LOTS OF PLEASURE BUT LITTLE HAPPINESS

Michael Nylan
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
mnylan@berkeley.edu

Two long speeches ascribed to the heroic Zichan of Zheng (d. 522 b.c.e.)
mirror the parameters for many discussions about pleasure-taking in early China. In
the first, Zichan explains to an envoy from the more powerful state of Jin how diplomacy was managed in the glorious days of yore: I have heard, when Lord Wen of Jin
was covenant chief (632628 b.c.e.), ... hosts and guests shared their cares and pleasures.1 In the second, Zichan expands upon the theme: It is indeed very hard to be
entirely devoid of desires. Let all [in your kingdom] get what they desire, so [that]
they attend to their assigned tasks and strive to accomplish them.2 As Zichans view
gradually unfolds, it becomes clear that his policy of governance is pleasure. All
people are bundles of desires, though the type and force of the desires that drive a
person are functions of that persons character and inclinations. To thwart peoples
desires does no one any good at all. Far better, then, to learn how best to accommodate each persons desires so that they, at a minimum, do the least harm to others in
the community. Suitable accommodations serve to strengthen communal ties, and
besides, the desire to emulate good models can be taught, which fundamentally alters the usual direction and pace of the impulses.3 Zichans speeches make it clear
that directing the desires of power holders, far from being a private matter best left
to the discretion of the individual ministers and rulers, is the fundamental business of
all good administrators.
Every student of early China finds it easy to recall favorite passages about pleasures great and small, wise and unwise. The excavated and transmitted literature
whether standard histories, medical treatises, philosophical texts, or bawdy
poemsis full of pleasure talk detailing the physiological processes entailed in
pleasure-giving and taking in what becomes over time the surprisingly precise vocabulary of pleasure. This essay offers a preliminary look into the pleasure theories
articulated during the classical era in China,4 in the expectation of future work from
myself and others. Up to now, this important topic has attracted curiously little at
tention, in part because most people assume that the true structure and workings of the human body are ... a universal reality,5 even if historians of antique
philosophyor science can hardly take this for granted.6 Partly, too, traditions, East
and West,are loathe to consider pleasure a topic suitable for serious reflection,
judging from the negative reactions garnered after announcements that pleasure
theory is my research topicreactions that hardly vary whether the context is China
or Euro-America.
Pleasure, however, is the only word in English capacious enough to allow for
the complex bodily processes supposedly registered in the senses, emotions, heart,

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and mind.7 Joy too often implies the disembodied in Western languages, given its
old associations with religious ecstasy and more recently with elevated or sublime feelings, when the very notion of what counts as religion, transcendence, or
higher values is more fraught, especially where early societies are concerned, than
many care to acknowledge.8 It is equally telling that no writings in classical Chinese
lend themselves to constructions of happiness, either in its older meaning of favored by fortune (since the texts urge power holders to create their own blessings,
regardless of the hand that fate has dealt them) or in its modern connotation of a
freestate of blissful autonomy. The great writers who are my subject evinced little
interest in the vagaries of fate (where fate refers to the conjunction of events encountered in life), reflecting the Ancients clear-eyed assessments about the variety of
losses to which all people are prey: sickness, death, natural catastrophe, decrepitude,
and slander among them.9 Notions of autonomy do enter into the early discussions
in Chinese, but in a limited way, as we will see, in the elites desire to avoid enslavement to other people and things, when devising their priorities and modes of operation. This admirable clarity about lifes constraintsso greatly at odds with American
positive thinking10precludes general cheeriness. Upon close examination, the
semantic units routinely translated as happy or cheerful in English have welldefined but different social valences in classical Chinese, as we will suggest by taking
two words routinely (mis)translated as happy.11
Before proceeding to the physiology and vocabulary of pleasure in early China,
readers should know that talk about pleasure was almost always pragmatic, geared
to the here and now. A few assertions about human nature and motivation formed the
prelude to a persuaders advice to a patron or student about the wisdom of socialengineering policies or the benefits of personal and social cultivation. For that reason, nearly all the extant accounts omit systematic treatments of some aspects relating
to pleasure that our persuaders most probably considered, if only to arm themselves
against their opponents rhetorical jabs. Idlers might ask, of course, whether the pleasurable sensation inheres more in the thing, the activity itself, or in the capacity for
pleasure developed by the person,12 or notice that the experience of pleasure, no less
than of pain, is fundamentally inexpressible and thus potentially isolating. But persuaders could gain no conceivable rhetorical advantage from over-specificity when
outlining their propositions about pleasure, lest the object of instruction begin to
quibble over minor points, lose the train of the argument, or let his attention wander.
The extant passages on pleasure aimed at a single goal: to encourage members of the
governing elite to revise their modes of behavior and their policies, the better to develop the requisite courage and practical wisdom that alone would keep their physical persons and houses trouble-free, in the absence of stupendous luck.13
It sufficed, then, for them to allege that (a) it is easy to recognize probable sources
of pleasures, (b) the preponderance of human activity consists of the pursuit of
pleasure, and (c) each person hopes to maximize his or her own opportunities for
pleasure-taking, so (d) when humans act recklessly, it is usually because they have
disastrously (mis)calculated the odds that their actions will conduce to pleasure,
never mind maximal pleasurefrom which we can conclude that (e) forging long-

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term constructive relations (in themselves sustaining) nearly always yields better
chances of attaining a pleasurable state than the alternatives; so (f) it is crucial for
every person to distinguish sustaining from consuming pleasures, if the body (and the
body politic, for members of the governing elite) is to continue to flourish. In their
efforts to push toward some kind of a resolution and ascertain the best possible
course of action, most of the persuasions ascribed to the late Zhanguo, Han, and immediate post-Han thinkers14 kept well within these accepted talking points. But
while it was futile to try to assign a fixed value to every single type of enjoyment, the
duration and intensity of specific pleasures, as well as the different pleasures aroused
in anticipation, in experience, or in memory, were significant factors to take into
consideration when prioritizing commitments so as to maximize pleasure.
Not coincidentally, the decision to employ the word pleasure, in place of joy
or happiness, affords the best pretext for beginning an overdue discussion of why
the ethical thought ... [of these early thinkers discussed here] was not only different from
most modern thought, particularly modern thought influenced by Christianity; it was
alsoin much better shape ... since this system of ideas basically lacks the concept of
morality altogether, in the sense of a class of reasons or demands which are vitally differ
ent from other kinds of reason or demand.... Relatedly, ... the questions of how ones
relations to others are to be regulated, both in the context of society and more privately,
are not detached from questions about the kind of life it is worth living....15

As the last section of the essay will argue (contra A. C. Graham, with an un
witting assist from Alan Gibbard), this particular focus on pleasure-giving and
pleasure-taking neatly obviates the normally knotty problem of how to get from is
to ought. For the moment, let me say only that the early writings in classical Chinese excel many philosophical treatises from other times and places in at least two
respects: first, insofar as they did not hazard a host of un-provable assertions about
social units or the cosmos, their advice comes to readers without many superfluities
and entanglements,16 and second, their relentless focus on social roles, process, and
relations (rather than on essences and truths) means we need no elaborate mental
contortions to consider how to apply their advice today.
Physiological Processes in Relation to Pleasure
Most thinkers in early China viewed pleasure as a basic necessity of life, like food
and air,17 assuming that the distinctive forms of pleasure-taking and giving, along
with other human creations as symbol systems and communal conventions, distinguished humans and raised them above the brutes. At the same time, thinkers tended
to blur the boundaries between the desires and the pleasures. In some arguments, the
desires seem virtually synonymous with pleasures, the initial impulse in response to
stimuli (desire) conflated with the resulting inclinations toward possible outcomes.
Humans are born with five sensory organs designed to produce sensory percepts
(the eyes see, the nose smells, the tongue tastes, the ears hear, the surfaces of the
body feel), plus the xin , or heart, which simultaneously identifies and evaluates

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the perceptual information that it receives, either directly or through the other organs, generating within the body inclinations and dispositions toward objects, people, and events external to the recipient. Upon leaving the womb, people come in
contact with external things, people, and situations through these organ systems.
Once external phenomena stimulate (gan ) the senses, inclinations and dispositions arise (qi or xing ) in response (ying ).18 These inclinations and dispositions comprise the first-order desires for food, warmth, and sex needed for survival
and continuance, as well as a host of second-order desires that transcend survival,
and tend to arise out of the inborn human personality, thus making us truly human.
Second-order desires include, for example, the mimetic desires to have what others
have and to emulate impressive people. The mimetic desires, born of the basic human drive for safety in sociality, can be turned to either destructive or constructive
ends. Like all other dispositions, they are morally neutral until attached to good or
bad actions and persons. A response to a specific situation takes on a precise ethical
charge primarily from its personal, familial, and social consequences.
Qi , often translated as spirit or pattern energy, is the medium facilitating
these movements. In theory, since all things are composed of qi, all things can be in
sympathetic communication with one another, even if certain subtle sympathies may
be too subtle for ordinary human beings to register.19 The key metaphor for this sympathetic communication is dong , movement, but a secondary analogy links the
internal drives propelling such contacts and exchanges with the metaphor of driving
[a carriage] (yu ). The qi of one thing supposedly ventures out to meet the qi of
another to which it is attracted for some reason,20 with all sensory perception stemming from some such form of contact.21 In classical Chinese, as in English, then, the
words for motive and emotion are cognate with moving and being moved.22
Evidently, the qi itself conveys or drives the inclinations sparked by stimuli,23 with a
famous text equating the qi in motion to steeds racing.24 And while the theories seldom specify whether the qi originally exists in different types (for example, qi colored
by delight versus anger) prone to respond by category, the theories stipulate that
once the human qi has made contact with the qi of an external phenomenon, the
hearts response to the stimulus is to immediately identify, sort, label, and evaluate
the phenomenon as hot or cold, pleasing or not, and so on. (Note the Chinese texts
failure to assign the identification and evaluation to different parts of the body, or
sever fact from value.)25 In the classical language of the time, then, the heart (xin )
produces both evaluations (si ) based on these complex processes and the evaluations consequences, that is, the commitments (zhi ) tied to memory and experience. Such commitments ultimately shape and define each person more than the
simple, unreflective impulses (ying ) shared with the birds and beasts,26 insofar as
the commitments are potentially directed in a sustained fashion toward specific aims
beyond mere satisfaction of the first-order desires.
As experience, reinforced by habit, by memory, and by schooling, puts more and
more labels on an ever-increasing number of stimuli, the experiential world of the
person inevitably has a huge impact on the configuration of his or her habitual dispositions.27 By adulthood, fewer and fewer experiences come to a person free of

