WORD AND GESTURE: ON XUAN- SCHOOL HERMENEUTICS OF THE ANALECTS

Robert Ashmore Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley

Introduction ),1 took its characteristic form Dark Learning, or Mystery Learning (xuanxue (ca. 190249) and Wang Bi (226249) during the in the work of He Yan Zhengshi era (240248) of the Wei dynasty, and it was to exercise a profound influence over elite intellectual life in China for several centuries, particularly in the Jin and in the Southern Dynasties during the period of division.2 He Yan and Wang Bi were renowned as subtle dialecticians and debaters on highly abstruse questions of ontology, language, and understanding, and the tone of the Zhengshi ( became a byword in later generations for the highest standard in urbane metaphysical speculation and pyrotechnical displays of abstract reasoning. Accounts of the xuan school all rightly emphasize the centrality of the Laozi and the Zhou yi to this brand of thought; somewhat later, the Zhuangzi also gained a place as a standard point of reference for xuan debate. It is rather easy to see how these texts, the so-called Three Mysterious [Works] ( )rich as they all are in speculation and fabulation on issues relating to language, cognition, and ontology would be well suited to provide grist for the mill of xuan discourse. On the face of it, however, it is much less easy to make sense of the fact that along with these texts the Analects also held a special place in the minds of many xuan-school thinkers, including He Yan and Wang Bi themselves, who both authored commentaries on that book.3 Indeed, many of the most prominent figures of xuan philosophical discourse prove to have been deeply engaged with the Analects: Guo Xiang (?ca. 312), for example, whose commentary on the Zhuangzi was instrumental in bringing that work to central prominence in xuan discussion, not only authored his own commentary on the Analects but in fact devotes a surprising amount of space in the opening passage of his preface to the Zhuangzi commentary to an account of the superiority of Confucius to Zhuangzi.4 Moreover, what we can see of the commentarial practice of scholars of the Analects through the Jin and up to at least the midsixth century shows that for many of these writers it seemed perfectly natural to incorporate xuan perspectives into their explication of this text. Traditional historiography from the Tang dynasty on tended to be rather dismissive of the devotion of xuan scholars to the Analects and to Confucius as a sage; orthodox classical scholars of later periods tended to view the close association of classicist learning and xuan discourse during this period as one of many symptoms of a generalized moral and cultural decay during the period of division, along with, for example, the typically short-lived dynastic regimes of the period, the loss of

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the north to non-Chinese invaders, and the incursion during the period of foreign religious and intellectual influence in the form of Buddhism. One might imagine that the particular set of prejudicesand the implicit view of historical causality involved in such judgments would not be shared by modern scholars of Chinese intellectual history, yet in some ways the residual effects of this traditional dismissiveness have continued to cloud our view of the intellectual landscape of this period.5 As a result, many of the questions raised by xuan-school scholarship on the Analects remain largely unexplored. Was interest in the Analects an integral part of the overall intellectual project of these xuan-school writers, or simply an afterthought? More generally, what sorts of distinctive interpretive claims or methods could xuan discourseoften characterized as metaphysical in its fundamental concernsgenerate concerning the Analects, a work to all appearances profoundly this-worldly in orientation and concerned almost exclusively with the realm of ethics? And finally, do xuan attitudes toward these disparate areas of concern show any sort of overall coherence, and if so, what sort of coherence is it? This essay will attempt to suggest some preliminary answers to these questions. The surviving textual sources for xuan-school hermeneutics of the Analects are framed between two major figures standing at the two ends of the tradition. The first of these is Wang Bi, whose Analects commentary, the Lunyu shi yi (Resolution of doubtful points in the Analects), is the first work known to us to apply a distinctively xuan-school approach to the interpretation of the work. The latter figure is the Liang dynasty scholar Huang Kan (488549), whose Lunyu yishu (Exposition of the meaning of the Analects) consists of Huang Kans own lecture notes on the Analects along with a broad sampling from earlier commentators, including (1) He Yans collection of Eastern Han and early Wei commentaries, (2) selections from a compilation (now lost) by the Eastern Jin classicist Jiang Xi of fourteen Jin dynasty commentators, and (3) selections from other classicists of ) known to Huang Kan and not included comprehensive understanding (tong ru in Jiang Xis compilationthis latter group including, among others, Wang Bi and Guo Xiang.6 Due to the vagaries of textual transmission (which were no doubt exacerbated by the systematic unwillingness on the part of Tang and later Confucian orthodoxies to take seriously the specifically classicist dimensions of xuan-school thought), Huang Kans work is now almost our only window into Analects interpretation from the third to the sixth centuries. We will begin in this essay by focusing on the application of xuan-school theory of language to the interpretation of the Analects in Wang Bis Lunyu shi yi, and then consider some of the prominent features of later xuan-school interpretation of the Analects as seen in Huang Kan and the commentators he cites. Gestural Language in Wang Bis Hermeneutical Thought Wang Bis Lunyu shi yi survives only in fragments, most of them drawn, as described above, from Huang Kans Lunyu yishu.7 Taken together, these are certainly only a small fraction of the original work; what is particularly regrettable is that we lack

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even fragments of an essay outlining the interpretive principles of the work such as we possess for both his Laozi and his Zhou yi commentaries. The one circumstance that allows us to be at all optimistic about gaining a satisfactory sense of Wang Bis interpretive style in the Lunyu shi yi is the fact that his approach to the highly disparate texts he commented on appears to have been a thoroughly syncretic one.8 In fact, surviving fragments of the Lunyu shi yi, when read along with relevant passages from Wang Bis other interpretive works (we will focus here on the preface to his Laozi commentary), show, moreover, that this syncretism is not only ontological but specifically hermeneutic as well. That is, for Wang Bi, the text of the Laozi and the text of the Analects not only refer, in ultimately reconcilable terms, to the same reality; they also require for their proper interpretation the same basic understanding of language. We will begin on the wandering path that will lead us to a better understanding of the bearing of xuan hermeneutics on the Analects with one of the most striking fragments from the Lunyu shi yi, in which Wang Bi explicates the phrase I set my mind upon the way ( ) in Analects 7.6:9
10

Way is a designation of the non-extant. There is nothing that it does not connect, and nothing that does not follow it; using a metaphor for it, we call it a way. It is still and without substance, and cannot be given a phenomenal image.

What immediately strikes us in this passage, of course, is the brashindeed, for some later readers, scandalousassertion that the way spoken of by Confucius is the same as that spoken of by Laozi, namely the the non-extant that forms the basis and origin of all reality within Wang Bis ontology.11 But as we read the entire passage carefully, we notice that Wang Bi is not simply defining what Confucius means by way; he is also explaining what kind of term way is as it appears in the passage, and how Confucius is using it. The word way, Wang Bi tells us, is used by Confucius as a designation (cheng ) of the non-extant; the accompanying explanation, moreover, allows us to infer something about what this sort of term that Wang Bi calls a designation might be. It would appear that a designation is a kind of term that does not directly designate the thing it calls, but rather involves an implicit figure of speech, in this case a metaphor. Thus, the term way, as Wang Bi explicates its use in Analects 7.6, is used to call the non-extant with respect to the latters property of connecting all things and being that along which all things pass, since these qualities are related to the kinds of qualities we associate with a way. Such an indirect, figurative approach, moreover, would seem to be necessitated by the very nature of the non-extant as described by Wang Bi here an entity that cannot be given any definitive phenomenal image. As we shall see, this specifically hermeneutical dimension of Wang Bis comment is not fortuitous; in fact, the notion of the designation (cheng) in the technical sense in which Wang Bi gives it here is a central part of a coherent and systematic view of the way in which authoritative texts use language in relation to ultimate truth, and of the corresponding method that is required for understanding such texts

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and gaining access to that truth. To appreciate more fully Wang Bis perspective on these issues, however, we will need to turn to the comprehensive statement about cis of language and understanding that appears in Wangs Laozi zhilu (Pre e the point of the Laozi ).12 When we have constructed a more complete picture of Wang Bis hermeneutical method as encapsulated in the technical sense that he gives to terms such as the cheng appearing in the fragment above, we will be able to return to consider further the implications of his approach for reading and interpreting the Analects. The Laozi zhilu e is an extremely dense text, with bearing on a wide range of ontological, political, ethical, and cognitive questions. Our discussion here will attempt to focus on the specifically hermeneutical dimensions of its argument. The crucial point of the essay in this respect is the distinction it draws between two contrasting functions of language. The first, which Wang Bi calls ming , or name, refers to the function of language that we might call denotative or referential: as ming, language picks out and refers definitively to particular objects or states of affairs. Understanding ming, then, is a matter of working backwards from the words of the text to the particular objects these words refer to, and thus deriving a meaning that is uniquely and completely determined by the text.13 The second function of language, termed alternately cheng, designation, or wei , predication, 14 refers to what we might call the gestural function of language, whereby the words of an utterance point toward a truth beyond the utterance itself, by speaking in terms of a particular feature of that truth, but without implying any claim to capture it exhaustively or uniquely in language. For Wang Bi, the text of the Laozi is concerned exclusively with an ultimate reality that he conceives as wu or the non-extant, a ground for the possibility of the existence of the myriad entities in the world, which itself remains beyond any possible determination. Wang Bis hermeneutical thought derives its fundamental orientation from a sense of the basic deficiency of language when it comes to expressing the truth of this ultimate reality. Something that is indeterminate by its very nature (e.g., the non-extant as Wang Bi conceives it) is clearly unsuited to discussion through ming the naming or denotative function of language, which refers to the forms of particular determinate things. It should therefore come as no surprise that Wang Bis theory of interpretation for the Laozi systematically favors cheng (wei), designation (predication), over ming, naming. 15 The following is the passage in the Laozi zhilu e which provides the most explicit definitions for these key terms:

