—whatever is done deliberately is thereby devalued. Another implication of the image is that the two terms are both like and unlike; the footprints mirror the feet in one sense, and yet they are not precisely the same as the feet; they differ according to the conditions of the road, and remain there when the feet are gone. We may also note that inherent in the image is a kind of double-sided relationship between change and stability: on the one hand, the feet are static, while the prints differ on different part of the road; at the same time, however, the prints remain where they are, while the feet continue on and disappear from the road altogether.Which is fixed and which is changing? Each is changing and each is fixed, in precisely opposite senses from one another. That which leaves the traces is the self-so, the selfgeneration (zisheng) of all things, their lone-transformation (duhua); this is almost “change” itself, and as we shall see below, in Guo’s conception of the self-so universe nothing lingers for an instant; all changes moment by moment, generating the new and not holding on to the old. What lingers and endures are only the traces of each moment of sponteneity, the cognized, objectified, or institutionalized forms that are remembered or perpetuated, forms that originally suited the one moment in which they were generated. Another important aspect of the image of footprints left on a road is that they are something that can be followed by later travelers, i.e., they invite imitation.They are something fixed that others can take as a guide to later actions,

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which can take on a prescriptive significance in the eyes of later walkers, who can take them as a model for their own course and their own walking. Hence we see implied in the metaphorical image of footprints several ideas that Guo will develop into pillars of his worldview, and we can see why just this image served him so well, or what a powerful impact it had in conveying or perhaps shaping his opinions. What is essential to the image of footprints for Guo is that they are something fixed that were inadvertantly left behind by something qualitatively other than themselves, and that after the fact invite imitation. Precisely these qualities, when applied carefully to their chosen referents, allowed Guo to offer a solution to the philosophical problems that faced him. Let us look at how Guo first introduces his idea of traces.We get our first hint of it in Guo’s remark, in his commentary to the statement in Zhuangzi’s first chapter, “From his dust and leaving alone you could mold a Yao or a Shun!”42 Guo says,“ ‘Yao’ and ‘Shun’ are merely the names given to their worldy affairs. That which made the name however is not the name. Therefore how could Yao and Shun have been merely ‘Yao’ and ‘Shun’? They must have had the reality [shi, opposed to name, ming ] of a divine man. But what is here [i.e., in this passage in the Zhuangzi] referred to as Yao and Shun is merely their dust and leavings.”43 Here the word ji has not yet appeared; we are merely told about names and that which makes the names (wei ming); but the meaning of this is not yet clear. This is merely the appetizer for the full discourse on this topic that is to come two comments later.The Zhuangzi says, “A man of Sung who sold ceremonial hats made a trip to Yueh, but the Yueh people cut their hair short and tattoo their bodies and had no use for such things.Yao brought order to the people of the world and directed the government of all within the seas. But he went to see the Four Masters of the faraway Ku-she Mountain, [and when he got home] north of the Fen river, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there [lit. lost all under heaven there].”44 Guo Xiang comments: Yao’s having no use for the kingdom is like the people of Yueh having no use for ceremonial hats. But the kingdom necessarily finds its master [lit. ancestor, source, zong] in he who has given up the kingdom.Although the kingdom took Yao for its master, Yao never possessed the kingdom, therefore “he was dazed and lost it,” but let his mind wander in the realm of absolute darkness [ming45]; although he sat [on the throne] atop the ten thousand things, he never ceased his free wandering. “The Four Masters” is a metaphor [ jiyen], used to show that Yao is not one with “Yao.” Yao is actually an [unknowable] darkness, but his traces are “Yao.” Looking at the darkness from the point of view of the traces, it is nothing strange that the inner and outer form different realms. The world only sees Yao as “Yao”; how could they perceive his dark [actuality]? Thus they seek the Four Masters beyond the ocean [i.e. in some transcendental realm] and take Yao to be simply what is seen, and thus say that he is merely tossed about by [worldly] things, and has lost that by which he can wander freely. But they do not understand that the most distant follows

’ :    



what is near and the most exalted meets with what is low. If one sternly takes peerless loftiness as the ultimate and refuses to be leveled into vulgar entanglements, then one is [merely] a hermit of the hills and valleys, and not someone who is truly independent [wudai]. How could such a one be capable of roaming in the infinite, or worthy of discussing the utmost ultimate with?46

Guo tells us that the sage actually is “a darkness” (i.e., something unknown and unknowable), but his “traces” are knowable and known, and they are named with the name “Yao.” The term ming (darkness) is used in a distinctive verbal sense in most of the rest of Guo Xiang, marking one of his central ideas, forming an essential part of his solution to some of the problems we will be discussing in this essay. Here, on the contrary, it is used in a related but distinct way that harkens back to Wang Bi, who says in his commentary to the last line of the first chapter of Laozi: “...The term xuan [dark, mysterious] means dark [ming]; that is, silent Non-Being. This is that from which both the Beginning and the Mother emerge. It cannot be named, and to say it cannot be named is the same as to name it ‘mysterious.’ The text calls it the mystery, based on its ungraspability. But once this has been said [it becomes clear] that it cannot be fixed as merely some one particular [i.e., determinate] ‘mystery.’ Thus this name is greatly misleading.Therefore [the text] says ‘Mystery of mysteries.’ ”47 Here ming is another name for Non-Being, which is to say, in Wang’s language, for the Tao itself. But it is what the same chapter of the Laozi would call the Tao that cannot be spoken of; and this is clearly one of the resonances of Guo Xiang’s pair of darkness and traces: they evoke the nameless and the named Tao of Laozi respectively. The traces are what can be named, and in fact the act of naming is part of what makes them merely traces; for once they are “known” they can no longer be the pure dark. Indeed, the Laozi itself uses the term ming as an adjective to describe the Tao48 and uses the term ji in a literal but not insignificant sense: “A good walker leaves no traces.”49 Of course the term ming is also used quite a number of times in the Zhuangzi; it is the second character to appear in the text: “In the Northern Darkness (ming) there is a fish . . .” Elsewhere in the text it is usually (though not always50 ) used to describe the indescribability of the Tao, as in the Laozi, and hence it has a positive connotation. Here however Guo uses it to describe the actuality of the sage himself; this is perhaps ultimately identifiable with the Tao, or at least closely parallel to it, and in coming to understand this idea of darkness we will depend largely on Guo’s reading of the meaning of Non-Being and Tao. But the focusing of the idea on the individual in Guo is significant and characteristic: the absolute and the universal as separated from the relative and particular are relinquished. Guo has no use for a metaphysical Tao, nor even the Tao as some kind of totality; Tao is simply nothing, the nothing that is needed for all things to be what they are—which is to say, literally nothing is needed, for they are self-so. For Guo this darkness is not the metaphysical Non-Being of Wang Bi, but rather a word for the unknowability of how things create themselves; it is because of this unknowability that former metaphysicians have mistakenly applied the term



 

Non-Being as if it were a substance that could have some kind of causal efficacy, which could do something or make something happen. Hence Guo says, “The dark obscurity (xuanming) is the reason it is called Non-Being, but it is not an actual Non-Being.”51 That is to say, the spontaneity of things, which ensures that we cannot ascertain what caused them to be what they are, made people formerly posit a cause that was unknowable, unnamable, dark; but the fact is simply that there is no such cause, there is nothing there, each thing is spontaneously itself.This is what was meant when the words darkness and NonBeing were used. We quoted Guo Xiang above as saying,“The self-so is the walking, the Six Classics are the traces.” The self-so is what leaves the traces, or to put it more accurately, the leaving of the traces is self-so, spontaneous. Yao’s “darkness” is simply self-so, which is called a darkness, as indicated above, because no cause that adequately explains his being-so can be found or known; as we shall see, this does not mean that no conditions of any kind have contributed to making him what he is, that he is not related to and affected by other entities.The sense has more to do with the inadequacy of the cognitive categories of cause and effect in providing a sufficient explanation for his being-so, and more crucially, the lack of any consciousness of a teleological cause that made him become such and such, the absence of any particular cognitive intention on his part to become thus. For Guo seems utterly to deny the efficacy of knowledge and will in making anything what it is; he is perhaps even more emphatic on this point than the Zhuangzi. Traces for him are the means by which this knowledge and will come about, by which one thing cognizes another, and thereby conceives an attitude toward that other.This may be, in the worst case scenario, an attitude of admiration and emulation, which brings with it the desire to become like that other. But this attitude, and the desire it brings, cannot in fact make one like the other; for the way to become that way is not through imitation.That other did not achieve his present characteristics in order to correspond to some model—it was a spontaneous reaction of his self-so to the times and conditions he found himself in.Yao is not Yao because of any teleological act of volition, nor because he decided it would be desirable to act like “Yao.” Hence Guo remarks,“The liberated man who ‘follows this,’ [yinshi, as recommended by the Zhuangzi]—how could it be that he knows following is good and therefore follows? He doesn’t know why he follows and spontaneously follows—this is called Tao.”52 Here again Tao means simply the absence of any external interference. In the same way,Yao is simply spontaneously what he is, and this is called “Yao” by the world. As an object of knowledge, as an object to anyone, including even his own knowing, he is merely “Yao”—but this knowing is not what made him what he is; that is simply spontaneously so. What we have here is not a distinction between one’s self—the darkness— and others, who perceive this darkness externally and hence apprehend only its determinate traces. On the contrary, there is no privileged perspective here; any knower, including “Yao” himself, apprehends only the traces. The self-so is by

’ :    



definition incapable of being an object of cognition, either one’s own or another’s. For cognition, in taking something as its object, inherently looks at it externally, as a completed and determinate extrinsic something translated into cognitive terms, i.e., into names; but these correspond not to its original spontaneity, which was not motivated to be what it was by any telos, by any conscious valuation that one thing was to be preferred to another.They correspond only to the traces left by that spontaneity in one time and place, which were perceived as fixed external entities rather than as unconscious parts of one’s own inner transformation because, as we shall see in a moment, they are not comfortable, not “fit”; one has failed to follow along with them, and to forget oneself in what we will call their self-rightness.These traces are then taken for its fixed inner nature, which is taken to possess a particular value worthy of deliberate emulation or avoidance. This “value” however is in actuality derived precisely from its spontaneity, which is necessarily the absence of any consciosness of an external aim or value. To understand this, we must comprehend Guo’s special use of the term ziran. Guo gives this term a meaning somewhat different from what is now usual. There are two senses of the Chinese character ran; like the English word so, it can signify either that something is thus and thus, or that some proposition is true or correct. Ran means both “being as it is” and “being right.”53 Guo’s assertion that each thing is “self-so” plays on both of these meanings (as well as, in other contexts, the sense of being self-sufficient or independent, uncaused by anything outside itself ): each thing is considered both “right” to itself, and spontaneously “so.” Thus Guo can say of things, “Each is self-right/self-so, each is self-permitting [ge ziran ge zike ].”54 Here Guo uses ran as equivalent to ke, meaning permissible and right; each thing is spontaneously right to itself. In this sense, the term ziran is for Guo a kind of value term. In fact, the self of any given entity is just this self-rightness, this self-so, which is defined as such because cognition plays no part in it, i.e., that it does not become as it is through teleological preknowledge of goals and deliberate conscious action. Spontaneity in this sense is its self, and also its being right to itself, which is testified to by its being comfortable and fit (shi ), and hence not conscious of itself. This last line of reasoning derives from the following passage in the Zhuangzi: To forget the feet indicates the fitness [or comfort, shi] of the shoes; to forget the waist indicates the fitness of the belt; when consciousness forgets right and wrong it indicates the fitness of the mind . . . He who begins in fitness/comfort and is never unfit/uncomfortable has the comfort of forgetting even comfort.

Guo comments: When all the parts of the body are fit/comfortable, one forgets the body. . . . Right and wrong are born from unfitness/discomfort. . . . He who still has consciousness of fitness/comfort is not yet really fit/comfortable.55

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 

To be conscious of anything indicates a problem, a lack of fit, a lack of selfrightness/self-so. Hence the sign of anything’s self-rightness is precisely the lack of reflexive consciousness of it, the type of cognition Guo identifies with traces. We will discuss the implications of this idea in more detail in the following section, dealing with Guo’s concept of “vanishing (into) things” (ming). When this self-rightness happens to have an effect on other things at that moment, inadvertant effects are reinterpreted as deliberate, cognized as external goals, as something bringing about an effect from without and connected externally to other things. An entity is not made thus and so because of cognition of the desirability of thus and so; the determinate traces come only after the fact, and are impotent in producing this genuine article, which is produced without any teleological intent dependent on the cognizing of goals.Tang Yijie remarks: Human cognition can only cognize the traces of things, that is, cognize the traces left behind by the activity of other things; they cannot cognize the “own nature” [self-determinacy, zixing] of other things which leaves these traces. If we don’t distinguish between the two, we would have to hold that we can cognize the own nature [self-determinacy] of other things, and that other things were the real objects of our cognition. But Guo Xiang believes that each thing is an absolute and independent existence, which cannot be the object of cognition.56

The traces of the self-so are merely their “external forms”; but as we saw above, this is not to be taken as if internal and external were opposed in the obvious sense, where the agent himself alone knows his true nature, and those outside him do not, and see him only externally and know only his traces. He himself knows only his traces; knowing can pertain only to traces. What is left out of this kind of trace-cognition is what leaves the traces, the self-right self-so of each entity, which Guo Xiang here calls “darkness” (ming). Guo’s use of the term “darkness” for “what leaves the traces” signifies the self-forgetting and darkening of cognition that is intrinsic to the comfortable fitness of self-rightness, a sense that will have important implications in Guo’s verbal use of this word, which I translate as “to vanish (into) things”; as we shall see later, this also implies that the the basic categories used by cognition to apprehend things, such as the categories cause and effect, and especially the notion of final cause, or conscious intention, are fundamentally incapable of explaining how things become what they are, since this is actually done by this cognition-antithetical self-so. Conscious will aimed at an extrinsic goal has no efficacy in creating any “genuine” effect, i.e., in creating any self-right (i.e., fit, comfortable and unconscious of itself) state of affairs, which is by definition self-so, brought about spontaneously. Guo Xiang elsewhere calls this darkness “the true Primal Jumble (zhen hundun ),” and there he begins to give us a bit more of an inkling of the content of this concept and its relation to traces, that is, how traces do and do

’ :    



not relate to the uncognizable darkness (the lack of any cause making things what they are, i.e., their spontaneously being what they are), and therefore also to cognition.The Zhuangzi has Confucius criticizing a “primitivist” as follows: “He cultivates the inner but doesn’t cultivate the outer. But a man of bright purity who can enter into simplicity, who can return to the primitive through nonaction and hold on to his spirit through embodying the inborn nature, and in this way wander in the everyday world—would you have been astonished by him? As for the arts of Mr. Primal Jumble, how could you and I be sufficient for cognizing them.”57 Guo says: As for the true Primal Jumble, it cultivates nothing; how could it take inner and outer to be different and cultivate only one of them? . . . This is the true Primal Jumble, and thus can undulate along with the world but still not lose itself (zishi ). Therefore although he wanders in the everyday world, yet, as if vanished, he leaves no traces; why would he necessarily startle you? . . . In the “that” it is the “that,” in the “this” it is the “this”; this jumble of oblique oneness,58 who could cognize it? What is cognized is always merely its traces.59

This last remark especially is crucial for understanding Guo’s notion of traces and cognition.The Zhuangzi text here could be interpreted to mean simply, as for example Watson takes it, “As for the arts of Mr. Chaos, you and I need not bother to find out about them.”60 (The speaker is Confucius, addressing Zigong). But Guo takes it to mean something like:“ ’Self ’ and ‘Other’ are insufficient for cognizing the arts of Mr. Primal Jumble.” The “this” and “that” in Guo’s comment also mean “Self ” and “Other.” The True Jumble, the indiscernible Darkness, is the “oblique oneness” (xuantong) of self and other; with respect to the other, this oneness is the other—that is, the other’s own selfforgetting self-rightness, its spontaneous being what it is. With respect to the self, this oneness is the self—hence, again, the self ’s own self-rightness. This oneness is simply the self-so of each thing, its own self-forgetting fitness to itself. It is each entity being fit to its own determinacy, and hence forgetting itself in being whatever it is. This oneness is not some transcendental oneness embracing all things from above, but merely Guo’s word for each thing’s spontaneously becoming what it is without any intention or deliberate action to become so, the universal lack of interference in each being itself and no other, with the result that in this way each is fit to itself, is thereby self-right and an implicit negation of all other rightnesses, and at the same time forgets itself and all others in this comfortable fitness in being itself and none other—this is what all beings share.61 Hence what is cognized is merely the traces, the objectified form of the original jumble, which is the undiscernible darkness, the self-right selfforgetting fitness by which things come to be what they are rather than anything else, the lack of any causal intelligibility, the cognitionless self-so. This attitude is connected to Guo Xiang’s broader polemic against all reflective awareness and knowing. Ultimately, Guo will deny all efficacy to such knowing, and even go so far as to claim that in some sense all things, includ-



 

ing those apparently accomplished by consciousness and deliberate activity, in the final analysis rest on a basis of nonknowing self-so, which is thus to be taken as the true foundation of all things. Guo says: All these things are so without knowing why they are so, and thus they are called muddled;62 now knowers63 don’t know how they know and yet they themselves spontaneously know; those who are born don’t know how they are born and yet are themselves spontaneously born.The ten thousand things are all different, but in that their coming to be never comes from knowing, they are all the same. Hence all in the world are muddled.64

But this “muddledness” is not something negative for Guo; on the contrary, it is precisely the unconscious self-so, that which leaves the traces, the natural condition of all beings. “The eye’s ability to see does not come from its knowing how to see; we see without knowing how to see, we know without knowing how to know, and this is what makes it self-so.”65 Whatever one does is not accomplished by knowing; even if it does depend on some deliberate volition and knowledge, these themselves are on some level spontaneous.We don’t know how to know, we simply spontaneously find ourselves able to know. Similarly, our ability to will is outside the power of our volition: we don’t will our willing, and yet we find ourselves willing. Guo puts it even more explicitly in the following passage: He who deliberately tries to make himself act deliberately is unable to act deliberately [weiweizhe buneng wei]; rather, his deliberate activity is simply spontaneously deliberate activity. He who deliberately tries to make himself know is unable to know; rather, his knowing is simply spontaneously knowing.This spontaneous knowing is nonknowing, and thus knowing comes from nonknowing. Spontaneous activity is nonactivity; thus activity comes from nonactivity. For these reasons, activity takes nonactivity as its master and knowing takes nonknowing as its source. ...66

This is an important passage; it indicates that all activity, even deliberate activity, is ultimately derived from self-forgetting nondeliberate self-so, and is in fact a species of this genus, an idea that will serve Guo well in his attempts to unify Ruism and Taoism, as we shall see at the end of this essay. Moreover, it alerts us that we must be careful not to misunderstand what Guo means by “self-so”: he emphatically does not mean, “What I myself make so, by an act of volition or knowledge.” Guo tells us: My life is not generated by me; thus my whole life long, within [my] hundred years, whether I sit, stand, walk, stop, move, or stay still, whatever I take or renounce, all my feelings, my innate determinacy, my knowledge, my abilities, whetever I have, whatever I don’t have, whatever I do, whatever I encounter, none of it is [because of] me. It is all simply self-so.67

Thus even that which is done by knowing or by willing ultimately rests upon not knowing and not willing, on the self-so.“These merely come to be of them-

’ :    



selves; they are not made so by their selves (zisheng er; fei wosheng ye).”68 This distinction is to be kept in mind whenever Guo speaks of things “creating themselves.” This term has a purely negative significance for Guo; it means simply that nothing cognizable as an entity makes it so. Thus he says: Although (the text) has the term, “What makes things what they are” (wu wu zhe), this is meant merely to show that things make themselves what they are (wu zhi ziwu); ultimately there is no thing that makes things what they are. . . . Once we have understood that there is no thing that makes things what they are, we should also understand that neither can things make themselves what they are (wu zhi bu neng ziwu). But then who is it that does it? They are all unconsciously and abruptly thus69 and self-so.70

This is one of the strokes by which Guo manages to unify spontaneity and deliberate action; ultimately, in his view, even deliberate action is spontaneous. This has further implications for Guo in that it means that even civilization is natural and even morality is spontaneous. We will look at this development in more detail below. For the moment, let us simply note that the self-so of the sages is neither their own doing nor anyone else’s; it is not even done by “the Tao.” This is precisely what makes it “self-so.” Guo says: The Tao has no power. When the text says, “They attained it from the Tao,” this is merely to show that they spontaneously attained it. It is simply spontaneously auto-attained; the Tao cannot make them attain it.What I have not attained, I cannot make myself attain.Thus whatever is attained [i.e., whatever qualities one has] externally does not depend on the Tao, internally does not come from my self; it is simply abruptly71 auto-attained and self-right (zide) and lone-transforming (duhua).72

Thus we see that when Guo says that all things are “self-so” he means that they are what they are without being made so by anything apprehendable by any consciousness, be it their own conscious volition or a transcendental Tao, or anything else that may be taken as a cause as a definite entity, which is itself a by-product of trace-cognition. At the same time, this unconsciousness of their becoming so is precisely what makes this becoming self-so in the other sense, i.e., self-right (emphasized here by the use of the term zide, and elsewhere by the term zidang; both de and dang also have the two senses that we saw in the term ran above, i.e., to be so and so [de = to attain certain characteristics; dang = to act as a so-and-so, to “be” a so-and-so], and to be right), and what gives it its intrinsic, uncognized value to itself. Indeed, this unconscious self-right selfso, which makes them become themselves, is the very self they are always becoming. Their real self for Guo Xiang, as we shall see below, is not any set of determinate characteristics they might happen to have at any time, but rather the fact that they are always comfortable being what they happen to be being, and forget it. This forgetting is their true identity.

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 

Wang Deyou explains the notion of the self-so implicit in Guo Xiang’s image of traces as follows: What is the self-so? Guo Xiang says, “The self-so means not to act deliberately, but to be thus and so of itself, spontaneously73 . . . But the self-so is merely the self-so, the spontaneous being such, of things themselves.”74 This means that self-so refers to having no intention to make or be or act [in such and such a way].Who is it that has no intention to do this? Things themselves have no intention to do this, things are spontaneously what they are.Thus, the subject of this predicate “self-so” is still things themselves; the cause of the creation of the traces of the sages still lies in the sage himself, but the sage had no intention to make these traces; they are merely [part of ] what he is spontaneously. It is obvious then that “that which leaves the traces” refers to the being-self-so of things themselves. . . .

Wang goes on to cite examples of Guo’s use of the term “the traceless” (wuji) for that which leaves the traces:“That which leaves the traces is the traceless.”75 “It lets things [go as they go, ren wu], thus it is traceless.”76 “The ruler is able to let things act as they spontaneously act (ren qi zixing), and thus he has no traces.”77 “They turned back to let the determinateness of things [be what they are], and the determinateness of things were of themselves one, hence they had no traces.”78 Wang comments: These all have one meaning: to be “traceless” is simply to follow along with and allow the self-so of things.Thus we can see that the terms “traceless” and “that which leaves traces” have nothing mystical about them, they simply refer to allowing the spontaneous activity of things themselves. On the one hand, one should have no intention, and let one’s own innate determinate abilities function; on the other hand, people ought not to interfere with external things, but should rather let them act at their own convenience.79

Two things are crucial in this reading: (1) that the “tracelessness” is in fact a subjective condition, meaning roughly to ignore or forget traces rather than to leave no traces, and (2) that the self-so is merely a fact about all entities, the fundamental condition of all things, rather than another thing.This interpretation is, I think, generally correct. It will be crucial to remember throughout our dealings with Guo Xiang that self-so is at best an abstract noun, describing a property of things, like “weight,” or “transperency.” It is essentially a predicate, and is simply not thinkable apart from the things of the world, which are the subject to which it is always implicitly appended.This is of course in keeping with Guo’s conception of the Tao as nothing whatsoever, as something utterly without being or activity; it is a name for something about things, the way they behave without the need for something outside themselves to make them behave as they do and be as they are. Thus to say that the self-so leaves the traces is equivalent to saying,“The fact that things are spontaneously what they

’ :    



are without depending on anything outside themselves to be so is what makes things as they are.” Stated thus, the tautology is obvious; this is indeed less an explanation of why things are as they are than a rejection of the possibility of answering such a question. For the question “why” rests on the assumption that things are so for a reason outside themselves, that one occurrence causes another, that something, their reason, makes them what they are. But this is just what Guo is denying. Guo tells us there is no way to know why things are as they are, and tells us why this can’t be known; it is because this inquiry is misguided by the erroneous assumption that the reason for things lies outside themselves. For only such an assumption could make any explanation meaningful; to speak of “reasons” in any sense is to assume that one thing causes another. Guo thus rejects the entire endeavor of asking after the reasons for things:“For nearby things, we can sometimes know their reasons; but if we continue seeking the sources [of these reasons themselves, and so on ad infinitum] until we reach the ultimate, we will find [it to be] for no reason, but rather self-so. Since it is self-so, we cannot ask the least about its reason.We must simply go along with it.”80 Thus, as the reader will have suspected long ago, Guo’s notion of the selfso is not an explanation of things, but rather the denial of the possibility of such an explanation; but it should be noted that Guo also asserts that this impossibility itself has a soteriological dimension. Guo has replaced the ontological “Non-Being” of Wang Bi, which was taken to be an explanation of the origin of all Being, and, as a complete lack of determinate characeristics, was taken as a model for the nonaction of the sage, with an epistemological “Darkness” or unknowability of the self-so, which denies that anything can be explained about how things come to be what they are, but at the same time takes this inexplicability likewise as a model for the nonaction of the sage: his activity too is to be unfathomable by conscious categories, done without knowing how it is done, spontaneous, completely fit and comfortable to itself to the point of forgetting all ideas of doing anything or any notion the things he encounters as being other. But we will discuss these ideas in more detail in due time.81 Then what kind of relationship do we have between the traces and “that which leaves them,” the self-forgetting self-rightness of the spontaneous selfso? Tang Yijie remarks that this pair of concepts is especially prone to a dangerous misinterpretation, since their relationship seems to resemble that we usually find between an essence and its manifestations; but such a conception would be inconsistent with Guo’s rejection of Wang Bi’s fundamental NonBeing as the noumenal essence of the visible phenemonal world. We quoted part of a passage above in which Guo says that all the sage kings, Yao, Shun, Tang, and Wu, are actually one; the passage in its entirety goes like this: “Yao” and “Shun,” the names of the emperors, are merely their traces; the self (wo) lodges in ( ji) these traces, but the traces are not the self.Thus the world is terrified by its own doing [not that of the sages]; the more terrified the world is, the coarser [the sage’s] traces will be. The coarseness or excellence [of the traces, lit. footprints] merely depends on the roughness or smoothness

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 

of the road; how could it be that the traveller has changed his feet? Thus the sages are one, and yet there is the difference between Yao, Shun,Tang and Wu. [We must] understand that this difference is merely in the names given by changing times; these are not sufficient to name the actuality of the sage.Thus how could Yao and Shun have been merely “Yao” and “Shun”? Hence although they may have the appearance of care and worry, and the traces of benevolence and righteousness, still that which leaves the traces is ever whole.82

A superficial reading of this passage might give the impression that a substancefunction type of relationship is implied here. The “actuality” shared by all the sages sounds like the one substance, while the “names” and “traces” sound like its diverse manifestations or functions; in such a case, the assertion that Yao is not one with Yao would simply mean that Yao’s substance, his unknowable dark actuality, is different from his determinate function, named “Yao”; substance, which is One, is not one with function, which is multiple, hence Yao is not one with “Yao.” Indeed, it cannot be denied that this general rhetorical structure is employed here; for although he has done away with any separately subsisting substance, this does not mean Guo must altogether abandon this way of speaking. But as we shall see, this relationship between the essential and the accidental is for Guo no longer an ontological description of what is, where something called Non-Being (i.e., pure indeterminacy) is the essential and Being (i.e., all determinacy) is merely its offshoots. Rather, it is an epistemological distinction that is being made between traces and what leaves them, where each thing is simultaneously the essential darkness, in its relation to itself as its own self-forgetting self-rightness, and at the same time a trace, which is just the same content as perceived from without, from a point of view not fit and and comfortable with this content. However, the general structure of this relationship has led Mou Zongsan to say, “ ‘Doing-nothing’ [for Guo] is the root, the darkness; ‘Nothing not done’ is the branch, the trace. But this root and branch, this darkness and trace, are not to be taken as two separated paths. . . . Non-Being is the root, Being is the trace . . . the two are concretely merged together ...”83 Such a desciption is, I think, misleading; while not entirely false, it can only be called true if carefully qualified. For there is a sense in which “Non-being is the root” for Guo, but only a very restricted sense; Non-being is the origin of all things in that it is literally nothing, and hence to say “Nothing is the origin of all things” is a marker to indicate that all things are themselves what they are, all things are self-so. Guo says, to take an almost random example of his many pronouncements on this point: [Being] does not arise from Non-Being. But then why does Zhuangzi repeatedly speak of the Non-Being as the beginning? Beginning here just means the transition from not yet being generated to being generated; if even so difficult a thing as being generated suddenly gets itself generated without depending on Non-Being above or on knowledge below, why do people try

’ :    



to manage generation in terms of what has already been generated, and thereby lose sight of self-generation? Non-Being cannot generate things; but the statement that things attain [Non-Being] to get generated is used to show that the generation of things is auto-attained [i.e., self-so].84

As Guo puts it elsewhere, “The reason Zhuangzi and Laozi are always talking about Non-Being is to show that there is no thing that generates things, that on the contrary all things simply generate themselves.”85 Guo often goes out of his way to twist the meaning of the Zhuangzi to make this point; for example, when the text says “(The Tao) gives their spirituality to the ghosts and the Ruler Above, and generates Heaven and Earth,” Guo says, “How could Non-Being give birth or make spiritual? It does not make spiritual the ghosts and the Ruler Above; rather, these self-spiritualize. This is to make spiritual without making spiritual. It doesn’t generate Heaven and Earth; rather, these self-generate. This is to generate without generating.Thus to make spiritual is ultimately not sufficient to make anything spiritual, but not making spiritual makes them spiritual.”86 In light of this insistence that Tao is and does exactly nothing, that there is no Tao outside of things in their multiplicity, that “there is nowhere it is not, but wherever it is it is nothing,”87 we must avoid interpreting this passage about the oneness of the sages as distinct from their multiple names as a statement about an ontological division presupposing this type of substance/function relationship, where one real substance divides or manifests in different ways. On the contrary, as I have indicated above, the meaning here is predicated on a purely epistemological distinction between traces and what leaves them. The “content” of these two is in fact identical; what differs is merely whether this is known from outside or forgotten (comfortable, vanished into self-right, selfso) from within.The sages are all one simply in the sense that they are all selfso, self-right, comfortable in their determinacy and self-forgetting. What this determinacy happens to be, however, may be completely different.Their oneness resides simply in their state of being self-so, but all the self that is so in each case is completely different.This is “darkness,” which comprises the one “actuality” of the sages, their self-forgetting self-rightness in being what each of them are. Since we are talking about sages here rather than just entities in general, it is not surprising that the “actuality” is the state of mind, or rather no-mind, attained by the sages, and shared by them all, the content of which we will try to explicate in more detail below. For the moment, we must simply understand this conception of the discrepency between how the sage appears in cognition and his true state of no-mind within the general framework of Guo’s conception of how actualities can relate to what is cognized about them. The abovequoted passage suggests that the actualities of things can be nothing but their self-so-being, in that each spontaneously comes to be what it is. But this situation also accounts for their multiplicity, which is precisely each one being what it is. This oneness in each one being itself thus implies its opposite, the differences among things.

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 

It might seem from the image of footprints that the different determinacies of particular things derive from the traces rather than the “feet,” the selfso.The differences among the different sage kings, and hence their determinacies, seem to derive in the above passage from the differences in the condition of the road on which the feet walked; that is, the different conditions and circumstances and times in which the self-so functioned, and the differences in the people who perceived them. But this conclusion is somewhat unjustified. As a matter of fact, the differences are also owing to the self-so; difference itself is self-so.We must be careful not to look at the traces as something that effects a differentiation of some original metaphysical unity, for a unity of this sort is just what Guo denies in denying Wang Bi’s Non-Being.At the same time, there are in fact several subtle senses in which Guo speaks of oneness, which we will discuss in more detail later. The sense most relevant here is rather subtle: the self-so is in a sense one: i.e., in the sense that it is none. It is nothing, the Tao that is literally not there at all and merely lets all things be themselves. This is obviously not to be confused with a mathematical “One” as opposed to two or three (Wang, on the other hand, explicitly associated his notion of oneness with number).This oneness is a word for a universal lack of metaphysical interference. “Self-so” signifies that each thing is such and such of itself, not caused by any external interference. The term thus has a negative signification, as we saw above; it means simply that nothing apprehendable as an external cause, neither the Tao not one’s own deliberate activity or anything else, has made this entity be so and so. Self-so just means this lack. As such, it is not in any sense to be opposed to plurality; its oneness resides only in the all-pervadingness of this absence, that this causal interference appears nowhere at all, not in its exclusion of multiplicity. Thus this oneness does not interfere with Guo’s emphatic assertion that the determinacies and differences among things are self-so, and need not be eliminated or looked down upon. Moreover, they are something that need not be derived theoretically, for they are the empirical starting point of his inquiry and lie behind all of his interpretative structures. Guo says: All things spontaneously divide themselves (wu wu zifen), all affairs spontaeously separate themselves (shi shi zi bie).This being so, if one wants to separate and divide them according to one’s own [views], this is to fail to see their self-division.88

This quote indicates that the divisions and determinacies of things are themselves self-so; differentiation itself is not something that violates the oneness of spontaneity. It is rather a manifestation of that oneness—a coexistence of oneness and multiplicity that is predicated on Guo’s idea of the oneness of Tao as a literal nonexistence, a universal lack of anything to interfere with things being the various things they are, as noted above, and on his related special conception of oneness. All that is objected to is the arbitrary differentiation applied from without, i.e., based on trace-cognition, where one point of view tries to subject another to its own determinacy, its own point of view, its own natural

’ :    



self-differentiation. This will become clearer in the discussion of traces and values below. In the present case, concerning the alleged oneness of the sages whose names and traces differ, it is to be recalled that as is often the case, Guo’s conception of the sages here is modeled on his conception of the Tao: they are all one as it is one, i.e., they are equal in that each did nothing to interfere with things. What the things did while not being interefered with was different in each age, and hence different names and values were given these sages, since those who perceived them not interfering differed in each case. The oneness of the sages alluded to here is thus precisely this oneness of noneness, the universal lack of interference, rather than some unitary substance shared by all of them and manifesting differently in various times and places. In their case, differences in the records about each are caused by differing traces; but the notion of traces is not used to explain the differing determinacies of things in general. Its function lies more in the explanation of erroneous applications of cognitive values to these differing determinacies.We will discuss this speculative sameness of sameness and difference in more detail below. For now, however, let us simply stress that the “darkness” in these passages means something like what Guo means by Non-Being; total absence of anything, that allows each thing, or in this case each trace, to come into being spontaneously, of itself. The darkness does not cause the traces in any determinate way; it is merely the roughness or smoothness of the road that determines the quality of the footsteps—but here the comparison breaks down, for the foot should have no shape of its own whatsoever.We see simply footprints appearing on a road, we see no one leaving the footprints; hence we say the leaver of the footprints is a darkness, an invisibility. We will see later that this corresponds closely with Guo Xiang’s conception of the sage and his ideal condition of having no deliberate mind or purpose of his own; the sage is one who simply allows things to take their own course, and he is indeed a darkness just as the Tao is a nothing; he has no mind of his own, and precisely this allows him to merge with things and allow them each to “lone-transform” spontaneously.The oneness of the sages is the same oneness as the oneness of the Tao: a noneness, which is to say merely the spontaneity of all multiplicity coming to be itself and independently transforming. It is characteristic that Guo speaks only of individual acts and individual entities; not only is the true nature of the Tao unknowable, the nature of the individual, exemplified especially by certain individuals, is also an impenetrable mystery. What is known about them is simply their “traces.” This is indeed a fundamental epistemological division in the individual, between himself and his traces:“Yao is not one with ‘Yao.’ ” What the world sees is merely “Yao”; it can have no idea what Yao is. “Yao” is an object of cognition, but Yao is not. “Yao” is a “sage”;Yao is merely spontaneous doing what he does in self-forgetting selfrightness. It may seem contradictory that in spite of this fundamental division between Yao and his traces, Guo often says that the sage is “traceless” (wuji). But Guo resolves this contradiction as follows: “The sage follows along with the



 

self-activity (zixing), and thus is traceless. Thus what is called the sage is in himself traceless, but when other creatures get hold of his traces, they give it the forced name ‘sage.’ Thus ‘sage’ is merely a name for tracelessness.”89 It is worth noting here that what is traceless still leaves traces; to be traceless means only that he has no traces with respect to himself, that indeed, as Wang Deyou’s interpretation of this term, quoted above, suggested, he recognizes no traces and does not himself act with respect to the traces of other things, nor seek to inflict his traces on others; he merely follows their own spontaneous activity. Nonetheless, other creatures, regarding him from without, can still get hold of his traces; these traces are merely himself as regarded from outside, as an other. His traces are the impressions he inadvertantly leaves in the cognition of other creatures; but leaving such traces does not prevent him from being, in himself,“traceless.” Tracelessness is the subjective condition of ignoring traces. The question here again is primarily epistemological; we may say that to the traceless all things are traceless, and to the trace-conscious all things are traces. The emphasis is again on the question of subjective cognition, which is here as elsewhere intimately connected to the image of traces. A failure to recognize this primary signification of the term traces, and its relation to spontaneity and to cognition, can lead to serious misapprehensions of Guo’s meaning.Tang Yijie says,“The ‘traces’ are traces left behind by a thing’s activity. . . .’What leaves the traces’ refers to the thing itself, which Guo Xiang calls its ‘own nature’ [self-determinacy, zixing] . . . that is, the reason this thing is this thing. This horse’s ‘own-nature’ is that he can walk a thousand miles in a day; this is ‘what leaves his traces.’This horse in fact walked a thousand miles in a day; this is his ‘traces’ . . . The grounds of a thing’s existence are its ownnature, that which leaves the traces; but what people can cognize about this existence come from its traces.”90 Tang distinguishes between the thing itself and its activities, taking the former to be an “independent existence” that is unchanging and the latter as the way it moves, relates and changes. It is the reason a particular thing is what it is, it is the ground and reason of its existence. This interpretation is not as accurate as that of Wang Deyou, in my opinion. One defect of this interpretation is that it takes Guo to be asserting that each thing is its own ground, rather than as saying that the category of ground was not applicable, and reasons could not be asked for. Tang’s view comes dangerously close to making zisheng, produced “of themselves” or spontaneously, into wosheng, produced by their selves.That is, instead of things being as they are for no reason at all, and hence being called spontaneous or self-so, they would be as they are because of themselves, because they were already implicitly what they later became explicitly, and they themselves were the cause of this. This would be perhaps a relation of potentiality and actuality as we find for example in Aristotle, or a kind of atomist universe where each monad develops its own potentials without interference from without, where the independence of things is conceived of as static and eternal. This would preserve the cause-effect rela-

’ :    



tionship, simply redirecting it into each thing’s relationship with itself; but Guo’s notion of independence rests not on making each thing dependent on itself alone, but rather in destroying the category of dependence itself, in spite of its apparent efficacy.The point for Guo, is that dependency, like any other existent entity or quality, is itself ultimately spontaneous, i.e., self-right, self-forgetting, vanishing into itself, not made so by deliberate activity or by any other ascertainable external entity, and thus the category itself breaks down, leaving each thing utterly free of conditions.The spontaneity and independence of things is not a result of their dependence on themselves; it means rather that they depend on nothing to be what they are, not even themselves, the Tao, their “fixed nature,” or anything else that one could mention. This is an unavoidable conclusion if even the Tangian position just quoted is thought through to the end. Li Rizhang, for example, interprets Guo’s concept of xing (original determinate nature) to mean “that which makes each thing what it is” (suoyiran), a term that even on the surface is blazenly in conflict with the notion of ziran—if a thing has a suoyiran, “that by which it is so,” its being thus and so is mediated, it has ceased to be self-so in Guo’s sense.The xing is for Guo the suoyiran of the traces, but there is no further nature that is the suoyiran of the determinate self-so occurrence itself, which is what, relative to the traces, is described as the xing. Li describes this suoyiran as “the inherent capability and determining rule which induces things to complete the process of their existences, and determines the direction, path and steps taken by this process. Actually, what is called a thing is nothing but a process proceeding in a particular direction, along a certain path, taking certain steps. . . . The ‘ability’ to be high or low or long or short is the capability represented by the ‘original nature.’ ”91 Here the “thing” reduces to a particular process, and the “nature” to the capability for this process to occur. The crypto-Aristotelean categories of species and genus, and of potentiality and actuality, might allow some sense to be made of this claim: a tiger hunts, for example, and it is the “nature” of the class of beings called tigers to be able to do so. When they do so in actuality, they are satisfying their inner teleology, actualizing their potential nature, which belongs to this particular species of animal. But all such categories are certainly lacking in Guo Xiang’s presentation, and in their absence this amounts to no more than saying that “the nature of X occurring is the ability for X to be occurring.” What is this ability? What makes something happen as it does? Guo explicitly rejects any attempt to answer this question causally. Its ability to be so is its being so, without the intervention of external causes, natures, or deliberate aims: this is the selfso. Indeed, if a changing thing had some fixed nature that caused it to change, these changes would not be “self-so” at all. Since one is changing and the other changeless, some difference would pertain to their relation, the unchanging nature (or capability) has to in some sense stand apart from the changing expressions, and hence any causality running from one to the other would would be an instance of something that is “other-so,” not self-so. Strictly speaking, the changeless nature would have to be “external” to the changing phenomena.