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labels, with some labels so firmly attached as to be unconscious, having become

second nature or xing to the person. That said, all experiential labels can be
altered through conscious physical and mental acts, though the effort required to
change fixed inclinations may be arduous. Thus, a person of sufficient will and fixity
of purpose (zhi ) can succeed in remaking all his ways of looking at life, deliberately forming a second nature that will allow him the best chance to attain his goals.
With inclinations usually translating into actions,28 how to go about fashioning a
better (i.e., more constructive and sustaining) set of inclinations becomes the first task
of the truly wise.
In describing such processes, most early texts caution against leakage (xie
orlou ) of qi caused by inappropriate desires and pleasures.29 Specifically, early
medical texts are quick to identify leakage of the jing , the most potent and en
livening form of qi , as the chief cause of illness, debility, and death, aside from
attacks by vengeful ghosts and spirits. After all, the desires and pleasures are each
conceived as qi flows, even floods, moving out to contact the qi of external phe
nomena. To establish contact, the qi must penetrate the skin and other bodily organs
as well, sometimes invisibly or in barely visible ways (e.g., pulse patterns, fine sweat,
bulging eyes). Repeated movements (dong ) out from the bodys core inevitably
threaten to deplete the bodys fairly closed systems of regularly circulating systems of
blood and qi (blood being but yet another form of qi). Each occurrence of leakage
represents the loss of a finite amount of the vital spirit allotted to a person; once
spent, that measure of vital spirit is difficult, if not impossible to restore.30 Obviously
enough, the more intense the outward flows, the greater the potential for losses.
Discharges were known to accompany sexual arousal along with a variety of
other conditions. Excessive (yin ) and over-indulgent (chi ) contacts exponentially increased the number and volume of leaks, until such point as the body
could not be cured;31 too many palpitations of the heart or too much outward flow
made it very hard to retain enough qi at the vital center, the xin.32 Hence the proverbial warning, profligate of ear and eye ... this is what the sages forbid.33 One
satirical poet saw it this way:
To give free rein to the desires prompted by ear and eye, indulging in the physical
comfortsthese harm the equilibrium [required] by the bloods flow in its channels.
Furthermore, going out by chariot and coming in by sedan chair are rightly deemed portents of rheumatism and paralysis. Cavernous halls and cool palaces are called inducers
of chills and fevers. Gleaming teeth and moth-eyebrows have been dubbed axes that
chop away at the vital nature. And the sweet and the savory, the fat and the richthese
are known as drugs that rot the innards.34

Clearly, some forms of flow are necessary to the bodys survival or equilibrium,
as when a person seeks food to prevent starvation or has sex to quell the bodys craving for it.35 Indeed, that the animal passions were shared by all humanity was not
necessarily a bad thing. After all, the passions and desires, the dispositions and inclinations so necessary to survival, drove engagement with the outside world, creating
the possibility for the constructive engagement with it that defined fully developed

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human beings. The desires for food and sex, in point of fact, provided a good model
for all such constructive engagement, for while both eating and sexual stimulation
could be managed alone, both afforded ample occasions for convivial and memorable exchanges.36 Besides, eating alone was usually less enjoyable than eating in
company, and a wide range of sexual activities called out for a partner.37 By analogy,
the pleasures that tended to go wrong were apt to be either solitary pleasures on
which no natural social checks were exerted38 or commodified pleasures, whose
very consumption denied the profound importance of good social relations. In the
eyes of most, other nonessential forms of arousalranging from the desire to read a
specific text to a yen for a concubine or bears paws for dinnercreated special
problems principally when the instances of arousal offered few or no compensatory
gains in the form of sustaining social relations. Art and ritual might promise to lend
the simplest of human desires and pleasures an added potential to build communities, but even art and ritual could not guarantee ipso facto that an act of striving to
realize ones desires would not on balance damage the physical person.39
Only by moderating and refining ones drives, in light of careful calculations to
assess which efforts were more likely to induce balance, could one hope to offset
outflows with inflows, thereby staving off physical harm. This way of thinking is very
old, and it can be found in all sorts of texts, including the Analects ascribed to Confucius, which says, The person of superior cultivation guards against three things:
when young, the blood and qi are not yet settled, so he guards against lust; when
mature, the blood and qi are vigorous, so he guards against combativeness; and
when old, the blood and qi are declining, so he guards against covetousness.40 Note
how alterations within the persons body necessitate continual adjustments to ones
approaches when making contact with the outside world.
Quick to apply the pleasure principle to the uses and maintenance of political
power, the theorists soon introduced various complications: serene enjoyment of any
given pleasure tended to enhance both ones pleasure in the moment and ones ability to judge the relative value to be assigned the pleasures on offer. So while numerous opportunities for pleasure-taking indubitably lay within a rulers or noblemans
grasp, it was worth asking whether the power holder fully deserved to enjoy that form
and amount of pleasure. If the answer was no, the powerful person ran the risk of
having the self-righteous or the merely envious deprive him of the very pleasures he
tried to enjoy. Even the prospect of future loss was apt to diminish the pleasures to be
had, for pleasure could only be enjoyed fully to the degree that it was reckoned fully
secure. As one early text put it, It is human nature to be incapable of feeling pleasure
in a situation that is insecure (buan , not safe, secure, and settled), nor can
one [under such conditions] gain anything from what one does not take pleasure
in....41 Thus, the classical Chinese texts name lack of security (also expressed as
you , cares or worries) as the chief antonym for the words denoting pleasure, while
security (an ) functions as the chief precondition for maximum pleasure.
With secure pleasure-taking reckoned a gain, the early texts advocated a number
of methods designed to secure a power holders position in relation to others. Spectacles in moderation, employment of the worthy, careful distribution of rewards and

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punishments, and sumptuary regulationstogether these four strong props led those
below to desire constructive social behavior. Even subjects bereft of good parentsand strict teachers could be schooled to build upon their mimetic desires to the
point where good actions were conflated with pleasure-taking, in this way promoting
social cohesion underwritten by a device whereby each achieved his or her own
[proper] place (ge de qi suo ).42 Note, however, that discussion and execution of this sort of lofty ideal could never hope to evade down-to-earth discussions,
as when the ruling familys desire for more discretionary income contradicted its
compelling need to elicit unwavering support from subject populations through generous boons and grants.43
But if pleasure was to be made ultimately secure, probable outcomes of actions
had to be weighed in no fewer than three time frames: pleasure in prospect, pleasureperceived, and pleasure in retrospect.44 Everyone knew that the keen anticipation ofa certain pleasure often exceeded the pleasure experienced or remembered,
just as everyone knew that a sense of unsullied honor might only long afterward
amply repay trouble and pain. Generally speaking, smart pleasure taking meant
choosing longer-term relations that promised more reliably sustained and sustainingforms of pleasure over shorter and riskier forms of gratification.45 Thus, the premier goal ofmany pleasure theorists was to encourage those in power to pose such
questions as, What pleasures were likely to be reliable, and which short-lived
and/or positively dangerous? and How much pleasure of what sort under what
circumstances sustains the person or consumes him?46 If the ruler and his min
isterscouldbepersuaded of the value of learning to direct and elevate their tastes,
they would then find that their desires and addictionsfar from being a severe
drain on scarce resourceshad become a secure way to delight hearts and minds
(yue xin ).47
To the modern reader, the sheer ubiquity of the pleasure discourse in early writings is stunning, once one manages to notice it. Our academic training or JudaeoChristian heritage blinds us to the fact that the Mencius spends nearly the whole of
Book 1 outlining its pleasure theory (a theory that will reoccur in every later Book).
Similarly, we tend to overlook an eight-part argument the sober Xunzi carefully builds
through lengthy pronouncements on pleasure that presume the desirability of using
our inherent desires to form a pleasurable second nature.48 Further reflection leads
us to see the prevalence of this discourse as great good sense, for nearly every piece
of writing preserved either in the received traditions or in excavated texts reflects the
preoccupations of the governing elite, where men in power agreed that if power is
pleasure, then the way pleasure is managed has direct consequences on the nature
of power itself.49
The Politics of Pleasure Theory
At their most crude, those at the apex of power were often at a loss to discover what
proportion of carrots to sticks would best motivate men and mobilize resources. At
least since the time of Mozi (ca. 470ca. 390 b.c.) and his followers, to postulate a

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generalized human nature or human condition in the ruler and his subjects was
simply to open discussions about the range of methods available to the governing
elite to induce a sense of community among peers and inferiors, in hopes of thereby
forestalling all manner of destructive behavior. In other words, analyses of human
nature were the necessary preludes to considering the all-important question of motivation, especially for those holding to the belief that when one acts for the sake
ofones own physical person, the empire is [simply] a means to ones goal.50 Certainly, the later Mohists and a range of Zhanguo masters (zhuzi ) saw the focus
on pleasure and desire as fundamental to every human being, even if few in society
had the luxury to freely choose among goods and courses of action. For them, To act
on account of something is to take account of all one knows and judge it [as in a
scale] by ones desires.51
For the sake of argument, a few thinkers took the controversial stance that commoners enjoying far fewer resources might find it easier than those in command of
resources to decide which pleasures to indulge in or refrain from. For instance, one
extreme opinion said:
The people there have neither wishes nor desires. They own everything naturally. They
know neither the joy of living nor the distaste for death. Consequently, they have no such
thing as premature death. They know neither love of self nor detachment from others.
Consequently, neither affection nor hatred exists for them. They do not turn away from
others or rebel, nor do they turn toward others and obey. Thus profit and loss have no
existence for them. They have nothing they love or to which they feel attached; nothing
they fear or shy away from.52