A name is something that determines a particular object; a designation is something that follows from a way of calling things. Names arise from the things they name, while a designation issues from the I who calls. Therefore, if we set out on it as that which all things follow, we call it a way; if we seek it as that from which all wonders emerge,

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then we call it mysterious. Wonders emanate from something mysterious; multitudes follow a way. Thus that which gives them life and nurtures them, neither obstructing nor blocking, and so allowing free progress to the natures of thingsthese are predications about a way. What gives them life, yet possesses them not, acts, yet does not make them dependent, and matures them, yet is not their stewardthere is a virtue, yet it has no subject16 such is a mysterious virtue.17 Mysterious is the most profound of predications; way is the greatest of designations. Names and cognomens arise from the forms, while designations and predications emerge from our setting out on it and seeking it. Names and cognomens do not arise without reason, and designations and predications do not emerge without cause. Thus to name and ascribe cognomens is vastly to have missed the point; to apply designations and predications is not to have exhausted the ultimate.18

Ming are conceived as bearing a direct and necessary relation to the forms of determinate objects, which are in turn fully conveyed by the ming; thus, the meaning of a statement formulated according to the function of ming ought to be unaffected by the circumstances of either the writer or the reader of the statement, the relation between ming and object being independent of either. Cheng (wei), by contrast, issue from the I who calls and have a meaning that is inextricably bound up in the particular circumstances within which that calling takes place. Thus, to understand the term way (properly, for Wang Bi) as a designation, one does not attempt to work back directly from the word way to find some determinate thing that that word names; one rather imaginatively reconstructs that cognitive act of setting out upon something beyond language that prompted the writer to call that something way: here, a cognitive act focusing on qualities pertaining to passage, communication, providing a pathway to myriad entities, and so on. It is in reference to such a cognitive act that it makes sense to apply an epithet like way, since these are the sorts of attributes we associate in ordinary language with the things we call ways. The sentence wonders emanate from something mysterious; multitudes follow a way, then, is not so much a proposition about an ultimate reality as it is an illustration of the senses according to which the terms xuan and dao are applied: if we are thinking of something as a source of wonders, then, from the perspective of that thought, it makes sense to call that thing mysterious, since the word mysterious generally describes something from which wonders emanate; if we are thinking of something as a mode of communication or passage for a myriad entities, then, from the perspective of that thought, it makes sense to call that thing way, since being a path along which many things pass is a general property of the various sorts of things we call ways. To understand properly the designation way, then, is not to ask What entity is named in general by the word way? but rather What is the cognitive context from which it made sense for the writer to apply the designation way, and what is the something beyond language pointed to within the horizon of that contextualized utterance? 19 The parallel statement of the limitations of ming and cheng at the close of the section quoted above ought not to be construed as suggesting that these limitations are of comparable severity. For while the sense in which the mode of cheng (or wei ) fails to exhaust the ultimate is inevitable, given the nature of the reality being
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pointed to (that reality being acknowledged to be beyond all determinations), the sense in which names and cognomens . . . vastly miss the point represents a possibility that is actually pernicious for our ability to express thoughts about and to understand the non-extant. This is a reiteration of a point made earlier in the essay, in the first passage, to invoke the ming/cheng distinction:

Any name for it must fail to match what it is; any designation for it must fail to express all that it is. A name must necessarily involve how one thing is distinct from other things, while a designation must necessarily have some analogy which it follows.20 Since there is distinction, then any name will lack inclusiveness; since there is a particular analogy followed, then any designation will lack exhaustiveness. To lack inclusiveness is a great divergence from its genuine state; to lack exhaustiveness means that one cannot make use of names.21

While the mode of designation cannot captureand does not presume to capturethe entirety of the thing it is applied to, use of the mode of naming results in outright incorrectness. This is because names function on the basis of sets of limiting distinctionsthe distinctions necessary to determine the thing named as that particular thing, and not any otherwhereas the nature of the realm of the nonextant gestured toward by the terms way, mysterious, and so on is exactly such as to defy limitation. Thus, the great difference from its authentic state that results from the application of ming to this entity is a worse error than the simple incorrectness that occurs when one positive entity is mistaken for another positive entity, for to attempt to approach the negative ground of possibility in terms of ming is from the outset to be utterly mistaken as to the very kind and nature of that entity. This passage develops its argument in paired parallel phrases, in which the first phrase of each pair refers to ming and the second phrase to cheng. Thus, after the final phrase expressing the grave error that results in attempting to apply ming to the non-extant (this is a great discrepancy from its genuine state), we expect the following phrase to give a culminating statement on the limitations of cheng. However, the phrase to lack exhaustiveness means that one cannot make use of names simply reiterates what we already know about cheng : it is an alternative mode of language to naming, and one which does not involve a claim to exhaustiveness. This final phrase, in fact, can be taken simply as a general statement about the intrinsic deficiency of language in relation to the non-extant: since exhaustiveness is impossible, one cannot make use of names. Cheng, as the mode of language that takes into account its own inescapable limitedness, is the only (partially) viable option. Wang Bi continues:

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This can be clarified by further elaboration. The term way derives from its being something which all the myriad things follow. The term mysterious derives from its emerging from the secret and dark. The term deep derives from its being something for which one probes the depths, and yet one cannot get to the bottom of it. The term large derives from how, despite ones efforts to fill it in or bring it all together, one cannot ultimately achieve this. The term distant derives from how it is far-off, indistinct, and impossible to reach. The term faint derives from how it is remote, faint, and impossible to see. This being the case, then, each of these terms way, mysterious, deep, large, faint, and distant possesses part of its meaning, but none expresses the utmost limit of what it is. However, something that can never be entirely filled in or pulled together cannot be named tiny; something faint, subtle, and without form cannot be named large. For this reason the text says, well style it way and lets call it mysterious, yet does not name it.22

Wang Bi here derives two parallel conclusions. First, the rules of contradiction that apply in the realm of ming and of positive entities do not apply for the language of the Laozi and the reality toward which that text gestures. Second, as an inference from this first conclusion, the linguistic mode of ming is intrinsically inappropriate as a means of conveying the kind of truth toward which the text of the Laozi points. From the terms applied by that text to the something beyond language to which the text as a whole is directed, Wang Bi picks out pairs that, if construed according to the logic of ming, create contradictory statements: they describe something both vast and miniscule, formless and large. He does this, however, not in order to demonstrate through reductio ad absurdum that the Laozi contradicts itself, but rather, by a sort of reverse reductio ad absurdum, to demonstrate that the positive logic of ming cannot be applied to the entity pointed at from different perspectives by each of these terms: it is the rule of contradiction itself, with its assumption of entities and attributes as determinate and limited (i.e., as the sorts of entities and attributes referred to through ming), that self-destructs when applied to the language of the Laozi. What must take the place of this logic are the avowedly ad hoc, partial, and situation-bound uses of language that Wang Bi calls designation and predication. A text like the Laozi, then, calls for a hermeneutical strategy that takes this limited, gestural sort of language fully into account. The readers task becomes one of resisting the temptation to take the necessarily partial and limited language of the text to be doing more than it in fact can, and thereby allowing that language to divert attention from the horizon of the readers own immediate experience, which is the only place where the meaning adumbrated by the text can possibly emerge. The prescriptions of the following passage thus apply equally to cultivating the way within oneself and to interpreting the text of the Laozi, as these two activities in the end prove to be one and the same:

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This being the case, then, those who speak of it lose its constancy; those who apply names to it depart from its true state; those who make deliberate use of it destroy its nature; those who cling to it lose contact with its source. For this reason, as the sage does not take words as the primary thing, he does not depart from its constancy; as he does not confuse names for it with its constancy, he does not depart from its true state; as he does not make an issue of using it, he does not destroy its nature; as he does not hold on to it as a set of rules, he does not lose contact with its source. This being the case, then, as for the text of the Laozi, those who try to explicate it through rational argument have lost its main intent; those who want to demand meaning of it according to names violate its larger meaning.23 Thus its fundamental goal is to discuss the source of the primordial beginning in order to clarify the nature of what is so of itself, and to elaborate on the ultimate reaches of the secret and the dark in order to put an end to confusions arising from doubt and bewilderment. It follows upon what is there without [actively] doing anything; it takes away without adding anything; it exalts the root so as to still the branchtips; guards over the mother so as to sustain the child; it devalues all clever techniques, taking action before the need arises. Do not demand [i.e., the meaning of this text] from others; one [must] seek it within oneselfthis is the great essential point.24