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 

Indeed, this brings us directly to another deficiency of Tang’s interpretation: its one-sided application of the quality of change and motion to the traces. But as we saw above, the image inherently suggests also that the traces persist while the foot departs, and this side of the picture is not accounted for by Tang. Tang is right, I think, to stress the unknowability of that which leaves the traces, but he is incorrect to consider it therefore static.92 Each thing is indeed an independent and unconditioned existence to Guo, but this is described by him, as Tang himself has pointed out with greater emphasis than anyone, as duhua, which I am translating as “lone-transformation.” Guo sometimes sounds as if he considers the determinacy of things to be fixed, for example when he says, “The text means to say that the determinacies of things have their different allotments and roles ( fen); thus the intelligent await their end holding on to their intelligence, while the stupid await death embracing their stupidity; how could they change their innate determinacy in the middle?”93 But in the light of his entire system, his emphasis on change and transformation, his admission of unfixity of worldly conditions that alone express determinate differences, and the logical inconsistency of this view with Guo Xiang’s notion of the self-so, as just considered, we may rather interpret such assertions to mean that at any given moment one is just what one is and cannot be otherwise, that one’s determinacy in that moment is self-so and absolute, not that one must literally be the same in every subsequent moment. For Guo makes it clear elsewhere that xing does not mean something eternally fixed: “Benevolence and Righteousness are the determinate nature (xing) of man; but man’s determinate nature changes (ren xing you bian), it is different in the past and in the present. Thus when we travel through and lodge in [any given determinacy] and then pass on, we remain dark [or vanish into things, ming, i.e., darkly merge (with changes)]; when we stagnate and hold to only one side of things, we appear (xian). When there is appearance, falsity arises, and when falsity arises there is much blame.”94 Whatever changes happen to occur to one’s determinacy, in and of themselves, are also self-so. “To follow one’s present determinacy and move directly forward [zhiwang] is self-so.To so move and harm that determinacy and the fact that the determinacy (xing) once hurt can change are also self-so.”95 (Emphases added.) Here we see clearly that xing and fen are something that can and do change; in fact, in light of Guo’s general view of the uninterrupted allpervasiveness of change, to be documented in detail, they must change.96

The Dangers of Traces

et us return to the question of traces. We have seen that Guo considers these the explanation of all potential perversions and misunderstandings of the self-so.What exactly is it about these traces that makes them such a problem? Why are they so dangerous? What quality of theirs allows Guo to make them the culprit for all perversion of a world that is otherwise inherently and spontaneously “right”? Guo says:

L

Benevolence is the trace of undiscriminating love; righteousness is the effect of bringing things to completion. The love is not [caused by] benevolence, but the trace “benevolence” moves in it; the completion is not [caused by] righteousness, but the effect “righteousness” appears in it.To preserve benevolence and righteousness does not allow one to realize that the love and the benefit come from having no deliberate mind; thus they can be forgotten.97

Here again we see the inadvertant arisal of traces from spontaneity. But this relationship cannot be reversed; these traces cannot cause spontaneity—for what is caused by something outside itself is not spontaneous.The concepts of benevolence and righteousness are traces of actions not caused by these concepts and the strivings they encourage; the spontaneous activity that is named by these terms and concepts is anterior to them. They are merely the traces left in an extrinsic cognition by these spontaneous activities.The traces can be forgotten, for they do not contribute to creating this spontaneous activity. Not only do they contribute nothing to it; they may actually interfere with it: That which causes no harm to things does not do so because it is practicing benevolence, but the trace “benevolence” moves in it; that which makes every principle hit the mark is not practicing righteousness, but the effect “righteousness” appears in it. Thus hitting the mark and causing no harm are not brought about by benevolence and righteousness. But the world goes running after [these traces], discarding themselves to follow others so that they lose 



 

their ever-so [i.e., their self-so]. Therefore the disordering of the mind does not come from what is ugly but always from beautiful appearances; the disruption of the world does not come from evil, but always from benevolence and righteousness. Thus benevolence and righteousness are tools for the disruption of the world.98

Here the traces are not simply ineffectual for producing spontaneity and hence superfluous; they are positively dangerous, for they cause beings to neglect their own inner necessity in favor of something attractive outside themselves. Now what is it about traces that makes them capable of this danger to the original spontaneity of things, makes them the disrupters of the world, the thing that introduces disorder into Guo’s perfect universe? They allow a foreign ideal to interfere with the function of each being’s spontaneity, which after all was alone what performed these emulated actions in the first place. By cognizing attractive external traces of another being’s spontaneity, these beings lose their own spontaneity.The reason the traces can cause such a catastrophe lies in the nature of traces themselves.We may get a more detailed comprehension of this by distinguishing three different but related problems inherent in the nature of traces. The first problem is that they persist determinately in time. Guo Xiang, like Zhuangzi, conceives of the universe as a place of unceasing “change and transformation, daily renewing, never holding on to the old,” where “time does not stop for a moment, the present can never be preserved, and yesterday’s dream dissolves in the present.” In such a cosmos, “man’s life is like a horse passing through a market; never can he stop for an instant, the replacement of the old by the new never ceases day or night. . . . ‘What I see’ [in the text, spoken by Confucius to Yan Hui] is daily renewal; the past is already gone; how could you get hold of it? . . . Regardless of how worthy or sagely, no one has been able to linger . . .”99 In short, “in the world there has never been anything that did not transform.”100 We noted above that the image of footprints itself implies that both the traces and that which leaves them persist, but in opposite senses; the traces maintain their determinate characteristics, whereas the feet continue to move on and be what they are, whatever that might be at any moment. Here it is the determinate duration that is seen to be problematic. In a world of unceasing change, it is easy to see why something that endures as the traces do would be potentially dangerous. Nonetheless, it is worth noticing that, far from concluding that, in a universe of flux, we should be grateful for the rare thing that persists, hold on to it for as long as possible, and value it as the one enduring haven that will save us from this nauseating transience, we are told on the contrary that such a stable entity is precisely the cause of all problems, is to be avoided at all costs. The conception of traces here derives from the original imagery of footprints; the walker goes on and is gone; what stays, what persists, is merely the tracks he leaves, which, although they certainly reflect him and his actions, are no replacement for him. They simply reflect what he did at one time, in one situation, in one place; but they are dead and static, while he is alive now some-

   



where else doing something else entirely.Thus, while the original act vanishes, its trace remains; people see it, cognize it, remember it, record it. The living impulse that knew to do just that just then (by not knowing how), has already passed on to the next moment; it is the flux of the self-so, formless and capable of assuming any form. This particular form may well have been right (selfforgetting, self-so) for this particular moment; but to hold on to it and try to apply it to another moment, rather than responding to the new situation with the new self-so, leads to disaster. Hence when the Zhuangzi has Laozi saying, “Can you stop? Can you disregard it in others and seek it in yourself? Can you briskly float along?” Guo comments, to each of these three questions respectively, “Pursue no old traces. Keep oneself whole and don’t imitate others. Do not stop in any traces.”101 Elsewhere he states, “The names and patterns (ming fa) are merely traces of what has already departed. They are not sufficient for moving along.”102 More emphatically, Guo says, “When we imitate the sages, we are actually only imitating their traces. Now traces are something that has already passed away; they are not a tool by which to respond to current changes. How could they be worthy of valuing and clinging to? If one clings to already completed traces to manage the Undefined (wufang), the traces will be a stagnant impediment when the Undefined arrives. . . .”103 The “Undefined” in this context can perhaps be understood as the as-yet undefined-by-traces, i.e., the present moment as it spontaneously unfolds. The traces should be discarded when their time has passed; otherwise they become a clog in the works of unceasing change, a stagnant impediment to the ever-new self-so. The practical implications of this position reveal Guo’s ultimate “Taoist” allegiance. He says, for example, “The models [or classics, dian] and rites of the former kings were used to suit a particular age. If they are not abandoned when that age passes, they become the people’s hobgoblin, by means of which falsity and imitation have their start. . . . When times change and the generations are different, the rites should change with them.”104 These rites and models, as Cheng Xuanying points out, are precisely what Guo elsewhere refers to as “traces.” Their danger lies in their tendency to outlive the time in which they originated, and to which they were suited, reaching like a ghostly shadow from the grave of the past to cast a suffocating gloom over the spontaneous newness of subsequent moments. This is closely related to the second major problem with traces: their tendency to let one thing regulate another thing, to make one thing conform to the model of another. For in Guo Xiang’s terms, one moment is one thing, and another moment is another thing. If an old moment casts a shadow over the present moment, this is a case of one thing tyrannizing another. Any two moments are for Guo Xiang a “this” and a “that,” or we may say, as we noted above, a “self ” and an “other.” Hence when the Zhuangzi says, “Rites and regulations change in response to the times,” Guo comments,“What ‘that’ takes to be desirable, ‘this’ sometimes takes to be undesirable; thus one ought to change in response to times, and then all will be fit and comfortable (shi).”105 Here

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 

“this” and “that” refer to two moments in time. But these two terms are heavily loaded for Guo Xiang, as they are for Zhuangzi. The entire structure of value relativity in these works is based on a perspectivism playing on the viewpoints of “this” and “that,” and their respective “rights” and “wrongs.”We will address this value question in more detail in a moment. Now however, we must note Guo Xiang’s attempt to preserve the autonomy of each moment of time, and each individual entity, so that none is obsessed by another time or another entity, and hence each can follow its own self-so, the self-so of this time, place, and self. This does not mean that there is to be no dominion of one thing by another, or that one thing may not follow another; for Guo is not an anarchist, and he unambiguously admits the legitimacy of political hierarchy.106 The tension between absolute autonomy and accepted forms of interaction and influence is one of the main problems in Guo’s thought, and we will not find a way to resolve it until we discuss Guo’s conception of “lone-transformation” (duhua) and its relation to mutual interactivity below. For the moment however we may note that Guo’s insistence on keeping one moment or self from interfering with another is focused primarily on ensuring that no one thing or moment should have to envy or imitate another. It is not a question of domination, but of sameness, and more specifically, of the subjective presence or absence of teleological desire: the problem for Guo is for one to try to make all others like itself, or to try to be like others. Here as everywhere, Guo objects to conscious volition. One point in time should not try to legislate for all other points in time; but by the same token, one perspective should not try to legislate for other simultaneous perspectives. As Guo puts it, “If we take the activity of one body and the pleasure of one will and implement it over the whole world, then one perspective will gain [or be right, de] but ten thousand perspectives will lose [or be wrong, shi].”107 The self-so should not be caught in the fitness of one moment; it “can follow along with changing times and not get attached to ‘self ’ or ‘other,’ ”108 i.e., it does not attach itself to any one moment (for self and other here mean also more generally “this” and “that,” the relationship between two moments regarding one another as mutually “other”) or perspective, but passes unimpeded through them all, being each as it encounters it, since the self-so is itself nothing but their self-so, their self-rightness, their fit relation to themselves, their selfforgetting comfort. Thus what is (self-)right and self-so for one becomes a disaster when used as a standard for all, just as the traces of one time become a disaster for later ages when they endure.After the Zhuangzi lists several excessively skilled masters at various arts, Guo says: These masters all took their own heavenly nature as their teacher, and each directly and spontaneously had their own excesses, their webbed toes, their swelling tumors and protruding wens; each of these was merely the rightness of one perspective (yijia zhi zheng). But if one [rightness] is taken to rectify

   

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ten thousand [others], then the ten thousand will not be right. Thus he who is perfectly right doesn’t rectify the world by means of his own self; he simply makes each in the world attain his own rightness.109

Their excesses were right for themselves, but wrong for others. One thing is not to become the standard for another; that is, the trace of one moment of self-so is not to impede another moment of self-so. When the Zhuangzi says, “He who allows his nature to be subordinated to benevolence and righteousness, although he may excel in it like Ceng and Shi, is not what I call good,” Guo comments, “To tie ‘this’ to ‘that’ is called ‘subordination.’ He who subordinates his nature/determinacy to benevolence is merely losing himself for the sake of benevolence; thus it is not good.”110 Benevolence is the trace of a former king in a former moment; but if one lets one’s own nature, the present moment of self-so in the present situation, be subordinated to it, possessed by it, modeled by it, if “that” is made the standard for “this,” the self-so self-rightness of “this” is perverted, and this is not good. He who lets his nature be possessed by or subordinated to the five flavors is also not good, says the Zhuangzi; Guo responds, “What is good is following one’s nature and penetrating all the flavors.”111 That is, the nature must not stick on any one or on all five, it must not be possessed by them, but rather if it follows along with whichever one is present in the present moment, this is following its own nature, and this is good, i.e., self-right.The good of many is to be attained by each moment taking care of itself, and being its own self-so in that particular moment. Indeed, as we shall see, the very unity of things, the “oblique oneness” of self and other, resides in precisely this self-so-ness and selfrightness of each one for itself, in opposition to all others. Hence Guo continues: If one calls benevolence and righteousness good, then he will be willing to lose his life in his devotion to them.This is not even being benevolent to one’s own nature and life. If one is not benevolent to oneself, what good can he be to others? Therefore he who follows along with his own nature and life and lets them take their course will be able to reach to [and benefit] others; he will reach to others and yet not encumber himself; self and other will be unified in spontaneously getting [to be what they are], and this can be called Good.112

This “Good” is simply self-rightness, each entity’s unconscious becoming what it is without deliberately trying, forgetting itself in its comfortable match with its own momentary determinacy. There is a certain optimism here that we may feel is predicated on a belief in a kind of preestablished harmony to the universe. Guo seems to feel that if each will do only what it does and not interfere with others, everything will go smoothly. Guo’s justifications for this point of view, which we will examine in more detail later on, involve an invocation of a metaphor of the relation of

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parts within a living organism and also, as we have a hint of here, the concept of sameness, and hence harmony, through the unitary fact of so-being, by which each thing is its own (different) self. Inherent in this conception is a notion of a kind of inner tendency of all individual entities subjectively to pursue their own unconscious directions through their own instincts, motivated purely naturalistically, and this self-transformation comprises their harmony and improvement of a sort. Guo says for example,“All in the world do not wish to be ‘bad’ [ugly, evil, etc.]. If they do become bad, some are forced into hard labor, some become confused and lose [sight of ] their nature/determinacy. But those who are confused naturally think of returning, and those who are bad naturally think of improving; thus I do nothing and the world self-transforms.”113 Although such statements are not common in Guo Xiang, they do perhaps point to a residual Mencian-type belief in an inborn tendency of all things to move in a particular direction, i.e., away from states that cause them pain and confusion, although not a belief in a special tendency of this kind for each particular class of things, which would be the “nature” of that class. Still, it should be remembered that, like Wang Chong before him, Guo’s optimism, like his “fatalism,” is such as to include also all the necessary periods of decay and imperfection as an inherent part of the perfection of nature. Both life and death are equally “right,” equally self-so, equally necessary—as are both success and failure, good and evil, and so on. As Guo puts it, “Heaven and Earth,Yin and Yang, these are born in relation to one another; right and wrong, order and disorder, these have their being in mutual dependence—how could any of them be excised?”114 The trouble of mutual entanglement is itself a part of spontaneity:“Beings with form spontaneously (ziran) interact with one another so as to fetter one another (xiang yu wei lei).”115 It is this total process of inevitable fetters of mutual entanglement, trouble and resolution and trouble, that Guo judges to be good, and which he holds should be left to itself, to self-transform. For left to itself, even with all its failure and evil and death, it is able at times also to produce success and good and life, and this is sufficient.To force these “positive” things beyond their measure merely falsifies them; it is better to leave them in their natural state, where they appear inevitably in the company of their opposites, than to try deliberately to create only the good sides, for not only is this endeavor ultimately doomed to failure, but moreover the process of conscious volition toward cognitively apprehended aims, in Guo’s view, leads to the falsification of even the good things that the world naturally produces, i.e., the loss of what made them be perceived as good in the first place, which is to say, their selfrightness. In this Guo stands squarely in the tradition of earlier Taoist thought. The third problem with traces is that they invite esteem and hence imitation, falsification, and the loss of spontaneity. That is to say, traces give rise to values, i.e., conceptions of what is good and what is bad, what is desirable and what is not. For Guo Xiang, as for Zhuangzi and Laozi, this is a most disastrous development.This brings us to a discussion of Guo’s value relativism. Su Xinwu holds that Guo Xiang has somewhat misapprehended Zhuangzi’s notion of rel-

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ativism as explicated in the second chapter of the work; while both are committed relativists, Su says, their justifications for this relativism differ. Guo Xiang derives relativity of values from the relational nature of all perspectives and propositions (“this” and “that”), where different predicates can be attached to a thing from different perspectives, whereas Zhuangzi derives it from the process of constant becoming, whereby everything is constantly changing into something else, and hence nothing can be absolutely or definitively predicated of it.116 But if we recall that for Guo Xiang, “this” and “that” can refer not only to different perspectives in a static relationship, but also to two moments in time, this difference vanishes. Guo’s relational relativism applies to the relation between any two moments as much as to that between any two perspectives. Two moments are in fact two perspectives, and the mutual impenetrability, as well as the mutual interfusion, that apply to any two creatures applies equally to every moment of every creature: Time does not stop for an instant, and the present is not preserved; thus yesterday’s dream transforms [into something other] today. How could the transformations of life and death be any different from this, such that one would be warranted in laboring one’s mind [choosing] between them? As soon as one becomes this, one no longer knows that; this is the case of dreaming to be a butterfly. As for human beings, within one lifetime, the present does not know the future; this is the case of Lady Li.And yet the ignorant illegitimately assume that they know that life is worth delighting in and death is worth despairing over; they haven’t yet understood the meaning of the transformation of things.117

Here we see that flux involves the perpetual change of perspectives, which in turn implies a thoroughgoing relativism or agnosticism with respect to values. Each perspective necessarily has its own self-rightness, which cannot be applied to any other perspective; to value the determinacy of one moment over others is to subordinate other moments and perspectives to this one, and hence destroy their own spontaneities, as we saw above. The problem for Guo is not that the world has false values so much as that it has any cognitive values at all; values (i.e., the conscious esteeming of one thing as inherently more worthy than another) are necessarily pernicious. These values spring out of cognizing something or someone as external to ourselves and wishing to make ourselves like that external thing or person, and believing this can be accomplished through such conscious volition. The third danger of traces, especially the particularly impressive traces of the sages’ nonaction, lies in their ability to be made the objects of valuation. “These errors all arise because traces invite esteem,” says Guo, summarizing the ills of the world complained of in the “Horses Hooves” chapter.118 Guo’s general principle is that “When something beautiful [i.e., good, attractive] is produced in front, falsification is born behind; thus all completed beauty [or good] is an instrument of evil.”119

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In other words, when something pleasant or good comes to light, it leads to esteem and hence imitation. But this goodness itself was spontaneous; it was not produced by conscious intention to create goodness, or any other cognitive aim.To try to do it deliberately, owing esteem and imitation, is mere falsification, and ruins the original spontaneity that was the true source of its beauty. The world’s ills derive from this source, and it is no different with the individual: “If one wishes to nurture his life and keep his inner [self] intact, the only way is to have nothing one emulates or attaches importance to.”120 But why is this? What is so terrible about values? In Guo’s view, this is a type of interaction among entities that inherently tends to pervert what they are spontaneously; when “this” reflects onto “that” cognitively and sees something it wishes to be like, or conversely, when “that” decides that it must make “this” like itself, the original spontaneous determinacies of each of them, their self-rightnesses as they were in that moment, is perverted.Very emphatically implied in this is the preservation of all the differences among entities, and indeed, even of what some might call their peculiarities and eccentricities: The long have no excess, the short have no insufficiency. Thus webbed toes and warts come from the body’s determinacy/nature; they are not superfluities dependent on external things.Thus both those with webbed toes and without are each sufficient in their own determinacies. It is only because this webbed toe or extra finger is different from what is possessed by the majority that the text calls it “superfluous.” But the deluded perhaps will say these do not come from his nature/determinacy, and thus desire to cut them off and discard them; this would be to hold that the Tao has that which it does not maintain, that its Power has that which it does not support, and there are worthless people and useless things—how could this be the idea behind perfect order? Things can be large or small, abilities may be many or few; to be big is just like a webbed toe, to have much ability is just like a wart; all things have their different determinacies [just like] these webbed toes and warts; if one does not let them alone to do what they do, this is equivalent to discarding the nature/determinacy of all the ten thousand things.121

This passage indicates, much more unequivocally than the Zhuangzi passage on which it is a comment, that there is no normative or Mencian dimension to the content of xing for Guo that would cover all the members of any species or class; whatever is manifest, whatever determinacy one has at the given moment, is one’s self-right xing, and is sufficient unto itself, however bizarre or “abnormal” it may be with respect to the characteristics of others. But as we shall see below, Guo’s distinctive conceptions of oneness are such that this unrelenting persistence of individual differences is not considered an obstacle to their oneness. Guo says elsewhere: . . . Each thing has its set determinacy; thus those endowed with much have no excess and those endowed with little have no insufficiency. But the dissi-

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pations of emotional desires never fail to disparage the little and value the much; seeing the valuable, they artificially try to copy it, thereby exceeding their own original function and harassing their self-so determinacy. If they could forget what they value and preserve their pure simple allotment, they would not exceed their determinacy and all the different endowments would be complete.122

This forgetting of otherness, and hence of value, is one of the foundations of Guo’s worldview. Guo says,“Blame and praise are all born from insufficiency. Thus he who is perfectly sufficient [in his own determinacy] forgets good and evil, discards death and life, becomes one with change and transformation— vastly, there is nowhere he does not fit, nowhere he is not comfortable. How could he know wherein reside [virtuous] Yao or [evil] Jie?”123 Thus total sufficiency within one’s own determinacy precludes cognizing other determinacies as worthy of esteem or censure. Again, we must be careful not to misunderstand here; Guo is emphatically not saying one’s “determinacy” ( fen, xing, ji) is absolutely fixed, and must never change.124 His insistence on “set determinacy” (ding fen) means rather that one’s determinations of a given moment are simply what they are and cannot be otherwise in that moment; indeed, it is inevitable that one’s determination will change, but wherever one is, one will be only there. Hence in speaking of Zhuangzi’s transformation into a butterfly in a dream, Guo says,“The difference ( fen) between waking and dreaming is no different from the distinction between life and death.The reason he could be ‘selfassured and doing as he pleased’ [in both cases, as Zhuang Zhou and as the butterfly] was that the determinate differences [between them] are set ( fen ding), not because there is no difference.”125 The change between life and death, and the transformation of consciousness from dreams to waking, are here characterized as ding fen , set determinacies; hence it is clear that this term refers only to the existence of distinctions and determinations at any and all times, not that the same determinations must always persist. Indeed, to stress this point once again, the latter notion would be utterly at odds with Guo’s entire concept of the flux of the world, the dangers of persistent historical traces, and the importance of “lone-transformation,” (duhua), the pinnacle of Guo’s thought. It is not change then that is objected to here; it is rather deliberate change, change motivated by a cognitive evaluation, teleological action, predicated on the apprehension of traces. Althogh ultimately, as we saw above, this type of action is itself, at another level of abstraction, selfso, self-right, and self-forgetting (in that we know without knowing how to know, etc.), it nonetheless has the result of leading to imitation and aritifice, and obstructs the self-so functioning of spontaneous change, from which all the various determinations we have hitherto enjoyed have sprung. Hence Guo here makes a pragmatic value judgment: we should learn to ignore these traces (which however must inevitably exist), since they interfere with our own selfrightness.126 This loss of self-rightness, the source of all genuine Goodness,

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springs from imitating others, for “if we imitate them we lose ourselves. . . . The great distress of the world is the loss of oneself.”127 It should be remembered, however, that this does not mean fortifying oneself and excluding all others; as we shall see in examining Guo’s elusive notions of the self, and its merging and “vanishing into” things, just the opposite is implied here.We will recall that self-so means reliance on nothing, not even on oneself or on the Tao. The self that is not to be lost here is this same self(-so), not any one determinate self that has already been performed thereby. It is for this reason that Livia Knaul speaks of zi as Guo Xiang’s word for the “true self,” and ji, wo, etc., as his words for the “false self.”128 For zi is actually not a self at all, nor even a substance, or for that matter even a noun; it is merely an adverb, meaning “self-”, “spontaneously.” “Spontaneously” is the true self. All other selves ( ji, wo, wu, etc.), if they are nouns, actual or abiding entities, are merely traces. This warning about valuing, be it noted, applies equally whether the object is oneself or others; it is just as dangerous to try to be like yourself as to try to be like anyone else, since as we saw, “oneself,” apprehended cognitively, is as much an outsider to one’s spontaneity of this moment as everyone else. At best it was one’s spontaneity of a previous moment, which cannot but be foreign to this present moment.Yao is not one with Yao, and the “oneself ” one would be trying to be like would in fact only be one’s own past traces, which would obstruct one’s new spontaneity as much as any other imitated traces. Guo objects to value in general, not only to finite or conflicting particular values. He does not advocate positing a true overriding value above them all, and urging us to value, for example, the Tao, thereby eradicating all the conflicting relative values. On the contrary, valuing the Tao is just as dangerous as valuing anything else. “The Tao doesn’t value, and hence it can maintain the world. But when the world is maintained [by the Tao], it values it [the Tao], and once it is valued, the Tao is lost. But the Tao can’t make the world not value it, nor can the world refrain from valuing the Tao, and thus they lose each other.”129 Conscious valuation of any kind is problematic. Valuation is something that emerges when two things relate to each other, or when one thing relates to itself cognitively (i.e., in the form of otherness, which is to say, as traces). Something sees and cognizes another, and compares what it sees to what it is, and from this comparison emerges valuation; the thing wishes to be like the other, and hence wills to be other than it is. All knowing deals only with traces, with this “otherness,” this potentially emulation-inspiring form that invites teleological volition. But this accomplishes only falsification and loss of one’s original nature. In short, nothing positive ever comes from knowing; the attainment of anything genuine always comes only from our own self-so selfright, self-forgetting momentary determinacy. This then is Guo’s conception of traces. They are the reflection of self-so self-rightness as it manifested in one particular moment and place, which when perceived externally (i.e., as unfit and uncomfortable), constitute cognition, and are clung to as adequate representations of the spontaneity itself. They are then

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valued and imitated, giving rise to the false belief that this imitation, this deliberate teleological activity, can actually accomplish results comparable to what is being imitated, the self-forgetting self-so self-rightness that left the traces. In this way one moment or perspective comes to pervert the self-right spontaneity of another moment or perspective.All interactions between entities by means of traces lead to these dangers. In themselves the traces seem never to have anything but a negative function in Guo’s writings.130

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Interactivity Without Traces: “Vanishing (Into) Things”

uo’s repudiation of mutual conscious apprehension does not mean however that all interaction between entities is to be ruled out. On the contrary, Guo Xiang introduces an alternate way for things to interact, the way the sage interacts with whatever he encounters, in opposition to knowing, which deals only with traces.This is ming.The literal meaning of this word is “dark,” and we have encountered it in its nominal sense before, contrasted to traces.This sense of the term is closely associated with Guo’s understanding of wu, Non-Being as literally nothing, as a marker for the lack of metaphysical interference and the inapplicability of the category of causality. Guo says for example, “This shows that there is no thing that makes things as they are, but rather that things spontaneously become what they are. Because they spontaneously become what they are, [the process] is [called a] darkness (ming).”1 But through most of the commentary, Guo uses ming as a verb; typically, one mings with things, with transformations, with what one encounters, with the determinacies of things or even with one’s own determinacy. In this sense too it is fundamentally contrasted to traces: the divine man “mings with things and is traceless.”2 To ming with something is, at the most immediate level, to ignore its traces, and to allow it to leave no traces on oneself. It is interesting to note that this word is the strict antonym to ming ( ) meaning brightness, or understanding, although they were in Guo’s time already very close in sound.3 This minging with things is a way of relating to them without the mediation of traces, and hence is precisely the opposite of the tracecognitive understanding denoted by the ming for brightness. Yet their similar pronunciations suggests a close relation between them, or at least a kind of ironic reference from one to the other. Wang Deyou gives an elaborate justification for glossing this term, as used by Guo Xiang, to mean “join” or “match,”4 and Wing Tsit-chan translates it in passing (without offering any particular jus-

G

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tification) as “silent harmonizing.”5 Both these glosses are accurate and helpful: it is clear from context, as Wang exhaustively illustrates, that the basic meaning of the term is “to join with,” or, perhaps more strongly, “to merge with”; and Chan’s notion of “silent harmony” is perhaps to be commended for suggesting a kind of paradox, which captures something of the sense of Guo’s usage. However, neither of these interpretations preserves the original sense of darkness, nor the implicit contrast with cognition, both of which are crucial for an understanding of Guo’s meaning. Guo states plainly: “Whatever is attained [or comes to be so], but not through knowledge, is ming.”6 The term thus implies both a “dimming” and “darkening” of the perceived object, and a “dimming” or “darkening” of oneself, one’s own identity, into that thing. To preserve this double meaning, we might translate the term directly as “dimming (into) things.” But to further suggest the radicality of Guo’s meaning, which implies the complete disappearance of the trace-identity of both self and object into the self-so of Non-Being, we will henceforth call this process of darkening, merging, joining, trace-ignoring, and harmonizing “vanishing (into) things.”The grammatically impossible transitive sense of the verb “to vanish” is meant to remain alive here: the term means both “to make the things vanish,” and “to vanish into the things.” This term is meant to suggest something of the sense of a border between things that is then passed over and thereby effectively obliterated, joining the two formerly separate entities, an overcoming of the dichotomy between the self and things,7 and the sense of darkness or forgetting, the eradication of cognition.8 The one occurrence of a verbal usage of the word ming in the Zhuangzi itself is worth remembering here as well, as another contribution to the resonances and implications of the term.This appears in the thirty-second chapter: “The perfect man returns his essence and spirit to the beginingless and takes a pleasant slumber (gan ming ) in the village of Nothing At All.”9 The term ming here is glossed as a loan for ming , with the eye radical, “to close the eyes,” and interpreted as sleep, in accord with the similar passage at the end of Chapter One. This connotation would seem to militate further for preserving the sense of unconsciousness or cognitive oblivion in our understanding of this word. It is in all senses the opposite subjective attitude toward other things to that described in the previous section, the concern with trace-cognition. Just as “self-so,” as that which leaves the traces, was considered as it were the descriptive opposite of traces, vanishing (into) things will be the subjective and prescriptive opposite of concern with these traces. It is a darkening of traces, combined with an accepting of all encountered contents as one’s own self, i.e., one’s own self-so, one’s own self-forgetting body, such that both self and other disappear as forms of trace-determinacy. Hence I beg to be excused for the peculiar and imprecise equivalent, “vanishing (into) things.” Let us try to get a “clearer” idea of the content of this concept. Guo says: When one draws lines on the ground and makes others follow them, these are traces that cannot be hidden again. If one possesses a self (you ji ) and

  : “ () ”

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faces objects [with it], one cannot vanish (into) things. Thus the great man does not brighten (ming ) himself so as to shed light on others; rather, he lets the others’ own light illuminate themselves. He does not confront others [displaying] his own virtues, but gives it over to them to attain their own virtues. Thus he can thread one unity through the ten thousand things and obliquely unify (xuantong ) other and self, obliteratingly (minran ) becoming one with all under heaven and joining inner and outer into one felicity.10

Many things are to be noted about this passage.Vanishing (into) things is said here to be made impossible by “having a self,” that is, a particular set of values or a fixed set of characteristics constituting one’s identity, that one wishes to inflict on others, or for that matter, on oneself. For Guo the latter is simply a case of imitating one’s own past traces, believing that one’s identity rests in this one content and no other. Guo has much to say elsewhere about the consequences of having a self in this sense, which will shed some light on the opposed concept of vanishing (into) things. Guo says, “if one has a self ( ji) it is impossible to achieve the great oneness,”11 and again,“If one cannot be empty of self (xu ji) in one’s interaction with things, every affair will fail to hit the mark.”12 More explicitly, Guo relates vanishing (into) things and this sort of self as follows: “That which people cannot forget is their selves ( ji). But when one is able to forget even this self, what will he still cognize? At this point one will know nothing and cognize nothing, but rather vanish into the self-so.”13 This suggests that this self is the most deeply ingrained of all objects of cognition; it is to be stressed that it too is an object, something known, the closest and most stubborn of all objects, which is to say, of all traces. The self in this sense is a trace like any external object, and is not itself the self-so spontaneity of knowing and doing. Its dangers are the same dangers possessed by traces in general: it is fixed, left inadvertantly by something extrinsic, invites cognition of itself as an object, and has a tendency to be taken normatively, i.e., as a fixed determinate content that one must value, preserve, and imitate. Thus the eradication of the self is only a special case of the general eradication of trace-cognition, or rather the most difficult case of this eradication. Once this is achieved, cognition has been conquered, and vanishing (into) the traceless self-so of things can begin. This vanishing (into) things is a darkness, as we saw above, and is the opposite of “shedding one’s own light on others,” that is, reflecting one’s own qualities onto others.Also implied in this light imagery is the idea of knowing and being known by others cognitively, of bridging the gap between self and other in that particular way. Guo says elsewhere, “If one illuminates (ming) ‘this’ in terms of ‘that,’ both ‘this’ and ‘that’ will lose [their true self-rightness].”14 When two things relate to each other by means of cognitive illumination, the opposite of vanishing into each other, they are distorted by their mutual relativity; their qualities are merely reflections of their comparisons to one another and to the observing subject.Therefore “the sage does not manifest ‘this’ to illuminate ‘that,’ does not renounce himself ( ji) to run after external things; rather he follows

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along and allows them to be as they are, so that each vanishes into its own ability.”15 This means that two perspectives and entities are not to be allowed to pervert each other by means of their cognitively apprehended traces, as discussed above. This explains the initially surprising positive reference to the self, which is not to be abandoned in a pursuit of external things.This is because both oneself and the things are to be left in their uncognized solitude, free of the reflections and comparisons to other things that they would have if made objects of relative knowledge, which would lead to values and imitation, as discussed above. Two other words in the long passage quoted above are closely related to ming, and are often used either parallel to or occasionally interchangably with it. These are xuan and min. We saw earlier that ming was in fact used by Wang Bi as a gloss on xuan, and the root meanings of both of these words denote “darkness”; both terms come to be used in the “Dark/Abstruse Learning” (xuanxue) to signify mystery and profundity. The compound xuantong, which I have translated as “oblique unity,” is also used often by Guo Xiang, very often with reference to self and other, or to “this” and “that.” In one rather important application of this idea, Guo says,“All things consider themselves ‘this,’ thus none are not this. Things all consider each other ‘that,’ so none are not that. Since none are not that, there is no ‘this’ in the world; since none are not this, there is not ‘that’ in the world. Thus there is no this or that, no self or other; this is whereby [self and other, etc.] obliquely unify.”16 This is the analytic side of Guo’s conception of oneness, which will be discussed in more detail below in relation to the other aspects of oneness to which it does and does not relate. But it seems to me that the notion of oblique unity as explained here, i.e., the forgetting of the cognitive categories of otherness, comes very close to spelling out the meaning of vanishing (into) things: it is the “oblique (dark) oneness of self and other.”This oneness is an “oblique joining beyond the realms of seeing and hearing,”17 but this does not place it in the intelligible realm of thought or even intuitive ecstacy, as it might for mystics elsewhere in the world; rather it is a oneness “darkened” to cognition, and to feeling as well.To be more precise, it is a oneness that resides precisely in our lack of cognition of any oneness, in our immediate experience of empirical multiplicity and individuality, our forgetting of the totality and complete merging into our own distinctness, as we shall discuss in more detail below. This lack of cognition is denoted with the word xuan, and the oneness thereby implied by the word tong. Together, they approximately equal the meaning of ming, the word for dark joining, vanishing (into) things, a oneness that is “dark” not only in that it is the antithesis of tracecognition, but also in that it is nonobvious: it is not a oneness of explicitly related or identical contents, but rather a oneness accomplished precisely because all the terms are completely different from one another, each comfortable in being its own self-rightness in whatever it changes into, and forgetting all the others, as will be explained below. The word min is close to ming both phonetically and in meaning,18 and adds an important dimension to or understanding of the implications of van-

  : “ () ”



ishing (into) things; its literal meaning is “destruction,” and it implies that when vanishing (into) things occurs, something is obliterated.This adds a radical and almost violent connotation to our term. What is obliterated? Guo glosses the Zhuangzi’s “join in great unity with the vast and boundless [ming (with the water radical), another cognate term, meaning “vast”],” with a phrase gramatically very similar to his frequent refrain about vanishing (into) things:“[He has] no border with things.”19 I believe this is meant to resonate with Guo’s notion of vanishing (into) things, and tells us what is obliterated therein: the borders between things. The contrast is drawn more explicitly elsewhere: “When things have borders, then whenever they are together they will yet be unable to vanish (into) one another.”20 Vanishing (into) things then is the obliteration of borders, which is to say, the mutual externality of things. But we have already discussed Guo’s word for things seen as mutually external: traces. And sure enough, Guo uses min in just this sense, as the antithesis to traces: “Letting things [do as they do] and not helping them along, root and branch, inner and outer will all attain [themselves] without obstruction, obliteratingly (minran) free of traces.”21 This then is the type of mutual interaction of which Guo approves; not mutual knowing, the shedding of cognitive light back and forth based on traces and mutual externality, but rather vanishing (into) things, the opposite of knowing. Hence we find Guo speaking of “vanishingly (mingran) forming a oneness with Creation (zaohua),”22 “vanishingly forming a oneness with one’s own times,”23 “vanishingly embodying all things (mingran wu bu ti ye),”24 and we now have an idea what he means by this. To vanish (into) things is to forget the traces of things (including “oneself ”), to forget one’s differences from them, to correspond with them so that no borders between them and oneself persist, to consider their content, as one encounters it, to be one’s own content for that moment. Hence it is not surprising to find the term associated with “oneness” of various kinds. But we must pause here to point out that this type of oneness is contrasted with another type of oneness of which Guo does not approve. “None know how to return to oneness by extinguishing the traces; instead, they chase after the traces in an attempt to seek oneness. But the more traces they get, the more they lose oneness; this is a great error. Even if they arise to illuminate it [the oneness], put forth words to express it, manifest cognition to reveal it, how could it lead to [the Tao and the world] establishing each other? It will only make them lose each other.”25 We may interpret this as an attack on a oneness effected through the unification of determinate characteristics (i.e., oneness defined as the possession of identical characteristics, a rational and deliberate conscious assembly of the particular characteristics of things into some sort of overriding wholeness or oneness). This would be merely to inflict the characteristics of one on the other, to shed light, to esteem and value. Guo says,“Some creatures are unable to be spontaneously aware of the oneness and thus make ‘this’ run after ‘that’ [i.e., subordinate or compare one thing to another], and thus they