This No Desires vision (repugnant, if not downright incredible) may have been
concocted originally merely as a goad for unruly rulers, given many others loud insistence that when supplies of pleasures were finite in number, people were all the
more apt to struggle over their possession.53 Such abstractions aside, the more pressing problem was that, as a rule, the more powerful the person, the harder it was to
induce the will to moderate or refine the desires. After all, men were wont to frame
the question What was power for, if not to gratify the senses and drives?54 The most
ambitious rulers tended to seek to control the uncontrollable: they wanted the ability
to roll heaven-and-earth in the palm of ones hands,55 and to avoid death altogether. But the pursuit of grandiose gratifications often proved unwise, even ridiculous.56 Thoughtful counselors therefore sought to dissuade those in power from trying
to achieve this level of power over others. When pressed, the bottom line for most
thinkers was this: ordinary people craved pleasure,57 and those in charge doubtless
enjoyed their privileged access to multiple types of sensual pleasure,58 despite the
assorted dangers that accompanied over-excitement, addictions, and their ensuing
outflows, the worst being indulgence in pleasures in ways that left them open to
sexual predators, slanderers, and sycophants. The problem was, a given ruler or officer sated with the flavors of grain and meat and made merry by the sounds of bells
and chimes, might be so entranced that he became oblivious to perennial dangers,
with the result that he virtually invited calamity.59 In addition, overuse of the senses

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weakened the body, including ones faculties of reasoning. Too much merrymaking,
in any case, was apt to meet with sorrow, and over-consumption (the very mark of
social distinction) could end in cruel sneers.
Those in power had better learn to know men and then know themselves,
reducing and refining their pleasures in a noble effort to sustain their native capacities. Knowing men and advertising that knowledgethese were the first arduous
steps along the way that would finally lead to doing away with the immoderate
desires and powerful memories that substantially harmed people, that is, the pleasures that know no bounds, the angers that do not abate, the restless wishes, the
sexual repression....60 Reduction and refinement of the appetites, coupled with
delayed gratification, would then do the trick quite nicely. The wise ruler would
not let the inborn inclinations to delight, pleasure, worry, and sorrow move him
(dong zhi ), except by rule (yi ze ).61 After all, it was the larger convulsions that did the most harm to superiors and inferiors alike. Having learned
these simple injunctions, wise power holders could then display their likes and
dislikes so as to show the common people what they valued,62 spreading the
wisdom around.
It was vitally important that those in power not err in the likes and dislikes created by their own evaluations of things and people, since those around them consciously and unconsciously imitated those same likes and dislikes, which might
generate heightened security or mistrust.63 Far-sighted administrators therefore
struggled to elucidate how to apply their insights into pleasure to the quotidian task
of ruling others. Xunzi, for example, devised one famous paradox whereby those in
service who wanted to live a life of ease could be made to see the necessity of
risking death on the battlefield for the sake of their ruler and promotion.64 The genius of such early prescriptions lay in their profound recognition that the inclinations
to pursue pleasure can never be fully suppressed, nor the desires eliminated before
death; unnatural asceticism was pointless, if only because the inclinations and the
desires could themselves be made to advance the good, if properly directed.65 Natural desires for pleasures could even be fully satisfied, so long as those in charge were
smart and determined enough to use every tool at their disposal to promote civilizing
efforts.
Let us watch Xunzi or a later disciple describing the sage-kings invention of
music:
Now people by nature have blood and qi, and a conscious xin, but they lack any [innate]
constants with respect to their inclinations toward sorrow and pleasure, delight and
anger.... The sage kings, mightily ashamed of these chaotic tendencies, instituted the
elevated sounds of the elegantiae and the hymns. These were rooted in human nature.
One could examine them for their regular expressions, and so were instituted the ritual
ceremonies. The [sages] music joined with the harmony of the qi in life and led the
peoples conduct via the Five Constants. It caused them to go to yang or yin, and not be
scattered or brittle or unduly clotted. The firm and resolute did not then become angry,
and the weak did not display any fear, with the result that the four full expressions [of the
emotions?] cohered at center and yet could be expressed outside [with no harm]. Each

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then rested in its rightful place, without detracting from the other. This was sufficient to
move the good hearts of human beings, and to prevent the bad qi from gaining a hold on
them [their bodies].66

So if the most consuming pleasures were no better than vermin eating away at the
vitals,67 there were ways to remedy the disastrous consequences of giving free rein
to the desires.68 An optimistic theory claimed:
It is true, of course, that it is the Five Tones that make people deaf, and the Five Tastes that
dull the palate. But if a person is moderate in developing justifiable inclinations and he
succeeds in freeing his person from inhibitions, this will not shorten his lifespan but
rather increase it!69

The deeper one delves into the early sources, the more obvious becomes an
important thread in pleasure theory: the warning presented to those in power that
they are not to be enslaved by their desires, but must rather work to counteract the
bodys natural impulses to respond indiscriminately to countless phenomena gen
erating innumerable desires. Equality seldom, if ever, figured in discussions of pleasure;70 the frequent calls for reciprocity in giving pleasure were quite a different
thing. Recalling rhetoric from other classical civilizations more reliant upon slave
economies,71 a typical early text puts it this way: if the direction of our wills depends
overmuch upon external things, pleasures, and practices, the inclinations (qing
) will be pulled this way and that by external things seizing upon them.72 Thus,
to call a person witless (yu ) was tantamount to saying that he had no master
(i.e., that he lacked self-mastery),73 while to say that a man lacked sufficient will or
commitments (zhi ) was to allege that he lacked the quality that defined nobility,
an abundance of courage.74 It followed that to be seduced by others (you yu ren
) is a condition to be avoided at all costs,75 because plainly, for a man to rely
on others is not as good as relying on himself; plainly, what others do for one is
never as good as doing it for oneself.76 In essence, to be enslaved by desire is to
forget that the true utility of things and relations lies in their potential to enhance the
occasions for serene pleasure-taking that will not undermine position, person, or
family,77 now or within the foreseeable future. The state of conflict arising from the
autonomic or insufficiently deliberate responses tugging against carefully considered
inclinations must be quelled, lest it harm the body and eventually increase dissatisfaction with the worlds abundant pleasures.78
It would be silly as well as wrong to downplay the differences expressed by the
thinkers competing for the courts favor over long centuries, imputing perfect unanimity to their presentations. One such debate has already figured briefly above,
pitting the advocates of No Desires against those promoting Refined Desires. Logical
objections, of course, could be raised against any and all parts of the basic hedonistic
justification for the good, such that most persuaders scrambled to evade the grim
implications of Yang Zhus insights.79 But bracingly, most of these thinkers made few,
if any absolute claims; they only stated that appropriate conduct undertaken after
careful calculations about personal, social, and cosmic consequences had a much
better chance on average than bad conduct, when it came to leading a good life of

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maximum pleasure and minimum distress. Once that point was conceded, per
suaders could easily get their intended audiences to accept the allied point: that
wiseadministrators could encourage others to choose to act properly by a combination of techniques, not the least of which was their self-fashioning as exemplary
models. Judging ones own commendable example to be a pleasurable display could
be intensely gratifying, and if a power holders deliberate model was propagated
for wider consumption,80 the ripple effect of his actions could manifest themselvesona grander scale. Thus would self love and the social [become] one and
thesame.81
An implicit promise is made, then, in the early texts: that a single person in society (never construed as an autonomous individual), with the help of societys
teachers (living or dead), has the potential to demonstrate an estimable unity of
purpose, by which he or she would remain whole and intact (quan ), retaining
perfect integrity, regardless of the pulls (yin ) and leakages (xie or lou )
occasioned by the excessive or inappropriate desires that threaten two-facedness,
internal conflict, debility, and worse. By definition, the intact person (a sage by
another name) may (sometimes, at least) achieve the ideal state where self-regard and
self-reliance (even sprezzatura) go hand-in-hand with the keenest awareness of the
unfolding situation and a readiness to engage productively with it; the sage-rulers
responses (gan ) reliably comport with the realities of the situation. In the most
common metaphor, he is like the archer whose arrow always hits the target, but
other metaphors of technique are common. Dubbed spontaneous (ziran ), his
activities are carried out reflexively, with perfect virtuosity, even as commitments are
reoriented, he being free at last from the agonies encountered during the often prolonged or arduous period spent in preparation for the task at hand.82
The Vocabulary of Pleasures Distinct to Early China
As we have seen, the early discussions of physiology agree that making contact with
external things, people, or events stimulates the senses (gan ), whereupon the
heart, or xin, evaluates these externalities and the dispositions that they produce. The
texts in classical Chinese, regardless of type, typically employ two key words in such
descriptions, le and xi , when discussing the full range of human responses to
the myriad things. Less often does other vocabulary associated with pleasurable feelings appear.83 That none of the pleasure words map conveniently onto our modern
notions of happiness may prove to peoples satisfaction the folly on insisting on
that anachronistic translation.
Because pleasure theory in early China is so ubiquitous, but so many have up
tonow overlooked it entirely, this section will outline the precise vocabulary items
capable of delineating the very wide range of feelings and responses from short-term
delight (xi , yue )84 to addiction to a certain pleasure (ni , yin , dan ) to
approval (hao ), in contrast to the relatively impoverished vocabulary that exists for
several other responses or movements (gan ), including worry.85 Vocabulary
pairsle (sustaining pleasure in relations) and xi (short-term delights) ver-