Wang Bi, in advocating a hermeneutic of the Laozi that treats the text in terms of designation rather than of name, makes the readers task both easier and more difficult. It is easier in that the reader need no longer seek to strain the language of the text, to construe a word like way, for example, as the hieratic syllable Way, as part of a hermetic vocabulary somehow held mystically to name the ineffable: for Wang Bi, the words of the Laozi are the familiar words of ordinary language. It is more difficult in that the notion of designation posits the constitutive incompleteness of the text, as the words of the text can serve only as schematic indications of mental orientations for the reader to reconstruct through imagination. The final meaning of the textthat is, the reality toward which these mental orientations pointcannot be recovered from the text as content determined by its language, but only (re)discovered within the subjective horizon of the reader, as an aspect of immediate experience. Since the topic pointed to in the text of the Laozi cannot, by its very nature, ever be conveyed as linguistic content, that text, in Wang Bis hermeneutic model, performs a function that is primarily negative: through its action on the reader of taking away without adding anything, it does not so much convey a message as it suppresses the cognitive impediments that prevent the reader from perceiving a reality that is and always has been present, equally for the texts author and for its reader. Application of a Gestural Hermeneutics to the Analects With this overview of Wang Bis hermeneutical thought as seen in the Laozi zhilu e, we can now at last return to consider the bearing of this system of interpretation on the Analects. We began the preceding section by looking at Wang Bis explanation of the use of the word way in the phrase I set my mind upon the way ( ) in Analects 7.6:

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Way is a designation of the non-extant. There is nothing that it does not connect, and nothing that does not follow it; using a metaphor for it, we call it a way. It is still and without substance, and cannot be given a phenomenal image.25

The tentative inference we derived from this fragment, we recall, was that while it overtly reflects the ontological claim that the way spoken of in the Analects is the same as that spoken of in the Laozi, it also implicitly reveals that the hermeneutical assumptions guiding Wang Bi in his commentaries on these two works are also similar. After the foregoing rather lengthy survey of Wang Bis treatment of the opposition of naming versus calling in the Laozi zhilu e, we are in a position to confirm that this is indeed the case. The term cheng, or designation, of course, is given the same technical meaning in both cases; moreover, the very language used to explain the sense in which way functions as a designation for the non-extant is virtually identical: where the Laozi zhilu e says if we set out on it as that which all things follow, we call it a way ( ) and that which gives them life and nurtures them, neither obstructing nor blocking, and so allowing free progress to the natures of thingsthese are predications about a way ( ), the Analects commentary says there is nothing that it does not connect, and nothing that does not follow it; using a metaphor for it, we call it a way. If, for Wang Bi, the ontological assumptions and the basic expressive strategies are the same for the Analects and the Laozi, what, then, we might well ask, is the basic difference between the two texts? Simply put, the difference lies in the person of Confucius. For Wang Bi, as for later xuan-school thinkers, Confucius is a sage (sheng ), whereas Laozi is merely a wise man or worthy (xian ), and this distinction entails a series of crucial differences in the ways in which one interprets their corresponding types of textual legacy. The crucial distinction is that whereas a wise man like Laozi (or, as we shall see, Zhuangzi) may know about the ultimate reality (the non-extant) beyond all linguistic and cognitive determinations, the former embodies that reality. Thus, whereas the Laozi is a text about the non-extant, the Analects is a record of the acts and teachings of Confucius, a sage who as such embodies the non-extant. The locus classicus for this doctrine appears in the following dialogue, recorded in the Literary Studies (wenxue ) section of the Shishuo xinyu :

Wang Fusi [Wang Bi], at the age of the capping ceremony [i.e., around twenty], paid a call on Pei Hui. Hui asked him, As for the non-extant, it is indeed that upon which all the myriad entities draw; yet the Sage [Confucius] was never willing to speak a word about it, while Laozi elaborated on it endlessly. How are we to make sense of this? Wang Bi said, The Sage embodied the non-extant; the non-extant, moreover, cannot be explicated. Thus his speech would of necessity extend into the realm of the positive. Laozi and Zhuangzi were not themselves free from the positive, and were always explicating that wherein they were deficient. 26

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This anecdote is preserved as a record of a remarkable moment of conversational brilliance; the careful staging of the exchange seems to invite us to appreciate Wang Bis answerlike a young mans cool and elegant response to a daunting social testas much as for any value it might have as an argument. Yet as one looks more closely at Wang Bis hermeneutical system as embodied in his commentaries, and more generally at the xuan-school discussion of the figure of Confucius, one comes to realize that however it first came into existence, Wang Bis resolution of the problem posed here by Pei Hui is not merely an isolated, daringly paradoxical bon mot, but is in fact a theoretical cornerstone for xuan syncretism. The doctrine of the sage as the embodier of the non-extant grounds much xuan-school Analects interpretation, beginning with Wang Bi and continuing at least up to the time of Huang Kan.27 We see a specific application of the doctrine, for example, in Wang Bis comments on Analects 7.38:
The Master was warm, yet severe; imposing, yet not aggressive; deferential, yet at ease.

Wang Bis commentary on this short passage employs a form of argument familiar to us from the Laozi zhilu e:
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The warm are not severe, the severe are not warm; the imposing must be aggressive, the non-aggressive are not imposing; if one is deferential, then one is not at ease; those who are at ease are not deferentialthese are mutually opposed constant names. As for one who, though warm, is yet able to be severe; who, though imposing, is yet not aggressive; who, though deferential, is yet able to be at easein a case such as this, the principle that cannot be named is complete. Thus in the ultimately balanced seasoning, the five flavors do not take form; in the music of the Great Assemblage, the five tones are not distinct. When centeredness and balance are fully present as the substratum, the five elements are without names.29

In his discussion of pairs of terms like vast and minuscule, formless and large, found in the Laozi as predications of the non-extant, Wang Bi deduces that since such opposed terms generate contradictions when construed as names, we must treat them as wei, or predications, which gesture toward the thing to which they are applied without claiming to denote it precisely or completely. Here, in his Analects commentary, Wang Bi argues that the apparent contradictions created by these pairs of opposed predications about Confucius require us to seek the truth of Confucius himself beyond the limited, positive realm of ming by following what these contradictory predications point to, namely a sagely person or embodiment that lies wholly in the realm of the non-extant. What we see in this fragment from the Lunyu shi yi, then, is a restatement of the doctrine of Confucius as a sage who embodies the non-extant, expressed in the form of an exegesis of a passage from the Analects.30

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One of the more striking implications of this view of Confucius as a sage is that Confucius is assumed to be perfect; wherever he describes himself as deficient or lacking in some way, the proper understanding of such statements involves deriving an indirect situational meaning or intent other than the literal meaning of the words he speaks. Commentators frequently use terms such as ji , lodge, or tuo , entrust, to describe the relation between Confucius words in such situations and their true situational meaning: the meaning is lodged or entrusted with the words of the utterance without being manifestly given in the words themselves. In some instances, xuan-school interpreters seems to imply that Confucius may actually experientially share in (tong ) kinds of experience that properly belong to imperfect people rather than to the sage, when such sharing serves the sages purpose in carrying out his teaching. In fact, in some cases the line between the gestural use of words to point to a situational meaning and the deliberate sharing in the experience of common humanity seems to become blurred, as we see in xuan-school interpretations of Analects 7.5, where Confucius says:
How far I have declined! For some time now, I no longer see the Duke of Zhou in dreams.

Huang Kans comments begin with a fairly detailed account of how not dreaming of the Duke of Zhou could serve as an indicator of decline for Confucius: for the sage to be complete requires not only sagely virtue but also the proper position, namely kingship; failing this, then, he ought at least to be in the position of assistant and guide ( ) to the king, in order, like the Duke of Zhou, to establish norms in ritual and music so that the transformative power of the way may be communicated. Confucius, earlier in life, had taken the Duke of Zhou as his model, always filled with thoughts of admiration for him and dreaming of him. Thus, no longer even to dream of the Duke of Zhou is a forceful reminder that those plans of putting his teachings into practice are not to be fulfilled. At this point, however, Huang Kan shifts perspective, and, having explicated the way in which no longer seeing the Duke of Zhou in dreams may be read as an index or symptom ( ) of decline, turns to consider the question of whether this symptom could actually have been experienced by Confucius:

However, the sage perceives with unmediated clarity; and is never reliant on dreams or mental images to begin with. That he nonetheless says he dreamed is a matter of his sharing in the manner of the things of the world to indicate decline. Therefore Li Chong says, the sage is without mental imageshow could he have dreams? This must be a matter of his being pained at the daily decline of the virtue of the Zhou, and being grieved that the way is not practiced. Therefore he lodges his sadness in not dreaming, and gives issue to his sighs in the phoenix. 31

The question of whether the sort of sharing in alluded to here by Huang Kan involves the sage actually having the experience alluded to, or whether it is simply a