 

speak of ‘oneness’ to set the situation right. But as soon as they have called it ‘one,’ it is merely speech [and not true oneness].”26 This is not the oneness of vanishing (into) things. “To unify things is not as good as not unifying them and letting them self-equalize; this is to forget their oneness.”27 It is to be noted that Guo is making an effort to avoid prescribing values here, lest he fall into contradiction with his own repudiation of such values: he is not saying “get rid of values,” but rather “when X happens, values will fall away of themselves.” The sage doesn’t do anything deliberately; he doesn’t even deliberately avoid value-laden deliberate action; it is just self-so for him. This is how Guo presents his position; whether or not he actually succeeds in avoiding putting forth prescriptive values by this maneuver, given that he is writing anything at all, will be discussed at the end of this book. But what is this “self-equalization”? Does it mean that they spontaneously come to share their determinate characteristics, or some set thereof? Only in a very attenuated sense; it means that each spontaneously remains what it is, different from all the others, and in this lies their oneness. Guo says, “He who unifies things is no different from that [i.e., the state of diversity]; but he who forgets unity says nothing and is spontaneously in the unity.”28 It is of the nature of things to differ, and they should not be made uniform. On the contrary, the distinctions between things are to be preserved, and it is precisely through this preservation of differences that the oneness is achieved.This will become clearer in our full discussion oneness and lone-tranformation below. For the moment, let us simply note that this oneness is a result of precisely the differences between things, their different allotments and determinacies. For the object of vanishing (into) things, when it is not “things” in general, indicating the achievement of a traceless oneness or transformation, is usually allotment or determinacy or limit ( fen, xing, ji ). At first sight the meaning of vanishing (into) things here may seem a bit more difficult to understand; but really it is the crux of Guo’s notion of oneness within difference. Guo tells us: Although the conditions of life and death are different, in that both the living and the dead rest in what they have encountered [i.e., each is comfortable and self-forgetting in being what they have found themselves being at this moment, ge an qi yu ], they are one. . . . Thus the differences between the Ruists and the Mohists are something I cannot make the same; but the fact that each vanishes into his determinacy (ge ming qi fen ) is something I cannot make different between them.29

This last phrase, each vanishes into its determinacy, is a frequent and very important refrain of Guo Xiang’s. It is vanishing (into) things because there is no self left over above and beyond one’s determinacy of this moment; one does not cognize and emulate other determinacies, even those of one’s own past “self,” and as it were, superimpose them on this present determinacy, thereby evaluating it, and preserving a consciousness of what is outside this moment’s determinacy. All such cognition vanishes into this determinacy, which is simply

  : “ () ”



forgetting oneself in the self-rightness of whatever content is encountered (yu) in this moment. Indeed, one does not even cognize and “emulate” this present determinacy; when one vanishes into it, it vanishes as well, in that it is no longer a determinate something set up as an object or standard to which some other determinate thing, the self, must accord.What is left is the darkness of the selfso, the self-forgetting fitness that is for Guo Xiang the only real “self.” The oneness of things resides in each vanishing in this way with its own momentary determinacy. They are the same in that each is different from the others by being what it is right now. The unity of self and other is precisely this: the difference of self and other. Guo says, “To affirm one’s own perspective and deny that of the other, to praise oneself and defame others—there is no thing which does not do this.Thus, although what they affirm and deny are different, self and other are equal [in this].”30 This attitude toward sameness and difference is one of Guo’s most distinctive and oft-used solutions to the problem of unity and multiplicity, alluded to briefly above but spelled out in more detail in the following passage: Although they all consider different things beautiful [and good], they all consider something beautiful [and good]. Each considers good what it considers good, thus all things share one goodness. All affirm what they consider affirmable, hence all the world shares one affirmation. . . . If one darkly penetrates and obliteratingly joins [with things], one will follow along with the world to illuminate the world. None in the world say “I am wrong,” which shows that there are none in the world who are wrong. None say “The others are right,” which shows that none are right. Having no right and no wrong, blending them into oneness, we can ride on the transformations and allow the changes to proceed, encountering all things without fear.31

What this all amounts to is an assertion of the oneness of oneness and diversity, and the ultimate reason for this is that they are all self-so. As Guo says elsewhere, “the silence of the abyss and the flow of the water, the movement of heaven and the stillness of earth are all one in that they do not deliberately act but are rather self-so.”32 To be self-so is to be oneself, which is to be other than others; the movement of heaven is like the stillness of earth in that each is not the other. Their oneness is in their difference from each other. Moreover, it should be recalled that, as we noted earlier, the Chinese for “self-so” means equally “self-right.” Hence Guo tells us, “Things are all self-so (ziran), thus and so without knowing why or how they are thus and so, and hence the more different they are in form, the more the same they are in each being ‘thus’ [or right, ran].”33 The individual perspectives and determinacies, the affirmations and negations of particular things are not obliterated in this oneness. Only their exclusivity or mutual externality, their cognitive form, that is, their traces, are denied: “The reasons the tendencies of things differ—how could it be that they first know difference and then endeavor to be different? They all do not know how or why they are so, and are self-so.”34



 

It is to be noted that an implicit distinction is being drawn here between what we referred to above as “valuation” and this implicit self-rightness. Each thing, it would seem, does have what we might call its own unconscious “values” implicit in itself at any moment (i.e., its own self-rightness). In each moment it has its own tendencies, has some things it likes and affirms, and others it dislikes and denies. But this is not what Guo means by valuation in the pejorative sense. The difference again lies in whether it is accompanied by the cognition of thirds or vanishing (into) things. Intuitive or uncognized values, what we might call descriptive rather than prescriptive value, simple expressions of the determinacy one is at a given time as expressed in one’s spontaneous attractions and avoidances, far from being stigmatized, is self-rightness. Broadly speaking, this is what Guo calls “affirming oneself (or being self-right) and negating the other (or not being the other)” (ziran er xiang fei), i.e., being self-right, a characteristic all entities share in being themselves. Cognitive values are derived from the apprehension of the traces of things, and are reflexively prescriptive. One intentionally tries to apply them to the determinacy one is, as an alien standard derived from a desire to emulate the traces of something external.The opposition between self and other is preserved in the cognitive form here, and the “that” is taken out of its original determinacy and forced onto “this,” thus creating opposition.The spontaneous and inherent self-rightness of each entity in comfortably being what it is and forgetting itself, on the other hand, leaves each within its own determinacy, and all are one in this: “Each thing is self-so, not knowing how or why it is so, and thus although their forms are ever more different, their being-so is ever more the identical.”35 Hence there need be no imposition of one affirmation on another; each remains what it is, within its own determinacy, and thus there is no opposition between them.“This and that are opposed to each other (xiang dui ), but the sage follows along with both (liang shun zhi ). Thus he who has no deliberate mind vanishes (into) things, and thus [for him] there has never been any opposite (dui) under heaven.”36 The sage sees every “this” and every “that” affirming itself and denying each of its others, and considers both sides right, since indeed both are doing exactly the same thing. Thus he allows them to go on being what they are, which being is their comfortable fit in being so, their self-forgetting, and thus their implicit affirmation of themselves, their self-rightness. Herein lies their identity and the coexisting rightness of all their mutually opposed perspectives. Vanishing (into) things lies in merging one’s sense of identity completely into whatever determinacy things happen to have, not in inflicting one’s own determinacy on them or doing away with their determinacy in some other way. Guo says: What [Zhuangzi] calls leveling (qi)—why should it require making their forms and shapes uniform, all matching the same compass and T-square? Thus vertical and horizontal, ugly and beautiful, things ribald and shady and grotesque and strange, each affirms what it affirms (ge ran qi suo ran), each considers

  : “ () ”



acceptable what it considers acceptable, and thus although there are a thousand differences between their various principles (li), they are one in attaining and being right in their own determinacies (xing tong de), thus (the text) says, “The Tao unifies them all.”37

The Tao for Guo Xiang is simply nothing, simply the allowance of all things to be what they are, and it is precisely this that unifies all things. Again, the sage is like the Tao in this, and by also having no particular self, he also makes them one in their differences: The sage has no self. . . . Thus he penetrates all things, ribald and shady and grotesque and strange as they are, and makes them one; he lets all their differences each rest in what it rests in, and all the different people not lose what they affirm. Thus he does not use his self ( ji) on things, but lets all the ten thousand things use their own uses on themselves. When all things use their own uses, which is right and which is wrong?! Thus even the perversions of dissipation, the strange and twisted differences of things are curvingly followed along with and given over to their own uses. Hence although their are ten thousand differences among their uses, each illuminates itself in perfect distinctiveness.38

This is both to transcend right and wrong and to preserve the right and wrong of each of the various determinacies or perspectives. The sage “sublates” the rights and wrongs of all things; he is beyond them without obliterating them. Thus, as Guo puts it, “He goes along with the rights and wrongs of the world, and lets them be what they are (ren tianxia zhi shifei ).”39 This is why Guo speaks of vanishing (into) the determinacy of things as the means for achieving a true form of oneness: The determinacy endowed to each has its limits. . . . when one lifts heavy weights and carries light things without disturbance to his spirit and energy, this is limited [i.e., determined] by one’s strength. But those who esteem reputation and love victory will break their backs [straining to lift what is heavier than they can lift] and still this does not satisfy their wish; such is the limitlessness of cognition.Thus the term “cognition” is born out of a loss of proper match, but it is destroyed in vanishing (into) the ultimate limits (ming ji) [of one’s present determinacy].Vanishing (into) the ultimate limits means to allow one’s utmost determinacy to run its course while adding not the slightest fraction of an ounce to it. For this reason, even if one bears ten thousand pounds, if this matches one’s capacity, then inattentively one will not cognize any weight on his body; although responding to ten thousand impeti, vanishingly one will not be aware of any imposition on oneself.This is the secret of nourishing life.40

This passage is important in that it delineates the connections between vanishing (into) things, determinacy and knowing very clearly. For we are here told that knowing (i.e., attention, awareness) appears only when one fails to vanish



 

into one’s own determinacy, or in other words, when one does things that do not accord with one’s innate capacity at that moment (i.e., the momentum of that moment’s transformations, the direction of whatever is encountered).This connotation of knowing is to be borne in mind throughout Guo’s anticognition polemics; indeed, as we noted above in introducing Guo’s notion of selfrightness, it is an old Taoist principle that awareness of something indicates that something is wrong with it, suggested by common and probably psychologically very significant experiences relevant to understanding the nature of attention. We already quoted the locus classicus of this idea in the Zhuangzi: To forget the feet indicates the fitness [or comfort] of the shoes; to forget the waist indicates the fitness of the belt; when consciousness forgets right and wrong it indicates the fitness of the mind. . . . He who begins in fitness and comfortableness and is never unfit or uncomfortable is he who has forgotten even the fitness of fitness, the comfort of comfort.41

We should also recall Guo’s remarks on this: “When all the parts of the body are fit and comfortable (shi ), one forgets his body. . . . Right and wrong are born from unfitness, discomfort. . . . He who still has consciousness of comfort is not yet really comfortable.” Consciousness of anything indicates a lack of fitness; more specifically, for Guo, a failure to vanish into one’s determinacy, to be precisely what one is at any moment and nothing more or less. Cognition indicates that one has attempted to step outside one’s own determinacy, gone against one’s innate capacities, done things that didn’t suit one, that made one uncomfortable, called forth attention and consciousness, made vanishing (into) things impossible. Guo describes it thus: Although dwelling at the convergence of ten thousand situations, he is constantly at leisure and self-fit, comfortable in himself (zishi); unconsciously, he does not feel the affairs that pass through his person, muddledly, he is not aware of the words that are coming from his mouth. But because people are deluded, they say the perfect man is exerting himself to do these things.42

The perfect man acts without awareness of so acting, because he is perfectly fit to himself, completely vanished (into) his own determinacy, and imperturbed by any values or standards outside of that determinacy that he should strive to live up to. This is what is meant by “being fit and comfortable in one’s own determinacy (shixing).”43 But this determinacy is not some fixed inner essence that one is to be content with, one’s “true nature”; it is rather simply whatever one happens to encounter at any moment: “Whatever he encounters, he is fit and comfortable, and rests in it.”44 This fitness means that one forgets oneself and the other that one encounters as distinct entities related as subject and object. This forgetting is for Guo comparable to one’s attitude toward the various parts of one’s own body, which are likewise forgotten owing to their completely smooth suitability to themselves and to the whole. By forgetting the things one encounters, then, one is able to “form one body with things.”

  : “ () ”



It is to be stressed here again that this “determinacy” is quite emphatically the determinacy of one particular moment; it does not mean one should always lift the same weight, that one’s capacities are not to change. On the contrary, Guo states, “Although transforming and changing with no constancy (bianhua wuchang ), one remains deeply rooted in vanishing (into) one’s determinate limits.”45 One is to vanish into whatever one is at this moment. Indeed, this vanishing (into) things, this lack of consciousness, is in a way the very standard that reveals what is and is not our determinacy at this moment.What fits, what is comfortable and hence unconscious, is one’s proper determinate allotment at that moment. Guo’s motto here might be “No pain, no gain”; but this would be an expression of his ideal, not a caveat or spur to greater exertion. For Guo it would mean,“Don’t make yourself uncomfortable by trying to add something to this moment’s determinacy—for it will change of itself in due time.” The difference between “self-rightness” and “valuation” is nicely crystallized in Guo’s comment on Mozi as opposed to the latter’s hero, Yu. The Zhuangzi quotes Mozi as recounting the way Yu “labored” (lao) in person to drain the great flood. Guo remarks,“Mozi only saw the laboring of Yu’s person; he did not perceive the comfort/fitness of his nature/determinacy.”46 This is the difference between traces and what leaves the traces.Yu acted as he did because it perfectly suited his determinacy, his self-affirmation, his being the particular being he happened to be at that time. Since this was so, he had no special awareness that he was acting: it was comfortable. Mozi on the other hand looked at the way this other being,Yu, had once behaved, and, taking this as a model, set out to imitate it. Externally, it appeared that Yu was laboring—that is, going against the grain of his own comfort, hence conscious of his act, vexed, acting in order to reach a particular goal outside of his own being-so. Mozi thereby took this as his model, and likewise labored his body and spirit.Yu was a particular way, a determinate being; his being-so was an implicit affirmation of what he did, a liking of what suited him. Mozi however was valuing; seeing something outside himself, he endeavered to be like it. Moreover, he attributed valuation to Yu himself, assuming that he too was acting in a way that did not suit his own determinate self-so, and hence conscious of discomfort, laboring. Here we see the connection between “having no deliberate mind” (wu xin), vanishing (into) things and determinacy, and the importance this has for Guo in achieving the true oneness inherent in multiplicity per se.We have seen first of all that this process of vanishing (into) things implies the obliteration of mutual exclusivity and externality: “This and that are opposed to each other, but the sage follows along with both.Thus he has no deliberate mind and vanishes (into) things, and there has never been any opposition (dui) in the world.”47 Guo spells out the further implications of this cluster of ideas thus: If we oppose the forms of things to each other, then Mount Tai is larger than an autumn hair. But if each is considered to accord with its own determinacy (xing fen), and things vanish into their own limits, then what has a large form



 

is not excessive and what has a small form is not insufficient. If each is considered to find sufficiency in its own determinacy, then the autumn hair will not especially have to be considered small, nor will Mount Tai especially have to be considered large. If we can call finding sufficiency in one’s own determinacy’s “largeness,” there is nothing in the world any more sufficient [to its own determinacy] than an autumn hair [and hence nothing is larger]. If sufficiency to one’s determinacy is not to be considered largeness, then even Mount Tai can be called small. . . . Since [all things] find sufficiency in what is naturally so and rest in their determinacies and inner necessities, even heaven and earth are not to be considered long-lived, and hence they are “born together with me.” The ten thousand things are not to be considered different, and hence they attain [their being what they are] together with me.48

It is to be noted that the differences between things are denied here because of the vanishing of each thing (into) its own determinacy, which are all different. Because each one vanishes, it doesn’t cognize the traces of others outside itself as a basis of comparison, and hence does not give rise to cognitive values and judgments, saying “I am small and the other is large” or vice versa. This total vanishing (into) things with one’s own determinacy cuts off any comparative consciousness of difference. Guo picks this line of reasoning up later, in commenting on the parable of the Autumn Floods, and the vast differences in size among various bodies of water: The rhetorical tone here seems to suggest that the view of the vast can comprehend the small, but if we search the [real] meaning we find this is not so. The world’s worries [come from] inequality.Thus those whose bodies are vast dispiritedly declare “smallness is without excess!” Those whose substance is small isolatedly49 declare “vastness is perfect sufficiency!”Thus above and below struggle to emulate each other, and looking up and looking down they lose themselves (zishi); such is the confusion of the people. This confusion seeks rectification, and to rectify it there is nothing so good as first delineating their distinctions [or pushing their distinctions to the utmost, ji qi cha] and following along with what they respectively declare. It is declared that vastness is perfect sufficiency; thus an autumn hair is no different from heaven and earth. It is declared that smallness is without excess; thus heaven and earth do not go beyond an autumn hair. From this the confused have a way to return, each knows his own limits, things rest in their determinacy, and those who wander freely use their own gait and roam in the realm of self-rightness (zide).50

The solution here lies in taking the determinate differences as they are, and in fact following their own declarations. If perfect sufficiency is the definition of vastness, as the small declare, all things are vast, for all are perfectly sufficient unto themselves; if having no excess is smallness, as the large declare, all are small, for none exceed themselves. The differences are to be preserved, and in fact this is the means whereby oneness is achieved. Each is completely itself, and hence unaware of anything outside itself.

  : “ () ”



This may sound dangerously solipsistic, but that is not quite what is intended here. Guo says: If the vision does not go past what is seen, there is no eye that is not clearsighted. If listening does not go past what is heard, there is no ear that is not sharp. If tasks do not exceed abilities, there is no technique that is not skillful. If cognition does not go past what is cognized, there is no determinacy that is not comfortable and fitting. . . . What need is there to set up what one cannot reach outside each one’s own determinacy, and make the world go running after such things without return?51

By cognizing what falls outside one’s own determinacy and contrasting that determinacy with this one, values arise, and there ensue uncomfortable and unfitting deliberate attempts to become something else in particular. Change by means of cognition and teleological goals aiming to overcome one’s present determinacy is what is warned against, motivating values conceived as originating outside oneself: That longevity and knowledge differ so greatly is indeed, compared with the sorrows of the mass of men, something worth sorrowing over. But the mass of men have never sorrowed over this; this is because the determinacy of each has its limits. If they know their limits, they cannot overstep them by even a millimeter; hence what is there for the world to sorrow over? Things have never envied the small from the perspective of the great; they always envy the great from the perspective of the small. But the different magnitudes of things all have their set determinacies, and this is not something envy and desire can affect; thus the vexation of envy and desire can be eliminated.52

Things, before the advent of cognitively grasped traces, are ordinarily not bothered by this inequality because they literally cannot perceive it, since what they perceive is simply their own determinacy, within their own limits. There is a certain sense in which this implies an absolute solitariness, a complete monadic singularity, as we will see in considering Guo’s ideas of unconditionality and lone-transformation. One is alone within one’s own determinacy, transforming in solitude, and one’s universe is nothing but this process. However, this is not the whole story; there is still vanishing (into) things, and this is emphatically a kind of interaction, but one that avoids the above pitfalls and hence may seem almost to be no interaction at all.And yet Guo places great emphasis on following along with things, riding along with changes, responding to things. This is to be done, not by cognizing what they are, as other entities known through their traces, which one then deliberately acts in accordance with, making one’s own characteristics identical to theirs; this is just what Guo rails against as valuing the other and losing the self. On the contrary, what is wanted is unconscious, fit, vanishing “forming of one body with change,” where the transformations of things are seen as the transformations of one’s own determinacy, one’s duhua, a concept we will discuss in more detail



 

below. Things come along and one vanishes into them, that is, is comfortable in them and forgets them as one does one’s own body when it is functioning well, and hence, by taking them as nothing, takes them as oneself:“If one keeps his spirit intact and maintains his physical form while at the same time vanishing his substance (ti) into things, then although he may be involved in utter flux, it is never not himself.”53 Vanishing (into) things means positing one’s identity into the flux of things themselves, “defining” oneself as whatever one encounters, inasmuch as one is comfortable/fit in it, and hence unconscious of it as one is of parts of one’s own body, rather than preserving a fixed identity aloof from what one encounters. This is to be solitary and yet completely involved with changing external things, free from the cognizing of traces and yet constantly interacting, if we may still use the term, with things.This is transvanishing (into) things, and it allows us to understand how Guo can assert both that “everything is my self,” and “I have no self.” On the one hand,“Death and life, transformation and change, I ‘self ’ them all (wu jie wu zhi ). Since they are all my self, what can my self lose? . . . Since nothing is not my self, I can obliquely unify outer and inner, thread past and present on one string, daily renew with change; how could I know then where my ‘I’ is?”54 It is worth noting that ‘to self ’ is used as a verb here (i.e., to consider them all my self ). This is descriptive of a subjective psychological condition, almost an action; it is not a statement of an objective condition, for example, that in reality all things are one with me because we all share the same essence or substance. Identity is in this sense something posited, a relation in fact effected by human beings, reflecting an act of human consciousness, or more correctly, unconsciousness, for in Guo’s view, the result of positing the self in all it encounters is precisely the loss of consciousness of self. This is because Guo defines self as self-rightness, and self-rightness means self-forgetting. One’s unconscious and spontaneous activity is what is most throughly incorporated into him, what is most himself.The true sense of identity is to have no sense of identity, to forget one’s identity, to lose consciousness of one’s self in its perfect fitness and comfort. Once again the vanishing (into) things of consciousness is considered perfection, and hence Guo says above, “How then could I know where my ‘I’ is?” Here Guo places his identity in the present moment of flux. Hence there is no one determinate configuration that is he; he is defining himself as whatever determinate configuration is present in any given moment, to the extent that he is comfortable and hence forgetful in it. Guo states, “the past I is not the present I; I pass away together with the present moment; how could I constantly hold on to the old?”55 This is the familiar Taoist strategy of defeating transiency and change by changing. As Guo puts it, “If we take change as what is constancy, then this constancy will never be exhausted.”56 Again, “All are equalized and unified in change, and thus do not take firmness and constancy as their master.”57 Guo dilates on this concept, relating it to some of his own more distinctive concepts as follows:

  : “ () ”



If one doesn’t know how to form one body with change, and plans instead to store [the present situation] away and make it not change, even though it may be deeply and securely hidden away, there will be no way to prevent its daily transformation. He who hides it away and tries to possess it cannot stop it from getting away, but he who stores away nothing and lets change proceed cannot be transformed by his transformations. . . . This is to vanish (into) each and every thing, to be one with each and every change.Thus one has no outer and no inner, no death and no life, forms one body with heaven and earth and joins with change; nothing can be found that gets away from such a one.58

If we recall Guo’s view that the relation between two moments is a special case of that between two perspectives, this strategy for constancy-within-change acquires a broader significance. Just as one transcends change by changing, by being whatever each new moment presents, one transcends the multiplicity of perspectives and determinacies by allowing them all to be themselves in their full unsmeared differentiation, by being fully whatever determinacy one encounters at any given time and place.The oneness of all moments, the identity that persists between them, is simply that each one is itself; while dead one is dead, while alive one is alive, and this is the unity of life and death, by which one can assert that both are one’s own identity. When the Zhuangzi says, “To possess the ten thousand differences is called wealth,” Guo comments,“Because there is nothing I am not the same as, I can alone possesses this ten thousand.”59 This identity of the subject with all his different objects, succeeding each other in time, is for Guo the same as the identity among all the various entities in the world themselves. Each is alike in being itself: Since there is no thing that he is not identical with, there is nowhere he can go within the changes of life and death that is not himself. Thus life is mytimeliness, death is my-following-along.Timeliness is my-aggregation, following-along is my-dispersal. Although aggregation and dispersal are different, I ‘I’ them all.Thus life is certainly me, and hence I gain nothing by it; but death is also me, so I lose nothing by it. Even the transformation of life and death are a oneness; if one sees this oneness, one can exuviatingly become unfettered by anything, obliquely unifying self and other. . . .60

By such total vanishing (into) the chaos of chance, one is constantly still and constantly one:“He who vanishes (into) things is entangled and disturbed when they are so, and yet has never ceased to be placid.”61 It is not hard to see here the by now familiar dialectical circle of nothing and everything in which Guo likes to play; as is so often the case, the ideal man is modeled after the Tao itself. Guo’s Tao is nothing, and hence the spontaneity of all particular things: it is everywhere and nowhere. This leads us to Guo’s conception of infinity. It means for him not unending extension or succession, but rather vanishing equally (into) all opposites that one encounters, hence having no “other,” nothing outside oneself. As Guo puts it, “He who roams in [the realm of ] no smallness and no largeness is inex-

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 

haustible (wuqiong); he who vanishes (into) no-death and no-life is limitless (wuji).”62 This is the infinity of transcending opposites rather than of going on forever, and this is the sense of Guo’s use of terms like “inexhaustible” and “limitless.” Elsewhere he says,“When right and wrong, death and life are washed away into oneness, this is perfect principle.This perfect principle is unobstructed to the point of limitlessness, and thus he who entrusts himself to it is never exhausted.”63 The individual, in participating in this mutuality of opposites, becomes equally “infinite,” and in the same way: not in persisting determinately as some particular entity (as only traces can do), but rather in being nothing in particular and being willing to be whatever is encountered.Thus in being everywhere and everything, in embracing completely all changes, he is also nowhere and nothing in particular.“Daily changing with things, there is forever no [particular] self (wu wo); since there is forever no self, there is forever no change.”64 In other words: “I originally have no self; how then could my self be lost?”65 But we must also beware of interpreting this as implying some sort of “universal self.” Guo is consistent in his emphasis on the inherent integrity of the particular, and his conception of this universal unity as merely the spontaneous difference of all things, parallel to his obliteration of any other type of Tao, allows him to include each individual self ’s “being of itself in particular” in his conception of “the self of mine that all things are,” so to speak. “The intention of the other is self-so (bi yi ziran); thus if one rides upon and uses it, each thing will complete its self (wan wu ge quan qi wo).”66 Each thing being what it is, they all call themselves “I,” and this “I” that each particular one calls itself, attached to all its particular different characteristics, is the “I” that I am in being all of them, in letting them all be their own “I” without interfering.This is true vanishing (into) things. Says Guo Xiang: “Lightlessly (wang yang67) letting the Singularity go as it goes (ren du), unjostled by what is external, the activity of the ‘I’ is complete and intact. Since all in the world keep their ‘I’s complete and intact, there is nothing that calls itself ‘I’ that is not complete and intact.”68 Lightlessness suggests vanishing (into) things, as does the reference to the Singularity; by this particular type of merging of self and other, the selves of each are preserved in their completeness. Whatever can call itself or be called an “I” is inherently complete and selfright in itself.This applies equally to any part and to any whole; each finger is complete in itself, as is each hand, as is each body, as is each nation and so on. It will be important to recall this passage when we return to the question of independence and unmediated lone-transformation, where each thing, no matter how thoroughly dependent on and enmeshed within a system of others, is also inherently independent and self-transforming. The “selfness” of each is simply its appropriateness to itself, its being itself, or as we said before, its “self. . .”, its spontaneity and self-rightness, and hence its forgetting of itself: “Each attains its own appropriateness, and thus each is I.”69 This is to say, they are “the Self ” in that each is “itself,” and at home with this self, to the point of forgetting this self. Each is the solitary “I”, the lone traceless process of change wherein

  : “ () ”



each new moment and perspective is equally itself, equally right to itself, selfright and self-forgetting, and thereby equally eternal, equally independent, equally “I”.This “I” they equally are is simply “self- . . .,”—i.e., being unintentionally and automatically whatever they are being. At this point we should be able to resolve one apparent contradiction in Guo’s thought: the tension between his polemic against “esteeming the other” (shang bi) or “imitating the other” (xiao bi) on the one hand, and his simulataneous insistence that the sage must always “follow and allow the other to take its course” (ren bi) (the object is also often changed to “things,” wu, or “change,” hua), or “follow along with the things” (shun wu, or with change, hua) on the other. At first sight, these two ideas, one of which is opposed and one of which is encouraged, may seem very similar; but as we can see now they are actually directly opposed to each other for Guo Xiang. To “let” (ren) is not to “esteem or imitate” (shang, xiao).To follow along or let things go as they go is to vanish (into) things, to inflict no traces of one’s own upon them and remain unaffected by their traces, and to do so to “change” is actually simply to vanish (into), and hence forget, one’s own momentary determinacy. This is to “have no deliberate mind” (wu xin), which is also to say, have no particular or persistently determinate mind, or self.To have no mind is like having no self and also having no activity, and all this means simply to have no particular identity or activity that one clings to, that one has cognitively decided one must be or do, because it has some intrinsic value.Whatever comes is one’s determinacy in that moment, and the next moment it goes, and a new determinacy takes its place, which is equally oneself, one’s mind of that moment. Thereby this determinacy is fully incorporated as one’s own self—i.e., one’s present self-so, which means it is fit, forgotten, darkened, traceless, vanished. To have no deliberate mind is to let things do as they spontaneously do, and this is to leave no traces.70 This is what is meant by taking the words and actions of the people for his own words and actions,71 but this is for Guo the precise opposite of “imitating the words and actions of others,” which we might also expect to be called taking the words and actions of others as one’s own. The difference is simply that in that latter case one chooses one particular other mind and deliberately attempts to be like it in every moment—and again, even the mind one had oneself in a former moment can be so chosen and esteemed. In the former case, one renounces as quickly as one adopts; one vanishes (into) whatever mind or determinacy one finds before one, and one is nothing but that determinacy in that moment, which is thus also forgotten, since it is perfectly fit to oneself, since it is oneself. Guo also sometimes describes this as “letting what one encounters [be what it is]” (ren suo yu),72 and this can perhaps give us a clearer idea of what he means by “things” or “changes” here. Things are the things one encounters moment by moment; changes are the perpetually changing subjective apprehension of ever-changing objects.These encountered objects determine what one is at any given moment.Thus Guo is able to speak of this “letting others do as they do” alternately as “letting one’s own self

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 

do as it does (ren wo).” For example, he says, “In receiving life each thing has its determinacy, and yet it lets what it values tempt it, and thus its inner necessity and determinacy are lost. If it would destroy its values and esteem, discard the other and let its own self do as it does, its senses would become spontaneously whole, and each man would contain his own genuineness.”73 In either case, whether letting the self or the other proceed as it spontaneously does, this “letting” is contrasted to conscious volition and imitation.This is the vanishing (into) things, the oblique unity of self and other. “One changes from a nonhuman being to a human being, and in this change the old being is lost. To take joy in such a loss of the old is to take joy in what one encounters. Transformation goes on without end, and in the course of it what is not encountered? If one takes pleasure in whatever is encountered, how could one’s pleasure ever come to an end?”74 One is simply whatever one encounters, and if one simply lets this transformation of oneself proceed, which is to say, the transformation of whatever one encounters, the transformation of other things, “one’s joy will be inexhaustible.” Moreover, this is precisely what the Tao does, and what the sage does; he lets all things be themselves, vanishes (into) their changes, and thereby they all flourish and are able to be what they are and do what they do. As Guo puts it, “He who has no deliberate mind and lets things transform themselves (ren hu zihua) is fit to be emperor or king,”75 and “the divine man is he who has no deliberate mind and follows along with things (shun wu).”76 Elsewhere Guo quotes the “Xicizhuan” of the Book of Changes to illustrate his meaning: “The perfect man has no deliberate mind and responds to things (ying wu), ‘simply changing as is fit/as is comfortable/ wherever he goes’ (wei bian suo shi).”77 In Guo’s usage, this familiar quote assumes a new meaning, for the resonances with his other usages of shi, fit or comfortable, and their connections with vanishing (into) things, also come into play here, which is not the case in the original context.The shi here, literally simply “to go,” has a bit of the same sense as yu, to encounter, and the transformations it implies. Hence the sense is something like,“He transforms into whatever he encounters, and is comfortable and hence vanishes in doing so.” Again the stress here, and one of the fundamental differences between imitating others and letting them go as they go or following along with them, resides in the question of conscious volition.What is comfortable and accords with one’s determinacy remains unconscious, and hence is not deliberately willed. Imitation is something like a forced responsiveness to others, one that passes through the corrupting medium of consciousness and will. Guo says, “To respond without any deliberate intention, like the tones Gong and Shang, is called resonance (ming).78 To respond without any deliberate intention is simply allowing the other (to be itself); it is not forced responsiveness (qiang ying).”79 Again, the model is the nonexistent Tao itself; it does and is nothing, has no particular intention or fixed self, and thereby “lets all things complete themselves.”80 In so doing it is being all of them, in that Tao is for Guo simply a

  : “ () ”



word for what all things spontaneously are, their self-so, but not any one of them, nor anything else, nor any particular totality of them. It is obvious that this is quite different from “esteeming” or “imitating” any or all of them.There is no question of there being a Tao trying to be like any thing or like all things; it simply is whatever all things are spontaneously being at any given time. It doesn’t try to make them any one way, or to do anything at all to them, and this is tantamount to saying also that it doesn’t try to make itself any particular way, or recall any particular past configuration of things that it wants to be like, or wants things always to be like. Its great virtue is to do nothing and be nothing in particular, so it can allow all things to be anything in particular. The same applies to the ideal man and the things he encounters; he follows them, lets them be what they are, but does not imitate or esteem any particular ones, nor does he attempt to make any of them other than they are, forcing one to be like another or himself to be like any one of them, or any of them like him. For in Guo’s ideal, there is no particular “him” for them to be like. The mind of the sage is nonexistent, like the Tao, and this is the great virtue of both.The perfect self-rightness of all things lies in this peculiar type of nonaction and silence, which is at the same time, by virtue of its very inaction and silence, the action and cacophony of all it encounters. By thoroughly merging with this cacophony, by becoming it, one fits it, vanishes (into) it, and thereby forgets it.