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sus dan (addictions) and wan (play)illustrate not only the wide spectrum
of human responses posited in early China but also the connotations and limitations
associated with each item. Notably, many words imply specific durations for pleasurable experiences, and often they take different direct objects, and assume a different
ethical valence as well.
Let us begin with le , to this authors mind the most important of all words. In
almost every instance le describes the relational pleasures that develop only through
long-term, constructive associations.86 These are the pleasures that one can rely
upon: taking pleasure in books (shu ) or in learning (xue ), in friends (you ), in
ones lot (fen ), in ones homeland (tu ), in ones profession or heritage (ye ),
in the arts, especially music and poetry (yue ), and in Dao or Tian .87 These
are the pleasures that sustain rather than consume. They restore the spirits, evoke
measured responses to external stimuli that do not roil the senses but instead refine
ones capacity for appreciation and heighten ones taste for reciprocity and communion. Such pleasures replace dread of change with a measure of trust in and affection
for either the human or cosmic processes, or both. Each of these pleasures presupposes self-regulation; nonetheless, the initial requirement for self-discipline and a
measure of accommodation becomes less burdensome once the person realizes that
a specific sort of engagement represents the obvious path to a more intense mutuality. For this reason, the feeling described as le forestalls weariness and the sense of
defeat; asa saying goes, Pleasure precludes a sense of bitterness.88 The duration for
le seems integral to its effectiveness, for the refusal to use le for either brief delights
(no matter how intense) or for ethically neutral or even immoral activities (using
people as things, for example) distinguishes le from xi.89 (See Table 1.)
Xi registers short-term delighta theoretically neutral state, whose expression
equates with a level of damage (or not) that can only be assessed after calculating
how often the person expends the self through movements with what sorts of objects in what sorts of activities. Xi, an expression revealed readily on the face90 (when
it does not erupt in laughter), often simply describes liking to do X,91 when X can be
anything from swordplay to dancing, composing a poem, going to war, resting after
hard work, or stumping others in debates. Xi is the feeling one has in response to good
food and good wine at banquets, to whatever goes easily and well. Xi is a word used
for getting possessions or rewards, or the pride of possession or sense of novelty to be
had from luxuries, curiosities, and baubles,92 also self-congratulatory moods and
airs.93 One early text describes it in terms of a correspondence between inner and
outer,94 and that fits our expectations based on the physiological descriptions.
Nothing is inherently wrong, of course, with delight or brevity, and that is why it
is best to regard xi as ethically neutral. I can take innocent delight in many things
and many activitiesand that delight need not do harm to myself or others. Still, the
small gains associated with such sources of delight pale beside the significant pleasures associated with le ().95 And since it is possible to take equal delight in fine weather and in a narrow escape from just
punishment, the term delight does not necessarily bespeak a profound transformation or commitment. A decidedly casual or unreflective air hovers over the set of

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Table 1. xi vs. le
xi (delight) and near synonym yue
(gratify, gratifying), expressions usually
visible on the face

le , relational pleasures developed

through long-term, constructive
commitments, whose strength is often
invisible

Objects that delight: (b) fine horses and dogs;

(c)lovely women; (d) amusing dwarfs and jesters;
(e) sumptuous clothes; (f) exquisite foods and
wines; (g) captivating music; (h) baubles and
luxuries (what Han Fei calls metals, jades, toys,
and beautiful objects). In sum, commodities and
commodified persons; sensual gratification; pride
in ownership; small perceived gains:
, . (Yi Zhou shu 1 [])

Objects that typically create and sustain pleasure

include taking pleasure in books (shu ) or in
learning (xue ), in friends (you ), in making
or in appreciating music (yue ), and in Dao
or Tian (whether an anthropomorphic
Heaven, cosmic operations, fate, or the way
things are).

No profound transformation or commitment is

associated with this ephemeral delight; often a
short burst of intense feeling cannot be sustained.

Over time, engaging in such relations profoundly

transforms the persons dispositions (qing )
and commitments (zhi )

Antonyms for xi include anger (n ) most often,

but also fear (ju ), bei or ai (feelings of
loss), hatred or resentment (hen ) toward
others; these emotions consume the person

Antonyms for le most often include bu an

(uneasiness, insecurity) or you (cares,
worries), but not physical pain; these
emotions consume the person.

Potentially destructive consequences: Now the

things that move people have no limit, so if
peoples likes and dislikes are not regulated,
thenwhen things come in contact [with people],
people will be changed fundamentally by things.
But to have humans changed by things destroys
the innate principles and patterns and exhausts
peoples desires [meaning, it leads to
exhaustion], and the condition where people
are enslaved by things.

The potential benefits of engaging in le

relational pleasures are described in this way:
Pleasure precludes a sense of bitterness,
(Shuoyuan, 7.14/49/28, in CHANT: le zhi wu
ku ) so life seems worth living, despite
the inevitable vagaries of human existence and
the sure prospect of death. In contrast to brief
delights, long-term pleasures by definition are
those pleasures that can be savored in
retrospect as much or more as in the
immediate experience, because they construct
relations of trust that will prove dependable in
crises. The desires can be fulfilled without
either too much leakage or enslavement.

inclinations covered by the word delightand hence xis associations with neg
ligence, lack of deliberation, even moral benightedness. That explains the early leitmotif found in so many of our sources: when good fortune comes, the noble man
isnot delighted [in contrast to his moral inferiors];96 while the fool takes illogical
delight in a stroke of good luck (which he misconstrues as a sign of his own skill,
favor, or greatness), the wise distrust luck, lest it render them arrogant and inattentive.97 Then, too, one can be delighted by manipulating other people, by judging men
according to ones whims, or by treating clients as pets or commodities to be col208

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lected.98 Worse still, one can take delight in anothers sorrow, anothers death, anothers punishment, and anothers degradation or downfallin short, anything
deemed likely to result inpersonal advantage, if wise pleasure calculations succumb
to wrong.99 Xi is thus the word used in connection with an underhanded or fraudulent scheme to curry favor with a higher-up100such actions likely to call down calamity upon oneself. So while le cannot take a negative object, xi can.
The sheer number of activities that elicit bursts of delight suggest a second problem: one cannot easily anchor so ephemeral a feeling firmly to a set of principles or
social roles; needless to say, what the ordinary person delights in is often at variance
with the preferences typical of a worthier and more refined person.101 It is, moreover,
a matter of no little consequence that there are occurring so many movements out
to put the object of delight in contact with the senses, absent reliable forms of recompense. After all, xi often describes having a good time or whatever goes ones way,
whether or not that conduces to ones edification or development.102 Of all the ways
that delight can go wrong, then, the most dangerous is when a voracious appetite for
short-term delights deadens ones sense of the value of long-term commitments and
obligations. Short-term delight becomes a particular problem for the ruler, because
he is to set an impressive example of circumspection for his people, who rush to
emulate him in whatever he does.103
The antonyms partnered with le are usually uneasiness or insecurity (buan
), or cares and worries (you ). Even if no physical pain or loss is registered, internal anxieties are seen to prevent the person from experiencing pleasures to the full. Notably, many texts, including the excavated Five Conducts
(Wuxing ) texts from Guodian and Mawangdui, leap quickly from buan
to bule (not pleasurable) to wude (without compelling charisma), just
aswe would expect.104 Antonyms for xi include anger (nu ) most often, but also
fear (ju ), feelings of loss (bei or ai ), and hatred or resentment (hen )
all feelings that physically drain a persons vitality.105 (It is quite possible, however,
for a person to feel a frisson of co-mingled fear and delight, doubling the drain on
resources.)106
A very long passage in Sima Qians Shijiborrowing from both Xunzi and
Zhuangzirecaps much of the pleasure theory already discussed:
Humans in life are at rest; that is heavens [i.e., peoples innate] nature. When they are
moved by things and motivated to act, that is the demeanor of that nature.107 Things arrive
at [ones physical person through sensory perceptions], one uses knowledge or consciousness to assess them, and only afterwards do likes and dislikes take form in it [the
heart]. When likes and dislikes are unregulated within, then understanding and conscious
thought are seduced by externalities and one cannot return to oneself [the stable state,]
and then the innate patterns and principles [in human nature] are extinguished.
Now things moving people have no limit, so if peoples likes and dislikes have no
regulation, then when things come in contact [with people], people will be changed
fundamentally by things. But when humans are changed by things, this destroys the innate principles and patterns and exhausts peoples desires [meaning, the full gamut is run
through, leading to exhaustion]. Therefore, there arises the recalcitrant and deceptive
heart, and excessive and rebellious actions. That is why the strong oppress the weak and

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the many tyrannize the few; why the clever deceive the stupid, and the brave make the
cowardly cower. That is why the old and young, orphaned and widowed do not get their
proper place. This leads to great chaos. [Rites and music] are the means by which to correctly align ones social contacts ().108