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matter of expressing the idea of decline in a manner that accords with the referential framework of ordinary people seems somewhat difficult to determine. Li Chongs remark, however, seems less equivocal: he dismisses out of hand the notion that a sage could dream, and seems to view the question as a matter of a sort of indirect form of expression employed by the sage.32 However one adjudicates this ambiguity, it remains clear that such a form of experience, or form of expression, is adopted by the sage with the purpose of communicating a message that is not directly equivalent to the explicit content of the experience or the meaning of the words, but rather issues from an adaptation on the sages part to the circumstances, expectations, and capacities of those he addresses.33 This dimension of xuan-school reading of the Analects, treating Confucius as a more-than-human figure without mind, floating like an unmoored boat, 34 who perceives the truth immediately and couches his teachings in limited human terms merely as a way of adapting them to the capacities of his listeners, might persuade us that the xuan interpreters attempt to accommodate the Analects within the framework of their ontological, epistemological, and hermeneutic thought was, indeed, as later orthodox critics would often claim, a more or less bad-faith effort to put new Neo-Daoist wine in old Confucian bottles, a project that did violence to the Analects basically ethical orientation in turning it into a sort of coded metaphysical tract. Such a conclusion, however, would be overly hasty. In fact the characteristic xuan preoccupation with the notion that ultimate truth cannot be exhaustively captured in language and with the corresponding necessity of construing authoritative language gesturally leads xuan commentators on the Analects to be deeply attentive to the situational nuances of the dialogue passages in the text, and to the ways in which, for them, the sages speech and actions represent perfect responses not only to the words of his auditors and interlocutors but to the idiosyncrasies of their ethical natures and to the historical world in which they all live as well. In terms of metaphysics, the sage is the one who embodies the non-extant; in terms of ethics, the sage is the one who responds perfectly to the flux of situational dynamics in the realm of the persons and entities that make up the world. Guo Xiangs preface to his Zhuangzi commentary, as mentioned above, emphasizes the fundamental difference between the sage and a mere wise man such as Zhuangzi. One of the keys to this difference lies in the way the two use language. Confucius speaks only when a real situation in the world makes speech necessary; his speech, moreover, is a response to that precise real situation and is therefore grounded and useful. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, allows his speech to roam beyond the realm of the real world, and, while Guo Xiang clearly finds value in the language of Zhuangzi, it is equally clear that he believes this sort of language to be inferior to that of the sage:

Now, a response where there is no coming-together is of no use, though it be correct; words that are not about concrete affairs cannot be put into practice, though they be lofty.

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When we compare him [Zhuangzi] with the one who was motionless and silent, and who only acted when it became necessary [i.e. Confucius], there is indeed a discrepancythe former might be called one who knew about being without mind.35 As for him whose mind was free of deliberate action, he responded following on what stirred him; his responses accorded with the time, and his words were only brief. 36 Therefore he [or it in the Analects] was [or is] of one body with Transformation, and flows through ten thousand generations, according invisibly with the things of the worldwould he ever have fabricated dialogues of his own invention, or wandered far in discoursing about things beyond the pale [i.e., in the way that Zhuangzi does]?37

As far as Confucius is concerned, what is at issue here is his ethics of teaching (or, more specifically, of speaking), and how these ethics differ from those of someone like Zhuangzi, who knows about the truth rather than embodying the truth. Guo Xiang draws a similar distinction from the perspective of Confucius in his comment on Analects 15.31, where he specifically addresses the question of such an ethics of teaching. The Analects passage reads:
I have spent whole days without eating, and whole nights without sleeping, in order to think. It was no help: its not as good as study.

For Guo Xiang, the notion that this statement could be literally true of the sage is implausible, yet he also takes it as axiomatic that the sage does not practice teaching by deception or fantasy ( gui jiao ) (Guo Xiang in fact more than likely intends to imply a specific contrast with Zhuangzi here). How can we say, though, that words which are manifestly not literally true are at the same time not deceptive or fantastic? Guo Xiangs comments on this passage attempt to address this apparent contradiction:

The sage does not teach by deception or fantasyyet how is it that here he says I did not sleep and did not eat, in order to think? Now, as for thinking about something and only then understanding it, or practicing something and only then being able to do it, common people are all like this [and unlike the sage]. As for the sage, there is no activity of the common people with which he does not occupy himself as well; when the activities are the same, the outer appearances will be the same as well. . . . Thus to believe that the sage must also think hard and exert himself in study is natural to the inner constitution of ordinary people; therefore [the sage] uses this inner constitution in teaching them. The teaching of the sage, then, is a matter of teaching the other person beginning from the way that person iswhat room then for deception or fantasy?

For Guo Xiang, the key difference in, and the key superiority of, the sages recourse to language lies in the way that it is a response to the here-and-now of the real world, and not a willful and capricious flight of fancy. Thus, a case like Analects 15.31, where Confucius utters words that cannot be literally true, according to the understanding of sagehood shared by Guo Xiang and other xuan thinkers, raises a

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potentially troubling doubt: does the sage, after all, sometimes use language in a deceptive or fantastic way? Guo Xiang resolves this doubt not by finding a way in which we might construe the sages words as literally true, but rather by emphasizing how, regardless of the propositional truth or falsehood of the words per se, the utterance does in fact constitute a response to a real situation, namely the need for his auditors to cultivate themselves, and the sets of assumptions and feelings about the world that will form the context within which they understand the words spoken by the sage.38 We approached the xuan-school notion of gestural language from the rather abstract, even metaphysical, perspective of Wang Bis Laozi zhilu e. At this point, however, we can see how the application of xuan ideas about language to the ethical concerns of the Analects is not at all necessarily the awkward or even dishonest undertaking many later scholars would have us believe. Guo Xiangs formula teaching the other by setting out from the way that other is ( ) not only seems a potentially fruitful way of examining Confucius ethics of teaching in the Analects, but indeed seems to echo the point of many passages within the text of the Analects itself.39 To cite only one of the most familiar such instances, we might consider the following exchange from Analects 11.22:

Zilu asked, Should one put a thing into practice as soon as one has heard it? The Master said, Your father and elder brothers are still alivehow should you presume to put a thing into practice as soon as you have heard it? Ranyou asked, Should one put a thing into practice as soon as one has heard it? The Master said, Yes, you should. Gongxi Hua said, You [Zilu] asked whether one should put a thing into practice as soon as one has heard it, and you said Your father and elder brothers are still alive; Qiu [Ranyou] asked whether one should put a thing into practice as soon as one has heard it, and you said, Yes, you should. I am confused, and make bold to ask you about this. The Master said, Qiu holds back, and therefore I urged him on; You has the energy of two, and therefore I held him back.

One of the prominent features of the Analects as a text is the recurrent phenomenon of the same question receiving different answers; this passage is particularly notable among such cases in that it not only provides us with the seemingly contradictory answers to a single question but also includes Confucius explanation of what he was doing as a teacher in each case. In neither case does he treat the question Should one put a thing into practice as soon as one has heard it? as an abstract ethical conundrum, divorced from the particular personality and circumstances of the person asking it; rather, in each case he bases his reply on a deep understanding of his interlocutors character, and one could say that where the students seem to ask for an answer to a specific question, what Confucius gives them is a response to their whole ethical situation, which includes, but is by no means limited to, the literal meaning of the question they pose.

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This dimension of the Analects, then, seems quite conducive to the sort of gestural approach that xuan-school scholars bring to their readings of the text. Indeed, this type of situation is mentioned in a more or less ad hoc way by commentators with no xuan-school connections at all. Zheng Xuan , for example, in his commentary to this Analects passage, observes that Confucius in each case corrects the person in accordance with his shortcomings ( )40 phraseology remarkably similar to Guo Xiangs comment that the teaching of the sage . . . is a matter of following on the way the other person is so as to teach that person. While earlier commentators had noted the importance of a situational approach to understanding the meaning of certain utterances of Confucius in the Analects the text itself seeming at times to invite or even to demand some such approach the notion of the meaning of the sage as intrinsically a matter of historically specific situational responses becomes, in xuan-school Analects interpretation, a pervasive and systematic preoccupation. For illustration, we might consider Wang Bis comments on Analects 7.17, which reads:
The Master said, If I were to be given several more years, so that I could study the Changes at fifty, then I could be free of major faults.