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The Unification of Independence and Interdependence

his brings us to the question of dependence and independence, of conditionality and unconditionality. For the relationship between things, or between the self and things, still seems to harbor a troubling ambiguity, or perhaps a paradox: this insistence that one become whatever one encounters seems to make one’s identity completely dependent on those external things that one happens to encounter, and yet Guo repeatedly speaks of this as “unconditionality” (wudai), a total independence of anything else. This seems to resemble the tension we just addressed, between following along with things and imitating them, and in what sense one remains “oneself,” uninfluenced by external things, in either case. More broadly, we can see here the two sides of Guo’s thought we have addressed so far—i.e., his repudiation of concern with traces, which seems to deny the efficacy and desirability of any mutual influence, on the one hand, and his advocacy of vanishing (into) things, which seems to call for the most thorough possible mutual influence and interaction, on the other. From the tension between these two views of Guo’s develops the tension between dependence and independence, and likewise from their inner connection and even mutual implication develops the resolution of this tension.This will be a crucial link in Guo’s solution to the problems presented at the beginning of this book—i.e., how to unify the realms of spontaneity, or, independence, and the teaching of names; or, participation on social and political involvement. For the dialectical turn of Guo’s mind is such that this unconditionality or independence he speaks of is not in any sense to be conceived of as the opposite of conditionality or dependence. If we interpret this as a literal and complete denial of the efficacy of external causality we will be led into great difficulties, not only because it is such a counterintuitive position but also because Guo quite plainly and explicitly rec-

T

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

 

ognizes interrelations, and that things affect each other.“The generation of any thing or event always has that from which it comes ( jie you suo you),” he asserts categorically, and he frequently invokes the principle of the mutual following or mutual necessity of things to each other (xiang yin, xiang xu, etc.). But if this is so, how are we to understand his constant refrain that things are “self-so,” “born of themselves,” “self-creating,” “independent,” “lone-transforming,” and so on? Various interpreters have addressed this problem in various ways. Fung Yulan says,“When Kuo Hsiang [Guo Xiang] said that everything spontaneously produces itself and is what it is, he meant that things are not created by any Creator. He did not mean that among things there are no relations one with another. . . . The idea is that when there are certain conditions or circumstances, certain things are necessarily produced. But they are not produced by any Creator or any individual.”81 Elsewhere he interprets the latter principle, of the spontaneous self-production of all things, to mean simply that “we cannot postulate with assurance that any one specific condition is the cause of any other specific condition.This is the principle of ‘self-transformation.’ ”82 In both cases, he compares this, rather amusingly, to the conception of historical necessity endorsed by dialectical materialism: “Socialism, for instance, is produced when there are certain economic conditions. According to what is known as the materialistic interpretation of history, it was not produced by Marx and Engels, still less by their manifesto. In this sense, we can say: ‘Everything produces itself and is not produced by others.’ ”83 Fung’s idea is that everything is caused by the totality of conditions, but not by any particular entity; no “one” and no “thing” causes anything to be what it is. They are caused by the entire historical situation of the moment. Zhuang Yaolang, in addressing Guo’s simultaneous admission of mutuality and independence, suggests that what we have here is a distinction between causal connection and mere correspondence, that the relations among things for Guo are “a type of simultaneous emergence, not a dependency.This means simply existing at the same time [as part of a total pattern], rather than being determined by a causal and conditional relations with each other. This is a mutual accord which brings all to completion together in the same self-so, mutual accord which means following along with the determinacy of each, but destroys any dependence between dominant and secondary entities determining one another.”84 This suggestion of the distinction between correspondence and simultaneous emergence, on the one hand, and causal dependence, on the other, is somewhat helpful, and some sense of it can be made if we refer to the interpretation of vanishing (into) things developed above. But there tends to be some suggestion that this correspondence is to be understood as a kind of fitting into the pattern of a larger whole.The parts all correspond to one another, but do not cause one another, because all are caused by the total situation of the whole.This whole then forms the real cause of the existence of each, a notion that points us back toward an ultimate creator or first cause, explicitly denied

     



by Guo, unless the category of causality itself comes under scrutiny. This problem becomes clear when Zhuang starts to compare Guo’s position to Buddhism,85 and his assertion that Guo Xiang “does not neglect the whole, but places the whole under the category of lone-transformation; in the belief that only if each individual lone-transforms and obliquely vanishes (into) things can the natural harmony of the totality be guaranteed.”86 Here we have a notion of preestablished harmony as some kind of determinate set of relations of the whole, which on close analysis does not really accord with Guo’s position, as we shall see. Tang Yijie suggests another way to approach this problem. “Each thing exists independently and self-sufficiently, and thus must let other things exist independently and self-sufficiently; this presents the question of how things relate to one another. But in Guo Xiang’s philosophy, each thing is an absolutely independent and self-sufficient entity, and there is no question of it being related to another thing. How is this contradiction to be resolved? According to Guo Xiang, since each thing is an absolutely independent and self-sufficient entity, if anything were not independent and self-sufficient, other things wouldn’t be able to be independent and self-sufficient.Thus the lone-transformation (duhua) of this thing is a condition of the lone-transformation of that thing, and vice versa.”87 The idea here seems to be that if anything failed to be self-sufficient, this would interfere with the self-sufficiency of other things; they would find this other thing depending on them, and this would obstruct their own selftransformation. Hence the independence of each thing depends on every other thing’s independence. Each of these explanations is strange sounding, but each has a certain amount of sense to it, and helps us take a first step toward resolving this crucial difficulty in Guo’s thought. However, we cannot help concluding, after considering the case closely, that each interpretation is somewhat forced and unconvincing, and moreover seriously partial. In other words, while none of these senses is absent from Guo’s conception of the simultaneous independence and dependence of things, they do not tell us the whole story or get us to the heart of the matter. To do this, we must look closely at the passages where Guo speaks of unconditionality, and also at his unique concept of lone-transformation (duhua), which Tang correctly identifies as Guo’s attempt to solve precisely this problem.88 The question of dependence is introduced in Chapter One of the Zhuangzi itself. Of Liezi’s ability to walk on the wind, the text says, “Although he could avoid walking, he still had something on which he had to depend (dai).” Guo remarks at this juncture, “Without the wind he couldn’t walk; this is dependence. Only he who has nothing on which he doesn’t ride is independent (wudai).” The Zhuangzi text continues, “But he who rides upon the rightness of heaven and earth and chariots upon the transformations of the six breaths to roam without end, what does he depend on?” Guo comments: Heaven and earth are a collective name for all things.The body of heaven and earth is all things, and all things necessarily take being-self-so as their right-

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 

ness. Self-so means that which is not “done” but which is so of itself. Thus great Peng’s ability to fly high, the little quail’s ability to stay low, the chun tree’s ability for long life, the morning mushroom’s ability for short life, these are all abilities that are self-so, they are not abilities produced by [deliberately] doing anything. Spontaneous capability not brought about by deliberate activity is what is called rightness.Thus to “ride upon the rightness of heaven and earth” is to follow along with the determinacies of all things; to “chariot on the transformations of the six breaths” is to roam through the paths of transformation. If one goes forth like this, where could one go where it would come to an end? If one rides upon whatever he encounters, what is he dependent on? This is the free wandering of the man of perfect virtue, who obliquely unifies self and other (xuantong bi wo).Among those who are dependent on something, even Liezi, with his marvelous grace was not able to ride when there was no wind; he could only wander freely when he obtained that which he depended on. And how much more is this true in the case of great Peng! Only he who vanishes (into) things and follows their vast transformations is able to be unconditioned and always unobstructed. And how could it be that he only makes himself unobstructed? He also follows along with the dependent, so that they don’t lose that which they depend on [or, their dependence, so dai]. If they don’t lack what they depend on, they are “identical with the great thoroughfare” (great nonobstruction, datong). Thus the dependent and the independent are something I cannot equalize, but since each rests in its determinacy, so that the heavenly mechanism [of each] unfolds of itself, and so that they receive [their determinacies] without knowing [how or why], these I cannot make different. Since [in this] the independent is not sufficient to be considered different from the dependent, how much less [is there any significant difference] between various degrees of dependence!89

Here Guo makes clear that he is not considering unconditionality separate from or opposite to conditionality. Unconditionality is for him something that includes and integrates conditionality into itself, or is identical to it in the most important respect.Their sameness is established just as the sameness of any other two entities, conceptual or concrete, is established by Guo Xiang: all are alike in that each rests in its determinacy, that the heavenly mechanism of each unfolds of itself, that they receive their determinacies without knowing how or why; in short, because they are all self-so. But this term “self-so” was one of the causes of the difficulty; for this term immediately suggests self-causality, and therefore independence; each thing “creates itself ” and doesn’t depend on anything else. However, Guo has here asserted that this is equally true for what is dependent and for what is independent. How are we to understand this? Tang Yijie says of this complex passage: Guo Xiang’s meaning here is as follows: (1) Originally each thing has its own nature (zixing90), and its own nature is self-generated (zisheng), and not given

     



to it by anyone. Liezi could walk on the wind; this was Liezi’s original nature (benxing), and whether there was wind or not, this did not affect his original nature of being-able-to-walk-on-wind. Thus this nature of Liezi’s, his ability to walk on wind, was not conditioned by the presence of wind. (2) If we look at it from the point of view of Liezi’s dependence on the wind to walk and apply this perspective to all things, there is nothing that is independent or unconditioned; all are conditioned. (3) Thus the distinction between conditioned and unconditioned is only so from one point of view; from another point of view, all things are able to rest in their natures [determinacies], not seeking anything [outside themselves], not acting but being spontaneously thus and so, following along with the natures of all things, roaming over the paths of transformations—are they not then “unconditioned and always unobstructed?” (4) If one seeks “unconditionality,” this is in fact precisely to be conditioned by and dependent on something, since what one seeks becomes something one is dependent on [lit., expects or hopes for, qidai]. If one pursues something one hopes to get, one’s existence becomes conditioned. (5) The true independence is not to distinguish between dependence and independence, but rather to find spontaneous satisfaction in one’s own nature; anything that is satisfied by its own nature has no need to seek anything outside itself.91

Like so many of Tang’s explanations, this is a valiant and important attempt to make sense of a difficular passage, but one that ultimately fails to convince or satisfy. Most worthy of amendation is Tang’s implication, which appears everywhere in his discussion of Guo Xiang, that xing is to be taken as some sort of fixed and original intelligible nature, and that each thing’s activity is an expression of this essence. I find this interpretation not to be in accord with Guo Xiang’s writings, as I have indicated before, and thus translate xing throughout as determinacy, a momentary determinacy, in accord with Wang Deyou’s analysis of the term.92 Thus Tang’s first point above seems highly questionable to me if taken at face value. Moreover,Tang’s third point, that the conditionality or unconditionality of things is a matter of one’s point of view, or, stated otherwise, that all things are in one sense conditioned and in another sense unconditioned, is again fruitful but inadequate. For it is not quite right to say “if we look at it from the point of view of Liezi’s dependence on the wind to walk and apply this perspective to all things, there is nothing that is independent or unconditioned; all are conditioned.” Guo clearly does recognize a class of beings to whom this perspective could not be applied, who are unconditionedly unconditioned, rather than unconditionedly conditioned.There is a clear division made between the beings who are conditioned and dependent, up to and including Liezi, and the sage who lets them each be themselves and hence is independent.This “soteriological” dimension to Guo’s thought is not to be ignored; he is everywhere concerned with describing the characteristics of the sage, the ideal man, and the distinction between the sage, who follows (shun, ren) everyone’s right and wrong, and other creatures, who each rest in their own right and wrong alone,



 

is preserved, although both are said to be right in being what they are, thence annulling this distinction on a higher level. Still, it must be stressed that at the same time he does preserve the difference between the conditioned and unconditioned on the immediate level, even as he unifies them on the higher level. Elsewhere too he acknowledges the sage’s preeminence, which resides precisely in having no right and wrong, or implicit determinacy, of his own other than to allow the right and wrong of others, or of both himself and his other, of whatever he encounters; he is able to “walk two paths at once.”This is of course his vanishing (into) things, and in this lies his unconditionality.93 Guo says elsewhere, “If he who accidently hits the target can be considered the great archer Yi, then he who biasedly affirms himself could be considered Yao. Zhuangzi uses this to illustrate that he who mistakenly hits the target is no Yi, and he who affirms himself is no Yao.”94 There is a distinction between those who only affirm themselves and deny all others, and those who let each affirm itself and deny the others, and affirms the way each does this to the other, or takes this as his self of that moment, his own vanished self-rightness. The latter is the unconditioned, the former the conditioned. Guo says, “It is clear the affirming and denying [having a right and a wrong] is something the various characters of things cannot lack; hence the perfect man follows along with both sides (liang shun zhi).”95 On this level, there is a substantial difference; to “follow along with both sides” is to transcend the opposition between things, and oppositeness in general, the righting and wronging of any one particular determinacy: To have something one affirms and something one negates is what the Ruists and Mohists affirm; to have nothing one affirms or negates is what they negate. Now if we want to affirm what they negate [i.e., not affirming or negating] and negate what they affirm [i.e., affirming and negating], this is to want to show no affirmation and no negation, no right and no wrong.To do this, there is nothing as good as reflecting the Ruists and Mohists off of one another. This will show that what each asserts as right is not right [since the other negates it] and what each negates as wrong is not wrong (since the other affirms it). This is to have no right and no wrong.96

The rights and wrongs of every particular determinacy and perspective are to be preserved, along with their dependencies, but the sage vanishes into them, has and is both, and thus, reflecting them off each other, has and is neither.This is the difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned, and it remains apparent throughout Guo’s commentary; the sage ultimately is different from other creatures, but in a way distinct from the way any two other things are different. Peng and the quail are different but also equal, each being conditioned, albeit by different things and of different magnitudes; Guo makes a point of asserting that there is no superiority or inferiority between them. But as we saw in the passage quoted above, Guo does seem to place the sage above both Peng and the quail, above Liezi and Song Rongzi, in another category altogether; he is unconditioned, for he knows how to walk two roads, whereas they

     



each only walk their one road. He follows the rightness of all things, different for each one, whereas each of them is confined to merely its own rightness, which is indeed right for it, but is conditioned. At the same time, it cannot be denied even for a moment that these two, the conditioned ordinary beings bound to one perspective and the unconditioned sage who embraces whatever he encounters, are the same in that each is spontaneously what it is. In this,Tang is right, but not in failing to recognize the important distinction clearly drawn by Guo at the same time, his explicit delineation of two classes of beings who differ in a fundamental way, even if this difference is to be annulled and sublated in the next step of Guo’s dialectic. Still, his emphasis on the importance of perspective and the epistemological implications of its mutability are in keeping with Guo’s point. Moreover,Tang’s fourth point, concerning the lack of subjective teleology, is of great importance in understanding this other, perhaps “deeper” aspect of things, in which conditionality and unconditionality are in fact the same, and are all equally unconditioned. For this emphasis on the absence of cognition is here as everywhere a key to understanding Guo’s meaning; in one sense, when he says things are uncaused, he means mainly that they have no final cause, no consciousness of a telos.That is to say, they themselves have no intention to do one thing or another, and hence they are unconditioned; such an interpretation would not of course exclude the existence of unconscious efficient causes, and it is possible to read Guo’s simultaneity of conditionality and unconditionality in this way as well; things are unconditioned in that they have no final cause, no conscious goal, but are conditioned in that they are, unbeknownst to themselves, affected by all the mechanical and natural causality around them that makes them what they are. Liezi’s inferiority to the sage lies in the fact that he wants to walk on wind when there is no wind, whereas the sage lets there be wind or no-wind, walking or no-walking, according to what he happens to encounter. This interpretation is, I think, valuable and worth considering, but again, does not tell us the whole story. As we shall see in the final analysis, it is not only cognized and deliberate teleological causality that Guo rejects when he speaks of independence, especially with respect to the independence of the sage. In spite of these reservations about Tang’s interpretation, it does contain important clues for understanding the Guo Xiang passage quoted above. To rephrase it in our own terms, taking into account the amendations noted above, we might say,“This present determinacy of Liezi’s, his ability to walk on wind, and indeed his dependence on wind to do so, is not dependent on the existence of wind perceived according to its traces as something external to himself.” The assumption is that Liezi found himself possessed of this ability without having applied any cognition or volition to attaining it, or that even if he did, these themselves were applied without conscious volition to exert conscious volition. This does not here exclude the possibility of the wind contributing to the development of this ability, so long as Liezi was not aware of



 

this and on some level not doing it deliberately. The conditionality of things, or their unconditionality, is unconditioned; whatever they are, whatever they need, whatever they depend on, all this is self-so, hence unconditioned, not made so by anyone or anything, and the standard of spontaneity given explicitly in this passage is that it means what comes to be without deliberate activity; it is here defined in contrast to teleological volition, as based on traces.This contrast with traces as noted above, is precisely what gives the term ziran its “meaning,” its sense of negating something, its discomfirmability.To say that something is selfso means precisely that it cannot be understood to have become what it is by means of traces; this means both that it did not come to be what it is by means of traces (i.e., it did not become so deliberately, motivated by a conscious aim), and that it cannot be understood in terms of its traces (i.e., as something that is caused mechanically by other things outside itself). Indeed, Guo sometimes implies that mechanical causality (i.e., a mere listing of antecedents) does not genuinely help us understand why a thing is as it is, does not answer our question,“Why is it thus?”The only satisfactory answer would be one analogous to our own direct inner experience of becoming what we are; only that would bring us as it were inside the thing and give us a satisfactory “understanding” of its workings. If teleological intention had any efficacy, this would provide such an understanding; we would only have to know the thing’s motivation in so being. But since this intentionality does not have any efficacy, no explanation can provide satisfaction; we can only say that they are self-so, as we are. Hence Guo says, “. . . They merely follow along with each other in coming and going; since there is no intention to do it, nothing can be asked about it (wu yi, bu ke wen ye).”97 The assertion that the dependent is also independent is on the most immediate level another application of a by-now familiar trick of Guo’s, that of jumping one level behind every deliberate act to find its spontaneity.We already quoted his remark about knowing: “Knowers don’t know how they know, but still spontaneously know . . .”98 Knowing is also a type of unknowing, for it is performed like all other spontaneous activities, without our knowing how. Or again, we will without willing to will, hence will is also spontaneous.The present case seems to be similar; the fact that certain things are conditioned is itself unconditioned. In fact, this trick can be applied to anything that is considered unspontaneous, and this is precisely Guo’s point. We could equally say, for example, that all beings are genuine on some level, even if they are only genuine dissemblers; their pretense at least is something genuine, and if they are only pretending to pretend, at least this second pretense is genuine. We can always push back to some level of unreflective spontaneity, and this is what Guo Xiang calls the self-so. The dependence of things is simply spontaneously so, self-so, neither they themselves nor anything else deliberately made them dependent. It is a function of their particular determinacy, and hence it is their own “rightness” to be this particular way—i.e., dependent. As such, it is to be allowed to be itself, to

     



“affirm itself ” (ziran), be self-right, like all else; thus one should “follow along with the dependent,” that is, let them be what they are being, and let them be dependent on what they are dependent on.This is “seeing that they don’t lose their dependency,” their special relationship to that upon which they depend, which is precisely what makes them what they are, or shall we say to avoid any controversy what expresses what they are. This is whereby all things, including the conditioned, are “identical to the great thoroughfare,” as unobstructed as the unconditioned. For they are not obstructed from being what they are, and being conditioned upon what they are conditioned upon. The sage “allows” them to do this, just as the Tao allows all things to come into being: by doing nothing to interfere with them, by vanishing (into) their transformations, letting each go whither it listeth, and itself being these transformations of theirs by forgetting itself and vanishing within them.And it is precisely by doing this that he is himself independent and unconditioned.To follow along with the determinacies of things is to ride on the rightness of heaven and earth, that is, on the rightness of each thing. His independence is thus not merely a question of lacking deliberate intentions and aims—or rather, is a further development out of this lack of aim that spills over to make him independent even of mechanical causality.This is simply because he accepts any and every condition or thing he encounters as himself for that moment, and hence need fear no change, is dependent on no particular condition to be himself, since he is equally himself in being any of them, in forgetting himself in the self-rightness of each.This is his “infinity” and his independence: the self he is in each of them is just their rightness. for each thing is right for itself, and he who vanishes into them and lets them all be themselves is thus always in the right. “The disputations about right and wrong are the ‘transforming sounds’The mutual dependence of these transforming sounds is such that they are never sufficient to set each other right. Thus it is as if they were not mutually dependent at all.”99 Although they are mutually dependent and exist only in relation to one another, this relation can never rob any of feeling itself to be right in being itself, from affirming itself. This self that it affirms is itself of course thoroughly determined by its relations with the others, but whatever it encounters or comes to be in that system of interdependence will be equally right for it and equally equal to itself. The sage follows along with this, and thus attains a higher independence and unconditionality.Whatever comes, whatever he encounters, is always right (i.e., self-right, right for itself). He need not seek what is right, nor is he dependent on encountering one thing rather than another, since all are right. Hence the difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned is preserved; the conditioned is dependent on its own particular desiderata, whereas the unconditioned is not dependent on any particular desiderata, but lets each dependent thing be dependent, and is as satisfied by (i.e., able to be comfortable with/as and vanished [into]) each of them being so related to their desiderata as the dependent things are in attaining them. But within this difference is a sameness; both are thereby unobstructed in attaining their determinacies, which are



 

to be conditioned and unconditioned respectively, and each is so without knowing how or why. From the perspective of the sage, all things are equally independent, in that all are equally right for themselves, whatever they are, and hence need fear no changes to their determinate contents. Other beings however do not realize this because they have been deceived by traces, which give rise to values in their minds and make them believe one state or condition is preferable to another, and hence must be attained. Believing X (life, wealth, happiness, walking on wind) to be more valuable than Y (death, poverty, misery, walking on earth), they become dependent on obtaining the conditions that make X so, cannot follow along with the rightness of Y to itself, hence cannot vanish into Y, and thus become finite, have something outside of what they consider their selves, and thus are dependent.The sage however sees even this dependence of theirs as being as legitimate as any other Y, and hence as its own rightness; hence he follows along with it, lets it be itself and get what it depends on when it gets it, and thus sees it as identical with the great thoroughfare. This is a first step toward comprehending how Guo uses his concept of vanishing (into) things to unify dependence and independence. I do not need to be just this particular determinate entity to have that rightness to myself which is my real identity, my self-forgetfulness. All entities are equally right to themselves, and hence I can be willing to be any of them, so long as I do not pervert my vanishing (into) them by means of value derived from perceiving extrinsic traces rather than my own perpetual spontaneity. In this willingness to be anything at all, I have made myself independent of any conditions. This is what resolves the conflict between the two opposite implications of vanishing (into) things—i.e., between the most total dependence (since one is made what one is completely by whatever one encounters) and the most total independence (one is always right in this, values one no more than another, is equally comfortable being any of them). Guo’s point is that one thing can only be considered dependent on other things for its existence when its existence is defined as being just this particular unchanging determinate content. If it defines itself rather as its rightness in being what it is, its comfort in being whatever it is being, then it is not dependent on any other thing to be this. Now the only thing that keeps one from defining oneself in the latter way is the traces, both in that their identity lies in their determinate persistence and hence they give rise to the belief that identity is just determinate persistence (which is not so for self-so, whose identity is simply self-rightness), and more important in that they lead to valuation, which makes one believe that one determinate content is preferable to another. In both ways, they lead to clinging to being one thing in particular, and hence dependence.Vanishing (into) things however is the forgetting of all traces, and hence in this vanishing (into) things one achieves independence, freedom from this erroneous trace-inspired definition of identity as fixed determinate content.100

     



At the kernel of this oneness of conditionality and unconditionality, of dependence and independence, as well as of constancy and change, we see implicit this special notion of identity. After the above discussion, we are now in a position to move on and gain a better understanding of what this identity or oneness in change and otherness is, what this singularity and aloneness within multiplicity might be, which will allow us finally to comprehend all that is meant by this unity of dependence and independence, and how this is used to resolve the tension between spontaneity and the teaching of names.To do this, we must carefully examine Guo Xiang’s most unique concept, in which all these questions reach their culmination, the pinnacle of Guo’s philosophy: lonetransformation (duhua).

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 

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Lone-Transformation

irst, some remarks about the binome duhua itself. Although it appears to have been Guo’s invention,1 and became immensely influential for metaphysicians and antimetaphyscians of this period and later,2 and although it seems to me that Tang Yijie is correct to consider it the zenith of all of Guo’s thinking,3 it does not appear in the commentary as often as this declaration of its importance might suggest. I was able to find only about a dozen occurences of the compound duhua in the entire commentary, although Guo uses du in a distinctive and related way, sometimes in compounds with other words (duwang, dulai, duxian, dusheng, dutuo, duxing, duzhi, rendu, you yu du, etc.), much more frequently. The term du bears an obvious relation to another favorite term of Guo’s, zhi ( straightforward, direct), used in compounds like zhiwang, zhiqian and so on, which appear to be a closely related mutation of duhua (since wang and qian, to go and to go forward, respectively, i.e., motion, is for Guo similar to hua, transformation, i.e., change). This kind of relationship is even clearer with the terms ziran, zisheng, zihua and so on; du, meaning “solitary,” “lone,” “singular,” or “unique,” is like zi, meaning “self-,” and hua is like sheng and even like ran, if we understand by this latter term the transitory determinacy of things, part of an ongoing process with its own momentary implicit affirmations and negations.4 The term zihua comes from the Zhuangzi itself,5 and was certainly present in Xiang Xiu’s commentary,6 but duhua is not to be found in the present Zhuangzi and there is no evidence that it appeared in Xiang’s commentary.This of course does not prove that it did not appear there, given how little of the Xiang commentary survives; but it would not be at all surprising, in light of Guo’s general radicalization of Xiang’s original downplaying of the role of any creator or metaphysical absolute,7 if this term were Guo’s own addition, as it seems to be. Guo himself also uses zihua quite frequently; but sometimes he uses duhua instead.The distinction between these two terms must be given some attention; it will not do to translate them in the same way,8 or consider them

F

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 

simply interchangable. Clearly Guo meant to go one step further, or emphasize another implication of self-transformation, the constant theme of the commentary, when he used this term. We will now try to determine just what the meaning of this term was intended to be, and to what extent it resolves the tensions already noted in Guo’s thought. The first thing we notice about the compound duhua, when we pause to consider the two words of which it is composed, is that it is an oxymoron. For to transform, hua, is to change from one thing into another, to become something different; this assumes the existence of some otherness into which one can change. The du, lone, however, suggests that while transforming, one is nonetheless remaining the same one; one is all alone. Moreover, this du suggests oneness without directly denoting a numerical quantity, one as opposed to two or three, as the actual numeral one, yi, would.Again we should remember Guo’s view of the relation between two moments in time as simply a special case of the relation of a “this” and a “that,” a self and an other. Change means self becoming other, and becoming other, and becoming other. But Guo is asserting that this constant flux and othering remains alone and identical, that this self confronting, and vanishing into, other and other and other remains singular, unique, and alone. This contradiction is not implied in the original neutral term for self-transformation, zihua; this paradox seems to be one of the things the replacement of zi with du was designed to stress. More generally, of course, it is simply the question of the relationship between self and other, or lack thereof, that this phrase calls to our attention. Readers of modern Chinese will be reminded of the binome duli, “independence,” which Guo does in fact use,9 and this is indeed one of the important implications of this term. A direct reference to yi or “oneness” as a modifier of transformation would tend to imply something about the unity of all transformations, that all are parts of a single overarching process of change, or the like. Zihua, self-transformation, would tend to imply that all are manifestations of a single spontaneity, stressing the self-sufficiency of the motive power or agency. Du, on the other hand, denotes uniqueness, particularity, individuality. This brings us back to the question of independence or unconditionality, wudai, in which connection we began this discussion. Indeed, the first appearance of duhua in the commentary comes in the discussion of the story of the penumbra and shadow near the end of Zhuangzi’s second chapter, which hinges on the question of causal dependency. I will here translate the brief Zhuangzi story with the Guo Xiang notes placed between the lines, as they appear in the original text. Guo’s long final comment on this story, which brings together most of the important themes of this essay in a succint and explicit form, will then be discussed in some detail. zhuangzi: The Penumbra asked the Shadow, “Formerly you walked, and now you have stopped. Formerly you sat, and now you have arisen. Why is it that you have no fixed course of action?”

-

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guo xiang: The Penumbra is the faint shade around the shadow. zhuangzi: The Shadow said, “Do I have something I depend on (dai) in order to be as I am? guo xiang: This is to say that the heavenly mechanism is self-so, sitting and standing are all unconditioned (wudai).That which is unconditioned and loneattained (du’de)—who could know its reason, and search out why it is so? zhuangzi: Does what I depend on depend on something else to be as it is? guo xiang: If we search for that which [each thing] is dependent on and seek out what [each thing] comes from, this searching will lead to an infinite regress, and in the end we will come only to the lack of dependence (wudai). Thus the principle of lone-transformation (duhua10) becomes clear. zhuangzi: Am I dependent on snake scales or cicada wings? guo xiang: If it were dependent on snake scales or cicada wings, the reason for its lack of a fixed course of action would not be difficult to discern. The reason for this lack is not discerned in the present case precisely because [the shadow] is not dependent on this type of thing, but rather lone-transforms. zhuangzi: How could I discern how and why I am as I am? How could I discern how and why I am not as I am not? guo xiang: Some in the world say that the penumbra is dependent on the shadow, the shadow is dependent on the physical form, and the physical form is dependent on the Creator. But I ask: As for this Creator, is he existent, or is he nonexistent? If he is nonexistent, how can he create things? If he is existent, then he is not qualified to materialize all the various physical forms [himself being one form].Thus only after one understands that the physical forms materialize themselves can one be spoken to about creation. Hence of all things involved in the realm of existence, even the penumbra, there has never been one that did not lone-transform in the realm of dark vanishing (xuanming).Thus creation is without any lord or master, and each thing creates itself. For each thing to create itself and not be conditioned by or dependent on anything else is “the rightness of heaven and earth” (tiandi zhi zheng). Thus when self and other follow one another (xiang yin), and form and shadow simultaneously come to be ( jusheng), although they are obliquely joined (xuanhe), it is not dependence. One who understands this principle has each of the ten thousand things return to its source within its own self without depending on anything outside itself, externally without apology and internally without pride; thus all come into being as if enticed11 but don’t know how or why they have come to be, all alike attain their being of what they are without knowing how or why they have attained it. Now if even in the case of the penumbra’s following of the shadow we can still say they simultaneously come to be and yet it is not a relationship of dependence, then although the ten thousand things come together to collectively form nature, nonetheless each of them in perfect distinctness appears on its own in independent solitude (liran duxian). Thus the penumbra

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 

is not controlled by the shadow, nor is the shadow caused [to do what it does] by the physical form, nor is the physical form transformed by Non-Being.Transforming and not transforming, being thus [or right, ran] and not being thus, following others or proceeding from one’s own self, none are not self-so; how could we discern how or why they are so? Thus if we let them proceed without trying to help them along, root and branch, inner and outer, all will unobstructedly attain what they are, and obliteratedly leave no trace. If we trace the nearby causal links and thereby forget that they are ultimately self-so, and posit the sources of things outside themselves, thus depriving them of having their master within themselves, then preferences and esteem will be born. Even if we want to push this aside and level things, once this esteem has lodged in their breasts, how could peace and evenness ever be attained again?12 We have a lot of interpreting to do here; let us start at the beginning. We see that du is first introduced here as a gloss on wudai, unconditionality or independence. The text of the Zhuangzi is somewhat ambiguous in the first question of the penumbra; tecao could mean “one fixed course of action,” or as Cheng Xuanying glosses, “independent action,” i.e., action taken that is “different from” (te) that of the physical form, which the shadow is alleged to be dependent on. It is important to keep both senses in mind when considering Guo’s comment,“Sitting and standing are all unconditional (wudai).That which is unconditional and lone-attained (du’de)—who could know its reason, and search out why it is so?”The shadow’s action appears to be both unfixed,“sitting and standing,” constantly changing, and also dependent on the body; it is apparently not single, not “lone,” in both senses. Guo asserts however that, contrary to these appearances, it is a lone singularity, both in its unity despite the changes it undergoes and in its independence despite its apparent dependence. It is noteworthy that as soon as Guo mentions this singularity, before he has even attempted to explain why it is so, he immediately links it with cognition; since it is single, lone-attained, its reasons for being as it is cannot be known. Causality of some kind is the presupposition of all explanatory knowledge; to explain something is to adduce its causal links with other things. Once Guo has denied the ultimate validity of causality, it is natural that he would deny that the reasons anything is the way it is can be known, and as we saw above, the reverse is also true. The two positions are mutually reinforcing. The affirmation of independence and lone-attainment is tantamount to a declaration that nothing is explicable. There is another link between knowledge and causality that should be noted as especially important for Guo: the connection between knowledge and final causes as discussed above. Teleological action depends, for Guo, on the cognitive recognition of a goal and its value.Without the explicit conscious positing of the image of the goal, there is no goaloriented action, no distortion of the “vanishing” self-so. Guo is generally opposed to goal-oriented action, and knowledge is one of the tools of this kind

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of action; hence when he denies causality, very often he is implicitly referring especially to final causes, and this makes it natural for him to connect this with a critique of knowledge in general.We will encounter this theme again below. Next we get the first use of duhua proper: “If we search for that which [each thing] is dependent on and seek out what [each thing] comes from, this searching will lead to an infinite regress, and in the end we will come only to the lack of dependence (wudai); thus the principle of lone-transformation (duhua) becomes clear.”This appears to be simply the familiar philosophical critique of the doctrine of a first cause, which Guo however here aims at the category of causality in general, rather than the first cause specifically. The point is simply that if we accept the common view of the universal efficacy of causation, we are led to an infinite regress, and still cannot escape having recourse to the concept of the unconditioned, or the ultimate breakdown of the concept of causality. Guo’s solution is not, however, to posit the first cause as itself uncaused, or to extend the chain of causality back infinitely, as for example the Buddhists usually do when they deny a first cause and speak of the cosmos as beginningless, while at the same time upholding the principle of causality as absolute. Rather, Guo rejects the concept of causality itself; he cuts out the middle man entirely, and asserts that all things are unmediated, and transform in solitude. Here however he has not yet explicitly asserted that this quality is applicable to all things; he has merely introduced this category of lonetransformation, asserting that it results inevitably from the inherent dialectical self-overcoming of the concept of causality itself. He has not yet directly applied this concept to anything; this will occur below. But first we get the next short comment: “If it were dependent on snake scales or cicada wings, the reason for its lack of a fixed course of action would not be difficult to discern. The reason it is not discerned in the present case is precisely that it is not dependent on this type of thing, but rather lonetransforms.”This remark gives us a better idea of the connection between cognition and causality that Guo wishes to draw.The reason the original question was asked, the reason the penumbra was puzzled by the shadow’s inconstant action, was precisely that no direct causal links can truly be established. The shadow’s actions are completely unpredictable to the penumbra, because the shadow is lone-transforming, an independent world unto itself, bearing no fixed cognizable relation to anything else. This line of reasoning reinforces the connection Guo is drawing between unknowablity, or at least inexplicability, and lone-transformation. Now we come to Guo’s manifesto on the question of causality, independence, and lone-transformation. It begins with a critique of the concept of a creator. Guo’s argument seems to be that if we do admit the idea of causality, we will be led to the idea of an initial creator; but this is an idea that Guo considers self-contradictory, or contradictory to the posited notion of universal causality that made its presupposition necessary. If the creator is not an existent thing, that is, if it is “Non-Being,” as was the prevalent claim at Guo’s time, Guo

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contends that it could not create the existent. On the other hand, if it were itself an existent thing, it could not be the creator of all things—presumably because this would mean being its own creator, and this would violate the assumed law of causality, whereby each thing must be grounded in something outside itself. Again, the idea is that the creator in this case would have had to create himself; but once this is admitted as possible, we have the concept of selfcreation in hand, and can dispose of the creator. Guo has dispensed with any separation between the finite and the infinite, as we have seen, and admits no realms or beings that are infinite, and that therefore have a special set of rules pertaining to them that differ from those applying to the finite. There is only one realm, the realm of finite entities in transformation; anything at all, in order to be anything, must be finite, i.e., have limits and determinations distinguishing it from other things. This is what it means to be a “being,” and if causality applies to one being, it applies to all beings. As for anything other than such being, the completely indeterminate Non-Being of Wang Bi, this is for Guo truly nothing, a cipher that can do nothing. If it is claimed to do anything, it must exist in some sense, and if it does exist the same rules apply to it as to all other existent entites. Hence the concept of universal causality contradicts itself; if taken seriously, Guo holds, it leads back to the concept of a creator, which however is uncaused and hence contradicts the original premise of universal causation.Thus does the concept of universal causality break down, yielding the idea of self-creation, self-so. Once we have this concept, and indeed have seen its inevitability, Guo asserts, we know that all beings, even the penumbra, the most dependent of the dependent, the slave of the slave, in fact self-create, are dependent on nothing, and lone-transform in perfect vanishing (into) their own determinacies. Having asserted this, Guo quotes the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, where the notion of independence or unconditionality was first introduced: This lonetransformation of all things, it turns out, is precisely the “rightness of heaven and earth” spoken of in that chapter, on which the Zhuangzi text said one must ride in order to be independent. This is not surprising since, as we have seen, this self-creation is for Guo self-so; not self-cause but the lack of anything apprehendable as a cause, the forgetting of all traces in the fitness and comfort of self-rightness.This assertion is thus simply a reappearance of the double meaning of the self-so, as self-rightness (= self-forgetting) and self-creation (= because no trace can be cognitively apprehended as the cause that creates any individual entity, i.e., because it is inexplicable). To go along with the self-transformation and hence independence of all things (including also the dependent, spontaneously relating to that upon which they depend) is thus to ride on the rightness of each one, on the fact that each is right to itself, and that this is to be independent of any concern about which way they happen to be, since whatever way they are is right, i.e., self-right. It is with the next section that we begin to get a more explicit discussion of the content of this notion of lone-transformation. First we are told unequiv-

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ocally that it does not mean an actual denial of the interconnections among things: “When self and other follow one another (xiang yin), and form and shadow simultaneously come to be ( jusheng), although they are obliquely joined (xuanhe), it is not dependence.” The ordinary interactions we observe are not denied; it is merely the interpretation of such relationships as causal links that is challenged. The correspondences among things cannot be denied, and Guo makes no attempt to claim that the relationships of relativity that Zhuangzi has outlined, between opposites that bear a logical inverse relationship to one another and are only intelligible through mutual reference, such as self and other, are in fact not relative to each other. Nor does Guo deny the observed interconnection of things in the empirical universe. On the contrary, Guo himself has dilated on such relations quite eloquently: Although man’s body is small and insignificant, it takes all of heaven and earth to collectively offer it up.Thus of the ten thousand things in heaven and earth, each entity cannot lack any one of the others for even one day. If even one thing were not present, then whatever comes to be would have no way to come to be. . . .13

Guo, in agreement with the “Taoist” tradition going all the way back to the Laozi, acknowledges that things “mutually generate” (xiangsheng). When the Zhuangzi quotes the saying, “When the lips are gone, the teeth are cold.When the wine of Lu is thin, Han-tan is beseiged,” Guo comments: The eradication of the lips is not done in order to make the teeth cold, and yet the teeth are cold. The wine of Lu was not made thin in order to bring about the seige of Han-tan, and yet Han-tan was beseiged. The sages do not appear in order to give rise to the great robbers, and yet the great robbers arise.This is all self-so mutual generation (xiangsheng), a necessary tendency.14

The logical relations of self and other are also not denied by Guo:“In the world there are none that do not relate to each other as self and other, and self and other both want to act on their own, related to each other as opposites, like east and west. . . . This is to be mutally opposed but unable to lack each other (bu keyi xiangwu).”15 Nor does this singularity mean remaining constantly the same, maintainting one set of determinate contents and resisting any change to it. Rather, Guo describes a state of “ever wandering in the Singular but not maintaning anything fixed ( fei gushou).”16 Clearly, Guo acknowledges the intimate mutual interaction of things, and even that they need one another in order to be what they are, and that they change into one another. How then can he call them independent, and deny that these are causal relations? Is there any sense to this claim at all? In the penumbra passage, Guo acknowledges that things “follow each other” (xiang yin17). To understand all that is implied by this phrase we must look at its occurrence in other places in the commentary.We have already seen the importance of the concept of “following” in our discussion of vanishing

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(into) things, but here the same term does double duty in also denoting causality, another common implication of the word yin , and we must be careful in keeping before us the two meanings of this term, and their combination into one concept. Of particular interest in getting to the bottom of the distinctive meanings Guo attaches to this term, we must turn to the recurrence of the phrase xiangyin a bit later in the commentary. A startling claim is made in this passage, one that this whole essay has been in a sense implicitly flirting with and leading up to. Guo says: “Nothing brings about mutual following as well as perfect lonetransformation (xiangyin zhi gong muo ruo duhua zhizhi).” Not only does Guo consider this mutual interaction compatible with lone-transformation; he asserts here that the latter is actually what brings about the former. By lonetransforming, they interact. Indeed, the more they lone-transform, the more they follow each other.This is a comment on the Zhuangzi text:“They merely take heaven as their father, and love it with their whole selves; how much more that which transcends it and protrudes above it!” (er kuang qi zhuo18 hu). Guo’s complete commentary on this remark goes as follows: “That which transcends and protrudes above it” means lone-transformation. Nothing br ings about mutual following as well as perfect lonetransformation. Thus what men follow (yin) is heaven; the productions of heaven are [actually] lone-transformation. People all take heaven as their father, and thus they dare not despise the transformations of day and night, the nodes of summer and winter; they follow heaven and rest in these changes. How much more then the outstanding lone-transformations reaching to the realm of dark vanishing (into) things—why don’t they allow these to proceed [as they proceed]?! Once they have allowed them, the transformations of heaven and earth will be followed like inner necessity.19

People “follow” heaven—that is, they allow the changes of seasons to proceed as they do without taking any cognitive attitude toward these changes, or attempting to alter them. If we accept Guo’s interpretation, we must read the Zhuangzi as saying, “They love heaven as a father; how much more its singularity! (qizhuo)” The productions of heaven are in fact lone-transformations. Each of them is a solitary independent unity, not produced by heaven or anything else, but rather produced “by itself ”—i.e., spontaneously, inexplicably, selfforgettingly. It is to be recalled that spontaneity for Guo does not mean being self-caused so much as being uncaused. It is not so much that one is one’s own ground; rather, one is ungrounded, comes to be so without trying to and without knowing how or why. But it could also be plausibly claimed that these two notions cannot be kept absolutely apart; they inevitably blur into one another, and if one concentrates on either one, and thinks it through to the end, it tends to become the other.They are to a large extent merely two ways of saying the same thing; their content is actually the same, but with different foci. But when Guo claims that things are not born from themselves, he means

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especially that they are not created by conscious volition; again, cognition is the implicit target. When things are done without cognition, without the positing of an other and the web of causal interconnections in which cognition moves, they are Singular or lone. In this passage, the lone-transformation of things is their “out-standingness,” what is referred to in the penumbra commentary as their distinctness, appearing each in its own singularity (liran duxian), as well as their freedom from the cognitive relations of causality. It is also the unity of the various productions of heaven implicitly posited by the common people. Just as all the different manifestations, night and day and the various seasons are all followed without conscious objection because they are all considered productions of the “one” heaven, which is loved as a father, all transformations are lone, are merely the one, even when they involve the opposites of life and death. Their oneness does not reside in their being produced by a cause that is identical in all cases, called Heaven. It lies in the fact that each is self-so, self-right, inexplicable, self-forgetting, and in this forgetting and disconnection from causal explanation, singular or lone. Both of these contradictory senses of oneness are implied in this term (i.e., oneness as distinct individuality and freedom from causality as understood by cognition, and the oneness of universality, what they share with all other entities), which however Guo interprets to mean merely their own self-so, and hence their individuality, thus removing the contradiction. The passage asserts that it is this singularity, this causelessness, this forgetting of otherness in the transformations’ spontaneous rightness, and this universality embracing opposites that people are really following when they follow heaven, for these are what heaven (i.e., nature) actually puts before them. Because people so regard things, they follow along with them; but this following is clearly more a question of human attitude than of causality. What is meant by following here is close to what we discussed above as vanishing (into) things, taking all changes as part of one’s own inner necessity or fate, and therefore letting them take their course without applying volition or any cognitive attitude to them. More than anything, this “following” implies the eradication of valuation, or rather the constant change of value to exactly match the constant change of encountered actuality, and consent to it. As Guo puts it, this is to “embody changes and join with transformation, so that wherever one goes one follows (yin), and whatever one follows is acceptable/right (ke).”20 In embodying the changes one encounters, and adapting one’s values so as to consider them right and comfortable to oneself, one ceases to consider them external to oneself, makes them part of one’s own self-rightness, one’s own real self. When one completely fits these things one encounters, and is comfortable in them, one forgets them, ceases to cognize them as traces, ceases to apply extrinsic values to them, One interacts with these external changes in such a way that they are forgotten and valueless like parts of one’s own body, and thus one is no longer consciously interacting with anything external at all, which is precisely what constitutes their self-forgetting and self-rightness. The idea is that