If classical Chinese texts forge such fine distinctions, we would expect to see the
same care taken with the verbs expressing a longing for an object or a person. And
that is precisely what we do find. For instance, having a taste or yen (shi ) for
something or someone is not exactly the same as desiring (yu ) something or someone, although early word lists like the Shiming (second century a.d.) tightly link taste,
pleasure, and desire. Similarly, addiction to a certain pleasure (ni , yin , dan ),
with the force of habit behind it, was deemed much stronger and potentially more
dangerous than mere approval (hao ). The Shiming, for example, described addiction as developing a taste for and quickening pleasure in (). In most
early sources, addictions, tastes, and desires are all depicted as horses racing to disaster (i.e., as a fast track to personal calamity), in part because there is no natural
limit to peoples cravings, especially when the person enjoys great power and wealth.
But, as early as Xunzi in the late third century b.c., and especially with Yang Xiong
(53 b.c.a.d. 18) and his followers, increasingly explicit and cogent arguments cast
conscious cultivation of ones person via the Classics and masterworks as simply
another, vastly superior kind of taste capable of offsetting the deleterious effects
ofbaser desires and addictions (shi yu or shi hao).109 In the Liji, for example, one
chapter has Kongzi urging his disciples to develop a craving for learning (shi xue
).110 Study, needless to say, had the signal advantage of distracting a person from
the outside world, thereby reducing the strength and number of his desires.111
Elsewhere, rituals figure as means to curb the desires by educating and elevating
them, until such point as the person realizes the final, ultimate insight that cultivation
is a pleasurable end in itself.112 The watchwords selectivity (ze ) and satiation
(yi ) emphasized the hard work and long training that went into becoming a true
connoisseur of good behavior, as well as the rewards of socially constructive be
havior.113 The consummate artfulness of the refined life, in these theories, culminates
in the ultimate goal of circumspection (in both its senses of looking at things from
all sides and prudential action), which more than repays any trouble taken.114
By a similar process, the word wan , originally signifying play, came gradually to be transferred to all the long-term relational pleasures. In the early texts wan
(possibly first used with playing an instrument)115 usually signifies a careless toying
with people and things, a delight in their tactile surfaces.116 By the late Western Han,
however, the Confucian reformers in Yang Xiongs circle increasingly seek to appropriate wan to signify the keen intellectual pleasures of rolling ideas around in the
mind and perusing good books that spark the imagination. By midEastern Han times,
Zhang Heng even claims that sages can play with the ideas, perhaps even the
substance of the Mystery or Way, as well as the cosmic forces and yin and yang qi.117
There is more vocabulary of pleasure in the pre-Buddhist sources, including kai
/ (magnanimous, expansive), xiang / (to enjoy, to savor, originally

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used of the ancestors pleased reaction to offerings of the finest sacrificial meats),
yu (to be amused, to amuse),118 xin (appreciate or appreciative, rather
than cheerfulness), yu (at ease, contented), yi (sated, satisfied), and
so on. None of these words appears all that often in the pre-Han and Han texts,
though frequency climbs in the post-Han period. What is striking in the early Chinese
texts is, first, the propensity for pleasure words to specify the time frames for their
ensuing experiences as well as the likelihood whether a response will sustain or consume; also, the trend whereby some few expressions originally reserved for carefree,
even careless, activities came, by the late Western Han, to be associated with the
stylish conduct associated formerly with le, the sublime pleasures to be had from
sagely action.119
Implications
This essays Introduction promised an ending attuned to the comparative mode of
Philosophy East and West; a brief discussion below therefore takes up the question of
why the early texts in classical Chinese (regardless of genre, there being no fixed
genre distinctions before Liu Xies Wenxin diaolong , ca. 500) seem to
this author to be in so much better shape than so many modern Western philosophical texts that we comb for validation. The reasons I adduce are these: (1) the classical
Chinese texts give the simplest possible explication for sensations and feelings experienced by humans; (2) these texts do not require us to posit such ludicrous constructions as an autonomous individual before analyzing ethical considerations; (3)
these texts do not rely upon the classic forms of guilt or shame to motivate those
in and out of power (though the texts acknowledge that exemplary people will feel
badly when they have harmed others, whether the fault has been ascribed to them or
not);120 and (4) these texts do not generate a problem of moving from is to ought,
one of the many problems bequeathed to us from Hume.
As I have discussed points 2 and 3 elsewhere, and point 1 at some length above,
I turn now to point 4. A. C. Graham, in a classic article, Taoist Spontaneity and the
Dichotomy of Is and Ought, famously considered the problem of is and ought
in relation to the Zhuangzi.121 The transition from is to ought, as readers will recall,
is essentially the problem of how non-normative claims about the world (the fact of
rain or how things are, to cite Allan Gibbards influential essay, Truth and Correct
Belief122) can possibly support or generate normative conclusions (one should take
an umbrellai.e., claims about what to do and like). Gibbard feels the need to
devise a hypothetical person called I+, who has all the facts or objective knowledge of the situation he is about to act within, in contrast to the usual person, who
has only subjective [i.e., partial] knowledge of the facts. Gibbard concedes that in
real life, your real questions ... are what to do on the basis of information you
have.123 Yet he bemoans that partial state of awareness, which he dubs primitive,
whereas my Chinese thinkers, I believe, would regard it as a constant, a realistic
assessment.124 Gibbard registers the important point that beliefs, at least in the
realworld, are costly in terms of time and effort, as true belief (defined as high

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credence both in a proposition and its negation) requires that the thinking person
pursue the implications of his beliefs, operating on the basis of these beliefs. Moreover, Gibbard believes, it would be silly to form sharp degrees of belief concerningeverything,125 if only because then so much time and effort would otherwise
be spent in trying to excise either incoherent or contradictory beliefs. (Compare
thehazards stemming from all those unrewarding movements out posited by the
classical-era texts in Chinese.)
The best we can possibly do, then, is to operate in ways that combine what Gibbard calls a subjective sense of ought with hypothetical imperatives (If you would
escape the fire, you must climb out the window!), a sentence pattern that first-year
readers of classical Chinese know very well indeed from X ze Y.126 What this suggests to me is that many, if not most, statements in classical Chinese are not meant to
be read as truth statements; far more commonly they are to be read in the same
manner as Gibbards hypothetical imperatives, which outline what is likely to rep
resent the best course of action in an unfolding situation whose final outcome cannot
be foretold. More and more, parsers of classical Chinese note that most persuasions
are praxis-guiding, highly contextualized suggestions. Needless to say, the foregoing
is the very reason why so many Western-trained philosophers, East or West, disdain
nearly all propositional content put forward in early China, believing it to assign too
important a place to personal dispositions and predilections (the subjectivity that
Gibbard thinks primitive or inferior), or to context and pragmatic considerations
rather than higher truths.
This author, on the other hand, cannot accept Gibbards bland assumption that
rationality (undefined) will surely prevail, once a person knows a sufficient number
of facts about the situation in which she may be compelled to act or choose to act.
As Gibbard so eloquently acknowledges, even a perfect objective knowledge of facts
cannot provide a person with a perfect knowledge of societal and personal constructs (including relative value),127 unless full knowledge means more than knowledge of all the factsalready elusiveand rather all the values of a given society,
this being both a messy and an improbable conflation of facts and values, in the
Western view. If no person exists in the world with a perfect knowledge of facts and
values, it doesnt help much to posit a perfect judge I+ who will be able to represent
a bridge between subjective and objective oughts.
Early thinkers in the area we now call China, by contrast, posit a world in
which all people act out of personal dispositions and predilections, though these
dispositions and predilections and the deliberations based on them can be radically
improved, so that they are in greater conformity with the prevailing patterns of the
social and cosmic worlds. The early thinkers I study routinely accept (perhaps always?) the necessity to act upon what Gibbard calls non-ultimate oughts.128 Not
believing they will ever have perfect information, either about their own make-ups
orthe world outside, they are unconcerned with epistemic oughts (oughts that tell
us what to believe in light of things we have no way of knowing).129 For this reason
alone, they are in manifestly better shape than the modern Western philosophers in
the canon.

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Notes
I would like to thank Henry Rosemont, Jr., and two anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments on the manuscript for this article.
1Zuozhuan , Lord Xiang 31.5. All citations to this text observe the standard
paragraphs of the Chunqiu zhengyi , which match those in Yang
Bojun , annot., Chunqiu Zuozhuan yizhu (Beijing:
Zhonghua Shuju, 1981; rev. 2000).
2Zuozhuan, Lord Xiang 30.13a.
3As is said in the excavated Xing zi ming chu , strips 89, p. 179:
learning and emulation sometimes drive it [the physical person]. All references are to Guodian Chu mu zhujian (ca. 300 b.c.e.), ed. Jing
men Shi Bowuguan (Jingmen: Wenwu Press, 1998).
4Classical era here refers to the pre-Buddhist era, i.e., before a.d. 316, given
how little Buddhism colors discourse before the fall of the north in 316 to
nomadic groups. Since we have few reliable sources that date to a time before
ca. 300 b.c. (and few of the inscriptions we have answer to this purpose), I use
the six centuries from 300 b.c. to a.d. 300 for this study.
5Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body (New York: Zone Books,
1999), p. 1. Contrast Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Mean
ingful Life (New York: Norton, 2009), which assumes universal expressions for
the emotions, including happiness, to be part of the basic human equipment
developed during evolution. The works of Antonio Damasio also presuppose
a universal human being having the same emotional equipment and physiological processes. To date, the assumption of the universal human being is
standard in the neurosciences and psychology.
6E.g., David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2006).
7See Marshall D. Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Re
flections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of
Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the
Human Condition (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008). Sahlins has persuasively argued, however, that the term human nature, where it implies
inborn flaw, is a Western construction.
8See, e.g., Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009).
9Li Zehou , Lunyu jindu (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu, 1998; reprint, Beijing: Shenghuo, Dushu, Xinzhi Sanlian Shudian, 2004). I suspect this
explains why they evince little interest in pain, regarding it as something that
comes to every person during sickness and death, and thus not liable to
human control.