Wang Bi explicates this passage as follows:

The Changes teaches in terms of incipience and the numinous. Yan Yuan was pretty close [to sagehood]; having committed a fault, he would amend it. That being so, then, by pursuing the numinous to its end and carefully examining incipience, he could have become free of fault altogether. [Confucius] makes clear that the way of the Changes is deep and wondrous, and warns against errors through an explicit admonition. The subtle speech [of Confucius] is pure and unadulterated; only after pondering it thoroughly does one retain its true significance.41

As suggested above, it is typical of Wang Bis approach to the Analects, as it is for xuan-school Analects commentary in general, to pay close attention to the specifics of the historical situation in assessing the meaning of a given utterance or act of the sage. Wang Bis comments here provide a particularly vivid illustration of the extent to which xuan-school interpreters took this as a fundamental principle, in that they supply such a situation, even where none is explicitly given in the canonical text itself. Wang Bi infers that Yan Hui, Confucius favorite disciple, is the immediate audience for this comment by the Master.42 Thus, we are to understand what appears to be a quite straightforward statement by Confucius about hoping to live a bit longer so that he can study the Zhou yi as in fact a veiled gesture through which the sage points to Yan Huis level of moral cultivation and obliquely proposes a way for Yan Hui to perfect himself. There are thus two distinct horizons of interpretation that apply here. The first is that of Yan Hui, who must reflect thoroughly on the words of the Master, asking himself not what the words mean but rather what the Master meant

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by saying them in this particular situation. We saw earlier how the gestural language of predications and designations as appearing in the Laozi was properly to be interpreted not as itself containing meaning in the manner of ming but rather as gesturing or pointing to a meaning that is already immediately present for the interpreter. In a similar way, Yan Hui, in interpreting these words of Confucius, is to see what the words as verbal gesture point to in terms of his, Yan Huis, own situation. The meaning of the utterance thus interpreted, then, is its situational point as a gesture directing Yan Huis attention to the kinds of understanding of incipience and the numinous available via study of the Changes understanding which could help him to progress beyond his present state of being pretty close to perfection, that is, sagehood. The second horizon of interpretation, that which applies for us as readers of the text of the Analects, is supplemental to the first: after seeing the proper situational meaning of the utterance in the foregoing manner, we appreciate how Confucius, who himself embodies the non-extant, intervenes through his subtle speechhis gestural languagein a way that is perfectly suited to the historical situation. For Yan Hui, then, the utterance encodes a moral lesson, while for us as readers it provides not only a vicarious moral lesson but also an example of the timeliness of the sages responses to the historical world within which he carries out his teaching, responses which are always perfectly suited to the needs and capacities of his interlocutors. The crux of Wang Bis approach to the Analects is consistently to treat the language of that text not as making statements that are propositionally true for all time, but rather as the traces of historically grounded gestures of the sage Confucius, whose meaning is just as much a matter of their being perfectly timely responses to a complex set of circumstances as of the content of the sages words. In the example above, the immediate meaning of Confucius utterance is to be sought within the context of the dialogue with his student Yan Hui; the secondary meaning of the scene in the horizon of the readers of the passage is derived from and dependent on this primary meaning. Another quite intriguing aspect of xuan-school explication of the Analects, however, is that in some instances it takes the primary context for understanding the sages meaning not as the immediate dialogic situation but rather as a broader social or historical frame of reference. Xuan-school interpreters, that is, often assume that the sage addresses words to an immediate interlocutor with an anticipation of how these words and that exchange will in turn be disseminated among a broader audience. We see such an interpretive strategy at work, for example, in Huang Kans explication of Analects 12.1, for example, which at face value seems to be a straightforward case of definition:
Yan Yuan asked about humanity. The Master said, To overcome the self and restore propriety is humanity.

Huang Kan, however, rather than construe the words of Confucius in this passage as a timeless definition of what the cardinal virtue of ren , or humanity, consists of, specifies a particular situational motivation underlying the words of Confucius

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responsehere a situational motivation pertaining not to the ethical state of his immediate interlocutor but rather to the general state of the age in which he lives and to the broader audience that may eventually come to hear of this exchange:
At this time people indulged in licentious extravagance, beyond what was proper; therefore he speaks of propriety. 43

This comment, merely one among many of this sort that appear in the surviving remnants of xuan-school Analects commentary, suggests that the sages situational responses recorded in that text may have an instructive value beyond the immediate circumstances of the original utterance. The sage, even while teaching his disciples in direct dialogue, seems already to anticipate that this direct teaching will eventually come to affect a broader indirect audience; his utterances are to be construed as issuing from a perfect response not only to the immediate dialogic context of utterance but, more generally, to the historical state of the world. This aspect of xuan-school interpretation of the Analects may seem rather odd to us today, and yet it may be viewed as the convergence of two related strands thought central to this interpretive style: the theory of the sage as the perfected embodier of the nonextant and the approach to the sages language as gestural response. Much of the discussion above of xuan-school Analects commentary moves from examples of interpretation of specific passages of that text to more general observations about the interpretive method that seems to underlie these examples. What the commentaries give us, typically, is an account of the expression of a meaning or range of meanings in the text, from which we can then derive a sense of the approach to interpretation that this account seems to imply. As noted earlier in this essay, there is a relative lack of extant material to tell us directly how commentators working within this broadly coherent style themselves thought about the principles underlying their method. Given the state of the evidence surviving from this school of interpretation, this is a void that it will not be possible to fill in with any completeness. We have seen, however, that the theory of expression, if we may call it that, underlying much xuan-school interpretation of the Analects ispace common preconceptions about this brand of thought as essentially metaphysical in orientationbased on an ethical theory of the sages response to the world. At the conclusion of this section I will comment briefly on what seems a likely candidate for an ethic of interpretation to serve as a counterpart to the ethic of expression that we see in xuan-school accounts of Confucius perfect capacity of response. In the Laozi zhilu e, Wang Bi seems to be advocating a model of interpretation that hinges on construing language not as denotative naming but rather as gestural pointing to something. In construing the designation way, for example, the reader is not to ask What determinate thing is named by the word way? but rather a complementary pair of questions, namely What was the gesture made by the author, from his existential perspective, in his choice of the designation way? and Recreating that gesture within my own mind, toward what state within my own immediate experience does that gesture draw my attention?

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Wang Bi does not give a name to this interpretive mode of attention, even in the rather abstract analysis of interpretation in the Laozi zhilu e, but a passage from the Lunyu shiyi suggests that Wang Bi might have characterized it as shu , or sympathetic understanding. 44 Analects 4.15 reads:

The Master said, Shen! My way is threaded together with one thing. Zengzi said, Yes. The Master went out, and the disciples asked, What did he mean? Zengzi said, The Masters way is single-mindedness and sympathetic understanding, and that is all. 45

In his commentary to this passage, Wang Bi emphasizes that it is a single, preeminent mental and moral faculty that is in question, and it clearly subordinates singlemindedness to sympathetic understanding:

Single-mindedness is the full emptying-out of the inner state; sympathetic understanding is something that reflects on the inner state so as to find commonality with others. There has never been a case in which someone reflected on something from the perspective of the self and yet failed to capture the inner state of that thing; nor has there ever been a case in which someone who was able to perfect sympathetic understanding failed to exhaust the ultimate degree of principle. If one is able to exhaust the ultimate degree of principle, then there is no thing that is not put in its proper place.46 The ultimate cannot be two things; thus it is called one. Moving by analogy from the self to put things in their proper places, working through classes of categorical resemblances and proceeding to their end: if there is a single phrase which yet may be practiced to the end of ones life, that must be sympathetic understanding. 47

The scope of sympathetic understanding, presented here as the core faculty through which the mind ought to engage with its world, clearly extends beyond hermeneutics proper. Nonetheless, it does seem to include what for Wang Bi is the essential mode of attention for the kinds of problems we would call hermeneutical: one that seeks meaning through thinking from the place of the other, who speaks or writes, and understands by reapplying that thinking within the selfs immediate horizon of introspection. The Status of the Analects and the Virtue of Timeliness Having seen some of the ways in which xuan-school commentators apply what we might term a hermeneutics of gestural language to the Analects, we may now be in a better position to understand why the Analects might have been particularly important within xuan discourse. Huang Kan, in his preface to the Lunyu yishu, narrates the sequence of events that led to the creation of the text of the Analects. He stresses the wide variety of roles and situations within which Confucius carried out

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his teaching, and how, once his subtle words were cut off by his death, there was no one to write his great deeds. The loss of Confucius as a living presence drove the disciples to compile their various memories of his teachings, both as a testimonial to Confucius and as a guide to pass down to later ages. Yet, having compiled the book, the disciples, according to Huang Kan, were faced with a puzzling problem when it came to giving that book a name. For unlike texts like the Record of the Rites or the Classic of Filial Piety, whose titles derive from the primary focus of their teachings, the organizational principle (ti ) of this book was one in which the routes to understanding were along many paths, the entries all being records of the masters teaching in response to the exigencies of the moment (ying ji zuo jiao ) throughout his life. 48 Thus, whereas the five classics are relatively exhaustive and coherent in organization, in the Analects topics tend to be treated elliptically; the same question sometimes receives different answers; words about the near-at-hand have meanings that are profound; citations from other classics appear mixed together and in no readily apparent order; and so on. Therefore, since its meanings were not determined in a single direction, its name was hard to seek among the categories of things; the decision to call the text Lunyu, as Huang Kan describes it, seems to have come about largely from the lack of anything more definite to call it. Later in his preface, Huang Kan returns to the ` -vis the other texts in the Tradiquestion of the distinctiveness of the Analects vis-a tionalist canon, using a striking image that he attributes to a certain Master Cai:49

There are things that are large, yet not universal; and others that are small, yet inclusive in their connections. To give an analogy, the things reflected in a giant mirror a hundred rods wide will certainly be one-sided; whereas the imaging of a bright pearl measuring but an inch will encompass all the six directions. Using this simile of Master Cais, then, it is said that the Analects is small, yet communicates in all directions, in this resembling the bright pearl; the several classics are great, yet one-sided in their application, like the giant mirror. How true is this saying!50

The Traditionalist classics are each the traces of the sages concern to restore the world to its natural order, yet the very scale and organization of these texts creates a limitation and the danger of losing oneself in something one-sidedof becoming an expert, for example, in ritual norms or in the music of the Zhou, without an understanding of the historical intent motivating the sages establishment of these bodies of learning. The Analects, conversely, derives its efficacy from precisely its small scale and its multifariousness: again and again, one is forced to seek the meaning of the sage within the moment, to understand his words and acts in the specificity of their historical directedness. One could argue that the single most consistent preoccupation of xuan-school thinking about meaning and interpretation was the concern to avoid losing sight of an informing intent through being unduly caught up in the traces that serve as the outward signs of that intent. Huang Kans preface deploys this central xuan-school theme in an argument for the irreplaceable