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in following heaven one is following lone-transformation, and lonetransformation implies this particular kind of mutual interaction, this following, because it allows each thing to vanish (into) the transformations of the other, seeing them as its own inner necessity and self-rightness, its own singular oneness, both as a constancy and as an aloneness, an independence without anything outside itself, rather than viewing it with trace-cognition as something external, something with a determinate content eternally counterposed to my determinate content. The otherness of the other is sublated into the self, and thereby the original mediation, which has made this self be what it is, is simultaneously abolished, transformed, and preserved in a new form. But this self, it must be remembered, is not the trace-self, the determinate being that is recognized as the self either by oneself or others. It is the “self-,” the fitness and forgetting, the darkness and vanishing, the spontaneity and prereflective, preevaluative, predeterminate process of transformation itself. The mutual following here said to be brought about by lonetransformation is what elsewhere was called “allowing the changes to go as they go” or “forming one body with every change”—in other words, vanishing (into) things. This is the type of interaction between two entities opposed to that of cognition of traces; each forgets the other and allows it to be itself, affirming what it affirms and negating what it negates, and this mutual allowing is their mutual following. Their externality and otherness is also abolished in this; the sage has no particular self and lets every self do as it does and be his self, whereas all other selves forget one another completely and follow along with their own determinacy, thereby unconsciously interacting with one another in their forgetting of one another, as we shall see below in Guo’s metaphor of the animal organism.This is of course more a psychological/mystical state that Guo is prescribing as a desirable attitude for a human being to take toward other objects than a description of causal relationships among objects. Nonetheless, as is often the case in Chinese philosophical discourse, the descriptive and prescriptive are not kept completely distinct. Hence we must bear this psychological sense of “mutual following” in mind in interpreting the penumbra commentary as well. The relationship between self and other and between form and shadow is said to be not one of dependence, but of oblique joining (xuanhe), a phrase reminiscent of Guo’s term “oblique oneness” (xuantong) of the self and the other, an idea that unmistakably suggests unconsciousness and vanishing (into) things, which further calls our attention to this psychological sense of “independence.” We noted above that Guo’s polemics against causality are usually aimed mainly at consciously entertained final causes, and this is the case here as well. For teleology is the kind of causality that is for Guo inherently bound up with consciousness in its very definition. It is action caused by cognition of a goal.This is most definitely being rejected here, and this is part of the sense of Guo’s claims for independence: things are not teleologically related to each other; their joining is dark or oblique (i.e., their interconnection is not a result or object of cognition or inten-

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tion). Guo’s remarks about lips and teeth, and sages and great robbers quoted above are also relevant here. In one sense then, Guo is simply saying that although there is some unknown or nondeliberate dependence among things in the realm of what we would call mechanical or efficient causation, things are not what they are for the sake of one another, but in their own consciousnesses are only for themselves, and in this sense they are independent. By following along with whatever transformation is encountered and considering it selfright, the sage sees it as his own identity, his own self-rightness, which is also a comfortable fit and a forgetting of traces and otherness, hence a singularity and an independence. But there is more to Guo’s position than this. For Guo is in fact also asserting something more broadly about causality of all kinds, applicable to all objects. To begin with, there is a claim that mechanical causes are also unknowable in principle, and that, as Fung puts it, “we cannot designate any particular thing as the cause of any other particular thing.”21 This is unquestionably a part of Guo’s position, and further connects the question of causality to the question of cognition, but in another way; efficient mechanical causes are unknowable, or rather are a way of regarding events necessarily connected with a type of cognition that Guo has discredited. No direct one-to-one relation can be drawn between cause and effect; the “chain of causality” is an illegitimate conception, both because, as we saw above, when taken to its logical conclusion it contradicts itself, and because the linear one-after-another apprehension of causal links that is characteristic of cognition (where one thing is seen as caused by another thing external to itself ) is applicable only to the traces, the objectifications or externalizations, of spontaneous activities, and cannot actually connect one particular to another, cannot describe the all-inclusive trace forgetting (and hence other-oblivious) spontaneity that actually was experienced by each thing in becoming what it is. Thus Guo is able to say of the way things are produced that “because they cut off all traces in their nonactivity and unconsciously form a Singularity, they do not come from anything (fei you you ye).”22 This is caused both by the nature of cognition and its inherent externality to its object (its restriction to the realm of traces) and to the synthetic nature of causality (i.e. that the effect is always the result of a convergence of conditions, and ultimately of all causes). As Tang puts it: Guo’s position is that if we take an entity as conditioned, we can analyze [and find] the conditions of its existence; but these conditions also have conditions, and if we continue to trace the causal links in this way we come to the conclusion that the conditions for any entity’s existence are infinite, which is to say that every thing and every condition is a condition of this particular entity’s existence. But to say that any and every condition is a condition of its existence is tantamount to saying that its existence is unconditioned.23

Everything and anything makes this particular thing what it is; thus it need make no distinctions between what is necessary to it and what is not, for all

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things are equally necessary to it. Any condition that arises is a condition of its existence, and thus it need not cling to any particular configuration of conditions, which is equivalent to saying that it is independent of conditions, that it is unconditioned.Tang goes on to criticize this conception of Guo’s for neglecting the sequence and relative importance of various causes in bringing about a given effect. While it is true, he says, that every cause is implicated in every effect, some are of greater importance and some of lesser in making this particular effect what it is, and the particular structure or arrangement of the totality of others is also an indispensible determinant of the effect. This is a valid criticism to the extent that one is concerned with the particular being of a particular entity; if one wishes to assure that it is red rather than green, or alive rather than dead, a particular configuration of the totality of causes would be necessary. But Guo is not concerning himself with any such fixed particular determinacy, which he would consider a kind of clinging, a failure to vanish (into) and “follow” every change. Of course, a given thing is dependent on a particular configuration of conditions in order to possess any particular set of characteristics, but it is not dependent on any such particular configuration to possess characteristics, to be a particular in general, that is, to be any particular. Given Guo’s definition of the self as not confined to any particular set of characteristics, and his notion of Being as something absolutely inviolable and imperishable, which can change but never cease to be, as simply a word for whatever one can ever become or encounter, this is not a serious problem for him. The self for Guo is simply the self-forgetting self-rightness of any condition of this Being. Life and death are both equally “I,” as we saw above; we are dependent on conditions to be one or the other, but not to be the type of “I” that is equally at home being either one, the self-rightness of each one to itself. To the extent that we are not psychologically choosing between one set of characteristics and another, we are independent; whatever happens, we will be something or other. Hence once again we are to vanish (into) the changes, to follow them completely, let them take their own spontaneous course and be “I” in the midst of any of them, at home and comfortable in being whatever one happens to become in any given moment, and hence devoid of reflexive consciousness. This is self-rightness, the forgetting in each moment of every other moment, hence vanishing (into) the absolute Singularity of that moment. Guo sums it up as follows: “To be whatever one encounters and rest contently in it, thus forgetting whatever was contacted in the past or future, this is to perceive the Singularity.”24 Thus we see several types of relation between lone-transformation (or absolute uniqueness and independence) and “trace-vanished” unconsciousness: (1) the inefficacy of cognitively guided teleological causality (i.e., intentional acts, in making anything what it is); (2) the inexplicability of any particular entity by means of mechanical causality, since such a conception breaks down into infinite regress—where each particular entity is ultimately caused by all other entities—and thus into meaninglessness; (3) the fact that both of these

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notions of causality presuppose a conception of the presence of mutually external objects, a notion Guo holds to be a result of trace-cognition, the perception of things from without, rather than spontaneous vanishing (into) things, which alone expresses the self-so by which thing actually come to be what they are; and (4) the unconsciousness of fit or comfort that goes with allowing all changes to be one’s own self, thereby being independent of any particular configuration of conditions. This sense of unconsciousness that goes along with fittingness and comfort in following all changes, hence allowing a sense of independence amidst interaction and mutual influence, is closely related to Guo’s notion of oneness in diversity, which is explicated first of all and most forcefully in his recurrent use of the imagery of the parts of an animal organism to illustrate the relations between things.25 First Guo relates this to the differing determinacies of things, and the differing roles thereby falling to them within the social and political hierarchy. He is here commenting on a line of the Zhuangzi text that asks rhetorically about the mutual regulation of the parts of the human body, as part of an inquiry about whether there is any “true lord” or self that regulates all parts of the body: “Are they all vassals and concubines? Are these vassals and concubines not sufficient to regulate one another?” Guo comments: If vassal and concubines match their own divided determinacies, they will not be unable to regulate each other (xiangzhi). By mutual regulation is meant the way hand, foot, ear, eye, the four limbs and each of the hundred parts of the body, each is in charge of its own job and all steer and utilize each other.26

By each being what it is, and each tending to its own determinacy, doing what it can do (also implied is each official tending to his own duties within a bureaucracy), each finds that all goes smoothly, and moreover each one is able to use all the others. That is, the hand uses all the other parts of the body as its subordinates when it is time for it to accomplish its hand-tasks; when it wants to pick something up across the room, the feet carry it over to it and support it as it does its job. When a foot-task comes up, the hands, in doing their handbusiness, aid in its accomplishment as well. In all these changing foci of attention and activity, the unity of the organism is maintained, and yet each part therein maintains its own integrity and acts only as itself and for itself, never thinking of the others. Guo develops this line of thought elsewhere: For he who embodies heaven and earth and vanishes (into) every transformation [the world is experienced as a body where] although the hand and the foot have different jobs and the five organs have different jurisdictions, and never interact (xiangyu), yet the hundred joints are unified and harmonious; this is to “interact in noninteraction” (xiangyu yu wuxiangyu).These parts have never acted for the sake of each other, and yet inner and outer are both aided [by each other]; this is to “be-for-each-other in not-being-for-each other” (xiangwei yu wuxiangwei27). If one labors one’s mind and will to succor the hand and the foot, and maneuvers one’s thighs and elbows to manage the

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five inner organs, then the more intense this mutual managing becomes the more inner and outer will both be troubled. Thus he who takes heaven and earth as one body has no love or deliberate action for anything between them.28

By ignoring each other, the various parts of the body are in harmony, and belong to a oneness. Here again we see the connection to forgetting and vanishing (into) things as an essential feature of this mutual interaction, which is also “Singular” for each. Each member knows only itself and acts only for itself, but in so acting it aids all the others; the hand does not help the foot by lifting and dropping the foot every time walking is wanted; on the contrary, it aids it best by forgetting all about foot-work and tending to its own hand-business: The perfect benevolence is like the hundred joints in the body all being comfortable and fit; all day one is not cognizant of them. When the sage [rules] above, he does not take any deliberate action, but simply indulges all so that each attains what it is. If each attains its doing of what it does, then all the various duties will be comfortable, the mass of creatures will each be satisfied with itself; how then could any in the world fail to forget itself? If each forgets itself, where is the lord? This is what is called “forgetting both.”29

The comfort and fit of the parts of the body in their relation to one another spells their unawareness of themselves, and by the same token, of one another. Each is alone in its own determinacy and forgets everything outside itself and also within itself. But this very vanishing of all otherness signifies that it is interacting harmoniously with all othernesses. Its feeling of independence is a sign that it is perfectly dependent, and its comfortable and unconscious restriction to its own determinate limits is whereby it participates in and aids the whole: In the world there are none that do not relate to each other as self and other. Self and other always want to pursue their own activities, and thus are opposed to each other like east and west. But self and other are related to each other like lips and teeth; the lips and teeth never act for the sake of each other, and yet when the lips are gone the teeth are cold. Thus the other’s activity for himself has a vast effect/merit (gong) in aiding me. Thus it is that mutually opposed entities cannot lack one another. . . . If they neglect the efficacy and merit of their activity for themselves and start thinking of kindly acting for the sake of each other, then the more conscientious they are in their kindness, the more falsity and meagerness [in actual mutual benefit] will flourish. . . .30

Any conscious attempt deliberately to help one another interferes with the spontaneous aid each thing gives to each other thing simply by comfortably being itself, and acting for itself, and thereby forgetting itself and its other. This is of course also to forget the whole question of oneness.As Guo puts it, “To unify things (yi zhi) is not as good as not to unify them and let them self-equalize, which is moreover to forget their oneness.”31 “To unify them is

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no different from [otherwise quantifying them], but he who forgets about oneness is wordless and lets them self-unify.”32 Oneness is not achieved through volition; it is simply a result of each part being itself with no thought for the others or for the totality. Here again we see Guo attempting to avoid the paradox involved in valuing valuelessness; he asserts that the valuelessness he values is not something that can be achieved by valuing it or deliberately trying to achieve it. It is itself a spontaneous by-product of the forgetting of traces, which is something Guo descriptively tells us the sages do when they obliterate with all things, not because Guo Xiang or anyone else told them to, but simply because they do so (i.e., inexplicably)—it is their self-so self-rightness to do so, comfortable to them, forgotten by them, not explicable in terms derived from trace-cognition like cause and effect, much less goal-oriented final causes, and consciously embraced value. It might be argued nonetheless that Guo has still merely pushed the paradox back one level, for it is clear from his writings that he does in fact value this type of behavior, and the fact that he is writing about it at all suggests that he does want to affect his readers’ consciousness and values in some way, wants to change them.This is a valid criticism to a certain extent, but there is also something inevitable about this paradox for a writer on subjects such as these, as Guo himself seems to have known and accepted without any particular distaste. We will discuss this question again at the end of this book. This forgetting of oneness itself, in any case, amounts to an assertion that Guo takes his own ideas seriously enough to accept their self-transcendence (i.e., that the entire structure of thought he has presented is as thoroughly undercut by his own critique of cognitive thought as any other such structure and is to be forgotten). Deliberate action on the basis of cognized ideas, including Guo’s own ideas, is useless.The true vanishing (into) things and independence of lone-transformation means even the forgetting of the oneness that Guo asserts it expresses, the self-so of which he is always speaking. This is also to forget both the traces and any notion of what leaves the traces, the self-so: In “sitting and forgetting” what is not forgotten? Both the traces and that which leaves the traces are forgotten; inside he has no consciousness of his self, outside no consciousness of heaven and earth; only then can he vastly embody all transformations and be everywhere unobstructed.33

This complete forgetting and vanishing (into) things is in fact the oneness of which Guo speaks, a complete correspondence with one’s own determinacy, which leaves no room for notions of the other parts either as separate or as a oneness and totality, nor for notions of what Guo Xiang has said about oneness that forgets oneness. This is of course also related to the question of values, for in forgetting one another the parts also do not value one another: The parts in man’s body are not intimate with one another.The head is spontaneously above, the foot is spontaneously below, the organs dwell within and

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the skin and hair without. Inner and outer, above and below, exalted and humble, honored and base, within the body each goes along with the limits of its own determinacy ( ji), and there is no intimacy or love between them.34

Values, as we have seen abundantly above, are born of mutual cognition, which is born of disharmony. Conscious intimacy or esteem, or any other deliberate interaction, destroys the original independence-in-dependence; this conscious mutual reference interferes with the spontaneous mutual implication that obtains when each thing is simply itself, does what it is itself suited to do, and does not trouble itself with any conscious reference to the condition of other entities. This is “oblique joining which is not dependence,” vanishing (into) things, “vanished self-attainment of which one remains unconscious,”35 lonetransformation that sublates its mediations into perfect forgetfulness, thereby ever wandering in the “Singular” although involved in unceasing interconnections and changes. This Singularity is also associated with “having no deliberate mind” (wuxin), with “returning within to hold to having no deliberate mind and thereby traveling in Singularity.” This having no mind is also a forgetting, the “sitting and forgetting which is the going along with and allowing of the Singular [to do as it does].”36 This is the vanishing (into) things that is unconscious of all traces (i.e., of all otherness, the form of all conscious knowledge).This is “to vanish (into) everything, and hence have no doubleness.” This is the Singularity embodied in lone-transformation. From this type of body imagery, we begin to get a deeper understanding of Guo’s conceptions of the constant and singular “I,” which is nonetheless none other than the self-forgetting fitness, the self-rightness of whatever transformations of life and death are encountered, the immanent unity-within-difference, the pure unity of the changes and multiplicities, which allows them to be both one and many, both changing and constant, both interdependent and independent.This “I” is simply each thing’s self-rightness in being its particular self, in becoming what it becomes and being comfortable in it, hence forgetting itself. This level of self-forgetting of itself in its rightness and comfort is whereby all things call themselves “I,” and it is this “I,” this self-rightness, that the sage is in encountering and being them all. But there is another dimension, what we might call a logical or analytic derivation, to Guo’s notion of oneness within difference, and the other immanent unities listed above.We have discussed this conception to some extent, but now are in a position to understand its context and implications more fruitfully. We can begin to get an idea of all that is meant by this kind of oneness from some of Guo’s remarks about the term “purity, unmixedness” (chun), which also implies a kind of oneness.37 Guo says: Purity means unmixedness (buza). When someone participates in all the changes of ten thousand years, the common mass of men call him mixed; thus they go scurrying about laboring their bodies and terrorizing their minds in

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order to avoid one thing and move toward another. Only the great sage clings to nothing, and unconsciously38 directly proceeds,39 one with every transformation. Being one with every transformation, he is constantly roaming in the[ir] Singularity (du).40 Thus although he participates and blends into [the changes of ] a hundred million years, a thousand differences and ten thousand distinctions, as “paths become what they are by being walked on,” so the past and present are one becoming-what-they-are; as “things are made what they are by being called something,” so the ten thousand things are one beingwhat-they-are. There is then no thing which is not what it is [or right, ran], and no time which is not the becoming of what it is [or perfection, completion, cheng]; this can be called purity.41

The oneness here is attained precisely by participating in the changes and differences, rather than keeping something away from them.The sage’s oneness is simply to be every change. There is not some one characteristic amidst the change that does not change, that is his self, that contains or underlies these changes; the oneness consists in simply not avoiding one thing in favor of another, in allowing every change to proceed without trying to keep any one thing pure and undefiled by otherness. Just as above we saw change overcome by giving in to change, here we see dependence and the imposition of otherness overcome by total surrender to otherness. The oneness in them is simply the allowing of each of them to be what it is, and thereby to be its own selfso “rightness.” All are alike in being regarded as “thus” and as “right,” and this alone is the “self ” that unifies them all; it is merely each of them being its own self. This, as we discussed above, is what all of them have in common amidst their differences, and this is also wherein the sage’s oneness with them consists. His unchanging self is merely each of them being their different changing selves. The “selfing,” which is also a considering oneself to be “thus” and a considering oneself to be “right,” is thus never lacking. Guo makes an explicit point of emphasizing that this universal rightness is a consequence of the differences among things, not something that they share or any one quality that is imposed upon them, saying for example, “If one regards the differences (shu) of things and lets each do as it does, then of the ten thousand things there will be none that is not right (dang).”42 Again, what things have in common is their being self-so, their self-rightness. Each thing is inherently right to itself, and this is its identity, the identity that all things share. This self-rightness is shown precisely by its comfort, and hence its forgetting of itself and its other.This is the “I” the sage is being in being all of them. It is not to be conceived of as some underlying substance that remains aloof and unchanged as the various transformations pass before it, or a universal noumenal self from which all phenomena are made. The “I” of things is their self-rightness, and in letting each be itself, unperverted by the values of other determinacies and other rightnesses; one is always this selfness, this rightness, of things. This is to “roam in the Singularity,” one’s own singularity and the singularity of each determinacy that might arise or be

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encountered, and this is precisely what the independence of lone-transformation signifies. This becomes even more explicit in a later comment about purity, where its connection with traces and valuation is spelled out.The Zhuangzi says,“The way of purity and unbleached whiteness is to guard and hold on to (shou) the spirit, and this alone; guard it and never lose it, and one becomes one with spirit. The essential penetration of this oneness joins with the heavenly order. A common saying says, ‘The mass of men value profit, the unimpeachable scholar values his reputation, the worthy man values his ambition, and the sage values his pure essence.’Thus unbleached whiteness means to be unmixed with anything; purity means to not lack the spirit.” Guo says: To be one with spirit is actually not to guard or hold on to spirit. Not to be distanced from one’s essence is not really a result of valuing one’s essence. But the traces of these things appear as valuing and guarding. . . . If we can take not lacking as purity, then even when a hundred activities are picked up together, when ten thousand transformations are joined into and included, this is still perfect purity.43

Guo takes pains to contradict the Zhuangzi here, so as to make it perfectly clear that the oneness he is speaking of is not a kind of holding on to some particular thing, such as the spirit, while everything else changes. Once again, the Zhuangzi text is taken to have been speaking of only the traces. For Guo’s unconscious spontaneity would never deliberately hold on to any one thing, since this would be a manifestation of deliberate preference of one thing over another, and of valuation, all of which are stigmatized as being a result of cognition-derived traces. But when later people see the records of these sages’ activities, they see only the traces, and hence it seems to them that the sages held on to and valued something. They seek to imitate these traces, and then incipit tragoedia. But what the sages were actually up to was precisely the opposite of such valuing and clinging.Their oneness and purity, on the contrary, was a total mixing into all changes and impurities, with nothing left over and nothing held on to or preserved. Letting each change be (it)self, they were never devoid of self. Guo conceives of oneness and diversity as “negatively identical” (i.e., unified within and by means of their difference). It is the mark of the true man that he “unifies heaven and man, equalizes self and other, and does not take oneness as different from not-oneness.”44 But how exactly does this occur? What is the justification for this oneness of oneness and diversity? We have seen already the use of the image of the body and the psychology of vanishing (into) things as two explanations of oneness within diversity. Both strategies were intimately associated with the question of unconsciousness and value, and argued by means of analogy or from a prescriptive standpoint, giving an account of the mind of the sage.We have also seen what we called the analytic argument for the oneness of oneness and diversity, where the oneness was taken to be precisely the right-

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ness of each different thing to itself, the identity of each thing as a selfrightness different from any other. Guo develops this line in somewhat different terms elsewhere as follows: Since now we are to speak of not having a right and wrong, it is not known whether this is like (lit., put in the same category with, lei) speaking of having a right and a wrong or not. If we try to say they are alike, we find that I take not having (right and wrong) as right, whereas the others take not having (right and wrong) as wrong, and in this they are not alike. But although what is considered right and wrong in the two cases differs, neither has avoided having a right and a wrong; in this they are alike.Thus we may say that to be alike and not to be alike are alike, and in this sense there is nothing whereby I am not like the other. But to be greatly not like these there is nothing so good as having no deliberate mind. [This would be] not only to discard right and wrong, but also to discard this discarding. They are discarded and again discarded, until no-discarding is reached;45 only then do we have nothing discarded and nothing not-discarded, and right and wrong vanish of themselves.46

Here the alikeness of all unalikeness is once more very explicitly asserted, in that each has its own right and wrong, which is to say, each is itself, and differs from the others. This is of course merely a more explicit restatement of the oneness attained by things in each being equally self-so, and hence self-right. The passage goes on to suggest the position of the sage amidst this; he does not take the position of taking no position, which is to say, setting a value on having no right and wrong. This would be the behavior of the imitator of the sage’s traces, who sees the sage’s freedom from right and wrong and thus considers this something good or desirable and hence sets out to copy it. The sage however also discards this discarding; that is, he has no deliberate intention at all, merely follows along with all things and lets them do as they do, vanishing with all changes, and right and wrong vanish spontaneously, not as a result of any conscious volition. Thus he is able to combine all changes in himself, just as each effect combines all causes in itself. But we should note here that any particular position of any kind, with any cognitive content whatsoever, is identical in its difference from the others. Having a right and a wrong is to have a particular perspective differentiated from others, and this is the alikeness of all things. Elsewhere, when the Zhuangzi says, “They avail themselves of the different things and lodge in the same body,” Guo comments: To avail of (or depend on, jia) is to follow (yin). Death and life, gathering and dispersal, all the transformations without fixed form, these are “different things.” When there is no difference that one does not avail oneself of [and follow], then although what is availed of is always different, they collectively form one body.47

Here again the secret of realizing this unity-within-difference lies in following the differences of things, and suffering them to be what they are, that

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is, to be different. “Each simply self-attains [its being what it is]; they are not the same as one another, and yet this Way [of self-attainment] is one.”48 The oneness of which Guo speaks consists in “moving together with every transformation, and vanishing wherever one finds oneself.”49 This is to follow along (yin) with the differences and changes, and this is the aloneness and independence that exists within dependence, or rather within “oblique joining.” Their lone-transformation, their singular unconditionality, consists precisely in their following along with all changes and vanishing (into) all otherness, to “consider all changes my self and obliquely unify self and other.”50 Each entity is its own totality of all other entities, its own independent convergence of all causes and conditions, “self-joining like the tallying of upper and lower lip”;51 hence “all under heaven keep their ‘I’ complete, and whatever calls itself ‘I’ is complete.”52 Hence we see that there are at least three senses of oneness in Guo Xiang: (1) the allegedly descriptive oneness of parts in the cosmos one with each other as organs in a body are one (i.e., in forgetting one another but inherently acting for one another when they act for themselves); (2) the logical oneness found in the single characteristic that all things share (i.e., to be themselves and to be different from one another, to have a particular determinacy that differs from all others, and thereby to be right to themselves); (3) the prescriptive psychological oneness attained by the sage, his traceless vanishing (into) things with all things and all changes, whereby he forms one body with whatever he encounters, forgets them and their traces and rather lets each be its own self (the second oneness) and thereby unconsciously and inadvertantly aid one another as members in one body (the first oneness). It is to be noted that none of these is an abstract or undifferentiated oneness. In all, it is a oneness within diversity, where the full multiplicity and determinacy of the parts is preserved, and indeed is the very basis on which the oneness is predicated. Moreover, since the first type of oneness is not meant to imply any claim that this totality of things will work out in any particular way, will end up preserving any particular set of determinacies, or accord with any intentional plan or values, it cannot be construed as a dogmatic assertion that there is really some kind of “preestablished harmony” in the cosmos, in the Leibnizian sense or Han Ruist sense. The “harmony” and “unconscious mutual aid” among entities may include their mutual destruction, the dissipation and disappearance of any and every particular determinacy; indeed, it depends on the ability of each determinacy to vanish (into) whatever happens next. Its sole guarantee lies in the other senses of oneness adduced above—the self-vanishing and self-so of each entity that “happens” to appear. If there is any “necessity” here, it is one that ends up being synonymous with “freedom” and even with “chance” or “contingency,” a point we will discuss in detail in Appendix B. Thus we can see, getting back to Guo’s conception of causality, and the independence that denies not only teleological but also any conceivability of efficient causality, while still following along with changing conditions, that it is

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predicated on his notions of the relation of oneness to diversity. Each effect is a synthesis of all its causes (which potentially include all things); it is their oneness.The converging causes, considered under the category of their oneness rather than their diversity, are this effect.The self-so of any particular thing can also be considered a self-joining of the causes that converge to make it so. As Guo says, “Things have their self-so, and principles have their ultimate perfection; in following along with this they move directly forward (zhiwang53) and thus vanishingly self-join (mingran zihe). . . .”54 The cause and the effect are the same thing, only considered from the perspective of oneness and diversity, respectively. There is nothing in the causes that is not in the effect and vice versa, but in the self-joining of the causes into the effect, their mutual externality is forgotten, vanished. This vanishing (into) things is the only difference between the cause and the effect. Any entity is at once both one and many, both self and other, both the effect and its causes. By using the psychological state of vanishing (into) things as an analogy for the kind of joining and annulment of externality and mutual-otherness that takes place in the converging of causes into an effect within mechanical causality, Guo is able to take the position that any particular effect is simply the totality of diversities considering itself a singular self and a single rightness, in that it is a self-so. This is equally true for each cause to the extent that it is also considered as an effect and as a oneness. From a psychological point of view, this is precisely what the sage does when he follows along with things, lets them be as they are, and vanishes with them. Each thing likewise vanishes all it encounters into itself, and is itself nothing but the joining of these things together by “self ”ing them, which is in fact to do nothing but be their diversity-preserving unity, both as an organ in the body incorporates all the other organs by forgetting them and performing its own tasks, and as a sage follows along with all transformations he encounters and takes their passing selves as his self, seeing their oneness in the situation that each is itself and different from all the others. In other words, any object within mechanical causality that operates without the intrusion of trace-cognition is always vanishing (into) whatever it encounters, taking the totality of others (causes) to be its self (the effect) moment by moment, and in this way may be likened to the sage who transcends trace-cognition and vanishes (into) all changes, and is thereby independent. The objects become dependent only when they have posited their identity in one particular content and no other, taking one particular being-so as preferable to another, which happens especially at the level of trace-cognition. This analogy betwen the sage and the inanimate object, however, should not be taken too literally. For there is of course for Guo a sense in which inanimate objects, despite their lack of this cognition, are considered to implicitly do just this, to have a certain inertial resistance to becoming something other, an uncomprehended clinging to being a particular entity with its particular determinate rights and wrongs. It is in this sense that these objects are dependent, as opposed to the sage’s independence. The distinction between the sage

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and others is always simultaneously preserved and annulled, as we discussed above, in that for the sage there is no distinction, but this is just what distinguishes him from others, in that for them there is this distinction. The sage’s superiority to a clod of earth rests just in his comprehension of the independence of the clod of earth in spite of its dependence, in that the clod’s momentary right and wrong are as self-right as any other. The sage’s vanishing (into) things encompasses and permits the determinate rights and wrongs of all things, at every point of convergence, not only the one he happens to be at. In doing so, he sees that every clod of earth is as self-right in its determinacy as he is in his own, is willing to follow along with the self-rightness of any and all of them as they appear without any inertial sense of his identity as any one particular content, and hence is independent and sees all as himself and all as independent, whereas the clod literally sees nothing. The cognition discarded by the sage is consciousness of things as external, and yet there is left over from this the encompassing of all things as one’s own self, which is really no different from vanishing (into) things. By not positing his identity in any one particular content, he takes in all contents; moreover, in surveying even inanimate things, he sees that they are doing just the same thing, taking in all contents implicitly just by being what they are, in spite of their inertial attempt to remain what they are in particular, a resistance to change, which shows an “ignorance” of this taking in of all contents as themselves. It is in this sense that the sage’s vanishing (into) things can be spoken of occasionally as a comprehension of all things: “By discarding cognition and allowing one’s determinacy to do as it does, [the sages’ and worthies’] divine awareness reflects everything comprehensively. . . . But if man is like a clod of earth [as Shen Dao recommends], how is this any different from death?”55 The sage’s reflection of everything is just his allowing of the self-rightness of each, and taking these as his own self and his own self-rightness. This is really no different from forgetting them as extrinsic traces, and going along with their changes as transformations of his own self-right determinacy. He “reflects” them in the sense that all are a part of his “lone” transformation.This singularity means that these things are no longer perceived as externalities, as others, as traces; they are his own self-rightness, and his own self-forgetfulness. In short, the independence of the clod of earth resides in the sage’s perception of its independence, as one facet of his potential self that is as good as any other. Let us return to apply all this to the penumbra commentary. When we understand this principle of lone-transformation, Guo says, we will let “each of the ten thousand things return to its source within its own self without depending on anything outside itself, externally without apology and internally without pride; thus all come into being as if enticed but don’t know how or why they have come to be, all alike attain their being of what they are without knowing how or why they have attained it.”That is, the source of each entity’s actions will be itself and its own fitness alone; it will act without reference to anything outside itself, and, since for Guo all cognition implies externality,

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without conscious reference to anything at all.This is one form of its unmediation, its independence. Having no reference to otherness, it will be neither apologetic nor proud, for these are attitudes predicated on one’s relative valuing of self and other. Moreover, in following along with the various unconscious causes that infringe upon it, in obliquely joining with them and having no fixed self apart from their various transformations, in being made what it is entirely by these othernesses, in being thoroughly dependent, each entity is independent of any particular configuration of causes. Dependence overcomes itself, is pushed to its logical extreme so that it falls through its own bottom, as it were. Being whatever causes it happens to encounter, it is not dependent on encountering any particular cause. Guo continues, “Now, if even in the case of the penumbra’s following of the shadow we can still say they simultaneously come to be and it is not a relationship of dependence, then although the ten thousand things cluster together collectively to form nature, nonetheless each of them in perfect distinctness appears on its own in independent solitude (liran duxian).” In this oblique joining and simultaneous production of the two terms in the relationship, the effect is nothing but the convergence of causes considered as a unity in this particular time and place. Thus in spite of the collectivity of things forming nature, each one is distinctly its own self, and appears in perfect singularity.This applies also to mutually conditioning opposites, such as life and death: “Death lonetransforms to become death; it is not that life produces this death. Life also lonetransforms to become life. . . . Death and life, each forms a body of its own.”56 As noted above, this could theoretically be applied equally to any whole and any parts of that whole. The body is an unmediated singularity, as is the arm, as is the hand, as is the finger, as is a hair on the finger. Each is part of a larger collectivity, and is inextricably lodged in its relationship with the others in its network, like the simultaneous generation of the penumbra and the shadow. But at the same time each one has its own particular determinacy, its own distinction from the others, into which it is completely vanished, either in completely matching with itself in the case of inanimate things or in having no consciousness or intention extending beyond its own borders in the case of sentient beings. It is because of its own particular determinacy that it fits into the totality, and forgets the totality, and aids every other member of the totality.57 In this forgetting, each is alone, and Singular, and unmediated even in the midst of its mediation. For it is nothing other than the convergence of all the others, all its mediations, into this particularity within the totality. Its forgetting of the others signifies precisely its perfect interaction with them. Hence each appears in perfect distinctness, and as an absolute Singularity, which is at the same time thoroughly enmeshed in interdependence and multiplicity. This being the case,“how could we discern how or why they are so?” For the singularity of this unmoving surface of self-so transformation remains outside the efficient causality governing the succession of particular contents, on which all explanations of how and why are predicated. Thus Guo recom-

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mends that we “let them proceed without trying to help them along,” in which case “root and branch, inner and outer, all will unobstructedly attain what they are, and obliteratedly leave no trace. If we trace the nearby causal links and thereby forget that they are ultimately self-so, and posit the sources of things outside themselves, thus depriving them of having their master within themselves, then preferences and esteem will be produced.” If we consider the identity of each thing to be a particular fixed content that is in a causal relation to all other things, taking each to be a Something that is affected by another Something outside itself, dependent on this other and thereby made to be what it is, we legitimize and encourage the operation of traces, valuation, and teleological action, which also involve the positing of an other, an aim or goal, and seek to affect our present determinacies with this otherness, make it conform to the extrinsically cognized ideal. Singularity is impeded by trace-cognition, which always involves the mutual externality of the traces, of knower and known. But things are not actually granted their identity, their self-rightness, by an other entity external to themselves, whether a creator or an ideal or by mechanical causes, according to Guo Xiang. On the contrary, they are all self-so, inexplicably what they are without knowing how or why, not made so by anyone or anything, even by themselves as an agent working on themselves as a patient. Thus in interacting with things, even with ourselves as we conceive of ourselves (i.e., by our trace-apprehension of ourselves, ourselves as other rather than in the self-forgetting self-rightness that is our genuine identity), we should not seek consciously to help things along, but rather let each one do its own job, associated with things just as the various parts of the body treat one another (i.e., by ignoring one another). In this way we forget all traces (that is, lasting impressions of something affecting them from outside) of each other. All obliteratingly forget each other, and are traceless in each moment of operation, neither deliberately leaving models for other moments or other organs, nor picking up such models from them for themselves, nor putting themselves in reference to them in any other way.Thus all are united in being themselves and forgetting one another. This then is Guo Xiang’s notion of lone-transformation. It is a complete independence and singularity that is alleged to come with the most unreserved vanishing (into) every change and multiplicity that is encountered. By following along with each transformation, making each imposing otherness oneself in that its self-rightness is one’s own rightness, all otherness vanishes, and the changes are seen as simply the transformations of one’s own self-rightness, which is always different and yet always oneself, the self-forgetting rightness. Inasmuch as all things are always changing and always self-right in whatever they change into, all are lone-transforming, in spite of the infinite web of interconnections that seem to have precipitated this or that particular transformation into this or that particular content. They are one in their mutual forgetting, and in the singularity and independence of each in its inalienable self-so self-rightness, but this oneness also implies their difference from one

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another, their utter disconnection from the traces of any other determinate content, since the self-rightness of each resides in being what it alone is, in negating and forgetting all other contents. At the same time, its particular content of any given moment is determined by whatever it happens to encounter, by its allowing of anything and everything to be its self, its self-rightness. Hence each entity can be completely involved with all other things and at the same time completely independent and self-so. Each entity is lone—i.e., spontaneous, untroubled by otherness, independent, forgetting everyone else, self-right—and yet also transforming—i.e., interacting, accepting whatever it encounters as itself, perfectly “fit” in its ever-changing place in relation to the totality it encounters and vanishes (into), moving into relation. From these implications of Guo’s notion of lone-transformation, it is not difficult to see the part it plays in solving his original problem: the creation of a unity of the self-so and social interaction, of nonactivity and activity, of spontaneity and the teaching of names.