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10Contrast Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Under

mining America (New York: Picador, 2010), for example. Classical Chinese
has words for to anticipate a good outcome, but hope unattached to a
precise outcome of specific activities does not exist. The closest word in Chinese to hope is wang , which is not at all the same thing.
11For a detailed analysis, see The Pleasures of Returning Home, in Michael
Nylan, Ordinary, Pleasures in Early China (forthcoming).
12A passage in the Taizu shun chapter of Liu Ans Huainanzi does
discuss this problem, concluding that pleasure inheres at least as much in the
attitude of the person as in the object responded to. For all Huainanzi references, see Liu Wendian , Huainan Honglie jijie (1926;
reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1989). For a good review of aesthetic perceptions in the Zhanguo and Han, see anon., Zhongguo meixueshi ziliao
xuanbian (Taibei: Mingwen, 1983) (hereafter Zhongguo
meixue), vol. 1, p. 105.
13See Mencius 6A/7 (D. C. Lau, trans., Mencius [Harmondsworth: Penguin],
p.164). Mencius insists that ethical taste is a natural feature of human awareness, as fundamental and as physical as the sense pleasures of the mouth,
theears, and eyes, though it is not based on simple experiences, but aestheticized experiences. Proper sensation is ... a matter of perception in
accordance with inherited standards of beauty (see David Schaberg, Social
Pleasures in Early Chinese Historiography and Philosophy, in The Limits of
Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. Christina
Shuttleworth Kraus [Leiden: Brill, 1999], p. 21). All of the Zhanguo thinkers
under review are concerned with formulating broad guidelines for political
elites, rather than with the psychosocial aspects of eccentricity or perversity in
pleasure-seeking and pleasure-getting. (Xunzi notes the existence of perverse
people, but, as he avers, general rules for society cannot be formulated with
primary reference to them.)
14This is true, regardless of anachronistic attempts to categorize them as Con
fucians, Legalists, or Daoists. I have argued in another publication (Yang
Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning [New Haven, CT:
American Oriental Society, 2011]) that many of the transmitted texts we call
Zhanguo were heavily revised in the Han.
15Adapting Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of
California Press), pp. 20, 251 (italics mine). Williams speaks of the Ancient
Greeks, I of those thinkers (nearly all of whom were policy advisors at court)
writing in classical Chinese.
16This is a point made by Li Zehou, in Lunyu jindu, and also by Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper, 1972).

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17Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber: Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, Includ
ing Womens Solo Meditation Techniques (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992), p. 44.
18Guodian Chu mu zhujian, Xing zi ming chu, strip 1, p. 179, says: In general, even though humans have their basic natures, their hearts have no fixed
commitments. They await contact with things before acting/moving/being
moved; they anticipate gratifications before they act; they await practice, before [their habits] are fixed (
).
19Yin/yang is tied to qi early, and wuxing only later, as the excavated medical
treatises and theoretical texts show. One can see the collected work of Vivian
Lo and Li Jianmin, e.g. Manuscripts, Received Texts, and the Healing Arts, in
Chinas Early Empires: A Reappraisal, supplement to The Cambridge History
of China, ed. Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), pp. 367397.
20See the Mengzi, the Zhuangzi, and the Fayan , for many examples. This
notion appears as late as Wang Anshis (d. 1186) essay on rites and
music (Li yue lun ). See Linchuan wenji , juan 66/4b11a
(e-Siku quanshu). In most early sources, addictions, tastes, and desires are
generally depicted as a horse racing to disaster/calamity (meaning, the fast
track to personal calamity). See Han Ying , Hanshi waizhuan
9/19. See the standard paragraphs preserved in the Harvard-Yenching Sinological Institute series and in James Robert Hightower, trans., Han shih wai
chuan: Han Yings Illustrations of the Didactic Application of the Classic of
Songs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). The same metaphor is
repeated in Liu Xiang , comp., Shuoyuan/Shuiyuan 10.30/84/11
(Jingshen). All references are to Shuoyuan zhuzi suoyin (Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 1992).
21See Michael Nylan, Beliefs about Seeing: Optics and Moral Technologies in
Early China, Asia Major 21, no. 1 (2008):89132.
22All these terms can be expressed by the single term gan , as in the phrase
gandong .
23See, e.g., Shiji 25.1206: . But other passages seem
to distinguish qi from the inclinations. See Hanshu 22.1207 (Beijing:
Zhonghua Shuju, 1962), which speaks of people containing the qi of heaven
and earth, yin and yang, and hence the inclinations toward delight and anger,
sorrow and pleasure (), which passage
separates the qi from the inclinations.
24See Yang Xiong , Fayan 3/3. All references are to Fayan zhu ,
ed. Han Jing (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1992), which maintains the standard paragraphing.

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25See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontanal Press/
Harper-Collins, 1985), chapter 7.
26Not just the autonomic responses, but any responses that do not truly reflect
deliberation.
27See the Xing zi ming chu essay, for example.
28Hanshu 75.3168, correlating the directions with characteristic inclinations: .
29E.g., Analects 15.2: (In adversity, the noble man is
steadfast; the petty person, overwhelmed, for sure!where overwhelmed
is literally flooded).
30There are elaborate recipes for the production of elixirs of life, either through
the ingestion of external products (plants, minerals, etc.) or through internal
disciplines, but not much faith is put in such recipes in the Zhanguo and Han
texts. (Note: by an analogy to leakages from the body, ruinous outlays and
expenditures are said to weaken the realm.)
31See Shuoyuan 16.61/127/25 (Tan Cong). The Discussions in the White Tiger
Hall (Bohu tong ), for example, urges that all men but the ruler take
only one wife, since this is the best means of restricting their indulgence in
sex. See Bohu tong, section 40 (Jiaqu ). Many texts associated excess or
lack of restraint with treasonous activitiesnot only because the vileness of
harem politics (which often overturned supposedly settled laws of succession)
drew attention to itself, but also because excess, treason, and treachery were
all cast as subversions of the natural order of things. For another piece of
medical testimony along these lines, see the Zuozhuan, Lord Zhao 1, recounting three diagnoses of Lord Ping of Jins illness (by diviners, by Zichan, and by
Physician He from Qin).
32See the talk of dongyao xin , recorded in an edict by Yuandi, recorded
in Ban Gu , et al., Hanshu (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1962), for the
year Yongguang 4 (39 b.c.), winter (Basic Annals). Cf. Lshi chunqiu
5.3 (Yi le). All references are to Lshi chunqiu zhuzi suoyin (Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 1994).
33Yanzi chunqiu 1.9/4/20. All references are to Yanzi chunqiu zhuzi
suoyin (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1993).
34Yan Kejun (17621843). Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han sanguo
liuchao wen (1836) (Beijing: Zhonghua, reprint
1958), 1/448.
35The nature of human beings is inclined to equilibrium, but wants and desires
to harm it (Huainanzi 11/95/29).

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36Voyeurism, in the Chinese model, was still touching with the eyes. See
Nylan, Beliefs about Seeing, op. cit. Optics and Moral Technologies in
Early China.
37The case of Han Wudi, Lady Li, and Li Yannian demonstrates the complexity
of describing what some would call sex workers in the ancient past. Masturbation seems to have held no particular allure in a society where it was not
forbidden or considered shameful.
38But that solitary pleasures are suspicious and presumably immoral is made
clear not only in Book 1 of the Mencius but also in Shiji 28.13971404, which
censures Wudis solitary pleasures. See Shiji 126.31983199, which speaks
of solitary pleasures tending toward excess. Cf. Hanshi waizhuan 72.3072,
which speaks disparagingly of merely amusing oneself ().
39Hence, the injunction in Analects 8/19 against cultivating wen zhang ,
unless those cultural forms be used in the service of a well-identified and
worthy aim.
40Analects 16/7.
41Lshi chunqiu 4.4/20/11 (Wu tu).
42Presumably this underlies the Yi Zhou shu 2/2/6 (Ming xun jie) statement
that a good ruler is to amuse them through pleasures, and make them cautious through rituals (). Xunzis chapter On Ritual,
speaks of the desire for spectacle as one of the most basic human needs.
According to Xunzi, sumptuary regulations were yet another institution that
could be manipulated so as to achieve three entirely different aims: (1) inequality temporary, (2) inequality changeable, and (3) inequality ultimately for
greater division and fairer division of wealth.
43See Okada Isao , Gen Kan kanch teiry ximin saik
, Sundai shigaku 44 (July 1978): 106133. Clearly, what
was needed, in part, was a willingness to redistribute resources in ways that
allowed for the construction of social differences in non-destructive ways.
Tooradical a redistribution would work against a correlation of the status hierarchy with moral values, and a failure to plausibly assert that correlation
would undermine moral education in turn. Conflicts do not map neatly onto
public versus private uses of wealth, as much as the redistributive mechanisms
for putting private wealth to public uses.
44These thinkers freely acknowledge the tension between pleasure as an immediate feeling and pleasure as the end result of a constant struggle against impediments to the pleasure.
45The opposition of long-term versus short-term gratification became the explicit subject of many passages like the tale of Gong Yixiu , a native of

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Lu who served as prime minister under Lord Mu of Lu (r. 415383 b.c.). Gong
loved the taste of fish, but resisted a bribe of fish, because that would end in
dismissal from office. See Han Feizi 35/109/8 (Wai qu shuo, B). All
references are to Han Feizi zhuzi suoyin , ed. D. C. Lau (Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 2000).
46Here I am arguing that the rhetorical necessity perhaps dictated the failure to
distinguish goal from capacity and activity.
47Shuoyuan 19.8/162/69 (Xiu wen).
48Kwong-loi Shun, Mencius and early Chinese Thought (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997), where pleasure, joy, or even happiness is missing (as the index
shows); for the Xunzi see Nylan, The Politics of Pleasure, Asia Major, n.s.,
14, no. 1 (2001) [actual publication date 2004]: 73124.
49James N. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of
Classical Athens (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 282.
50Lshi chunqiu 21.4/141/6: .
51A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science (London: SOAS, 1978),
A75.
52Liezi 2.1314; trans. mod. from A. C. Graham, trans., The Book of Lieh-tz
(London: Murray, 1960), pp. 3435.
53Of interest is Sima Qians moneymakers chapter, which identifies the
greatest threat to prosperity not as war so much as profligacy. The struggle
over the finite supplies of pleasures is deemed natural throughout that
chapter. [in press] Assets Accumulating: Sima Qians perspective on moneymaking, virtue, and history, in a volume devoted to the Shiji, ed. Olga Lomova
(Scheduled, 2014).
54In the common belief that the reason why people take pleasure in being
rulers is that they can to the utmost satisfy their sensual desires, and do what
suits their own personal convenience [or their bodys ease]. See Huainanzi
7/58/12 (Jingshen). Cf. Analects 13/15, condemning this belief, which says
that the one phrase that could come close to ruining a country is this: What
pleasure is there in being a prince, unless one can say whatever one chooses,
and no one dares to disagree?
55Huainanzi 7/60/21 (Jingshen): .
56See Jane Geaney, Guarding Moral Boundaries: Shame in Early Confucianism, Philosophy East and West 54, no. 2 (2004): 114142, for the dangers of
boundary crossing, in this case from human to god.
57E.g., Liji 19/14/101/18 (Yueji; Legge trans., II, 127).
58Still, it is worth noting that the world of pleasure can be surprisingly cheap
toparticipate in, and a great many classical pleasuresnot just food and sex,