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value of the Analects, since the text whose apparent disorder and lack of systematic coherence or theme paradoxically serves as a sort of guarantee against just this sort of loss of perspective. Mencius 10.1 refers to Confucius as sheng zhi shizhe , the timely one among sages, and it is problems relating to this timeliness of Confucius as sage that seem particularly to have preoccupied xuan-school interpreters of the Analects. These readers clearly acknowledge the words and textual legacy of Confucius as authoritative, but effect a fundamental reformulation of the mode in which these words and texts command authority: they do not stand as generally applicable doctrinal propositions but rather as the verbal traces of the sages situation-bound, ad hoc gestures, whose ultimate meaning resides in a realm acknowledged to be beyond words. The words of the sage are limited and desultory excursions into the realm of the positive and of human history on the part of a person whose perfection consists exactly of his full embodiment of the non-extant and his ability to perceive truth in terms of the worlds original uncorrupted state. For xuan-school interpreters, there is a certain reluctance that underlies the sages recourse to words. As Guo Xiang says in the preface to his commentary to the Zhuangzi:
As for him whose mind was without action, he responded following on what stirred him; his responses accorded with the time, and his words were only brief. 51

It is not surprising, then, that Analects 17.19 was one of the touchstone passages for xuan-school thinking about Confucius:

The Master said, I wish to be without speech. Zigong asked, If you do not speak, then what will we little ones pass down? The Master said, What does heaven say? The four seasons progress; the hundred creatures grow. What does heaven say?

Wang Bis commentary reads:

The Master wishes to be without words: we may suppose that it is that he wishes to make manifest the root. Lifting the root, one orders the branches, and manifests things in the ultimate. Establishing words to pass down a teaching is done with the intention of allowing natures to communicate freely, yet the shortcomings of this method go as far as to obscure it; entrusting ones point in passed-down phrases is done with the intention of correcting the errant, yet the tendency of this method leads to prolixity. Once one seeks within the way, there is no end to what can be drawn on. For this reason in attending to the root one discards words, taking heaven for ones model in carrying out transformation. Observed from the perspective of purity, the mind of heaven and earth appears in wordlessness. Cold and heat follow one another in alternation: thus wordless commands are carried out in the four seasons. Is heaven something garrulous?52

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The sage Confucius, for xuan-school interpreters, is someone who passes down a textual legacy of teaching while at the same time feeling a fundamental ambivalence about the ability of language to serve the purpose of that teaching. The ultimate goal of all the garrulity of the classics is to express a truth to which the sage himself, as an embodier of the non-extant, could gain access by immediate observation from the perspective of purity. This is the fundamental fact that must be taken into account by the readers sympathetic understanding, in order for the meaning of Confucius subtle speech to become manifest. Conclusions This essay is a preliminary attempt to come to terms with the systematic coherence of xuan-school Analects interpretation; the suggestion that the conventional assumption that the interest in the text on the part of thinkers such as Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, and their successors was merely peripheral to their real intellectual projects needs to be critically revisited. Many aspects of the Classicist scholarship of xuaninfluenced thinkers during this period remain to be examined more closely; indeed, even in the realm of xuan-school Analects commentarial tradition, I have largely set aside, for the time being, questions of the distinctiveness of individual commentators approaches, or the development of the tradition over time, and so on, in the interest of showing the broad coherence of xuan thinking about the Analects. At the very minimum, I would hope that this essay might serve as a reminder of some of the pitfalls to which scholarship on the intellectual culture of the Wei and Jin has been susceptible, and in particular of the perils of uncritically applying the dichotomy Daoist/Confucian to the study of the intellectual culture of this period. Later Traditionalist scholars came to be deeply suspicious of xuan-school discourse, viewing its syncretism as dangerously heterodox. The Qing dynasty scholar Pi Xirui , for example, minces no words in debunking early Tang praise for the Southern-style scholarship that carried on the xuan tradition, singling out Huang Kans work on the Analects for particular criticism:
As for the saying of those people of the Tang that the southern scholars were succinct and obtained the flower, in fact it was nothing more than a glittery display of bons mots, giving rein to pure conversation to the shaking of a whisk; in composition they esteemed the lush, licentiously indulging in their extraneous bug-carving skills. As, for example, in Huang Kans Lunyu yishu which omits without comment such things as systems of names and institutionsfor the most part it is an expatiation in parallel prose on the points of Laozi and Zhuangzi. This is as far removed as it could possibly be from the way in which Han scholars explicated the classics.53

Pi Xiruis work on the history of the canonical scholarship of traditional China is an indispensable resource for students of Chinese intellectual history. Comments such as the one above, however, serve as a reminder that Pi Xiruis perspective is not that of an intellectual historian as we conceive of the term but rather that of an advocate of a particular version of a Confucian orthodoxy. From Pi Xiruis perspective

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the xuan school thinkers are definitively wrong. If our own interest, though, is not whether these thinkers are right or wrong but rather simply a desire to understand how their views of language and their textual heritage made sense to them, then we need to take a critical approach both toward traditional polemic against xuan thought and toward the scholarship on the period that deliberately or unwittingly assumes these traditional biases and assumptions. I have tried to suggest in this essay that if we approach xuan discourse on the Analects in its own terms, if we see it in terms of its own timeliness, then we may discover a remarkably sophisticated and coherent way of thinking about history, language, and canonical texts, for which the supremacy of Confucius as sage, and the centrality of the Analects, is not mere window dressing but an integral and essential dimension.

Notes I have benefited from the suggestions, criticisms, and support of a number of friends and colleagues in preparing this article. I would like to take the opportunity here to commemorate a series of enjoyable conversations and exchanges by thanking Christian DePee, Ron Egan, Christoph Harbsmeier, Eric Hutton, Andrew Jones, Michael Nylan, Alan Tansman, Stephen West, Wu Guangxing, Yang Xiao, and Yu Shiyi, as well as two anonymous reviewers for this journal. 1 I will simply use the term xuan or xuan school in this essay. Some of the more helpful studies on xuan discourse in general, and on the particular issues dealt with here, include Kong Fan , Wei-Jin xuan tan (Shenyang: , Wei-Jin xuanxue xin lun Liaoning Jiaoyu Chubanshe (1991, 1995); Xu Bin (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2000); Wang Yao , (Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, Zhonggu wenxue shi lun , Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao (Bei1986); and Tang Yongtong jing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1953). The latter, in particular, remains unsurpassed for the rich range of sources it addresses and for the conceptual rigor of its analysis. Tu Wei-mings article, Profound Learning, Personal Knowledge, and Poetic Vision, in Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen, eds., The Vitality of the Lyric Voice: Shih Poetry from the late Han to the Tang (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 331, provides an overview in English of much of the background relevant to this essay and is also highly suggestive of the ways in which questions of ontology, interpretation, and aesthetics are intertwined in the intellectual culture of this period. Rudolph Wagners work on Wang Bi, particularly his The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), has also been of great help to me in writing this essay. 2 Of course, while the Zhengshi era came to be thought of as a point of departure for Wei-Jin xuan discourse, the issues and conceptual forms of the school were far from arising out of thin air: the case for an intellectual lineage leading back,

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via the Jingzhou school of scholarship at the regional court of Liu Biao , to Eastern Han antecedents seems incontrovertible; moreover, the notion of xuan itself can in some of its dimensions be traced to Yang Xiong and his Taixuan jing . See, for example, Tang Yongtong, Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, pp. 8489, and Wang Yao, Zhonggu wenxue shi lun, pp. 3355, for concise summaries of what we know of the intellectual lineage leading up to Wang Bi. (Assembled explications of 3 He Yans commentary, titled Lunyu jijie the Analects), is included, along with Xing Bings subcommentary (shu ) in the Shisan jing zhu shu edition of the Analects. As He Yans title suggests, however, this work is a compendium of early Analects commentary, rather than a new work with a distinctively xuan perspective. Therefore we will focus our attention on Wang Bis Analects commentary, which, while surviving only in fragments, clearly does attempt to incorporate such a perspective. 4 Fragments of Guo Xiangs Analects commentary are preserved in Huang Kans Lunyu yishu (see the following discussion). On the references to Confucius and the Analects in the preface to Guo Xiangs Zhuangzi commentary, see the discussion below. 5 We will return briefly to some of these issues in the concluding section of this essay. 6 I will cite the text of Takeuchi Yoshio , Rongo gisho (1921), reprinted in Takeuchi Yoshio zenshu (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1978), pp. 197422. For the layers of sources included in the Lunyu yishu, see Huang Kans preface, in Rongo gisho, p. 202AB. 7 Four fragments from the Lunyu shiyi also appear in Xing Bings Lunyu : two fragments commenting on Analects 7.1 and 7.6 are zhengyi found in Xing Bings work and not in Huang Kan, and two fragments commenting on Analects 14.37 and 15.35 duplicate text cited by Huang Kan. I will cite here the collated text of the Lunyu shiyi fragments appearing in Lou Yulie , Wang Bi ji jiaoshi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1980, 1999), pp. 621637, mentioning variant readings not noted in the latter work only where relevant. 8 Here we will be observing the syncretism of Wang Bis hermeneutical thought in detail, via analysis of specific passages of commentary. The proposition that Wang Bi takes a syncretic approach to canonical texts of Daojia and Rujia provenance is itself, of course, not a controversial one. See, for example, the discussion in Tang Yongtong, Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, pp. 84102. 9 Citations of the Analects will follow the text and the pian numbers appearing in Yang Bojun , Lunyu yizhu Zhonghua Shuju, 1984, 1994). and zhang (Hong Kong:

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10 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 624. 11 Tang Yongtong suggests that Wang Bis purpose in writing the Lunyu shiyi was precisely to harmonize the Analects to the ontology of the Laozi as he interpreted it, and seems to imply that this meant explaining away such passages in the former work that resisted such harmonization (see Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, pp. 84102, esp. p. 90). This seems more or less correct in its particulars, although the implication of bad faith on Wang Bis part seems unnecessary. In fact, Wang Bis syncretic approach to Daojia and Rujia canonical texts was very much a two-way street: Rudolph Wagner points out that Wang Bis Laozi commentary holds statements from the Xici attributed to Confucius as authoritative in explicating the Laozi; moreover, Wagner makes the intriguing suggestion that Wang Bis clear belief in the personal superiority of Confucius to Laozi, which would have been unacceptable to later Daoists, may have resulted in the texts being expurgated during its sojourn in the canon of religious Daoism. See Wagner, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator, pp. 137141. 12 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiao shi (1980), pp. 195210. Except where otherwise noted, citations from Wang Bis works follow the text of this edition, with occasional minor adjustments of punctuation. For a review of the arguments leading to the identification of this piece, see Rudolf Wagner, Wang Bi: The Structure of the Laozis Pointers (Laozi weizhi lilu e), Toung Pao 72 (1986): 92129, which includes a complete English translation and analysis of the text. Another English rendering of the Laozi zhilu e appears in Richard John Lynns complete translation of Wang Bis Laozi commentary, The Classic of the Way and Virtue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 3047. Professor Wagner also has a full translation of this commentary in press, Wang Bis Commentary on the Laozi: Critical Text, Extrapolative Translation, Philological Commentary, which is to form one of three parts of a serial study of Wang Bi as commentator and philosophical figure. The first part of this series, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator, has been particularly helpful to me in developing the argument of this section. 13 For economy of expression, I will use the word text to refer to the object of interpretation, though it does not appear to me that Wang Bis analysis makes any distinction between written texts and oral utterancesin fact, one might say that the gist of his approach is to treat text as utterance, that is, to ground the text as a verbal gesture occurring in a particular context between a particular speaker and a particular interlocutor. 14 I will use call and calling as the verb and participle forms of both cheng, designation, and wei, predication, in this discussion, since the two are closely related and involve the same basic type of gestural verbal act, which is primarily defined through its opposition to ming, or naming. I will use predication as the noun form for wei in preference to predicate, since it is

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clear that for Wang Bi what characterizes wei is the act of predicating, rather than a predicate in the sense of an attribute of an entity conceived as constantly belonging to that entity apart from the specific context of utterance. While designation and predication belong to the same general type of verbal act, it does seem possible to distinguish between the use of cheng and cis, with designations and predications in the realm of wei in the Pre gestural language corresponding, respectively, to names and positive qualities in the realm of denotative language: a designation is an ad hoc name, which is unlike a proper name in that it does not presume to be definitive, while a predication is an ad hoc attribution of a quality, which, unlike a positive quality, does not claim to be a constant attribute of the thing of which it is predicated (as we shall see, predications are also unlike positive qualities in that the former are not subject to the law of contradiction). See also below, and Wagner, Wang Bi: The Structure of the Laozis Pointers, pp. 108109 n. 67. ` -vis the 15 Of course, what Wang Bi says about the limitation of naming vis-a realm of the non-extant lying beyond language should, it seems, also call into question our ability to use the term the non-extant itself as a name for that realm. In the interest of clarity I will ignore such problems here. 16 Lynns translation seems to omit the phrase here.

, where possessive, as 17 Both Wagner and Lynn construe the phrase mysterys virtue (they translate: the influence of the Dark/the virtue of mystery), perhaps in an effort to force strict grammatical parallelism with the syntactically parallel phrase predications of the way ( ) above. In fact, loose parallelism such as will accommodate the reading given here is quite common in the prose and poetry of this period. That this reading is the required one, moreover, is made rather clear by the relevant passage in Wang Bis commentary, which defines a mysterious virtue precisely as one for which no agent/subject is determined:
In instances where a mysterious virtue is spoken of, this always indicates that there exists a virtue, whose agent, however, is unknown, issuing from darkness and obscurity. (Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 24)

18 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, pp. 195210. The text of the Laozi zhilu e is densely packed with references to the Laozi itself, which are fully documented in this edition. Such references will not be noted here except in cases where they bear directly on the discussion. The translations are my own; I have tried, insofar as possible, to make my version coherent with Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, in the rendering of key terms, though it has at times been necessary to depart from that version to highlight the specifically hermeneutical implications of the Laozi zhilu e.

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19 To illustrate this idea further, we might consider the following diagram: Denotative (ming) (name) Henry Aaron (positive quality) strong Gestural (cheng/wei) (designation) The Hammer (predication) home-run-hitting

The name Henry Aaron claims to identify definitively a particular person, independent of the context in which the name is pronounced; the positive quality strong claims to identify an attribute that belongs to that person intrinsically and generally, independent of the particular perspective of the person who happens to make the predication Henry Aaron is strong. The designation The Hammer, while similar to a name in its use, does not claim to be unique or definitive in its relation to the thing it refers to; moreover, unlike Henry Aaron, which claims to refer directly to its referent without recourse to any description, The Hammer, as a designation, follows from a predication, namely the predication home-run-hitting: since a hammer is something that we associate in ordinary language with hitting things hard, it makes sense to borrow that term as a designation following from the predication home-run-hitting. We also note that the predication home-runhitting is based on a particular observational perspective, and does not claim to identify a quality that belongs to the subject constantly or independent of the time and circumstances under which it is applied. This illustration is meant as a rough guide for thinking through Wang Bis analysis of cheng (wei) versus ming, but is somewhat inexact: we cannot equate Wang Bis category of ming, for instance, with that of proper names, or even with the grammatical category of nouns; rather, it generally characterizes language as it is used to perform an ` -vis objects that is broadly like naming. One might also consider operation vis-a the categories of sense and reference as described by Frege, and observe that ming is language conceived of as referring, whereas cheng (wei) is language conceived of as sense-bearing. 20 That is, naming something involves conceiving of the thing named as some particular thing as opposed to the thing or collection of things which it is not, while calling always takes place from a particular perspective, and will therefore not be expected to convey exhaustively all the possible experiences and impressions of the thing it calls that might be available from other perspectives. 21 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 196. 22 Ibid., p. 196. 23 Lynn renders this phrase those who blame it for misuse of names do violence to the concepts involved, and suggests a connection with contemporary debates on the problem of name and actuality (ming /shi ) (Lynn, The Classic of the Way and Virtue, p. 33 n. 25). Such a context is certainly helpful

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for our understanding of the overall argument Wang Bi lays out here, yet it seems to me simpler in the immediate context of this passage to construe the word ze in its more general sense of hold responsible (for something), demand (a particular thing of someone). Likewise, at the end of this passage, the idea of it would have no blame placed on others, but insists that it be found in oneself seems somewhat obscure: what others, and blame for what? If we again construe ze in the more general way, however, the idea becomes quite coherent: it is a matter of not demanding or expecting the understanding to come from outside, but rather of seeking it within oneself. 24 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 198. 25 Ibid., p. 624. 26 Xu Zhene , ed., Shishuo xinyu (Hong Kong: Zhonghua Shuju, 1987), p. 107. An alternate version of this anecdote, appearing in the short biography of Wang Bi by He Shao preserved in Pei Songzhis commentary to biography of Zhong Hui , exhibits a number of the San guo zhi minor variations from the Shishuo xinyu version, the only problematic one being its rendering of the final phrase as . See San guo zhi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1982), 3 : 795. Tang Yongtongs proposal (Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, p. 96) that we read in this text as a graphic error for seems very attractive. Rudolph Wagner is quite adamant that we need to read a break between and , or, in the He Shao text, which Wagner treats without and , so as to conemending, as suggested by Tang Yongtong, between strue the final clause as meaning Therefore his [Laozis] obstinate talking [about the non-extant] is exactly his deficiency (see Wagner, Wang Bi: The Structure of the Laozis Pointers, p. 100, and The Craft of a Chinese Commentator, pp. 129 ff.). Given the frequent mention by Wang Bi and others of a basic reluctance to speak on the part of Confucius, such a reading has a certain appeal. It seems unlikely, though, for the following reasons: (1) if the meaning were as Wagner maintains, one would expect no , and would expect a final , in both texts, and quite probably an intensifying adverbial particle such as preceding in the Shishuo xinyu text; (2) Wagners proposal requires that we construe in the Shishuo xinyu text as an intransitive verb meaning simply speak, a seemingly quite awkward usage that, as far as I know, is unattested anywhere else (if we take it that the object is implied from the preceding context, we would still expect the pronoun here); (3) Wagners reading has the result that two versions of what is clearly the same anecdoteversions in almost every other respect practically identicalwould have significantly different points: one would claim that the deficiency of Laozi and Zhuangzi was that they spoke about the non-extant, while the other would claim that their deficiency lay in speaking tout court. Again, Tang Yongtongs proposed emendation of in the San guo zhi text to is orthographically quite plausible, and also allows us to read the two versions as telling exactly the same story in perfectly idiomatic literary Chinese.