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The Unity of Activity and Nonactivity

n the midst of his discussion of the penumbra passage, Guo makes a striking statement that leaves no question about how thoroughgoingly he means us to take all this:“Thus transforming and not transforming, being thus [or right, ran] and not being thus, following others or proceeding from one’s own self, none are not self-so.” Following others and proceeding from one’s own self are equally from one’s own self, that is, equally self-so, equally lonetransforming.This should not be surprising in light of all that has already been said about the oneness of sameness and difference, and of dependence and independence. What we have arrived at here, at long last, is the oneness also of deliberate activity and nondeliberate activity (youwei and wuwei), which is to say, the oneness of morality and spontaneity, the initial problem with which this long and roundabout exposition started. For it is surely remarkable, given Guo’s rather extreme and radical denials of the value of all the most fundamental modes of human behavior—valuation (including even the preference for life over death), cognition, volition and teleological action, deliberate benevolence, and objectified institutions, all of which appear to be indicted by Guo as troublemakers—that he nonetheless wholeheartedly affirms the value and legitimacy of the existing social order and its institutions. Regardless of his motivations for doing so, which may not be so difficult to discover, Guo surely faced a challenging dilemma when it came to harmonizing these two positions theoretically.We are now in a position to understand how Guo sets out to solve this problem. The trick is done by asserting that activity is in fact a kind of nonactivity, that the latter includes the former, much as dependence was a kind of independence, as change was a kind of constancy and difference was a kind of sameness. We have already seen one hint of this technique, in Guo’s assertion that knowing is accomplished without knowing how it is accomplished, and hence is itself a kind of unknowing. Moreover, in the penumbra commentary, we are

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told categorically that transforming and not transforming, being thus or being right and not being thus, following others or proceeding from one’s own self, none are not self-so.Thus in discussing the two views about the creation of the universe presented in ch. 25 of the Zhuangzi, that nothing makes the world as it is (mo wei) or that something causes it (huo shi), although Guo first says that technically speaking the first view is correct, he goes on to add, “That things affect each other (xiang shi) is also always self-so. Hence to say nothing does it is not yet to be free of the realm of things.”58 The abstract denial of mutual interaction is still one-sided, and hence not correct. Precisely because nonaction is to be followed through to the very end, it reaches the point where it overcomes itself and includes its opposite, which is what is implied in Guo’s expansion of the self-so into his new concept of lone-transformation, as discussed above. This is made possible for Guo by means of his new conception of the relation between the self-so and its manifestation, his idea of what traces are and what they do. This allows Guo to offer a distinctive solution to the philosophical problems as outlined at the beginning of this essay. We saw previously that there is no normative or particular content to suoyiji, what leaves the traces, or ziran, the self-so and self-rightness of things. The distinction between traces and self-so is simply an epistemological contrast between what this content is to itself, in its fitness and spontaneous self-forgetting, and what it is as perceived and imitated by another: the latter is the trace. Given this definition, no content is excluded in principle. This “darkness,” this unknowability of the self-so that leaves the traces, is not a word signifying the definite lack of any determinate character, as Wang Bi’s Non-Being was interpreted to mean, whereby whatever does have particular characteristics is definitely not it, and is devalued, or derives value only from its relation to this indeterminate NonBeing. Rather, each thing, to the extent that it came about without intention (and all did, on some level), is fit to itself, self-right, self-forgetting.To the extent that it inspires others to imitate it, however, the same content is a trace. Thus Guo’s notion of the self-so, and nonaction, is given meaning by its contrast to traces, not to action. Hence it can include action.This is Guo’s great advance over his predecessors, and what allows him to accomplish the unification of spontaneity and culture.They had not been radical enough in their affirmation of spontaneity, so their sponteneity remained one-sided, excluding its opposite. For Guo however, nothing whatsover can be outside spontaneity. Hence when the Zhuangzi says, “Those above must be without activity and thereby make the world work for them, those below must have activity and thereby work for the world,” Guo says: The term “nonactivity” (wuwei) must be carefully examined. To make the world work for one is also to have the activity of making the world so work. But if one spontaneously attains this activity, moving in accord with one’s determinacy, it is called nonactivity.Those who work for the world also spontaneously attain their being-so. But those who are in the lower positions personally manage affairs, and thus when even Shun and Yu were ministers they

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are still to be spoken of as having activity. Thus if we contrapose above and below, the lord is quiescent and the minister is active; if we contrapose past and present,Yao and Shun were nonactive and Tang and Wu handled affairs. But in that each used their own determinacy and their heavenly mechanisms obliquely gave forth their functions, past and present, above and below, all are nonactive. Who could be active?59

Activity and nonactivity can be spoken of both as contraposed, in which case there is indeed a distinction between them, or from the broader perspective in which both are equally spontaneously fit and comfortable in being themselves and forgetting themselves as traces, in which case everything without exception is nonactive. Indeed, Guo’s “nonactivity” very explicitly transcends both acting and not acting, and thus also includes both:“If there is any acting or not acting (you wei bu wei) among these things it ruins their self-transformation (zihua).”60 Nonactivity is simply the allowance of this self-transformation, activity in accordance with one’s own determinacy, and herein lies its independence in spite of its interaction with all other things: To self-act in accord with one’s own determinacy is to act without dependence.61 But this is independent nonactivity within the world of interaction, within the social and political world. It is “the self-motion of one’s determinacy . . . this is true-activity (zhenwei), not having-activity (youwei).”62 “To do as one does is the true activity; to do this true activity is nonactivity.”63 This conception of “true” activity as nonactivity allows Guo to apply the principle of nonactivity to the political world without denouncing the activity therein, hence allowing him to legitimize the entire social apparatus while at the same time maintaining the value ultimacy and ontological omnipresence of nonactivity and spontaneity. Hence he can say that “everything the heavenly man does (wei) is self-so.”64 In light of this idea, Guo finds a way to cancel Zhuangzi’s distinction between heaven and man (which the Zhuangzi also does in places, while in other places this distinction is left very much in place): My life has limits—this is heaven(-conferred).The heart wants to increase it— this is human. But this is just an assertion made from the point of view of human beings—in reality all things are heaven(-conferred). “Heaven(conferred)” means self-so; human (activity) is all self-so, and thus order and disorder, success and failure, what one encounters and what one does not encounter, ultimately none of it is done by man; it is all simply self-so.65

What is apparently in the most agitated activity is actually nonactive under this definition, for nonactivity simply means acting in accord with one’s own determinacy, to do as one spontaneously does. In this, all are nonactive: “To follow along with its self-shaking (ziyao) and thus have it shaking is to shake without any activity; to follow along with its self-agitation (zidang) and thus have it agitated is to agitate without motion.”66 To accord with one’s determinacy, as we have seen, is a matter of “cutting off esteem and discarding valuation, and returning to vanishes (into) one’s own determinacy.”67

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Thus true activity is defined as simply according with one’s self-rightness, one’s own unconscious fitness with oneself, to merge into one’s self-so and not allow the interference of trace-cognition of otherness, with its notions of teleological volition and its efficacy. But what one does may include any type of activity, including social and political involvement, as long is this accords with one’s own comfortable self-fitness, as Guo affirms it does. Guo considers the divisions and interrelations of things, including social hierarchies and purposive activities, to be self-so, nondoing, if they are in accord with the determinacies, the unconscious self-rightness, of the various members themselves, and they are in such accord as long as they are not perverted by trace-cognition—and this is always so on some level, in that even the application of trace-cognition and teleological will is unconscious and unwilled, and hence, at least when evaluated with resspect to that level of self-forgetting, self-right.This is to merge into one’s own spontaneous determinacy and not allow teleology or trace-cognition of otherness, derived from the discomfort and consciousness brought on by lack of such an vanishing (into) things, to interfere with the self-so.Thus when the syncretic chapter “The Way of Heaven” (ch. 13) says, “The ruler precedes, the minister follows; the father precedes, the son follows; the older brother precedes, the younger brother follows; the senior precedes, the junior follows; the man precedes, the woman follows; the husband precedes, the wife follows. Honor and lowliness, precedence and following are part of the workings of Heaven and earth, and from them the sage draws his model,”68 Guo comments, “Although the sequence of precedence and following is the work of man, it comes from within the perfect principle [of spontaneity], and is not the doing of the sage.”69 When the text goes on to elucidate the sequence of practicing the Tao, starting from understanding heaven and moving on in fixed sequence to the Tao and its Power, Benevolence, and Righteousness all the way down to right and wrong and rewards and punishements, Guo describes this as the “self-so sequence,” that must be followed in governing, and then explicitly remarks, “That the practice of the Tao begins with understanding heaven does not mean that rewards and punishments are to be discarded; it is rather that one should not lose their sequence of precedence.”70 This is to say that the understanding of the transcendent Tao does not imply an eradication of the mundane forms of social and political life; the understanding of Heaven or spontaneity does not make the world of man unimportant or a matter that can be left behind. Rather, its being ruled is a necessary part of the order of spontaneity, even if this rule involves such apparently unspontaneous methods as reward and punishment. It is for this reason too that Guo occasionally even asserts that such things as practice and deliberate craft can also be considered part of this spontaneity: “It is a self-so principle that there are some things that are brought to completion by the accumulation of habitual practice. . . .”71 “It is a self-so principle that there are also some things that require smelting and forging to become implements . . .”72 Such assertions are made possible because the distinction between the

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self-so and its manifestations is now merely epistemological, a relation between traces and what leaves them. Hence every content, even deliberate crafting of objects, is both self-so and a trace. It is self-so for the craftsman who in making things accords with the self-rightness of his determinacy and forgets himself in this comfort. It is a trace if it is done with uncomfortable conscious awareness and deliberate effort to make things conform to an external model. In either case, however, the activity is the same. Hence all human activity, to the extent that it fits the determinacies of the agents and is thus comfortable to them, can be considered self-right. Guo makes this point explicit when commenting on the ninth chapter of the Zhuangzi, which compares human civilization to the training of horses, and which delivers an equally negative judgment on both endeavors. Guo however sees it differently: The true determinacy of horses is not such that they reject the saddle and hate to be ridden; it is just that they have no desire for superfluous luxury and honor. . . . He who is good at riding them does so by actualizing their abilities to the utmost; the way to do this is to let them follow their own spontaneity (ziren). But if when they would walk one makes them gallop, seeking a function that exceeds their ability, some will be unable to bear it and many will die. If however we allow both nags and steeds each to accord with its own power, going along with and fitting to the distinct determinacies of sluggish and swift, then although they leave their footprints all over the world’s wildernesses and beyond, the natural determinacy of each horse will be kept whole. But when the deluded hear [us say], “Allow the horses to follow their own determinacies,” they say we should release them and not ride them; when they hear talk of nonactivity, they say walking is not as good as lying down; how is it that they go so astray without turning back!? They grievously miss Zhuangzi’s point.73

Guo here twists the meaning of the Zhuangzi passage so that the problem is not in riding horses, or having civilization, but rather merely in making the weak and slow horses try to conform to the standard of the strong and fast, that is, to make the petty man conform to the standard of the sages, the traces these sages leave through their own self-so, which are called benevolence and righteousness by those who apprehend them.“The determinacies of the horses all differ; to seek to level their functions then is to exhaust their strength and cause the beginning of dissolute deception.”74 Thus the natural determinacies of the so-called exemplary men and the so-called petty men are spontaneously different, and this is as it should be.The problem is when one standard, the standard of the former, is applied to all, and this occurs whenever a cognitive awareness of this difference comes to light, when the traces appear, and are taken as the thing itself, that which makes it so, which is actually the nonreflexive level of spontaneity.Without this, all are different without consciousness of their difference, and the value-terms associated with their traces vanish. Guo tells us:

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Those who are willing to die for things and are deluded and perverse are “petty men,” those who walk the way squarely and uprightly are “exemplary men.” But if all dwell in trees and caves, undivided from the birds and beasts, filling their mouths and drumming their bellies, gathered together with the various creatures without making any distinction, how would they know anything of “exemplary man,” how would they distinguish anything as “petty man.”75

This is a state of vanishing (into) things of each with his own determinacy, to the exclusion of traces. But then comes cognition, and with it the attempt at standardization, and the idea that things can be made thus and so by means of deliberate conscious volition. The Zhuangzi says, “The unwrought simplicity was harmed in order to make instruments—this is the crime of the artisan.The Tao and its Properties were destroyed to make benevolence and righteousness— this is the crime of the sages,” and Guo Xiang translates this into his own terms thus:“The artisans have their restrictive systemizations of compass and T-square; the sages have their esteem-inducing traces.”76 The perfect self-so of the sages leaves traces. In the penumbra commentary, Guo implied that the arisal of traces derives from deliberate or conscious interaction between things, when one thing tries to help another along rather than letting it be itself, which comes from positing the sources of things outside themselves (i.e., the belief in the efficacy of causality, particularly teleological causality). It is from this belief that valuation is born, which leads to conscious meddling with others and with oneself. But why does such a state of affairs come about? Why is it that this erroneous attitude arises, this trace-cognition and its belief in teleological causality that leads to valuation? It is perhaps not surprising, given Guo’s repudiation of the category of causality on which all explanation is founded, that he offers no explicit explanation for this unfortunate development. But he does give us some idea of the origin of these developments when speaking of the “traceless”: “A ruler who is able to let (the people) self-act is traceless,” says Guo.77 This is much in keeping with his more general conclusions as discussed previously.Traces come from seeking to interfere, from not letting things self-act—but such interference, as we have seen, is taken to be the result of teleological action, which is the result of valuation, which is the result of cognition, which is itself the result of traces. Hence Guo here only delivers a circular and tautological explanation of the origin of traces—they derive ultimately from themselves. In this derivative sense too they are “self-so.” This self-so, as we saw previously, undermines the structure of all explanation; hence it is not surprising that Guo merely offers us tautologies about the emergence of traces or else tells us that it cannot be otherwise, that they spontaneously emerge: The Yellow Thearch did not practice benevolence and righteousness; he directly vanished with things, and the traces of benevolence and righteousness self-appeared (zixian).When the traces self-appear, the minds of later genera-

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tions will necessarily devote themselves to them, and thus did the traces of the Yellow Thearch cause things to be disturbed.78

Benevolence and righteousness are a direct and even spontaneous (zi) result of the sage’s vanishing (into) things with things (i.e., his total ignorance of all traces). This ignoring of traces fits things so well that, although in its own moment it is totally vanished, when future moments look back to it from their external standpoint, it can’t but leave an impression and inspire the disastrous impulse to imitate. Here again it is the relationship of self and other, especially in its most pervasive form as the relationship between two moments in time, one looking back to the other and seeing it as an externality, that facilitate the emergences of these traces in the mind. In this sense it is a spontaneous manifestation of the constant change and transformation of the world as Guo sees it, and the spontaneous differences between moments and determinacies implied therein. In any case, it is clear that, for Guo, the existence of traces is inevitable; they are themselves in a certain problematic sense self-so.They cannot be eradicated. The two contrasted forms of oneness discussed above—i.e., the oneness within diversity of which Guo approves and the forced unification of things into an abstract oneness—also correspond to that which is imitated and its imitation: When one takes the ten thousand things themselves as the root, all transformations can be one and all forms can be the same.The traces of this however cause later generations to attempt to regulate things by means of themselves [and thereby effect a oneness], and thus all things are awry.79

This result however is apparently inevitable:“Once the traces of sagehood have come to light, benevolence and righteousness become untrue and rites and music are separate from the true nature, attaining only their outer form. If there are sages, there will be this defect; what can we do about it?”80 The implication here is that nothing can be done about it. This position has a practical result: Guo does not endorse the Zhuangzi’s suggestion for the rectification of the situation—i.e., the abolition of the sages and their benevolence and righteousness—since these bring about such perversions of self-so spontaneity. Guo draws a distinction between the sages and their benevolence and righteousness, between that which leaves the traces and the traces themselves; in his view, both of these inevitably exist, but the traces can be ignored. Thus he places the blame for all perversions of self-rightness on the later generations who perceive and imitate the traces, not on the sages. These latter-born can perhaps learn not to be motivated by the traces, but the traces themselves will always exist. Guo says: It is a self-so principle [i.e., a fact of things with no explanation, ziran zhi li] that when one moves, a shadow follows, and when one speaks, an echo follows. When one smoothly follows along with things (shun wu), traces in the form

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of names are established; but he who was going along with things did not do it for the name. Not doing it for a name is perfection, but ultimately the name could not be avoided; who then could release him [from this consequence]? Thus names are shadows and echoes; and shadows and echoes are the fetters of forms and sounds.When one understands this, the name-traces can be done away with; once this is done, the esteeming of others (shangbi) can be cut off, and once this is done, one’s determinacy and inner necessity can be kept whole.81

Traces are, among other things, something that exists in the mind of the unenlightened of later times, who look back at the past and understand it in these terms. And yet we may further ask why there should be in the world any memory or consciousness that does in fact look at past moments and other beings in this way, why there is this deluded kind of cognition at all—and to this I think Guo can give no answer except his blanket response that this, like all else, is self-so, inexplicable, something simultaneously free, necessary, and arbitrary. Thus we see the Zhuangzi’s heated critique of the sages reversed by Guo Xiang into an attack on the unenlightened of later times who apprehend and try to imitate their traces. We see in the above passages how the concept of traces enables Guo Xiang to assert the unimpeachability of the sages, much in contrast to the Zhuangzi’s own heated critique but in close accord with Guo’s Ruist agenda, and yet also to agree with the Zhuangzi’s contention that “the sages” have ruined the world.The existence of sages has indeed wreaked havoc on later ages; but this was not caused by any fault of the sages themselves. On the contrary, they were perfect men; the fault is in their traces, and more specifically, in that their traces invited cognition, retention, esteem, and imitation. Thus, “disorder is born out of the traces of order.”82 It is precisely the greatness of the sages that makes them so dangerous. Hence Guo says, “Sagely wisdom, benevolence, and righteousness, these are traces that are far from any crime or defect; when traces are far from any defect, the common people esteem them, and when they esteem them, artifice and deceit are born, and when artifice and deceit are born, the tools of atrocities are inevitably not lacking.”83 In statements such as this we do get a clue of a possible derivation of the appearance of traces from an inherent acceptance of the old Taoist idea of the mutual creation of opposites: it is precisely the perfection of the sages that creates the greatest calamity of traces and imitation, in accordance with the implicit broader rule that evil is born from good and vice versa. This idea however is never explicitly connected with the origin of traces by Guo Xiang. Guo says elsewhere, “The reason Virtue goes into decline is that the sages do not appear generation after generation, and thus those above [i.e., the rulers] are unable to be without action but envy [and imitate] the traces of nonaction, thereby bringing about this defect.”84 The classical Ruist heroes, the sage-kings, were perfectly spontaneous and without action. The problem was that their spontaneity inevitably left behind traces, and there were none equally sponta-

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neous to succeed them. Hence later rulers, who were incapable of spontaneous nondeliberate nonaction, valued and imitated their traces, tried to practice nonaction, and thereafter everything was falsified. “No one knows how to return to the One by extinguishing the traces; they seek the One through following the traces, and the more they capture the traces, the more they lose the One. This is a great error.”85 The villians of the piece are the later rulers who are incapable of nonactivity, and who imitate the traces of the spontaneous sagekings: “How is life harmed, how is the nature changed? It all comes from esteeming the traces of nonactivity.”86 This esteeming and clinging to traces is done by corrupt Ruists of latter ages: “Because corrupt Ruists cling to the traces, these disasters are brought about.They don’t think to dispense with the traces and return to oneness, but rather roll up their sleeves and attempt to order traces with traces—this can be called the extreme of shamelessness.”87 When the Zhuangzi says, “Yu ruled the world by causing the hearts of the people to change. It was assumed that each man had a heart of his own, that recourse to arms was quite all right. Killing a thief is not to be considered killing a human being, they said; and each took himself as the sole source and took the rest of the world as merely good for laboring [for him],”88 Guo comments, “. . . That the defect reached this [extremity] was not caused by Yu, thus the text says, ‘merely the world itself.’ This is to say that the traces of the sagely knowledge do not bring disorder to the world, but the world must inevitably have this disorder.”89 The disorder is not the sage’s fault. It is merely an inevitable result of the traces of his activity. If anyone is at fault, it is “the world itself,” for the sage, like the Tao, actually does nothing; nothing is owing to him. In fact, the sage is himself, as we saw before, “traceless”: “The sage follows along with the selfactivity of things, and thus is traceless. But although that which is called a ‘sage’ is in himself without any traces, when other creatures get hold of his traces they force the name ‘sage’ on them. Thus ‘sage’ is a name given to tracelessness.”90 The implication here is that the concept “tracelessness” is itself merely a trace, and it is this trace that is given the name “sage.”That being himself did not call himself traceless, nor cognize himself as someone without traces—to do so would have been to be enmeshed in traces. But even this unnamed tracelessness cannot help leaving a trace in others; it is traceless from his own point of view, but not from that of other creatures.To the traceless all is traceless, but to the trace-following even the traceless leaves traces. This is to be understood again in connection with the basic image of footprints on a road, and the importance of conscious teleology in Guo’s assignation of terms. The traceless is he who takes no notice of traces, whether his own or those left by others, does not walk in accord with former traces or worry about those he might be leaving. Hence Guo Xiang finds a way of interpreting Zhuangzi’s relentless attack on the sages into his own Ruist-accommodating system: he simply asserts that every negative reference to “the sages” in the text actually means only their “traces,” the existence of which, of course, is owing to those who apprehend them rather than those who allegedly leave them:

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“The sage” is just the traces of the [true] nature, in the form in which it is attained [i.e., known] by the common people; it is not that which leaves the traces. When the text here says, “Then along comes the sage [and ruins the world],” it is as if to say “along come his traces.”91

Thus when the text says that the sage has ruined the world, the real meaning is that the common people ruined it by regarding him as a sage and imitating him. The traces are inevitable; hence “tracelessness” becomes a subjective condition: it means not heeding traces, whether one’s own or another’s. The sage is therefore blameless. Guo can thus seem to agree with every statement made by the anti-Ruist chapters of the Zhuangzi text, and yet completely reverse the meaning. For example, when the text says,“Thus the sages have benefited the world little and harmed the world much,” Guo Xiang comments: How true this statement is! But although this statement is true, we still cannot do away with the sages. Since all the knowledge in the world is not yet able to be completely obliterated, the way of the sages is still needed to subdue it. If everyone else’s knowledge is allowed to exist and only the sages’ knowledge is obliterated, this will harm the world even more than allowing the sages to exist. Thus although the harm caused by the sages is much, it is still better than the disorder of having no sages. But although it is better than having no sages, it is undeniably not as good as the total lack of harm there would be if all [the knowledge] were obliterated.92

Here we see Guo’s moderate position; he is willing to admit the value of the Ruist sages, and even that it is better to have them than not to have them, given the fact that the rest of the world is not willing to give up its deliberate action and knowing. But at the same time Guo makes it clear that this is far from his ideal; it would be far better if all could obliterate their deliberate and discriminating knowledge by means of traces, and return to their own selfrightness.The sages have harmed the world much; not because they were themselves at fault, but because their traces were misapprehended by others and imitated. Even so, it is necessary to have them, since this trace-cognition already exists in the minds of their imitators, and must be subdued by the governing cognition of the sages. It would be best if all this trace-cognition vanished, but the existence of only the ordinary people, with their trace-cognition, ungoverned by the sage and his institutions, would be the worst.What we have is a situation between these two, where the sage harms the world with his attractive traces but mitigates this harm somewhat by keeping these cognition-tainted people in relatively good order, presumably because the particular traces they are imitating are his traces of perfect spontaneity and self-rightness, rather than traces of something that is itself already a pale imitation. Thus, by an application of the concept of traces that might be described either as skillful or as crafty, an essential place has been found for Ruist ideals while at the same time maintaining an ultimate allegiance to Taoist ideals of spontaneity.

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Let us recall here how Guo Xiang described his ideal of the inner sage who is outwardly a king—i.e., the self-so Taoist who also heads the political hierarchy or at least takes a place in the imperial bureaucracy, the union of inside and outside the realm of rules ( fangnei, fangwai, i.e., mundane [social] and transcendental concerns), as we quoted above: At the point where principle reaches its ultimate, outside and inside [the realm of social rule] vanish (into) one another; there has never been one who roams outside [i.e., in spontaneity] who does not at the same time vanish (into) the inside [i.e., morality]. Thus the sage constantly roams outside the realm to vanish (into) what is inside it, following along with existence with no deliberate mind, and hence although his body is waving about all day long, his spirit and breath remain unchanged, looking above and below along with ten thousand different circumstances, and yet calmly constant and selflike.93

We can now see some of the justifications behind this assertion, and also the uses to which it would be put by Guo, the problems it meant to solve. The unity of the inner and the outer, of social morality and spontaneity, is founded on the unity of interdependence and independence, which in turn is founded on the unity of oneness and multiplicity, of constancy and change. By means of this elaborate machinery, Guo was able to consent completely to the existing social order. Indeed, the “place” allowed for Ruist values in Guo’s synthesis is at times very considerable; in fact, given the general intensity and extremity of his usual Taoist rhetoric, it is even shocking at first.The fact that all things create themselves and spontaneously do as they do does not render the ruler superfluous or harmful; on the contrary, Guo even goes so far sometimes as to affirm that the “perspicacious king” (ming wang) is in fact in some sense responsible for the felicity of the world: If there is no perspicacious king in the world, none will be able to self-attain or be self-right. It is actually the achievement of the perspicacious king to make them self-attain and be self-right. But this achievement resides in nonactivity, and in allowing the world to do as it does. All in the world are able to allow themselves to do as they do, and thus it seems not to be the perspicacious king’s achievement. . . . The perspicacious king ever follows the sufficiency of things’ own determinacies, thus each person says “I am self-so,” and they never know of their dependence on the perspicacious king.94

This passage must be carefully interpreted, for it seems directly to contradict Guo’s position on dependence and spontaneity. After all his carrying on about the absolute independence of each entity, we are certainly justified in being shocked by this assertion that things “depend on the king.” But if we recall the stress Guo lays on consciousness and lack thereof, whereby the lack of conscious teleology comes to be regarded as a sort of independence, it becomes clear that the last phrase, “they never know of their dependence” is for Guo



 

equivalent to saying, “They are (to themselves) independent of the king—and this independence is true.”They are correct to say they are self-so, even though their being allowed to be self-so is because of the king. For if they were aware of him and his contribution to them, this would mean he was leaving traces, and hence was not really a perspicatious king, and hence not really responsible for their felicity. To express it in a paradoxical formula, their dependence on him is proved by their (correct) belief that they are not dependent on him. If they thought they were dependent on him, they would be wrong. The paradoxical nature of the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness according to Guo, and which follows inexorably from his definitions of these notions, is here manifested in full force. Consciousness is in a sense always wrong; its awareness of something is a sign that this thing is not self-so; but since self-so is the real source of things being as they are, what consciousness thinks about what makes things thus must be mistaken. At the same time, it must always be right: for to feel independent is for Guo to be independent; to acknowledge nothing outside oneself and hold no goals outside one’s own present determinacy before one’s eyes is to roam in the Singularity of lonetransformation. But there is little to be gained by reiterating the intricacies of this idea. There is another sense in which the king is responsible for the felicity of his subjects—i.e., in that he has left them alone. By occupying the throne and doing this, he has prevented anyone else from occupying the throne, and thus kept it from the hands of potential meddlers.This is a weak sense in which he is responsible for them—i.e., by preventing interference. Here again, the sage is to be compared to the Tao, which is also nothing but a lack of interference, but upon which things in a certain sense depend, in that it allows each to become itself and spontaneously attain its own self-rightness. In this sense, the Tao causes them, since it occupies the “place” of a metaphysical absolute, precludes the existence of any actual metaphysical principle that would in fact interfere with the self-becoming of things. Even so, this is a rather weak sense of dependence, and the reader is left with the feeling that Guo is speaking in this way as a merely ad hoc explanation of the Zhuangzi passage at hand, which may or may not be consistent with his overall position. Nonetheless, to take it a step further, it must be granted that even a sage who leaves all the traces of benevolence is spontaneously endowed with his qualities, and thus is also a necessary (= free = chance95) self-so part of the whole, and in Guo’s view should be allowed to do what he does—i.e., to practice his virtues, and not, as Zhuangzi suggested, be abolished. Guo says, “When the deluded hear that the abundantly endowed is not sufficient to rectify the scantily endowed, they want to discard the abundantly endowed and only allow the scantily endowed; this is to discard the entire world; is it not badly mistaken?”96 The “deluded” who suggested this course could include also the author of the passage upon which Guo is here commenting; for the “abundantly endowed”

     



here means the sages. They should be allowed to do what their determinacies lead them to do just like the commoners. When the same chapter of the Zhuangzi goes on to say, “I think benevolence and righteousness are not the real nature of man!” Guo interprets it to mean that the meddlers erroneously believe that benevolence and righteousness are not a part of human nature, and thus must be deliberately wrought; herein lies their delusion. Guo on the other hand holds that these qualities of the sage, benevolence and righteousness, are as legitimate a part of the world as any other, and like all others, would be allowed to proceed to be themselves. This is the meaning of Guo’s remark,“Benevolence and righteousness are spontaneously a part of man’s nature and condition; one should simply let them do as they do.”97 This is not to help them along, nor to discard them, but simply to let them be. The rapprochement with Ruist values, and even a kind of Mencian view of the inherency of moral tendencies, is obvious, but the distinction between the two views should also be noted; for Guo does not suggest fostering or nurturing these qualities any more than any other qualities, as do the Ruists, nor eradicating all talk of such things, since they can only be a goad to falsification, as did the author of the eighth chapter of the Zhuangzi. Rather, Guo says that if these things exist, they must be a part of man’s inherency, just like everything else—for as we see in Appendix A, for Guo everything is intrinsic. Since they are there, let them do what they do.This is Guo’s basic position about everything, and moral feelings and virtues are no exception. Guo Xiang calls for no changes in the objective structure of society or the world. It is inevitable that there be civilization and records of past worthies, for these are the traces left by the perfect self-rightness of certain individuals, later called sages. Precisely their self-rightness and beauty made their traces so attractive, and hence so dangerous, so liable to pervert the self-rightness of others by being taken as normative values. All Guo recommends is that those who live in the wake of these beings learn to ignore their traces, forget them, not be fooled by them into imitation. Ideally, he wants us to learn to read these traces, these records of former worthies, differently—not as sets of instructions on how we must also act or descriptions of how we must strive to be, but merely as an inadvertant side effect of someone else’s self-rightness, which tells us only imperfectly about that unknowable spontaneity itself and cannot aid our own self-rightness.The traces are a text that may be left in place, which may be taken descriptively, but which should ultimately be ignored, lest it be taken prescriptively. In itself, any content—Ruist sages, involvement in social structures and so on—is self-right; as it affects other consciousnesses, it is a danger, the beginning of wrongness. Thus does Guo’s conception of traces allow him to place social purposivity and “spontaneous” nonaction on the same level, as equally valid contents in themselves, while at the same time maintaining a radical commitment to the value ultimacy of spontaneity, unknowable self-rightness, and to find a way simultaneously to assert that all things are completely right, and



 

at the same time to agree with the Zhuangzi’s assertion that some things are more right than others. Guo Xiang uses very vivid rhetoric to assert that all things are self-so and therefore self-right; he gives his uncompromising approval to everything.There is, however, one notable exception to this attitude: trace-cognition. This is the question that remains when we survey the path we have covered in this long exposition as a whole.We have seen the opposition between morality and spontaneity overcome by the nonexistence of the Tao, the all-inclusiveness of concept of the self-so, the epistemological interpretation of the relation between traces and what leaves them, the development of the concept of lonetransformation from the ideas of self-rightness and vanishing (into) things into one’s own determinacy, whereby oneness and multiplicity, constancy and change, interdependence and independence were unified, and hence all was justified.All apparent deviation from this universal justifiability of each thing being itself was explained by attempted imitation and coercion, which derived from valuation, which derived from the extrinsic relationship between two entities, which derived from trace-cognition. Why, we may ask, is this one thing not to be considered as acceptable as anything else? Even if we grant that this trace-cognition is to be attributed to the perceivor, who could also have ignored these traces or disbelieved in their efficacy, still, because this cognition does exist, why is it not a part of the spontaneity and hence legitimate? This is a question that I believe Guo never answers, and indeed could never have answered; for he needed both sides of this position, and used both freely. His overall worldview would admit of no exception to the spontaneity of things, and thus he sometimes asserts the acceptability even of teleological activity and cognition, if only weakly and implicitly, as we saw above in his statements about not knowing how to know. In such passages, cognition itself was considered self-right to the extent that it too was performed spontaneously. On the level of its self-forgetting spontaneity, it was self-right, but in its alienation from this nonknowing, when it takes itself to be efficacious in actually producing results, its legitimacy is rejected. Thus sometimes Guo does offer a kind of solution to this problem. Moreover, he sometimes takes pains to distinguish between the spontaneous disappearance of tracecognition and valuation in the sage, which he is praising, and any attempt to eradicate these things deliberately, for example motivated by his own writing, which would land him in an irresolvable paradox. However, Guo also needs to be able to interpret away all the complaints the Zhuangzi makes about the world, to explain why anything could ever be considered wrong. For this he needed to make a scapegoat of teleological volition and trace-cognition, and when necessary, he freely made use of this alternative. The tension between these two strategies is, in my opinion, never resolved. But it should also be noted that this double-sidedness is not merely a result of wishy-washiness, but to a certain extent necessarily follows from some of the deliberately paradoxical notions with which Guo begins.The inclusion of both

     



activity and the lack of activity within the conception of nonactivity or selfso, which therefore also transcends both alternatives, necessarily led to a doubleedged attitude toward this activity that is ultimately nonactivity. It is both justified and unjustified, and as we have seen, Guo sometimes goes so far as to say it is justified from the point of view of those who are spontaneous, and not otherwise.This is a common solution to such problems. Chinese Buddhists, for example, were later to hold that all beings are already enlightened, but also that they must work to become enlightened.To explain this, they said that from the point of enlightenment it was known that there was no difference between enlightenment and nonenlightenment, but to the unenlightened this difference did exist. Guo’s thought offers a similar paradox, as we see most clearly in his dilemma concerning the valuation of nonvaluation, and how to commend it without implying that by doing so he is encouraging people to value his principles and act accordingly. It is likely, however, that such conclusions will always result from systems of thought wishing to unify opposites, in particular the opposites of the mundane and the supermundane, or the finite and the infinite. In the West, we may think of Hegel’s treatment of the problem of finitude and infinity. Hegel pointed out that to regard these as opposites was to regard the infinite as something finite—i.e., as having something outside itself, viz., finitude. Such notions of finitude and infinity as absolutely separated were thus necessarily self-contradictory, and hence mistaken.The true infinite would have to be found within finitude, as finitude’s relation to itself and perpetual selftranscendence.98 Thus the opposition of finitude to infinity is itself a symptom of finitude, and one who has understood what the notion of infinity implies will see it as unseparated from finitude. Once we have arrived at this point, however, it is not surprising that our conclusions will be baffling and paradoxical to the standpoint that still holds the two to be irreconcilable opposites. This, I believe, is an inevitable result of this insight into infinity, or in Guo’s case, spontaneity as self-so and selfrightness, and its overreaching and inclusion of its opposite.To certain types of minds, such “mystical” shilly-shallying is unbearable; they want to know whether something is X or not X, good or bad, spontaneous or unspontaneous, finite or infinite. But the point here is that no such black-and-white answers can be expected on questions like this, as the concepts themselves are not adequate for describing their referents. This does not mean that nothing can be said of the views of these thinkers—I have tried to elucidate Guo’s position on these questions in terms of what he himself has said—but we can never expect to clear up the self-contradictions that he will be found to be embracing. Nor, I think, should we wish to. I have tried to show that Guo’s paradoxicality is not a result of mere sloppiness or carelessness, but necessarily results from his conception of the self-so and its self-rightness, which must dialectically reconcile opposites, such as those between dependence and independence, self and other, oneness and multiplicity, doing and not-doing, and value and valuelessness. To



 

understand the process by which this occurs and the thinking that underlies it is both possible and important, I think, and potentially profitable for the investigator with philosophical and comparative philosophical interests. But more than this, such as whether he is ultimately for or against X, we cannot ask: having followed Zhuangzi in embracing the category of “following both,” Guo has forever excused himself from this decision, and we, haplessly latter-born and enmeshed in the traces of this long-dead spontaneity, can only try to follow the path this following followed.

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Guo Xiang’s Use of the Term Xing: The Inherency of Change and the Confluence of Chance, Freedom, and Necessity in the Notion of the Self-So

iven Guo Xiang’s conception of universal change, and his rejection of any unchanging substratum behind appearance, why does he call the momentary determinacy of things their xing, the usual meaning of which definitely connotes innateness or inherency, and even immutability? The answer is that for Guo Xiang everything is intrinsic, with the single possible exception of what is cognized as traces and motivated thereby, which is to say, what is perceived subjectively to be extrinsic. This trace-cognition introduces the erroneous notion of externality into the world. Everything that is self-so is intrinsic, which is to say, whatever is not done out of conscious motivation, not inspired by traces, by what is cognized under the form of mutual externality. Traces alone are extrinsic, in the sense that they are considered extrinsic.What one becomes without conscious volition is what is defined as inherence by Guo, what one “can do without studying and know without learning,” as the classical Mencian phrase has it, and this he calls xing. What one becomes without conscious volition is inherent in that it is self-so, one’s own self-so, one’s own self-rightness, and thus for Guo one’s own real self.This self-rightness is always changing into a new determinacy, but whatever determinacy it becomes is equally self-right, and hence equally inherent, equally one’s own deepest self, the momentary determinacy that Guo denotes with the word xing. It is this inescapability of “self-rightness” that provides the implication of immutability that goes with the term. Thus this term xing does not imply for him some unchanging inner essence of a thing, any more than do the terms fen or ji. When Guo Xiang speaks of

G





  

the fixity of xing, as he sometimes does, he merely means, in a formula, that one’s determinacy cannot be changed, not that it cannot change. Hence Guo says, “The heavenly nature (tianxing) that each one receives has its original determinate portion (benfen); it cannot be escaped, nor can it be added to.”1 At first glance such statements suggest the most inexorable predetermined fixity. But we must read carefully; Guo does not say that one’s determinacy stays always the same, that it does not change; he says explicitly that it cannot be “escaped” or “added to”—both of which terms unmistakably point to conscious deliberate activity, attempts to change what one is, acting upon oneself as an agent upon a patient. One’s determinacy changes, but it cannot be changed by extrinsic action upon it. Deliberate action cannot change it; it is “fixed” within a given moment, and that moment cannot be otherwise, but as Guo is wont to repeat, “[Things] take self-attainment as ‘right’ and self-loss as ‘wrong,’ take what suits their own determinacy comfortably as good order and what loses such harmony as disorder. But things have no fixed limits (wu wu ding ji), and selves have no constantly comfortable fits (wo wu chang shi); different determinacies come to have different conveniences, and thus right and wrong have no constant master.”2 What is right or so in a particular moment is just what fits the determinacy of that moment, and this rightness changes as that determinacy changes, which it must, since things have no fixed limits or determinacies.Things always “follow their allotted determinacies ( fen), and thus what they do is not constant.”3 Sticking to their own “allotted determinacies” necessarily implies change. Hence Guo says, “When we examine the alternations of fullness and emptiness, we come to understand that there is no constancy in the attainments of allotments ( fen).”4 The point is that all things are always changing of themselves, and hence do not require extrinsic activity upon them to change them. Their changes, even when apparently coming from outside (i.e., what is “encountered,” what one vanishes into), are to be considered the intrinsic and spontaneous transformations of their alloted determinacy: “He whom the age regards as worthy becomes a lord; he whose talents do not match his generation becomes a vassal.This is like heaven’s being high of itself, earth being low of itself, the head spontaneously being above and the foot spontaneously being below; how could they replace each other? Although they take no pains to be right they are necessarily self-right.”5 This remark gives us some insight into what Guo means by spontaneity and by unchangeability. In saying that the above and the below cannot change places he does not mean they are fixed in their places for all time, or that they are destined to be where they are by the material they are made of; rather, he states that they are given their positions purely because of their chance relation to the times in which they happen to live, and whether the present generation esteems them. Circumstances at this particular point in time happen to put every one in some particular place, and when Guo states that they cannot be otherwise, he merely means that in this moment they cannot be otherwise. Further, this circumstantial becoming such is what Guo calls “self high, self low,” and so on; precisely this is self-so. This

 ’    

XING



should be comprehensible to us after comprehending Guo’s notion of dependency and independence, and their oneness in lone-transformation, and also the oneness of freedom, necessity and chance in the concept of self-so, as discussed in the main body of this book. Here we must also note that the constancy of things means only that they self-transform in Guo’s sense, they spontaneously change into what they become rather than being deliberately changed, not that they do not transform at all. As Guo puts it elsewhere, “If one acts upon or [deliberately] refrains from acting upon them, this ruins their self-transformation.”6 Guo’s strictures against changing one’s determinacy are thus aimed as always against extrinsic conscious activity; in no way do they imply a repudiation of change at some “essential” level, or assert the existence of a fixed noumenal “nature” or intelligible character to each individual being, with which it is required to act in accordance. On the contrary, what Guo advocates is to change by vanishing (into) and following along with all changes, to take all changes as intrinsic to oneself, to “roam in the paths of transformation, abandon oneself into the flow of daily newness, transforming along with the ten thousand transformations of the ten thousand things. . . . This is to obliquely unify oneself with the ten thousand things and form one body with transformation. . . .”7 This is taken to be the opposite of emulating extrinsic changes and willing to be other, which is alone the type of change Guo repudiates.The only constancy he advocates, conversely, is the constancy of change: “Taking transformation as one’s constancy, one’s constancy is inexhaustible. . . . Since all are leveled in being transformation, one does not take fixed constancy as one’s master.”8 What is constant is merely that they are all self-so; indeed, this is precisely what all beings in all states share: “They are all equal in not acting, but rather selftransforming.”9 They are constantly fit to whatever they happen to be, they always rest on a self-forgetting darkness of self-so. This is to be remembered when dealing with all of Guo’s discussions of present determinacy (the term generally used by Guo to emphasize the side of constancy is xing, whereas the term fen is used to emphasize the aspect of changeability, but ultimately it is to be remembered that the two refer to two sides of the same thing). These considerations must also make us reconsider the charges of a fixed predetermined fatalism that are often leveled against Guo Xiang. Guo is definitely no fatalist. In fact, he is said to have authored, in addition to the Zhuangzi commentary, a work entitled “Jixiong youji lun,” (“Good and bad fortune come from oneself ”) as an explicit repudiation of fatalism, a work that is unfortunately no longer extant. But in this capacity, we should note the relevant multiplicity of senses of the term self-so (ziran) in his writings. As Tang Yijie has pointed out, this single term covers a number of notions that we are accustomed to taking as mutually contradictory; moreover, it is not so much that the term has these different contradictory meanings, but that its one simple direct meaning encompasses these other concepts. For self-so means equally necessity, freedom, and chance. Guo uses it to mean all three, but in each case the other



  

two are also implied.Tang sees these as three distinct aspects that are interrelated and imply one another, and attributes to Guo the implicit position that all existences can be considered from any of these three points of view; continuing his interpretation of xing as something like intelligible character, for example, he holds that the manifestation of this character is the necessity of the thing, but its possession of this particular intelligible character is inexplicable, arbitrary, chance. In other words, necessity itself is meta-accidental, accidental when considered as a whole from one level higher. Moreover, to completely manifest and act in accordance with this intelligible character is the greatest freedom and independence, accomplished by remaining free of comparative and relative concepts and remaining in one’s own nature and character in and of itself.10 While Tang is correct to identify this confluence of the three concepts in Guo’s notion of self-so, I believe this explanation fails to recognize the thoroughgoing radicality of this identification in Guo’s thought; it is not merely that these three aspects can be identified for everything, but that the three notions themselves are in their deepest meaning identical: for what these three concepts have in common is their self-so. Here ziran signifies the free necessity of chance, and all of these may be regarded as nothing but three different ways of viewing and describing what is at bottom one simple concept, that of being self-so. To be self-so means not to be grounded in anything—that is chance. It means to be what one is without being grounded in anything else, hence not contingent on or changeable by anything else—that is necessity. It means in this sense to be grounded only in oneself, or only in one’s present moment of action and determinacy—that is freedom. Entities are self-so; this means they are what they are and cannot be otherwise—self-so is necessity.There can be no ultimate explanation of their being-so—self-so is chance. They themselves are being-so, not made so by others and themselves experiencing this spontaneous becoming-so from within—self-so is freedom. The further implications of this position will be explored in Appendix B.