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but also viewing spectacles like royal progresses, mourning processions, and
marriage festivals, and, in some cases, travelwere open to nearly all people,
even if a few pleasures were reserved for the titled or rich. By the end of this
period, the craze for travel was just starting up. For one example, see Baopuzi:
At home, there are no silks and satins to delight the senses; outside, I have no opportunity to enjoy travel and sightseeing. Sweet and tasty things do not pass my mouth,
nor do decorative colors pass before my eyes. Perfumes do not reach my nose; my ears
are not struck by music.... In such conditions as these there is nothing to become
attached to. (James R. Ware, trans., Alchemy, Medicine, Religion in the China of a.d.
320: The Nei pien of Ko Hung (Pao-pu tzu) [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967], p. 45;
citing chap. 2, 7b)

See Michael Nylan, The Power of Highway Networks during Chinas Clas
sical Era: Regulations, Metaphors, Rituals, and Deities, in Highways and
Byways, ed. Susan Alcock, John Bodell, and Richard Talbert (London: John
Wiley and Sons, 2011), pp. 136.
59See Yanzi chunqiu 2.5/13/17; cf. 1.11/5. Cf. Chunqiu fanlu 8.1/35/27 (Du
zhi): ; Hanshu 4.134, the
edict of Wendi; also Huangdi neijing, pian 14 ():
. The date of the Chunqiu fanlu is uncertain, as different
chapters date to different periods. See Michael Loewe, Dong Zhongshu, a
Confucian Heritage, and the Chunqiu fanlu (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
60Ge Hong, Shenxian zhuan 1/4b5a; trans. after Wolfgang Bauer, China and
the Search for Happiness: Recurring Themes in Four Thousand Years of Chi
nese Cultural History (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 106, who follows
Lionel Giles, A Gallery of Chinese Immortals (London: Probsthain, 1948).
61Yi Zhoushu 3/2/24 (Chang xun jie).
62Guodian Chu mu zhujian, Zhiyi (Black Robes), section 2.
63See Zuozhuan, Lord Zhao 15.5, for the first; and for the second, Lord Zhao
11.4.
64See the opening lines to the Li lun chapter in the Xunzi.
65Xunzi jishi 22, p. 527. Those without desires and drives he took to be as good
as dead. However, it is not only the Confucians who advocated a Middle
Way.For expelling the desires, see Huainanzi 1/6/30 (Yuandao shun):
[ = ]; or Sushu , zhang 3 (Qiu ren zhi zhi ):
. But for the belief that expulsion of all desires was un
natural, see Huainanzi, juan 10/82/27 (Miu Cheng xun).
66Hanshu 11.1037, based closely on Shiji 24.1206.
67Han Fei 49/150/11 (Wu du).
68Chin Shi-chi [Jin Shiqi] , Jing Pinggong bingan gouchen
, Guoli Zhengzhi Daxue lishi xuebao 31 (May

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2009): 150, shows how closely interwoven are diplomatic, political, and
medical concerns in the discourse of two key texts of the time, the Zuozhuan
and the Guoyu . Self-restraint turns out to be crucial to both long life
and a strong state.
69See Wenzi , chap. 3 (Jiu shou ), which cites Laozi, zhang 12. Cf.
Ge Hong, Shenxian zhuan, 1/4b5a (trans. after Bauer, China and the Search
for Happiness, p. 106).
70Cf. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes, p. 272.
71Cf. ibid., p. 143, where it is observed in early Greece that adults were accused
of debased behavior when they put up no manly and fine resistance to the
consuming pleasures.
72See the opening lines of Xing zi ming chu in the Guodian Chu mu zhujian.
73Huainanzi 7/58/16 (Jingshen): .
74See Huangdi neijing suwen , Suwen , 7 (23): 364. The zhi
is also correlated with the kidney system as one of the five shen (animating
forces). One list of the five dispositions gives delight, anger, sorrow, fear, and
pensiveness (), but the lists vary from text to text. A second gives
delight, anger, sadness, anxiety, and fear, replacing anxiety with pensiveness; see Suwen 7 (23): 364365. And a third (Zhuangzi , Qiwulun
) gives six: pleasure, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret.
75Huainanzi 7/55/1 (Jingshen).
76Han Feizi 35/109/11 (Wai qu shuo, B):

77Mohist Logic A75 says, To act on account of something is to take account

ofall one knows and judge it [as in a scale] by ones desires. But see, for
example, Lshi chunqiu 21.4/141/6: (Ones
physical person is what acts. The empire is the motive for ones actions).
78For the last, see Hanshu 8.258, which cites fairly standard medical theories, where it says that people are given different inclinations; two different
kinds of qi are named, yin and yang, and several different inclinations (
), which people aside from the sages cannot hope to regulate. The
sages who can regulate their inclinations then can manage to regulate all the
myriad affairs as well. Cf. Guoyu 4/17/54 (Jinyu): ():
. References are to Guoyu zhuzi suoyin
(Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1999).
79Yang Zhu noted the paradox by which the very conventional careerist moves,
designed to acquire a state of mind free of unnecessary anxiety, may sometimes cause a person to choose death or low rank, even if these acts of high
courage mean the absolute cessation of pleasure.

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80Schaberg is particularly good on the public character of the rulers actions

(Social Pleasures, pp. 67). Though I read Schabergs article late in the preparation of this manuscript, I have learned much from it. Aside from Schabergs
work, the only work known to me on pleasure in early thought is John C. H.
Wu, Joy in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Chu Ping-yi (Taipei: Hua Hsin Cultural
Publications, n.d.). I am indebted to Nicolas Standaert (Leuven University)
for sending me a copy of the latter publication. There is also a good Ph.D.
thesis by a student of Alan K. Chan: Bendick Ong, Emotions in Early Confucianism (National University of Singapore, 2011). In many places my own
analysis differs from that of Ong, who seems to overvalue the emotions he
relates to cognitive processes (e.g., yue ), thereby forfeiting much of
thesetexts inherent interest. Ong also assumes that the Guodian and Shanghai Bowuguan mss. are largely Confucian in nature (p. 2). Work on later
imperial periods has been done by Paolo Santangelo and Ulrike Middendorf,
among others.
81The quotation about self-love and social comes from Alexander Pope.
82I see the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, for example, as urging rigorous forms
of logic-chopping to reacquaint us with our authentic selves, which the embrace of social conventions threatens to destroy.
83For example, yu is only used once in the Analects (10/5) and sparsely thereafter. Kuai refers, contra Ong, to quickening/arousal in ones person.
Xing zi ming chu defines yue as ; see Guodian Chumu zhujian,
strip 12, p. 17; cf. strip 47.
84Ong, Emotions in Early Confucianism, p. 24, notes that yue can be negated by bu , but xi cannot. I would translate yue as to feel gratified,
to find gratifying, or to gratify. Yue does not appear on any bone or bronze
inscriptions.
85Some sixty-one expressions use you , but the terms that can be combined
are relatively few in number, and it is hard to distinguish one from the other.
86In binomial expressions this breaks down, for obvious reasons.
87Tian or Dao may be construed as an anthropomorphic Heaven, as cosmic
operations or fate, or as the way things are. The list of objects for le that I
have compiled is based on examining every single usage in the ICS Concordance Series for Han and pre-Han texts, as well as the excavated manuscripts.
88Shuoyuan 7.14/49/28: le zhi wu ku .
89The two pleasure words le and xi are paired not all that often, but when
they are, the pairing refers to real and lasting pleasure at the prospect of something that is likely to represent a lasting good (as in Taixuan jing zhuzi
(Tetragram 26, titled Le). Most other passages distinguish xi from le
sharply, as in Lshi chunqiu 25.3/162/21.