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27 For Guo Xiang, for example, the theory of Confucius as sage, and of the infe` -vis Confucius, is a central part of his view of the way riority of Zhuangzi vis-a in which Zhuangzi uses language. See Tang Yongtong, Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, pp. 103111, and the discussion below. 28 Lou Yulie reads , following the Zhibuzu zhai and Wuying dian editions of the Lunyu yishu (see Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 625 and p. 635 nn. 1213). The textual history of the Lunyu yishu is extremely complicated; apart from a fragmentary Tang dynasty manuscript found at Dunhuang, all extant versions stem from an extremely diverse array of manuscript traditions in Japan (for an overview, see Chen Jinmu , Huang Kan zhi jingxue [Taibei: Guoli Bianyi Guan, 1995], pp. 149222). Takeuchi Yoshios Rongo gisho, the only critical edition of the Lunyu yishu currently available, reads (p. 264, with collation note at p. 392). I adopt here the reading appearing in Ma Guohan , Yuhan (Yangzhou: Yangzhou guji shudian (1874) shanfang ji yishu , Lunyu jishi (Beijing: Zhong1990), p. 339, and Cheng Shude hua Shuju, 1990), p. 506, which seems clearly preferable. It is unclear whether one or both of these latter editors had access to a different recension of the Lunyu yishu, or whether they silently emended the text (Cheng Shudes comments make it fairly clear, at any rate, that he was not simply following Ma Guohan). At any rate, while the other readings seem more or less awkward, none fundamentally alters the overall thrust of Wang Bis commentarial strategy as laid out here. 29 Cheng Shude, Lunyu jishi, p. 506. 30 Wang Bi takes a similar tack in his comments on Analects 9.2, where the person from Daxiang says, How great is Confuciushe is widely learned, but has no basis for a reputation ( )! Wang Bi comments, [Confucius] is like the harmonious music which issues from the eight types of instruments, yet the eight types of instruments are not its name (Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 626). 31 Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 255B. The phoenix referred to at the end of this passage is a reference to Analects 9.9, where Confucius says, The phoenix does not arrive, and the Yellow River does not put forth its charts. Im finished. The phoenix and charts were auspicious omens indicating the imminent rise of a sagely king; Confucius interprets the nonappearance of these omens as indicating that the way is not to be put into practice during his time. How this might relate to the questions Li Chong is discussingthe nature of the sage and the way in which he lodges his meaning in words that are not to be construed literallymay not be immediately apparent. The connection is suggested by the remark by Miao Xie quoted by Huang Kan in his discussion of Analects 9.9: The sage has comprehensive knowledge of fate, no longer needing such things [i.e., omens] in order to know . . . the reason why he says

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this [i.e., mentions the omens, even though he does not himself need to rely on such things to know fate] is so as to resolve the expectations of the multitudes of common people [who had hoped that Confucius might become a king] (Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 275B). 32 On the related issue of whether or not the sage has emotions or simply behaves as though he has emotions, see Tang Yongtong, Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, pp. 7283. 33 Note also that Huang Kans latter remarks, and the statement he quotes from Li Chong, seem to suggest that the decline in question is not really so much a matter of decline in Confucius himself as it is a matter of decline in the world. 34 From Huang Kans comments on Analects 9.4 (Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 273B). The phrase floating like an unmoored boat, of course, is a quote from the Lie Yukou chapter (no. 32) of the Zhuangzi. See Guo Qingfan , Zhuangzi jishi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1989), 4.1040. 35 That is, Confucius is mindless, whereas Zhuangzi merely knows about mindlessness. 36 The phrase is a quote of Analects 10.1, When Confucius was in his local community he was self-effacing, as though unable to speak; when he was in the ancestral temple or at court, he spoke eloquently, only briefly. 37 Zhuangzi jishi, 1.3. While there is not space to present the full case here, I think it is quite likely that the immediately following phrase, , This is why it is not constant [not a jing] and yet is the cap of the hundred schools, which as far as I know is always taken in modern scholarship to refer to the Zhuangzi, in fact refers to the Analects. 38 We might also consider the parallels between the way Confucius is conceived as following up on real situations and responding to them, rather than taking premeditated or deliberate action, and the way in which the language of the Laozi is said to operate in Wang Bis Laozi zhilu e, where he says, for example, that that text follows on what is there without taking deliberate action ( ). 39 There are interesting parallels, for example, between xuan commentarial strategies in the Analects and those of modern-day exegetes who have applied various versions of speech-act theory to their readings of the text. The pioneering work in this regard was, of course, Herbert Fingarettes Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Yang Xiao has recently revisited this line of interpretation, arguing for an expanded notion of what we may view as the performative dimensions of the text (How Confucius Does Things with Words, [unpublished ms.]). Another parallel that was probably relevant for at least some of the xuan-school commentators would have been the Buddhist theory of upa ); Huang ya, or skillful means (Chin: fangbian Kan, in particular, is known to have been quite learned in Buddhist doctrine.

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For the time being, however, I will defer any attempt to trace specific Buddhist influences on xuan-school hermeneutics of the Analects. Something rather like the notion of upa ya is, at any rate, part of xuan Analects commentary before the main period of Buddhist influence, and, indeed, we can even say that it is there in the text itself. 40 See Lunyu zhu shu, in Ruan Yuan , ed., Shisan jing zhu shu (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1980, 1983), 2.2500. 41 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 624. Tang Yongtong, Wei-Jin xuanxue lungao, p. 90, takes the final clause of this passage to apply to the language of the Yijing itself, rather than to the words of Confucius in Analects 7.17, but this seems to weaken substantially the force of the passage as commentary to the Analects. More decisively, moreover, the phrase wei yan , or subtle speech, is very closely linked with the actual speaking presence of Confucius. 42 Wang Bis ground for such an inference is clearly the section of the Appended Remarks to the Zhou yi, beginning:
To understand incipience, is this not [to partake of the] numinous . . .

on which this passage from Wangs commentary is closely modeled. The most immediately relevant Zhou yi passage reads:
As for this son of the Yan clan, he may well be pretty close [to being perfect]! When he commits an error, he never fails to know it; knowing it, he has never done that thing again.

Wang Bis commentary reads:

43 Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 301B. A likely basis for Huang Kans comment would be passages elsewhere in the Analects, particularly the exchanges concerning ritual in book 3. In this sense we might view this as an example of a tendency to treat disparate textual traces as informed by broadly coherent meanings or intentions on the part of the sage. See the following discussion and note 42 above. 44 A brief comment appearing in the Laozi zhilu e does seem, however, to offer a hint of corroboration to such a supposition: , If one uses names to determine things, then principle and sympathetic understanding will certainly be lost (Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 196). While this comment appears in context to be primarily a criticism of the shortcomings of the Nominalist (Mingjia) school, we need not assume that it does not apply equally to ming as a function of language in general, as described elsewhere in the text. The Lunyu shiyi passage on shu suggests that for Wang Bi, shu is the faculty whereby one can arrive at li; if we make the plausible suppositon that Wang

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Bis terminology is consistent within and among his various commentarial works, then we can summarize the argument in the Laozi zhilu e concerning the distinction between ming and cheng/wei in the following terms: shu (which, in its hermeneutic dimension, consists of reading language gesturally) allows access to li; ming (language construed as name) obstructs this process. 45 I give single-mindedness for zhong (which usually means something like loyalty) in an effort to capture the way in which Wang Bi seems to be using the term in his comments on this passage. 46 The term tong as Wang Bi uses it here is quite difficult to render by a single English equivalent. It conveys a comprehensive understanding in which each thing falls into place; at the same time, since the defining perspective for Wang Bis thought is that of the sage-kings actual ruling of the world, it carries political connotations of governing as well. Since the political connotations are peripheral to our concerns here, the paraphrase given here is an attempt to render the former sense; one might think of the ways in which the English word govern may also be used of logical or grammatical relations as well as relations of political control. 47 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, p. 623. 48 See Huang Kans preface to the Lunyu yi shu, in Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 200B. 49 Perhaps the Cai Xi whose name is listed as one of the earlier commentators whose work Huang Kan draws on. 50 Takeuchi, Rongo gisho, p. 201B. 51 Zhuangzi jishi, 1.3. See also the discussion above at notes 36 and 37. 52 Lou, Wang Bi ji jiaoshi, pp. 633634. 53 Xirui, Jingxue lishi (Taibei: Yiwen Yinshuguan, 1996), p. 186.

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