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Comparative Notes on Freedom and Determinism

efore we bring our inquiry to an end, some comparative remarks are in order. For it may help us to understand Guo Xiang, and our own reactions to him, if we consider some of the related ways of thinking that have appeared in our own tradition. Indeed, we may well feel that what is most distinctive about Guo Xiang’s thought, as interpreted above, is less the line of thinking or the concepts employed than the implicit human values that would have led or allowed someone to come to these conclusions, and feel at rest in them. For among all the peculiarities of the Taoists, perhaps none is so startling or undigestible to many as their repudiation of consciousness, valuation, and volition, and the polemic against these usually highly regarded human properties is particularly pronounced in Guo Xiang, who is at once the most radical and the most accommodationist of Taoists.The predicament of the human creature in the face of the relentless causal law, and the universal mutual determinacy of things, has often been noted by philosophers, but the response to this acknowledgment has varied widely. Some have found some way to assert the existence of an opposite principle in the human creature that is free and not a part of this causal determinacy—and this free something is usually associated with precisely the qualities Guo repudiates: purposive striving, valuation, consciousness, and volition, “the soul.” Moreover, if the universality of the causal law in the natural world is admitted, it is necessary to assert that this free something is radically different from nature, that it is something outside of the natural world, something metaphysical. Others, notably Hobbes, Priestly, Nietzsche, and especially Spinoza, have accepted the total dominion of the inexorable causal law and repudiated human freedom as illusory, accordingly striving to accept the iron determinism of fate with rational resignation.11

B

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

  

Besides these two positions, there have occasionally been those who attempted to unify these two positions somehow, so that they fit into neither of the two former categories. Guo is one of these; as we have seen, he accepts the total uselessness of purposive volition without thereby repudiating freedom; however, he does repudiate the kind of freedom advocated by the first perspective—that of consciousness and volition, as well as any other kind of metaphysical or transcendent realm that is free. He does not make room for a coexistence of freedom and necessity by positing two distinct realms, one of which is free and one determined (for example, the realm of human spirit and the realm of nature). On the contrary, the coexistence of the two is accomplished, ultimately, by his concept of self-so, which as we have seen involves necessity, freedom, and even happenstance equally in its definition, and is developed in the notion of lone-transformation discussed at length previously. Of course we cannot possibly give anything like an exhaustive account of the views of all the relevant thinkers here; but to better appreciate the distinctiveness of this position, let us look a little more closely at some of the other possible attitudes toward this question noted above. The second attitude, complete acceptance of causal determinacy as represented by Spinoza, requires little explanation; it takes the causal law known to us through scientific observation to be the inexorable law of all natural phenomena stolidly at face value, and dismisses the subjective feeling of freedom as a simple illusion.This is not difficult to understand, and is in some sense the simplest, if most courageous, response to this question. The first response is a bit more peculiar, and seems to be predicated on some dissatisfaction with the total acceptance of determinism, based not only on the evidence of subjective consciousness but also, be it noted, the needs and desires of human subjectivity. As an example of this response to the problem, which finds the inexorability of the causal law unbearable and hence posits another realm that is not touched by it, I will quote at some length several passages from Fichte’s Vocation of Man, because it crystallizes this attitude so well, and makes so explicit the emotive biases behind its mode of reasoning. Fichte says: Nature proceeds throughout the whole infinite series of her possible determinations without pause; and the succession of these changes is not arbitrary, but follows strict and unalterable laws. Whatever exists in Nature, necessarily exists as it does exist, and it is absolutely impossible that it should be otherwise. . . . In every moment of her duration Nature is one connected whole; in every moment each individual part must be what it is, because all the others are what they are . . . every moment of this duration is determined by all past moments, and will determine every future moment . . . I myself, with all that I call mine, am a link in this chain of the rigid necessity of Nature . . . It is this, my interconnection with the whole system of Nature, which determines what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be.12

     



Thus does Fichte state the universal interdependency of things, and the absolute necessity of all that it be exactly what and how it is and not otherwise.This is a restatement of the Spinozan position, and also in itself would not be denied by Guo Xiang. Then Fichte continues to spell out the human implications of this position, sounding even more like Guo: I am a manifestation, determined by the whole system of the universe, of a power of Nature which is determined by itself alone. . . . I do not truly act at all: Nature acts in me.To make myself anything other than that which Nature has intended is something I cannot even propose to myself. I am not the author of my own being; Nature has made me what I am and everything that I am going to be. I may repent and rejoice and form good resolutions—although, strictly speaking, I cannot even do this, for all these things come to me of themselves when it is appointed for them to come. But it is certain that, with all my repentance all my resolutions, I cannot produce the smallest change in that which I must inevitably become. I stand under the inexorable power of rigid necessity: if this necessity has destined me to become a fool and a profligate, a fool and a profligate without doubt I shall become; if it has destined me to be wise and good, wise and good I shall doubtless be. Blame and merit do not apply to necessity, nor do they apply to me. Necessity stands under its own laws. I stand under them as well. I see this and feel that my tranquillity would be best ensured if I could make my wishes accord with that necessity to which my being is wholly subject.13

Here Fichte is further spelling out the stoical or Spinozistic position of ataraxic acceptance of the necessity of nature, which seems to follow from the conclusions he has so far drawn about interdependence. Guo Xiang would have agreed with all these remarks and implications, with the important exception of the conception of “Nature” as something other than “myself,” as when Fichte says, “I am not the author of my own being; Nature has made me what I am and everything that I am going to be.” In one sense Guo would agree, in that I am not woran, made by my own conscious volition; but Guo’s word for what Fichte calls “Nature” is “self-so,” and this means, as we have seen, precisely that each thing is in fact the sole author of its own being. We will further discuss the implications of this difference in a moment. In fact, this position is set up by Fichte merely as a straw man to be knocked down, and he tells us frankly why he feels this to be necessary: For why should I any longer hide from myself the sadness, the horror, the amazement with which I was filled when I saw how my inquiry must end? . . . now, at the end, may I not confess that this result contradicts the profoundest aspirations, wishes and wants of my being? And, despite the accuracy and the decisive strictness of the proofs, how can I truly believe in a theory of my being which strikes at the very root of that being, which so distinctly contradicts all the purposes for which alone I live, and without which I should



  

loathe my existence? Why must my heart grieve over, and be torn by, that which so perfectly satisfies my understanding?14

Here Fichte discloses his affective motivations for finding this theory inadequate: it contradicts and makes a mockery of all the purposes for which he lives. And what are these? What exactly fills him with such terror? That I should be destined to be wise and good, or to be foolish and profligate, without power to change this destiny in the least—in the former case having no merit, and the latter having no guilt: this it was that filled me with amazement and horror.That my very being and all of its characteristics should be determined by something external to me, and that this thing in turn should be determined by something external to it: it was this from which I so violently recoiled. . . . What I desired was this: that I myself, that of which I am conscious as my own being and person, but which in this system appears as only the manifestation of a higher existence, that this “I” would be independent, would be something which exists not by another or through another, but of myself, and, as such, would be the final root of all my own determinations.15

This is, I think, fairly typical of the response of a particular type of mind to premises such as those Fichte has just outlined, and which we also encountered in Guo Xiang’s system. There is a wish for perfect self-determination and freedom.And wherein are these to be sought? Precisely in Guo’s nemeses: conscious thought and teleological will: I would exercise my voluntary power freely, for the accomplishment of aims which I shall have freely adopted; and this will, as its ultimate ground can be determined by no higher, shall move and mold, first my own body, and through it the surrounding world. My active powers shall be under the control of my will alone, and shall be set in motion by nothing else than by it.Thus it shall be. . . . My actions shall be the result of this will; without it I shall not act at all, since there shall be no other power over my actions but this will.Then my powers, determined by and subject to the dominion of my will, will affect the external world. I will be the lord of Nature, and she shall be my servant. . . . To be free in the sense stated, means that I myself will make myself whatever I am to be. I must, then—and this is what is most surprising and, at first sight, absurd in the idea—I must already be, in a certain sense, that which I shall become, in order to be able to become so; I must possess a two-fold being, of which the first shall contain the determining ground of the second. . . . [This is accomplished through teleological volition.] In the mere conception of a purpose I am already that which I subsequently become once I have willed and acted upon this purpose. I am beforehand as a thinking what I am afterwards as an active being. I create myself: my being by my thought, my thought by thought itself . . . Freedom, such as I have laid claim to, is conceivably only of intelligences; but to them, undoubtedly, it belongs.16

     



Fichte, like Guo, is looking for the possibility of freedom and selfdetermination in the midst of the interdependency of things; he wants to find a way in which, in Guo’s words,“things create themselves.” But it is very interesting to note that he finds this in precisely the opposite direction from Guo, so tidily so in fact that one is tempted to make unconscionably broad generalizations about Western and Chinese approaches to this problem. For Fichte, and many like him, it is not true that all things create themselves; only conscious, willing beings do so, by virtue of their conscious willing, which allows them to be both grounded and ground; all other entities are completely unfree, and do not create themselves. Man is accountable, and the rest of nature is not. Man’s vocation is to exercise his will in the control of nature, and hence his self-creation. Here man is divided into two aspects: man as ground—i.e., the conceivor of purpose, the willer—and man as grounded—i.e., the agent and realizor of purpose. For Guo on the other hand, all things create themselves— not because of conscious volition, but rather precisely because ultimately it is not owing to volition that they are what they are; rather, they are so spontaneously, “of-themselves.” This is what makes Guo’s solution so fascinating—it solves the same problem in the precisely opposite way. This is caused largely by the differing conceptions of nature behind these two lines of reasoning, as we have noted. Fichte assumes that nature is something external to the individual, and hence a constraining extrinsic force; this assumption is reiterated in his conclusion, which again divides conscious willing beings sharply from the rest of nature.Accompanying this conception is a feeling of horror and despair at the thought of being determined by this external nature, and hence being nothing but a cog in a vast machine that is in all senses other. For Guo, however, self-so is one’s own self being so; it is not something other that determines what one is; in fact, otherness itself only enters into the picture precisely with consciousness and volition, which posit an external object and an extrinsic purpose.With this comes a feeling tone that those of a Fichtean cast of mind may find surprising or even grotesque: a celebration of and song of joyful praise for this inexorable, inexplicable necessity/chance/freedom of the self-so. For here necessity is one’s own necessity, which is to say, freedom. Freedom, for Guo, is a word for how it feels to be within necessity, indeed, to be within it so completely and with so perfect a fit that one forgets oneself, one vanishes (into) necessity. It is difficult to determine whether the differing conclusions on this point derive from different assumptions, different cultural concepts, or simply different temperaments. Personally, I believe the last alternative is not to be overlooked; it is clear in both the cases under consideration here that an emotional response to certain ideas had a great deal of bearing on what kind of conclusions were ultimately drawn. Both Fichte and Guo Xiang came to conclusions that satisfied them, and although these were opposite conclusions, they were alike, as Guo would say, in that each suited its drawer. Certain thinkers only feel they have come to a “conclusion” when they have come to feel “satisfaction.”



  

The preferences and needs of individuals no doubt play a powerful role in determining what sort of thoughts are felt to be attractive, and it is likely that there are always those who feel dissatisfied with one or the other of these solutions to this problem of freedom and determinism. It would be highly misleading to consider Guo’s view in any sense representative of the Chinese tradition, for as we know, later Chinese intellectuals also found such total unaccountability and self-so inevitability unpalatable, and the moral perspective regained ascendancy, as it did in Fichte. Still, the form in which this later moralism presented itself, and to some extent its content, bore the unmistakable marks of Guo’s way of thinking, and strenuous moral volition and conscious teleology continued to be spoken of as somewhat unworthy of a sage even by the most stalwart Ruists of later times. The various compromises effected between Taoist and Ruist ideas at various times constitute one of the great enduring themes of Chinese intellectual history, and the form taken even by the strictest Chinese moralities bears the mark of this relationship; moderate/extremists such as Guo Xiang helped this dialogue along by presenting a first, albeit ultimately rejected, way to fuse these two ways of thought, and helping to bring into ascendancy those elements of the original Ruist texts that favored a morality that devalued conscious moral volition.This is something that strikes the eye most forcefully when comparing Western and Chinese moralists; the latter belong to an enduring tradition of downplaying the value of explicitly teleological action and thought, whereas just the opposite seems to be the case in the Western tradition. Also often noted in such broad comparisons is the alleged divisiveness of the Western tradition, its tendency to split things into mutually exclusive opposites, whereas the Chinese tend to blur important distinctions, overvaluing specious oneness, allowing all sorts of illogical and fuzzy compromises and coexistent opposites. In this present case this would no doubt be applied to Fichte’s division of man and nature into mutually exclusive categories, and also, more generally, of freedom and necessity, which he regards as irresolvably opposite. In contrast, Guo not only completely unifies man and all the rest of nature, but also nonchalantly employs the term “self-so” simultaneously to signify the three apparently contradictory notions of freedom, necessity, and chance. However, these neat divisions of cultural differences are to be trusted no more than any other neat divisions. There were thinkers in both China and the West who exhibited the general tendencies said to characterize the other; nonetheless, it may be true that the mainstreams of thought in the two cultural traditions did tend to differ in these ways, in comparison to one another; there were more thinkers who allowed for contradictions in China, and they were more influential, and more of the opposite in the West. Be that as it may, we cannot neglect the exceptions. For there have been occasional thinkers in the West who tried to find a simultaneity of freedom and necessity. These seem to fall within the post-Kantian German idealistic camp of the early nineteenth century, to which Fichte also belonged. One might guess

     



that this had something to do with Kant’s own work on this problem, in particular the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant had shown that both the two opposed positions of freedom and necessity were equally defensible by reason, which is to say, equally indefensible.17 By indicating this, Kant sought to demonstrate the inability of human reason ever to answer this question. At the same time, he suggested a possible way that the conflict might be resolved, by the positing of the “intelligible character” of things, transcending the appearances ruled without exception by the categories, including those of causality and dependence. Kant says, In its intelligible character (though we can only have a general concept of that character) this same subject must be considered to be free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through appearances. Inasmuch as it is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances. And consequently, since natural necessity is to be met with only in the sensible world, this active being must in its actions be independent of, and free from all such necessity. . . . In this way freedom and nature, in the full sense of these terms, can exist together, without any conflict, in the same actions, according as the actions are referred to their intelligible or to their sensible cause.18

It is clear that this doctrine of “intelligible freedom” is in fact itself another example of the first type of response we referred to earlier—i.e., that of positing another realm of an entirely different type to be the refuge of freedom, in spite of the inexorable necessity of the phenomenal world. Thus the two do come to coexist, but only in two totally separate realms, one of which is free and the other of which is determined. Fichte’s ideas as quoted above are but another mutation of this Kantian idea.The same may be said of Schopenhauer, who adopted this point of view from Kant and further developed and stressed it.19 For Schopenhauer, however, this intelligible character did not lay in consciousness or in the empirical will, as for Fichte, nor was it an unknowable X as for Kant; rather, it was an original act of the universal Will, a grade of the Will’s objectification, which fixed the individual’s character once and for all, prior to the forms of time and space. Particular conditions merely gave this preestablished character the chance to manifest, under the form of the “principle of sufficient reason” (i.e., of causality). It is free in being what it is in the sense that the Will was the thing-in-itself and hence undetermined by anything outside itself, ungrounded; but at the same time, this free act had already fixed one’s specific character before one’s birth, and hence no latter-day act of empirical will could ever change it. Moreover, its manifestations are strictly ruled by the principle of sufficient reason.Things can do whatever they wish, but cannot wish whatever they wish; motives and stimuli act as inexorably on a given character as mechanical causes act on a given substance; in this sense it is determined by necessity. Hence all things are simultaneously free and determined.



  

That this is declared of all things, not just man, is to be noted especially; unlike Fichte, who interpreted Kant’s doctrine by positing two realms within the world of our experience, namely human consciousness and nature, the former being free and the latter determined, Schopenhauer holds more firmly to the noumenal-phenomenal split, by means of which he asserts that all things are both free and determined. Man has no special status of freedom distinguishing him from the rest of nature; like all things, he is in one sense free (noumenally, in what he is) and in one sense determined (phenomenally, in what he does). Schopenhauer sums up his position as follows: In a word: man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily. But this is due to the fact that he already is what he wills. For from that which he is, there follows of necessity everything that he, at any time, does. If we consider his behavior objectively—i.e., from the outside—we shall be bound to recognize that, like the behavior of every natural being, it must be subject to the law of causality in all its severity. Subjectively, however, everyone feels that he always does only what he wills. But this merely means that his activity is a pure expression of his very own being. Every natural being, even the lowest, would feel the same, if it could feel.20

This last statement hearkens back to Spinoza’s remark that if a stone flying through the air could think, it would “believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish.”21 Schopenhauer accepts this as true, but does not like Spinoza regard this as folly on the stone’s part: “Spinoza (Epist. 62) says that if a stone projected through the air had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own will. I add merely that the stone would be right. The impulse is for it what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity in the assumed condition, is by its inner nature the same as what I recognize in myself as will, and which the stone also would recognize as will, if knowledge were added in its case also.”22 All things are will, and all properties of a thing are an objectification of its noumenal will. Hence all determined things are right in their feeling that they are free. Schopenhauer thus arrives at a univeral coexistence of freedom and determinism, applicable to every single thing in the universe without exception; they are free or determined, depending on the perspective from which one wishes to view them, subjectively or objectively, and both views are equally correct. This much of his view has obvious similiarities to Guo’s ideas on this subject. But Schopenhauer bases this conception on the Kantian division between noumena and phenomena, adhered to with fanatical tenacity, and identifies the subjective, free perspective with the former and the objective, determined perspective with the latter.This part of his doctrine has no parallel in Guo Xiang. However, there is one exception for Schopenhauer, where freedom is not only noumenal but also becomes phenomenal; this is the case of the denial of the will, where the thing-in-itself, the will, freely abolishes itself. This may

     



perhaps remind us of some of the things Guo Xiang has to say about the sage, in that his annulment of dependence lies in the lack of the desires coming from valuation, from wishing to be one thing rather than another. But for Guo, this is because all things are right, and hence the sage freely becomes any and every one of them; for Schopenhaeur, on the other hand, all things are wrong, and the saint gets to escape having to be any of them by renouncing the will. Moreover, Schopenhauer would not regard the mischief of the will to derive from valuation or cognition; on the contrary, for him the relationship is reversed: valuation and cognition both are mere by-products of the will, which wills regardless of their presence or absence. If the will did not have this motive or derideratum before it, it would find another one just as well; the essential thing is that it must will something. What’s more, the only way the will can ever abolish itself, and thus bring freedom into the phenomenal world as well as the noumenal, is through cognition and understanding of the suffering of the world; cognition is ultimately the only possibility of salvation.The contrasts with Guo’s position on these points is obvious.23 There is another German idealist who must be mentioned here as well: Fichte’s grand-successor, Schopenhauer’s archenemy, Hegel. For Hegel too saw both freedom and necessity as universally applicable to all things, not because these two predicates referred to the two realms of their being but rather because the two conceptions themselves were ultimately convertible. At the same time, a difference in degrees to which this identity is realized in different creatures is posited by Hegel, allowing him to apply his conception more hierarchically than Schopenhauer does, even though theoretically or in itself both predicates are applicable to each thing, since they mean the same thing. We might say, in Hegelian jargon, that this identity is in-itself in all creatures, but for-itself only in Hegelians. Hegel explains this identity of the opposed concepts as follows: When anything is said to be necessary, the first question we ask is,Why? Anything necessary accordingly comes before us as something due to a supposition, the result of certain antecedents. If we go [no] further than mere derivation from antecedents, however, we have not gained a complete notion of what necessity means. What is merely derivative, is what it is, not through itself, but through something else; and in this way it too is merely contingent. What is necessary, on the other hand, we would have to be what it is through itself; and thus, although derivative, it must still contain the antecedent whence it is derived as a vanishing element in itself. Hence we say of what is necessary, “It is.” We thus hold it to be simple self-relation, in which all dependence on something else is removed.24

What is necessary has a reason for being so; but Hegel points out that if this reason for being so is considered external to that which is necessary, it is actually contingent on that other thing rather than necessary. Only if its ground lies in itself can it be truly necessary. In Hegel’s view the Notion of necessity,



  

properly understood, means precisely freedom, which is to say, dependence on oneself alone, self-groundedness: The truth of necessity therefore is Freedom. . . . Necessity is often called hard, and rightly so, if we keep only to necessity as such, i.e. to its immediate shape. Here we have, first of all, some state, or, generally speaking, fact, possessing an independent subsistence: and necessity implies that there falls upon such a fact something else by which it is brought low. This is what is hard and sad in necessity immediate or abstract.The identity of the two things, which necessity presents as bound to each other and thus bereft of their independence, [is] at first only inward, and therefore has no existence for those under the yoke of necessity. Freedom too from this point of view is only abstract, and is preserved only by renouncing all that we immediately are and have. But, as we have seen already, the process of necessity is so directed that it overcomes the rigid externality which it first had and reveals its inward nature. It then appears that the members, linked to one another, are not really foreign to each other, but only elements of one whole, each of them, in its connexion with the other, being, as it were, at home, and combining with itself. In this way necessity is transfigured into freedom—not the freedom that consists in abstract negation, but freedom concrete and positive. From which we may learn what a mistake it is to regard freedom and necessity as mutually exclusive. Necessity indeed qua necessity is far from being freedom; yet freedom pre-supposes necessity, and contains it as an unsubstantial element in itself. . . . In short, man is most independent when he knows himself to be determined by the absolute idea throughout. . . .25

Here we see a notion of freedom within total determinacy and necessity, a unity of the two conceptions, where freedom and independence are conceived as existing within total causal interactivity, precisely because these two conceptions have the same content. No metaphysical realm is posited to explain this, nor is a strict division drawn between man’s spirit and nature. It applies to all things as they are here in the one world. Like Guo, Hegel has here found the unity of freedom and necessity for all phenomenal things just as they appear by examining the notions of freedom and necessity themselves, noting what they have in common, and finding a broader but also more accurate conception that encompasses both. It is to be noted, however, that Hegel’s unity emphatically does not include chance, the other element in Guo Xiang’s concept of self-so, although Hegel seems to have had an intimation of the unity of necessity with contingency, since this immediately precedes the section on freedom in the Logic, and indeed seems to be what drives the dialectic forward to a unity of necessity and freedom instead, precisely so as to avoid this unpleasant association with contingency, which was the most repugnant anathema to Hegel. This is a highly significant difference; for it is chance above all that is

     



excluded from any value legitimacy even in Hegel; the nature of rationality being what it is, contingency and chance can be granted only a grudging place in a system that exalts rationality as the ultimate principle of the world. Of all conceptions, it is the least likely to be successfully integrated into such a system, and despite Hegel’s daring unification of many pairs of opposites, the opposition between chance and rationality is one before which he seems to stop short. Guo is not committed to rationality, in fact it sees such conscious connecting of ideas as the single most dangerous impediment to the smooth function of spontaneity and its attendant unity of necessity and freedom, and thus it is not difficult for him to include chance within this unity.26 In fact, Guo has just the opposite problem: how is reason and rational thinking to be integrated into his system? Is this not also something that is self-so? Why should consciousness and volition alone be excluded? His concept of necessity lacks the sense of an imperative to seek rational connections between things, in fact it strenuously discourages such activity; it has the unfathomable aspect of fate, something about which no questions can be asked, which is utterly inexplicable and a law unto itself. Necessity for Guo is not a foundation for logical reasoning, but rather a declaration that nothing can be known or done about the entity in question; it is necessarily so, which is for him the same as saying it happens to be so, which means it is self-so. In a sense, then, in spite of many similar elements, Guo is Hegel’s antipodes; for him everything without exception is, as Hegel would say, merely “given,” merely “immediate.” For Hegel, this would mean leaving all that one encounters in their immediacy as completely extrinsic objects, not integrating them into the total body of interconnected knowledge, whereby one sees Reason, which is the inmost nature of one’s own spirit, in all things, thereby overcoming their immediacy and accomplishing their unity with oneself. It is certainly true that Guo is an advocate of the absolute primacy of the immediacy and givenness of each entity; although he would perhaps agree with Hegel that every entity is in fact both mediated and immediate, he would differ in holding that the latter is the side to be stressed and remembered at all times. But for Guo Xiang this immediacy is precisely the self-so. We have already discussed in some detail Guo’s notion of selfhood, as consisting not of any particular content, but of the self-forgetting self-rightness of each entity. It is through this double meaning of the “self ” in self-so that Guo overcomes the subject/object dichotomy that Hegel found objectionable in the cult of immediacy; for Guo, these given “self-so” entities are one’s own self in their givenness, since their givenness is their self-so, which one may vanish (into), thereby taking their self-rightness as one’s own self(-rightness) for that moment. Hence the oneness of the subject is achieved not through seeking out the mediation—i.e., the implicit rational connections, of the apparently immediately given object—as for Hegel, but rather by taking its immediacy, its self-so lonetransformation, as one’s own self-so, one’s own self-right immediacy for that particular moment. This difference between these two thinkers, both of whom had an insight



  

into the necessary unity of freedom and necessity and of immediacy and mediation, as well as Guo’s relation to the other Western thinkers discussed above on this question, is well worth pondering when considering the characteristic habits and values of philosophers East and West.

Notes

PART I 1. For example, Mou Zongsan, one of the greatest Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century, makes the claim that Taoism as such reaches its perfect expression only with the Guo Xiang commentary, which finally fulfills the line of thought that is in many ways still undeveloped or imperfectly expressed in the classic Taoist texts. See his Yuanshanlun (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1985), xii–xiii, 280–304. 2. It is worth noting in passing that both instances would serve as good supporting evidence for Nietzsche’s thesis, put forth in his Geneology of Morals, that the words for “good” in general derives in many languages from the terms identifying the ruling race. 3. These are a set of bamboo strip writings recovered in 1993 in Jingmen, Hubei, and published in 1999. Among them are three sets of passages also found in the present Laozi text, corresponding to about one-third of the latter text. These works are tentatively dated to the middle or late fourth century .., making them the earliest known version of the Laozi. Scholars disagree on whether these passages are to be viewed as the totality of the Laozi as it existed at that time (which would mean that the text is accretional, and the passages not found in the Guodian texts were added later), or as excerpted notes taken from an already existing larger version of the text.Wang Bo has expressed the view that they are best understood as three separate sets of excerpts coming from three different larger versions of the text, representing three different recensions or traditions. (See Wang Bo, Jianbo sixiang wenxian lunji, [Taipei: Taiwan guji chuban youxian gongsi, 2001] 242.) In any case, it is notable that none of the current Laozi’s most virulently anti-Ruist pronouncements (e.g., the explicit condemnation of benevolence, righteousness, and ritual) are found in the Guodian versions.This does not prove that these were not present in any of the texts from which these notes were excerpted, if in fact that is what happened, but the supporting evidence, e.g., in the presentation of similar conceptions in roughly contemporaneous texts (the “Neiye” and “Xinshu” chapters of the Guanzi, for example, which use Laoziesque rhetoric but pre

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  

sented as consistent with Ruist goals), suggests the hypothesis that the Laozi tradition may have been “radicalized” at a later time in its textual development. Indeed,Wang Bo even argues that the authors of the “primitivist” chapters of the Zhuangzi (e.g., chapters 8, 9, and 10), traditionally viewed as extensions of the virulent anti-Ruism of the Laozi (a departure from the more complex attitude toward Ruism in the “Inner Chapters” (1 to 7) of the Zhuangzi), may have been responsible for tweaking the Laozi text in this direction, being influenced by existing versions but also substantially radicalizing their anti-Ruist implications.This would mean the hard-core anti-Ruism of the current Laozi text is a reflection of the editorship of this group of post-Zhuangzian Taoist thinkers. See Wang Bo, 237–38. 4. Here I follow Graham’s interpretation of the existing evidence on Yang Zhu. See Graham, Chuang-tzu, 5 and 224–53. 5. In stressing this sense of the term “Tao,” I am in partial agreement with Chad Hansen’s controversial view that the term is to be understood in its usual sense, as a guiding discourse, even in the apparently metaphysical pronouncements of the classical Taoist texts. See Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). I am at odds with Hansen’s view, however, in that I do not think the term is to be understood exclusively or even primarily in this sense here, as will be clear in what follows. 6. The two most powerful attempts to classfiy the strains of thought in the text are surely those of Angus Graham, in his, Chuang-tzu (London:Allen and Unwin, 1981), and Liu Xiaogan, in his Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters (Ann Anbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1994). These two scholars agree that most of the traditional “Outer” and “Miscellaneous” chapters are not the work of Zhuang Zhou. They differ in that Liu considers them all the work of actual followers of Zhuang Zhou, and in the way they divide the remaining chapters according to philological, stylistic, and philosophical characteristics. Liu divides the remaining chapters into three distinct groups: the “Transmitters,” the “Huang-Lao School,” and the “Anarchists.” Liu holds that the work of the “Transmitters” most closely resembles that of the “Inner Chapters” of Zhuang Zhou, and come closest to him in time. Liu considers this group responsible for chapters 17 to 27 and 32.The “Huang-Lao school,” who synthesize Ruist,Taoist, and Legalist ideas, are responsible for chapters 12 to 16, 33, and the latter part of 11. The work of the “Anarchists” can be found in chapters 8 to 10, 28 to 29, 31, and the first part of 11. Graham’s catagories are the “School of Zhuangzi,” the “Syncretists,” the “Primitivists,” and the “Yangists.” Within the “School of Zhuangzi” writings, closely comparable to Liu’s “Transmitter School,” to which Graham attributes chapters 17 to 22, he further distinguishes a “Rationalizing” and an “Irrationalizing” strain, and in both cases considers a significant philosophical departure from Zhuang Zhou to have occurred here, a position that I share, as will become apparent below. Liu, on the contrary, seems to approve of the traditional consensus that, for example, the “Qiushui” (Autumn Floods) chapter is a faithful systematic exposition of the ideas of the Inner Chapters, a view that I reject. (See Liu, 98–99.) Graham’s “Syncretists” are represented by chapters 12 to 14, the end of 11, 15, and 33 corresponding approximately to Liu’s category of Huang-Lao. Graham’s “Primitivists” are represented by chapters 8 to 10 and the beginning of 11, and his “Yangists,” which he considers non-Taoist, are represented by chapters 28 to 31; these two categories together correspond to Liu’s category of “Anarchists.” 7. For a fuller account of my interpretation of the Zhuangzi, and my arguments for reading this controversial text in this way, see my article, “How Many are the Ten

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Thousand Things and I?” in Scott Cook, ed., Hiding the World in the World: Ten Uneven Essays on The Zhuangzi (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming). 8. See Mou Zongsan, Caixing yu xuanli, 169. 9. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 317. 10. While the terms “ti” and “yong” are used in tandem in Wang’s commentary to the Laozi, they do not really become technical terms strictly and consistently contrasted to each other in his philosophy. Nonetheless, the relation of Non-being to Being for Wang Bi, discussed below, does correspond closely in its content to the relation later systematically represented by the terms ti and yong . 11. Tang Yijie, Guo Xiang Yu Wei-Jin xuanxue (Hubei: Renmin chuban she, 1983), 296. 12. I.e., the teaching concerned with the names corresponding to various social roles, and hence the ethics of human interaction; the term is probably ultimately derived from the concept of the “rectification of names” (zheng ming) in early Ruism, whereby the actions of individuals were to correspond with their named social roles. See Analects, 13:3, and Xunzi, “Zheng Ming pian.” 13. From He Shao, “Biography of Wang Bi,” quoted in Tang, Guo Xiang, 36. 14. Wang Bi, Laozi zhu, ch. 41. 15. Ibid., ch. 38. 16. Wang Bi, Laozi zhilue. In light of Wang’s above-cited attitude concerning Laozi’s insufficiency, this remark can perhaps be taken as containing an implicit criticism of Laozi; however, it was not always taken this way, and this notion of extinguishing the branches was to become influential in later Wei-Jin metaphysics. 17. I will not be discussing the plagiarism controversy in any detail in this paper. For an excellent presentation of the relevant evidence, see Su Xinwu, Guo Xiang Zhuangxue pingyi, (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1980); I mainly follow Su’s conclusions on this question, namely, that Guo used the Xiang commentary extensively in compiling his own, but changed it significantly to accord with his own way of thinking.Tang Yijie independently comes to similar conclusions, without documenting the evidence as exhaustively; see Tang, Guo Xiang, 128–53. 18. Xiang Xiu, “Nan ‘Yangsheng lun’.” The implicit conflict between these two attitudes in Wang’s thought is well expressed in the friendly exchange of polemics between Xi Kang and Xiang Xiu. 19. Xie Lingyun, “Bianzong lun.” 20. Wen Xuan,“Ren Fang,Wei Fan Shi-xing zuo qiu li taizai bei biao.”Also quoted in Tang, Guo Xiang, 56. 21. Ibid. 58. The above overview of the development of these ideas in Wei-Jin metaphysics is derived largely from Tang’s account, 34–61. 22. See the entire text, with commentary, of the “Chong You Lun” in Mou Zongsan, Caixing yu xuanli, 362–70. 23. Compare for example the extant fragment of Xiang’s original commentary on Zhuangzi, ch. 19: “How could any of them be worthy of being considered a predecessor? They are all forms, colors, and that is all,” with Guo Xiang’s version. Xiang, as quoted in Zhang Shen’s commentary to the Liezi, says, “All alike are physical things with form

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and color, and none is worthy of being prior to the others.What is prior is only spontaneity.” Guo Xiang’s version in the present text leaves out the last sentence, which in Xiang’s original seems to grant some transcendent status to Spontaneity outside of the things of which it is predicated. Su Xinwu notes, “As for Xiang’s and Guo’s respective explanations of the ‘Original Substance’ that creates and completes the universe, Xiang seems not to have yet subjectivized his notion of substance, whereas Guo has done so, depicting it as a purely subjective realm which no longer is seen as a substantial objective reality.” (Su Xinwu, Guo Xiang, (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1989) 61–68; henceforth cited as Su). Another passage from Xiang’s lost commentary quoted by Zhang Shen refers to a passage not found in the present (i.e. Guo Xiang’s) version of the Zhuangzi. Liezi, Ch. 1., says,“Therefore, that which generates things is itself ungenerated, that which transforms things is itself untransformed.” Zhang’s commentary says, “This saying also appears in Zhuangzi. Xiang Xiu’s commentary says, ‘My being-generated was not generated by me; therefore generation simply generated itself.That which generates generation—how could it be a thing? [It is no thing], and therefore it is ungenerated. My transformations are not transformed by things; therefore transformation simply transforms itself.That which transforms what transforms—how could it be a thing? It is no thing, and thus it is untransformed. If that which generated things was itself generated, if that which transformed things was itself transformed, how would it be any different from things? This makes clear that only that which is ungenerated and untransformed can be the root of generation and transformation.’” (Emphasis added.) None of this appears in Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi text; the closest approximation would perhaps be Ch. 6: “That which kills life is without death, that which generates life is without life [or, that which generates generation is ungenerated]. There is nothing this thing does not send along, nothing it does not welcome, nothing it does not destroy, nothing it does not complete.” To this passage Guo Xiang comments,“Kill means destruction; death also means destruction.This means that this death has never been destroyed, this generation has never been generated. Since one has died and has been generated, one is able to enter into the undying and ungenerated [i.e., death and generation]. Therefore one can embody the regularity (fa), and be without generation or death. Since the regularity is ungenerated and undestroyed, why should one’s emotions rejoice or lament? Go along with it and there is nowhere one will not go. Allowing them to send themselves along, there is nothing one doesn’t send along.Allowing them to welcome themselves, there is nothing one doesn’t welcome. Allowing them all to destroy themselves, there is nothing one doesn’t destroy. Allowing them all to complete themselves, there is nothing one doesn’t complete.”The difference between these two comments, and Guo’s decision to exclude Xiang’s with his own in this place or perhaps omit this part of Zhuangzi altogether, gives a strong indication of their differing conceptions of the status of the absolute. 24. Tang, Guo Xiang, 68. 25. Indeed, since, as noted in the Introduction, the thirty-three-chapter version of the Zhuangzi now in circulation is based on Guo’s own edition, edited down by him from the earlier fifty-five-chapter version, it would seem that he regarded precisely these thirty-three chapters as the work of Zhuangzi, eliminating all from the text that he did not think could be interpreted into a coherent whole coming from one author. It is surely remarkable that even so he included so much that he was forced to object to or shamelessly reinterpret. In any case, since Guo did the editing of this text himself, we can feel fairly sure that he regarded all these chapters as the work of Zhuangzi, and hence exterted himself to interpret them as one coherent whole.

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26. Zhuangzi jishi, ed. Guo Qingfan (Taipei: Muduo Press, 1983), 213. (Henceforth cited as ZZJS.) 27. The literal sense of this term is “lodged words” (i.e., stories that are temporarily lodged here) in this apparent subject matter, but have their ultimate destination (i.e., meaning,) elsewhere. 28. Indeed, Guo’s belief in the validity of this interpretive strategy may have been what allowed him to include all these contradictory elements in his edition of the Zhuangzi. 29. ZZJS, 699. 30. That is, he compares the latter unfavorably to the former, labors them, gives them a hard time. 31. ZZJS, 424. 32. Ming. I translate this word elsewhere as “vanish (into) things,” and its full implications will be discussed in detail below. 33. ZZJS, 268. 34. ZZJS, 532. 35. Ibid. 36. Huainanzi, “Shuoshanxun.” 37. Dao bu xu xing. 38. ZZJS, 928. 39. Ibid., 398. Note the relation between the miao and the cu here. These terms are later adopted and developed into crucial categories in Tiantai Buddhism. 40. Donald Munro, Images of Human Nature; A Sung Portrait (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 36. 41. ZZJS, 375. 42. Ibid., 31. Watson’s translation from The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 34. 43. Ibid., 33. 44. Ibid., 31. Watson’s translation, from Watson, Complete Works, 34. 45. Guo Xiang’s use of this word will be discussed in detail below; the translation here is to be taken as a mere marker for the word’s presence. In its special verbal use I shall normally translate it as “vanish into things.” 46. ZZJS, 34. 47. Wang Bi, Laozi zhu, ch. 1. 48. Laozi, ch. 21. 49. Ibid., ch. 27. 50. Another usage (as a loan for the verb meaning “to sleep”) will be discussed in the treatment of Guo Xiang’s verbal use of this word, below. 51. ZZJS, 257. 52. Ibid., 73. 53. The former meaning is emphasized by Guo’s use of the term zi’er, and the latter by the terms zide and zidang, interchangeably with ziran in certain contexts. 54. ZZJS, 951.

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55. Ibid., 662. 56. Tang, Guo Xiang, 297–8. 57. ZZJS, 438. I interpret the passage in accordance with Guo’s commentary, although his reading gives a rather special and forced meaning to the last sentence. 58. Thus do I translate Guo’s use of the term xuantong .The sense is a oneness that is “dark,” i.e., oblique, indirect, not obvious. This implies a oneness of two things that remain apparently completely distinct and different. The determinate characteristics are not identical; the two entities are identical in some way unknown perhaps even to themselves. Not a sameness as X is the same as X, but as X is the same as A. The implications of the term “xuan” as discussed above and in connection with Guo’s term “ming” are also to be remembered here. 59. ZZJS, 438–39. 60. Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia university Press, 1968), 136. 61. Guo Xiang’s notion of oneness-in-diversity will be discussed at length below. 62. Mang.The use here is, according to most commentators, cognate with the same character with the water radical.This gives us a sense of muddledness and cognitive blur, and hence is closely related to the concept of ming discussed above and below. 63. Reading wei as fu, in accord with the emendation of Tang Yijie (Tang, Guo Xiang 270). 64. ZZJS, 61. 65. Ibid., 812. 66. Ibid., 224. 67. Ibid., 199–200. 68. Ibid., 50. 69. Huran. This term, which normally means simply “suddenly,” has a rather extended meaning in Guo Xiang. The hu here also implies to not pay attention, to neglect, unconsciousness. Moreover, the ran has a sense of both being-so and affirming, embodying a particular point of view, as we will discuss below. 70. ZZJS, 754. 71. Taking jueran as equivalent to jueran, with the mountain radical, meaning “abruptly arising.” Lu Deming’s “Shiming” (Ibid., 251) suggests that jue should here be read as equivalent to curan, which however would amount to the same meaning, i.e., “abrubtly.”The last term in this section, duhua, will be discussed in depth in the last part of this essay, as the culmination of Guo’s unification of independence and interdependence, for which the groundwork is being laid in the image of traces presently under discussion. 72. Ibid., 251. The last term, duhua , will be discussed in greater detail below. 73. ZZJS, 20. 74. Ibid., 764. 75. Ibid., 288. 76. Ibid., 308. 77. Ibid., 446. 78. Ibid., 556.

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79. Wang Deyou, “Guo Xiang zhexue de jidian ji xiangying de jige gainian,” in Wen shi zhe, (no. 1, 1987): 33. 80. ZZJS, 496. 81. For the moment, however, let us tip the hand a bit, and note in passing that it is for this reason that Guo’s notion of independence is not to be considered the opposite of dependence; rather it encompasses the latter within itself; even the dependent is independent. This notion also has important implications for Guo’s conception of the relation between Ruism and Taoism, which we will discuss in more detail further on. We should also note here the connection that will develop between these sets of ideas: traces are what is cognizable, and do not pertain to the spontaneity that actually makes things what they are.This is accomplished without the aid of consciousness or knowing. Moreover, it is inimical to the most characteristic method of knowing: the application of the “principle of sufficient reason,” the search for a cause. Causality, knowing, and traces are all closely related to one another, and all of them are equally inapplicable to spontaneity. 82. ZZJS, 375. 83. Mou Zongsan, Caixing yu xuanli (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1985), 187. 84. ZZJS, 425. 85. Ibid., 381. 86. Ibid., 248. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 86. 89. Ibid., 989. 90. Tang, Guo Xiang, 296. 91. Li Rizhang, Zhuangzi xiaoyaojing de li yu wai (Taipei: Liwen wenhua gongsi, 2000), 182–38. 92. Tang’s interpretation of this point may be partially motivated by his desire to read Guo’s idea of that which leaves the traces as comparable to Kant’s ding-an-sich. See Tang, Guo Xiang, 298. More specifically,Tang’s idea is comparable to Kant’s idea of “intelligible character,” which remains potentially free in spite of the inexorable causal determinism applying to the “empirical character.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 464–79. In this view, developed further by Schopenhauer, one’s determinate character is an independent and inexorable fact outside of the phenomenal world, which manifests itself in accordance with the laws of causality without which that world cannot be known to human cognition. The relation of this notion to Guo’s ideas of freedom and interdependence will be discussed in more detail in Appendix B. 93. ZZJS, 59. 94. Ibid., 519. 95. Ibid., 281. 96. For a further discussion of Guo Xiang’s use of the word xing to denote changing momentary determinacy, see the discussion of his notion of inherency and change, and the implications this has for the further meanings of self-so as simultaneously freedom, contingency and necessity, in Appendix A. 97. ZZJS, 283.

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98. Ibid., 323–324. 99. Ibid., 710–11. Guo continues here: “[But when the text says], ‘Something unforgotten resides,’ this means [the disappearance of the old] is succeeded by daily [i.e., constant] renewal. Although I forget the old me, the new me is already here; [this flux] has never begun to be not me; thus what worry could I have? Thus he can depart from the vulgar, cut off the worldly dust and vanish (into) with every thing without exception.” 100. Ibid., 747. 101. Ibid., 785. 102. Ibid., 887. 103. Ibid., 344. Wufang might also be taken as “the boundless,” “the methodless,” “the directionless,” “the positionless,” “the unsquarable,” or as a reference to spirit (shen) as in the “Xicizhuan” to the Zhouyi. I have translated as above because the passage seems to be stressing what is as yet without determinacy, what has not yet had cognitive borders put around it and is perhaps inherently unsusceptible to systemization. Ultimately it seems to be a reference to “daily renewal,” the constant newness of change, to which Guo so often alludes. 104. Ibid., 513–14. 105. Ibid., 515. 106. See for example ibid., 156: “When a thousand people gather, if they don’t take one to be their lord, they will either scatter or fall into disorder.Thus even if there are many worthy ones there cannot be many rulers; even if there are no worthy ones there still cannot be no ruler.This is the way of heaven and man. . . .” and passim, especially p. 58, to be discussed below. 107. Ibid., 550. 108. Ibid., 905. 109. Ibid., 316. 110. Ibid., 327. 111. Ibid., 328. 112. Ibid., 328. 113. Ibid., 452. 114. Ibid., 583. 115. Ibid., 869. 116. Su Xinwu, 231–37. 117. ZZJS, 113.The Zhuangzi tells us that Lady Li cried when she was taken as a captive to the state of Qin, but later ended up happily married to the ruler there, and wondered how she could have ever cried. 118. Ibid., 341. 119. Ibid., 828. 120. Ibid., 644. 121. Ibid., 312. 122. Ibid., 313–14. 123. Ibid., 243. 124. See for example ibid., 281, quoted above, and Appendix A.

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125. Ibid., 113. 126. Guo of course involves himself in an inevitable paradox here, in that he is himself putting forth a value by calling for the ignoring of these traces and their valuation.This paradox is a commonplace of certain types of thinkers, and is I think inevitable for Guo and for all writers dealing with subject matter that involves the transcending of finitude as the unification of opposites. This topic will be discussed at the very end of this book. 127. ZZJS, 356. 128. Livia Knaul,“Kuo Hsiang and the Chuang Tzu,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 12, no. 4, (December 1985): 439. 129. ZZJS, 554–55. 130. This position is to be compared to the utilization of the concept of “traces” in Tiantai Buddhism, which I believe adopted and adapted this term from Guo. Here traces are associated with teachings, as in Guo, and are contrasted to the “root,” ben, a formal category of the thing itself precisely as contrasted to the traces, which signifies the Buddha’s enlightenment. However, the relation between these two, in typical Tiantai fashion, is merely relative and hence can be applied ad infinitum at different levels of discourse. Zhiyi says, for example, “The root is the one real-mark, while the traces are everything else besides the real-mark of all dharmas. Again, when principle (li) is contrasted to event (shi), it is called the root, but once one is speaking of principle and event, both are to be called teachings, and thus traces.Again, both principle and event as teachings are to be called the root, and the practice of this teaching by those who receive it is to be called the trace; it is like a man who leaves footprints in going to his dwelling place: by following the footprints the dwelling place can be found. Again, practice is whereby one realizes substance, and substance is the root; when function arises in accord with this substance, this is the trace. Again, to truly attain substance and function is the root, and to provisionally put forth substance and function [in teachings and practice] is the trace.What manifests today [i.e., in this case, the preaching of the Lotus Sutra] is the root; but what is said in the past and future is the trace.” (Fahua xuanyi, ch. 8;T33.764b.) The connection between traces and the element of time noted in the last comparison, and between present activity and later comment on (and “distorted” cognition of) it is especially reminiscent of Guo, but the dialectical structuring of level after level, each annuling and subsuming the previous one, is not. An even more striking difference lies in the fact that in the Tiantai classification of Buddhist teachings, although the traces are not ultimate or literal truth, they have a positive function as upaya, skillful means for the enlightenment of sentient beings, and hence from a higher perspective are to be regarded as part of, and even identical to the entirety of, the Buddha’s truth.The traces are deceptive, as in Guo Xiang, but it is Tiantai’s distinctive position to hold that this deception is itself beneficial for the revelation of the true, or that the true manifests itself all the more in its distortion—an idea never found in Guo. PART II 1. ZZJS, 753. 2. Ibid., 182. 3. William Baxter has reconstructed the archaic pronunciations of these two words during the time period in question as *meng (darkness) and *mrjeng (brightness). Personal communication.

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4. Wang Deyou, “Guo Xiang zhexue de jidian ji xiangging de jige gainian,” Wen shi zhe, no. 1, 1987, 33–34. 5. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 329. 6. ZZJS, 757. 7. Thus does Zhuang Yaolang construe the term. See Zhuang Yaolang, Guo Xiang xuanxue (Taipei: Liren shuju, 1998), 305–06. 8. It is perhaps also significant in this connection to note the relation of this word with the word ji, meaning extremity, interface, or border. For ji is often used by Guo Xiang to mean the determinate limits of a thing, what makes it what it is, and as we shall see below, it is often the object of the verb ming . Hence it is worth noting that ming when used at the very beginning of the Zhuangzi, is asserted to be cognate with the same character with a water radical, and glossed to mean both wu ji (the limitless, hence having no particular shape or form, hence “dark”) (by Emperor Jian Wen of the Liang dynasty; see ZZJS, 2.) and ji (the extremity; specifically, the north and south extremities, far from the sun and thus “dark”) (by the Buddhist exegete Hui Lin, quoting a certain Sima; see ZZJS, 3). 9. Ibid., 1047. 10. Ibid., 185. The final reference to felicity (fu) is a term used in the previous several comments; Guo defines it as “the inner,” i.e., that which accords with one’s own capacities. 11. Ibid., 397. 12. Ibid., 401. 13. Ibid., 429. 14. Ibid., 87. 15. Ibid., 78. 16. Ibid., 66. 17. Ibid., 100. 18. Baxter has reconstructed the archaic pronunciation of min as *mrinB. (Personal communication.) 19. ZZJS, 391. Yu wu wu ji. 20. Ibid., 754. 21. Ibid., 112. 22. Ibid., 129. 23. Ibid., 184. 24. Ibid., 195. 25. Ibid., 555. 26. Ibid., 82. 27. Ibid., 80. 28. Ibid., 82. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. Ibid., 43. 31. Ibid., 191.

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32. Ibid., 299. 33. Ibid., 55. 34. Ibid., 10. 35. Ibid., 55. 36. Ibid., 68. 37. Ibid., 74. 38. Ibid., 78. 39. Ibid., 82. Cheng Xuanying’s gloss on this note puts it even more clearly: “He is not separated from right and wrong and yet able to have no right and wrong; thus it is called ‘walking two.’ ” 40. Ibid., 115–16. 41. Ibid., 662. 42. Ibid., 240. 43. Ibid., 5. See also ibid., 3. 44. Ibid., 957. 45. Ibid., 304. 46. Ibid., 1078. 47. Ibid., 68. 48. Ibid., 81. 49. Kuairan. The translation is very tentative; I do not know what is intended by this adverb. 50. Ibid., 566. 51. Ibid., 357. 52. Ibid., 13. 53. Ibid., 96. 54. Ibid., 277. 55. Ibid., 244. 56. Ibid., 504. 57. Ibid., 505. 58. Ibid., 145. 59. Ibid., 408. This “alone” (du) will become important in the following discussion of the further implications of these ideas. 60. Ibid., 192. 61. Ibid., 255. 62. Ibid., 11. 63. Ibid., 110. 64. Ibid., 885. 65. Ibid., 938. 66. Ibid., 939. 67. Guo’s interpretation of mi yang from the Zhuangzi text. It is actually the name of a kind of thistle, but the choice of a plant with such a name for this passage was most likely not accidental.

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68. Ibid., 185. 69. Ibid., 809. 70. Ibid., 308, #6. 71. Ibid., 851 #1. 72. Ibid., 157. 73. Ibid., 355. 74. Ibid., 245. 75. Ibid., 286. 76. Ibid., 179. 77. Ibid., 920. 78. It is possible that another phonetically inspired connotation to vanishing (into) things (ming, *meng) and brightness (ming, *mrjeng) is implied here. Baxter has reconstructed the archaic pronunciation as *mrjeng. 79. ZZJS, 149. 80. Ibid., 162. 81. Fung Yu–lan, Chuang-tzu; A New Selected Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989), 120–21. 82. Fung Yu–lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy,Vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde (London: Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1953), 212. 83. Fung, Chuang-tzu, 121. 84. Zhuang Yaolang, Guo Xiang xuanxue, 304. 85. Zhuang describes “Buddhism” as denying the first cause, like Guo, but also viewing all entities as purely self-extrinsic, attributable entirely to external causes, with no intrinsic causes. He contrasts this to Guo’s view of the determinacy and nature of each being as its true intrinsic cause, which is an unknowable, unique, absolute, and independent particular, which decides all the activities of the entity in question.This analysis not only oversimplifies the Buddhist tradition (in particular Chinese Buddhism, which, partially under Guo’s own influence perhaps, has a more complex view of the “nonself ” doctrine, which makes it possible to say equally that “all things are intrinsic to the self,” or that “nonself equals true self ”), but also makes the mistake of regarding Guo’s “determinacy” as a fixed nature that actually determines things one way rather than another, rather than as a name for the vanishing comfortably (into) conditions themselves. See ibid., 299–300. 86. Ibid., 304–05. 87. Tang, Guo Xiang, 282. 88. Ibid., 65. 89. ZZJS, 20. 90. I translate here in accordance with Tang’s interpretation of the text; in my own translations of Guo Xiang I render the term xing as determinacy, in accordance with Wang Deyou’s interpretation. 91. Tang, Guo Xiang, 271. 92. Wang Deyou, “Guo Xiang zhexue de jidian ji xiangying de jige gainian,” Wen shi zhe, 1 (January 1987): 28–34.

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93. One could perhaps give Tang the benefit of the doubt by saying that this sort of unconditionality, since it is wholly a function of whatever it encounters and follows along with things, is in this sense conditioned; but this does not seem to be what Tang means here. 94. ZZJS, 838. 95. Ibid., 62. 96. Ibid., 65. 97. Ibid., 961. 98. Ibid., 61. 99. Ibid., 109. 100. Here again we see the importance of rejecting Tang’s claim for the unchangeablitiy of a self-nature, for in Guo this would merely be a kind of clinging to one content that would on the contrary obstruct independence.True vanishing (into) things is predicated on constant change, and the constant rightness of constant change. PART III 1. Joseph Needham has suggested that the term might have been inspired by the Chinese translation of the technical Buddhist term, pratyeka-buddha, dujue. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 564, n. f. This seems quite far-fetched to me. Needham offers no evidence to support such a claim, and indeed, merely suggests it in passing in a footnote as admitted unmitigated speculation. But this is the only speculation concerning the origin of this term in previous literature that is known to me. 2. Cheng Xuanying’s subcommentary to Guo’s commentary, for example, uses it very frequently, and it was also picked up by Han Kangbo, in his commentary to the “Xicizhuan,” and by Fan Zhen in his “Shenmie lun” (“On the mortality of the soul”). 3. Tang Yijie, Guo Xiang yu Wei-Jin Xuanxue (Hubei: Renmin chuban she, 1983), 280, and passim. 4. Many commentators have noted this latter family resemblence of terms; Tang Yijie in particular has schematized Guo’s thought largely in terms of the interconnection between and mutual implication of the terms zixing, zisheng, and duhua. See ibid., 263, and passim. See also Qian Mu, Zhuang Lao tong bian (Hong Kong: Xinya yanjiuso, 1957), 396 and passim. 5. ZZJS, 585. 6. See Su Xinwu, Guo Xiang Zhuangxue pingyi (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1980), 175. 7. See above, note 23 to Part One of this book. 8. Derk Bodde, for example, translates both as “self-transformation,” which is perfectly reasonable if the two terms are encountered in isolation, outside their original context in Guo’s commentary as a whole. See Fung Yu–lan, A History Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde (London: Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1953), 207–10. Needham also translates duhua as “self-transformed” (Needham, Science, 564), and Wing-tsit Chan has simply “transform itself ” (Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 330).



  

9. ZZJS, 1090. This term had already been around for a long time; it appears, perhaps for the first time, in Laozi, ch. 25. 10. This is the first appearance of the term in the commentary with the exception of one occurrence in the preface attributed to Guo Xiang, the authenticity of which has been questioned. See Wang Liqi, “Jinben Zhuangzi Guo Xiang xu fei Zixuan suo zuo kao,” Tushu jikan, j 8, #314. 11. Youran. The sense of luring or temptation is apt here, in that it provides an example of a case where, although one is moved by other things, yet one is ultimately self-moved, and where one does not quite cognitively understand the mechanism of one’s motion, nor does one move as the direct result of an act of conscious volition. 12. ZZJS, 111–12. 13. Ibid., 225. 14. Ibid., 348. 15. Ibid., 579. 16. Ibid., 235. 17. This term is not without a suggestion of causality about it; it suggests both that one thing follows another in a sequence, logical or otherwise, and also that something is subjectively “following along” with another. Guo is playing with the two senses here, as Zhuangzi had. 18. This term is interpreted by Guo Qingfan as transcending (chao), cutting off connections ( jue), singular (du); he cites other glosses and cognates meaning one-legged, independent, special, and so on.The original sense seems to be that of a single peak protruding from among the cluster of smaller peaks.This is surely what inspired Guo’s connection of this passage with the idea of the Singularity of lone-transformation. 19. ZZJS, 241. 20. Ibid., 260. 21. Fung, History, 210. 22. ZZJS, 958. 23. Tang, Guo Xiang yu, 294. 24. ZZJS, 254. 25. It is worth noting that Ruist writers early and late seem to prefer an organicism based on the image of a plant, whereas Guo uses exclusively the image of an animal organism, despite his anticognition position. The effects of these divergent images are potentially far-reaching, as they strongly influence the general conclusions drawn in both cases. 26. ZZJS, 58. 27. I translate the wei here as “for the sake of ” rather than “to act,” as this seems to be the sense in which Guo is taking it; it is questionable to me however whether this is indeed the sense intended in the text of the Zhuangzi. 28. ZZJS, 265. 29. Ibid., 500. 30. Ibid., 579. 31. Ibid., 80. 32. Ibid., 82.

   



33. Ibid., 285. 34. Ibid., 498. 35. Ibid., 322. 36. Ibid., 391. 37. Guo explicitly links this term with du: “When the chamber is empty, the unmixed purity is unmediatedly generated in solitude (dusheng).” Ibid., 151. 38. Tunran. I translate thus in accord with Guo’s previous note: “Tunran without consciousness (wuzhi) and directly proceeding (zhiwang). . . .” The term is related morphologically to both chun (purity) and hundun (“primal chaos, mixed together”). 39. Zhiwang. This is another mutation of duhua. 40. Chang you yu du. Another mutation of duhua. 41. ZZJS, 102. 42. Ibid., 582. 43. Ibid., 546. 44. Ibid., 240. 45. An echo of Laozi, ch. 48. 46. ZZJS, 79. 47. Ibid., 270. 48. Ibid., 853. 49. Ibid., 196. 50. Ibid., 192. 51. Ibid., 101. 52. Ibid., 185. It is for this reason too that Guo can proclaim that he who lonetransforms is most essential to the world and inseparable from it. As Guo puts it, “He whose mind is complete discards his body and forgets his five organs, unconsciously travels in Singularity (duwang), and yet none in the world can be separated from him (tianxia zhi muo neng li). . . . If his spirit is complete and his mind whole, then his substance will vanish (into) things; the world can never keep far away from he who vanishes (into) things. . . .” Ibid., 188.The political connotations are not accidental here; the sage is he who achieves perfect independent Singularity within the world, and such a man is for Guo also necessarily the ruler of the world, albeit one who does nothing at all to rule. This is part of Guo’s total identification of human society and spontaneity, which allows him to justify the hierarchical structure of society, and also to vindicate the Ruist sage-kings. We will discuss this important issue in more detail below. 53. A mutation of duhua. 54. ZZJS, 99. 55. Ibid., 1091. 56. Ibid., 763–64. 57. For a similar idea of unintentional mutual benefit, see Hegel doctrine of the Cunning of Reason, elucidated for example in Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 272–73. 58. ZZJS, 917. 59. Ibid., 466.

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  

60. Ibid., 588. 61. Ibid., 664. 62. Ibid., 811. 63. Ibid., 1065. 64. Ibid., 224. 65. Ibid., 226. 66. Ibid., 432. 67. Ibid., 326. 68. Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang-tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 146. 69. ZZJS, 470. 70. Ibid., 473–74. 71. Ibid., 257. 72. Ibid., 280. 73. Ibid., 333. 74. Ibid., 340. 75. Ibid., 337. 76. Ibid., 339. 77. Ibid., 446. 78. Ibid., 373–74. 79. Ibid., 417. 80. Ibid., 337. 81. Ibid., 206. Throughout this book I translate the terms xing ming as “determinacy and inner necessity” in accordance with the interpretation of Wang Deyou, “Guo Xiang zhexue de jidian ji xiangying de jige gainian,” in Wen shi zhe, no. 1 (1987): 28–34. See also ZZJS, 156, where ming is defined as “what nothing can be done about.”This is what is intended by the phrase “inner necessity” here; it implies not what is fixed over time or predetermined in some intelligible realm, as the common translation “fate” might imply, but rather simply what is so, the pure facticity of the moment, which can change but cannot be changed. See Appendix A. 82. Ibid., 389. 83. Ibid., 378. 84. Ibid., 552. 85. Ibid., 555. 86. Ibid., 326. 87. Ibid., 377. 88. Watson’s translation, 165, modified. The text here is quite obscure; I interpret in accord with the suggestions of Chen Guying, Zhuangzi jinzhu jinshi, vol. 1 (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1989), 424–45. 89. ZZJS, 529. 90. Ibid., 989. 91. Ibid., 337. 92. Ibid., 348.

  



93. Ibid., 268. 94. Ibid., 296–97. 95. See Appendix B. 96. ZZJS, 313. 97. Ibid., 318. 98. Hegel’s Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1969), 137–50. For Hegel, this involved the category of being-for-self, and thus ideality, which exemplified for him the true infinity. The doctrine is also supported by Hegel’s conception of the nature of a qualitative limit, expressed earlier in the same work. APPENDICES 1. ZZJS, 128. 2. Ibid., 583. 3. Ibid., 585. 4. Ibid., 570. 5. Ibid., 58–59. 6. Ibid., 588. 7. Ibid., 246. 8. Ibid., 504–505. 9. Ibid., 403. 10. Tang Yijie, Guo Xiang yu Wei-Jin xuanxue (Hubei: Renmin chuban she, 198), 276–80. 11. To this camp also belong a number of religious thinkers, notably both Luther (in On the Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio)) and Calvin, who took the concept of the freedom of the will as an affront to the omnipotence of God. Catholic orthodoxy on the other hand does accept free will, but not to the extent that it would eliminate original sin, the need for salvation, and free election by grace. For an extensive discussion of this problem from the theological perspective, see Augustine, On Free Will and of Nature and Grace. 12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Roderick Chisholm (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1956), 9–18. 13. Ibid., 24–25. 14. Ibid., 25–26. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. Ibid., 29–30. 17. Immander Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 409–15. 18. Ibid., 469. 19. Schopenhauer openly declares his indebtedness to Kant for this doctrine, saying, “. . . Kant’s presentation of the relation between the empirical and the intelligible character and thereby of the possibility of uniting freedom with necessity . . . is one of the most beautiful and profound ideas brought forth by that great mind, or indeed



  

by men at any time. . . . [I]t is only with its help that it is possible to comprehend, insofar as human powers can, how the strict necessity of our actions nevertheless coexists with that freedom to which the feeling of responsibility testifies and by virtue of which we are the agents of or acts, these actions being morally ascribable to us.” Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, trans., Konstantin Kolenda (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 96. 20. Ibid., 99. 21. Spinoza, Epistle LXII, in On the Improvement of the Understanding; The Ethics; Correspondence, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 390. 22. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne, (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 126. 23. It is interesting to note in this connection the interpretation given to Guo Xiang’s notion of lone-transformation by the eminent intellectual historian Tang Junyi; for Tang’s explanation of this state sounds very much like Schopenhauer describing the state of aesthetic contemplation in which we can perceive the thing’s own Idea or intelligible character outside of its relation to all other things—i.e., outside the principle of sufficient reason.Tang takes lone-transformation as a kind of contemplation similarly divorced from their temporal and causative interconnections, a kind of pure perception that isolates each moment and each encounter into singularity, away from all comparison with other moments.The temporal element is of course more stressed here than in Schopenhauer (I think correctly), and Tang does not take this sort of contemplation to be a seeing into any sort of noumenal realm. For Tang vanishing (into) things means just this forgetting of connections, of the principle of sufficient reason. See Tang Junyi, Zhongguo zhexue yuanlun, Yuan Dao pian, vol. 2 (Hong Kong: XinYa shuyuan yanjiu suo, 1974), 917–43. 24. Hegel’s Logic, trans. Wallace, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 208. 25. Ibid., 220. 26. It should be noted however that the clear conception of happenstance as such (oran) enters Chinese philosophy through the work of the skeptic Wang Chong, from who Guo inherited and adapted many of his implications of the term ziran, self-so, also the key term in Wang’s naturalism. Guo’s own contribution then is not the combination of necessity and chance, which were present already in Wang Chong’s usage of the concept of self-so, but rather in adding the concept of freedom to this unity, in seeing the necessity and chance of the self-so simultaneously as freedom.

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Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Hansen, Chad. A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Language and Logic in Ancient China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. ———. “A Tao of ‘Tao’ in Chuang Tzu.” In Experimental Essays on Chuang Tzu. Edited by Victor Mair. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Logic. Trans. William Wallace. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1969. Henricks, Robert G. Lao-tzu Te-Tao Ching. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Jiao Hong. Laozi yi. Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1962. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.Trans.T.V. Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Knaul, Livia. “Kuo Hsiang and the Chuang Tzu.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12, no. 4 (December 1985). Kong Fan. Weijin Xuanxue. Taipei: Hongye, 1993. Laozi Wangbizhu, Boshu Laozi, Yiyin, Jiuzhu, Huangdi sijing. Taipei: Tianshi chubanshe, 1982. Lau, D. C. Lao Tzu.Tao Te Ching. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963. Legge, James. The She King. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1985. ———. The Shoo King. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1985. Li Disheng, ed. Xunzi jishi. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1979. Liang Qichao. Mojing jiaoshi. Taipei: Xinwenfeng chubanshe, 1975. Lin Shuen-fu.“The Language of the ‘Inner Chapters’ of the Chuang Tzu.” In The Power of Culture: Studies in Chinese Cultural History, edited by Willard Peterson, Andrew Plaks, and Ying-shih Yu, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994. Li Rizhang. Zhuangzi xiaoyaojing de li yu wai. Taipei: Liwen wenhua gongsi, 2000. Liezi zhu shi. Taipei: Hualian chuban she, 1969. Lin Congshun. Xiang-Guo Zhuangxue zhi yanjiu. Taipei: Wenshizhe chuban she, 1981. Liu Xiaogan. Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters.Trans.William Savage.Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1994. ———. Zhuangzi zhexue ji qi yanbian. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1987. Liu Xinfang. Jingmen Guodian hzujian Laozi jiegu. Taipei:Yiwen yinshuguan, 1999. Luo Zongqiang. Xuanxue yu Weijin shiren xintai. Taipei: Wenshizhe, 1992. Mou Zongsan. Caixing yu xuanli. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1997. ———. Yuanshanlun. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1985. Munro, Donald J. The Concept of Man in Contemporary China. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1977. ———. The Concept of Man in Early China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969.

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Zhou Yi Zheng Yi. Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1986. Zhuang Yaolang. Guo Xiang xuanxue. Taipei: Liren shuju, 1998. Zhuzi yinde; Laozi, Zhuangzi. Taipei: Zongqing tushu chuban gongsi, 1986.

Index

Confucian, Confucianism. See Ruism Confucius, 6, 8, 12, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 39, 52 Consciousness. See Cognition Creator, 4, 86, 101, 103, 104, 126

Abstruse Learning. See Xuanxue Activity, 21, 40, 112, 123–140, 144, 145 Actuality, 48–49 Anarchism, 3, 54 Aristotle, 48, 49 Augustine, St., 177n Axiology. See Valuation

Daodejing. See Laozi Darkness. See Vanishing Dependence, 20, 49, 85–95, 100–123, 125, 127, 135, 136, 139, 145, 149–160, 167n Desire, 10, 11, 54 Determinacy (“True Nature,” Xing, Ji ), 31, 38, 42, 46, 48–50, 54–59, 65, 66, 70–77, 81, 88–90, 92, 110–115, 118, 120, 127, 129–135, 143–146, 167n, 172n, 176n Determinism, 149–160

Being, 10, 23–26, 43, 110, 163n Benevolence (ren) and Righteousness, 6, 7, 15, 50, 51, 55, 112, 128–132, 136, 137, 161n Book of Changes, 14, 15, 17, 23 Buddhism, 3, 4, 87, 172n Causality, 20, 36, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48–49, 65, 85–95, 100, 102–113, 117–122, 126, 149–160, 167n Chan Buddhism, 3, 4 Chan, Wing-tsit, 18, 65 Chance, 118, 136, 143–146, 153, 154, 158, 167n, 178n Change. See Transformation Cheng Xuanying, 53, 102 Christianity, 15 Chuang-tzu. See Zhuangzi Cognition, 19, 36, 38, 39, 43, 48, 51–53, 57, 59, 60, 65–74, 77, 91, 102, 103, 106–116, 118–120, 122, 125, 128–138, 143, 157, 167n, 174n Comfortable. See Fit

Emulation. See Imitation Engels, Friedrich, 86 Environmentalism, 3 Epistemology, 9, 11, 12, 19, 43–45, 48, 91, 126, 129, 138 Esteem. See Imitation Evil, 28 Existentialism, 4 Explanation, 43 Fatalism, 56, 145 Fichte, 150–155 



  

Filial Piety, 7 Final Cause. See Teleology First Cause, 86, 103 Fit, Fitness. 19, 36–38, 43, 45, 53–55, 60, 70–72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 93, 104, 107, 109–115, 120, 123, 126–129, 153 Following, 20, 21, 81, 86, 89, 93, 94, 105–111, 117–120, 140, 145 Forgetting, 11, 20, 21, 30, 36, 39, 51, 66, 68–70, 74, 78, 80, 81, 83, 104, 107, 112–115, 118, 119, 121–123, 129, 137, 153 Freedom, 118, 136, 143–146, 149–160, 167n, 177n Fung Yu-lan, 109 God, 4, 5, 7 Graham, Angus, 14, 162n Guanzi, 8, 161n Hansen, Chad, 162n Heaven, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 139, 157–159, 175n, 177n He Yan, 23 Huainanzi, 31 Huayan Buddhism, 4 Hume, David, 4 I. See Self Imitation, 33, 36, 52, 56–61, 67, 68, 70, 75, 81–83, 116, 117, 126, 130–134, 138 Independence, 20, 21, 31, 48, 49, 54, 80, 81, 85–95, 100–115, 125, 135, 136, 138, 145, 149–160, 167n Infinity, 79–80, 104, 139 Intelligible Character, 146, 155, 177n Intention. See Volition Kant, Immanuel, 154–156, 167n Knaul, Livia, 60 Knowledge, 9, 12, 13, 36, 38, 39, 92, 125, 134, 156 Language, 11 Laozi, 3, 8, 9, 17, 18, 23, 24, 29, 31, 35, 45, 53, 56, 105, 161n, 162n

Lao-tzu. See Laozi Legalism, 14 Leibniz, 118 Li. See Ritual Liezi, 87–91 Li Rizhang, 49 Liu Xiaogan, 162n Lone-transformation (duhua), 20, 21, 33, 41, 47, 50, 59, 70, 77, 80, 86, 87, 95–123, 125, 126, 136, 138, 145, 150, 159, 174n, 175n, 178n Luther, Martin, 177n Marx, Karl, 86 Mencius, 7, 56, 58, 137, 143 Metaphor, 34 Metaphysics, 4, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 23, 99, 136, 150 Mind, 11 Mohism, 7, 8, 14, 90 Morality, 14, 15, 18, 23–25, 29–32, 41, 137, 154 Mou Zongsan, 44, 161n Munro, Donald, 32 Mysticism, 3, 21 Mythology, 15 Necessity, 118, 136, 143–146, 149–160, 167n, 177n, 178n Needham, Joseph, 173n Neo-Confucianism, 4 Neo-Platonism, 15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 149, 161n Non-activity, 21, 26, 123–140 Non-Being, 10, 18, 23–26, 35, 36, 43–47, 65, 102–104, 163n Non-knowing, 26, 35 Old Testament, 15 Oneness, 12, 13, 21, 44–47, 55, 58, 67–71, 73, 75, 78–80, 100, 102, 106–108, 111–119, 122, 125, 131, 135, 138, 139, 145, 166n Parable, 28–29 Parmenides, 25 Pei Wei, 25–26 Penumbra and Shadow, 100–123, 130



Perspective, 11, 12, 13, 57, 61, 71, 73, 79, 89, 91 Philo, 15 Plato, 15 Potentiality, 48–49 Pre-established Harmony, 55, 87, 118 Priestly, 149 Primitivism, 14 Purpose, 10, 24, 27, 128, 137, 149–153 Relativism, 12–13, 56–57, 105 Rightness, 19, 28, 37, 55, 87, 92–94, 104, 107, 114–116, 119, 122, 144, 173n Ritual (li), 5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 25, 53, 131 Romanticism, 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3 Ruan Ji, 24 Ruism, Ruist (Confucianist), 3, 5, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31, 90, 118, 132–135, 137, 161n, 162n Sages, 28, 29, 45, 48, 82, 89, 90, 93, 94, 108, 109, 113, 115, 118, 130–137 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 155–157, 167n, 177n, 178n Self, and Other, 19, 20, 31, 39, 45, 53, 60, 66, 70, 71, 73, 77, 79–82, 85, 88, 99, 100, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118–120, 123, 126, 131, 139, 143, 152, 159 Self-forgetfulness, 20, 28, 43, 45, 49, 53, 54, 59, 60, 66, 70, 72, 78, 81, 94, 107, 120, 122, 126, 138, 145, 159 Self-generation, 25, 33 Self-rightness, 20, 28, 37–39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 54, 56, 59, 60, 67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80–83, 90, 93, 108, 110, 113–117, 120–123, 126, 128, 129, 131, 134–139, 159 Self-so (Ziran), 18, 19, 23, 28, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40–42, 45, 46, 48–50, 53, 54, 56, 59, 67, 71, 83, 113, 117, 119, 126, 136, 138, 139, 143–146, 154, 159. See also Spontaneity Self-transformation, 25, 86, 100, 104, 127, 145



Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 24–25 Shen Dao, 120 Skepticism, 3 Soteriological, 89 Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 149, 151, 156 Spontaneity, 13, 14, 18, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 40–43, 47, 51, 92, 106, 116, 123, 126, 136, 137 Substance and Function (ti yong), 18, 19, 23, 31, 44, 47, 163n Su Xinwu, 56–57, 163–164n Tang Junyi, 178n Tang Yijie, 18, 26, 38, 43, 50, 87–91, 99, 109, 110, 145, 163n Tao, 9, 11, 12, 41, 42, 45, 82, 83, 93, 128, 130, 133, 138, 162n Tao-Te-Ching. See Laozi Teleology, 10, 19, 20, 27, 33, 36, 37, 54, 59–61, 77, 91, 92, 102, 108, 110, 113, 118, 122, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135, 138, 152, 154 Tiantai Buddhism, 4, 165n, 169n Time. See Change Totality, 87 Traces (ji), 18, 21, 30, 31–61, 65, 66, 69, 76, 85, 92, 94, 102, 104, 107, 108, 111, 116, 119, 122, 123, 126, 128–138, 143, 167n, 169n Transformation, 19, 33, 50, 52, 57, 58, 65, 75, 77–82, 87, 88, 93, 100, 104, 106, 110, 111, 114–121, 123, 125, 126, 131, 135, 138, 143–146, 167n, 173n, 176n True Nature. See Determinacy Unconsciousness, 19, 35, 40, 41, 50, 66, 91, 114, 116 Unhewn, 10 Unity. See Oneness Value,Valuation, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 37, 41, 54–61, 67, 68, 70, 72, 75, 82, 89, 94, 102, 107, 113–118, 121, 122, 125–127, 129, 130, 133, 135, 138, 139, 149, 154, 157, 159, 169n



  

Vanishing (into) Things, 19, 29, 35, 38, 39, 45, 47, 50, 60, 65–83, 85, 87–90, 93, 94, 101, 102, 104–114, 117–123, 126, 128–130, 135, 138, 145, 153, 159, 165n, 172n, 173n, 175n, 178n Volition, 19, 33, 36, 40–42, 57, 58, 60, 82, 91–92, 107, 108, 113, 117, 125, 128, 130, 138, 143, 149, 150–156, 159, 174n Wang Bi, 17, 18, 23–25, 31, 35, 43, 46, 104, 163n Wang Bo, 161n, 162n Wang Chong, 26, 56, 178n Wang Deyou, 42, 48, 65, 89 Wang Fu, 26 Wang Yangming, 4 Will. See Volition Xi Kang, 24, 25 Xiang Xiu, 17, 25, 26, 99, 163–164n

Xie Lingyun, 25 Xuanxue, 17, 18, 23 Xunzi, 7, 14 Yang Zhu, 8, 162n Yao and Shun, 29, 33, 34, 36, 43, 44, 47, 59, 60, 90, 127 Yijing. See Book of Changes Yin and Yang, 15, 56 Yue Guang, 25 Zen Buddhism. See Chan Buddhism Zhang Shen, 163–164n Zhuang Yaolang, 86–87 Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou), 3, 4, 11–14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 27, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 44, 45, 52, 53, 56, 58, 72, 74, 79, 87, 90, 99, 105, 106, 111, 116, 126, 130–140, 162n Zhu Xi, 4 Ziran. See Self-so; Spontaneity