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90Xi se (delighted look) appears frequently in the early sources, as in

Yanzi chunqiu 5.8/42/21. Sources tend to focus on three possible looks that
the face can wear: xi or delight, feeling grave (as in mourning), and feeling
arrogant (as in military situations, when one has a keen awareness of ones
own power).
91In this, xi is like hao .
92See, e.g., Yanzi chunqiu 2.22/19/2030, which speaks of delight in playthings.
Note that the gods are supposedly delighted when they can savor offerings at
their leisure, knowing that peace prevails. For this, see Hanshu 99/zhong.
93Yuandi, for example, said to his aides Congratulate me with wine! (
), according to Hanshu 97B.3973. It was also said of Dong Xian that
he wore a self-congratulatory look ().
94Shiji 39.1668. The passage speaks of inside and outside (meaning inside
and outside the state of Chu), but the peace between the two situations, inside and outside, is key to the rulers experiencing a feeling akin to ease in his
mind. Cf. Shiji 40.1705, where the advisor says what pleases his ruler, so that
again their two hearts are one and their two minds see eye to eye.
95Yi Zhoushu 1/1/6 (Du xun jie). This may explain the quotation from Yue jue
shu 16/47/14 (ref. to Yue jue shu zhuzi suoyin [Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 1993]), where xi refers to something small in the
scale of things for heaven, but comparatively great in the order of things. It is
also possible, however, that the passage simply required the use of parallel
variants to enhance its rhetorical power.
96See Shiji 47.1917, where the proverb is quoted to Kongzi, who responds by
asking if one may take serious pleasure (le) in giving rank to someone [worthy]
who is low-ranked. Qu Yuans Li sao poem contains lines that recall this
proverb, and this may be the idea that Analects 13/26 points to.
97Zhanguo ce 211/109; 447/220.
98For the latter, see, e.g., Xun Yue , Qian Hanji 10.167 (references
to Qian Hanji zhuzi suoyin ).
Hence the contrast between the fools illogical delight in a stroke of good luck,
which he believes to be a sign of his own greatness, and the wise persons
distrust of luck, lest it render him arrogant and inattentive.
99The examples are too numerous to list, but to take one: the First Emperor of
Qin is delighted at the sight of General Fans head, when the would-be as
sassin Jing Ke shows it to him. Li Si and Huhai also express delight that their
deceit, which ends in the rightful heir apparents suicide, works to their advantage.
100The attempts to delight the Dowager Empress L are underhanded and cynical. See Shiji, juan 21 (Jing yan shijia ), 22 (Qi Daohui wang

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shijia ), and, only slightly less cynical in relation to Gaozu, in

Shiji 23 (Xiaoxiangguo shijia ).
101Zhanguo ce 209/107. All references are to Zhanguo ce zhuzi suoyin
(Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992).
102For a splendid example, see Shiji 112.2961, which speaks of Everyone feeling pleased at getting what he wants ().
103See, e.g., Shiji 119.3100 ().
104Wuxing, strips 1213, Guodian Chu mu zhujian, p. 149, has a whole series
of stepped sequences, which includes an (security) and yue (feeling gratified), and ends with . Cf. Cong zheng, part 1,
slip 16, part B, slip 3, Shanghai Bowuguan cang Zhanguo Chu zhu shu, vol. 2,
pp. 229, 235: (When the noble man takes pleasure, then his governance is true and aligned; when the small man, one is
suspicious and dubious.)
105See Yi Zhoushu 58/33/6 (Guanren jie); cf. chap. 64/4041 (Taizi Jin jie).
The most famous case proving the ill-effects of pent-up frustrations is described
in Shiji 130.3295.
106See Yi Zhoushu 64/40/10 (Taizi Jin jie); also Dongguan Hanji
2.1/12/69, which speaks of things that both delight officials () and make
them sore afraid. Reference to Dongguan Hanji zhuzi suoyin
(Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992).
107Reading song as rong , which is a standard gloss.
108Shiji 24.1186.
109See Fayan 2/9, where a love for classical learning and virtue is compared to a
taste for rare delicacies honed through practice in connoisseurship. Similarly,
Wang Fus Qianfu lun 8/12/25 (Sixian) describes an ideal longing for (si ) or taste (shi ) for worthy men. See Qianfu lun zhuzi suoyin
(Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995).
110Liji 3.43/15/10 (Tangong A). Some historical background: To the social critics of the time, the centralization of imperial powers meant the steady proliferation of expensive tastes for luxuries at the court. This, at least, is the constant
refrain of the Yantie lun , the much later and highly fictionalized account of the courts Salt and Iron debates on the monopolies that paid for
luxuries. During the Eastern Han, the official rhetoric stressed return to the
basics (fan ben ) or return to authenticity (gui zhen ), two multivalent slogans that signified (1) an emphasis on farming (by men) and sericulture
(by women); (2) a preference for simplicity and a distrust of ostentation; (3) a
decision not to overwork the senses (er mu ), body (xing ), or spirit
(shen ) through pleasure; and (4) the nurturing of the immature spirit. Preconditions for the development of higher forms of learning were thought to be

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the growth of schools and local civil centers and an increasing reliance on
ritual. (Xiang xu is clearly not equivalent to schools, as they represent
places where people after work gather to criticize the government.) It is not
clear what relation official rhetoric bore to the contemporary mores among
the governing elites at the local and national levels.
111See, e.g., Hanshu 87B.3571, where Yang Xiong describes himself as
someone whose study has made his second nature refined and quiet, while
reducing his desires.
112Kongzi jiayu 30.1/54/16ff. (Wuxing jie). References are to Kongzi
jiayu zhuzi suoyin (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992).
113Da Dai Liji , juan 3, pian 48 (), which corresponds closely to Jia
Yi , Xinshu (Sibu congkan ed.), juan 5, pian 2 (also Bao Fu). For Da
Dai Liji, references are to Da Dai Liji zhuzi suoyin (Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 1992). For the salutary caution exercised by wise
men toward their own desires and addictions, see Da Dai Liji 4.1/24/27
(Zengzi lishi). Note the admission that some pleasures are inextricably
mixed with pain.
114Xunzi further claims that only this type of pleasure is invariant in its degree of
enjoyability, for he claims it as a constant. It might be objected that even the
man of the highest insight is hardly infallible, so he cannot always form a triad
with heaven-and-earth, nor derive singular pleasure from his contemplation
ofhimself in the context of the larger world. But when Xunzi describes the
noble man, he describes a type of person, not an individualan acknowledged expert in his chosen field of practical endeavor. In proposing this ideal
type, Xunzi would dissolve the gap that makes the life of maximal pleasure
seem a stark alternative to the life of supreme insight, as in Socrates Philebus.
For Xunzi, no such conflict exists in the realm for the perfected man; thus, the
possible objection posed by Socrates to such a view, that pleasure is not a
single thing but many opposing things, is countered by Xunzis exultation in
the stunningmultiplicity of forms that transforming goodness takes, as it orders
and balances things outside itself.
115Hanshu 66.2885.
116This verb is often used of letters whose tactile surfaces are thought to retain a
pleasurable trace of the letter writer. The negative connotations of toying with
people are made abundantly clear in the Shangshu chapter 33 (). Xunzi
21/107/5 (Jie bi ) specifically says of wan that it is of little benefit but of
no great harm, either. But many texts fret over the tendency of play to devolve
into harmful attacks. See, e.g., Zhao shi Yilin , Hexagram 30 (Li ):
or Guanzi; see Guanzi zhuzi suoyin
(Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1991) 17.2/125/17. Compare you xin
(to roam in the mind): to take ones pleasure in, shift attention to. Objects of
this expression include, for example, the arts of emperors and kings (di wang

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zhi shu), as in Hanshu 25B.1251. Gan xin (literally, sweet to ones

heart) is a metaphor for saying what one likes (Hanshu 25B.1260), as
when the First Emperor of Qin liked the way of the immortality cults.
117See Zhang Heng , Si Xuan fu , in Wenxuan , juan 15.
118Cf. zi yu , to amuse oneself.
119On this, see Nylan, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical
Learning in Han China.
120See Michael Nylan, Living without Sin, Reflections on the Pre-Buddhist
World in Early China, in Sin and Expiation: Perspectives from Asian Reli
gions, ed. Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara, Brill Numen Book Series
[NUS] (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 5772. All this changed in the post-Buddhist
world, I argue there. But human desire and pleasures did not simply dis
appear as a topic for discussion after the classical era in China. They were
taken up inthe Song by thinkers like Wang Anshi (10211086), in the Qing by
those like Dai Zhen, and during the Republic by Zhang Taiyan (18681932).
However, the introduction of Buddhism indelibly marked all subsequent aspects of the pleasure discourse. The Eight Releases (bajie ; Sanskrit astavimoksa) begin with (1) analysis of the object of desire, (2) temporary release
from desire, and (3) permanent release from desire, as preconditions for releases from ignorance, from being itself, and from thought. It would probably
not have occurred to any classical-era thinker to make denial of the physical
senses the single path to enlightenment and complete absorption into Ultimate Reality.
121A. C. Graham, Taoist Spontaneity and the Dichotomy of Is and Ought,
inVictor H. Mair, ed., Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983; reprint, 2010), pp. 322. Graham says Western
philosophy has been complaining about the move from is to ought since
Hume. Graham can only account for this move on Zhuangzis part by saying
of this move, rather lamely, that Zhuangzi was more a poet than a philosopher. He refuses to be deterred from the rather elusive imperative behind the
denial of imperatives (ibid.). Graham still confesses to remaining in moral
philosophy but colliding with Zhuangzis unexpectedly firm logic. What
logic there is, he says, is directed against all logic (p. 4); Graham equates Follow the Way with Respond with Awareness. Both points, to my mind, constitute only part of the Zhuangzian message (which Graham says shares a
structure with all other Daoist texts). I am not sure that every school (in
Grahams terms) or constructed lineage (in mine) offers its own definitions
of key terms in key debates, as Graham says (p. 5); rather, each prioritizes its
commitments differently. (I do not dispute that Zhuangzi claims that words
change their meanings, according to experiences.) Graham, moreover, oversimplifies when he speaks of ganying (response-reaction) in Pavlovian terms
(p. 9). Nor do I find any contempt for emotions in Zhuangzi (p. 11). Graham

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concludes, Since Western philosophers have almost given up hope of finding

logical grounds for imperatives, it may seem a little unfair that a Chinese antirationalist should, without looking for it, have stumbled upon such a firm rock
bottom for his philosophy of life (p. 14). Graham assumes that the Zhuangzi
is independent of viewpoint (p. 15), but numerous passages show humans,
like animals, to be creatures of habit. There is no reason why Respond with
Awareness demands that we respond with full awareness of every viewpoint (p. 18). That would mean the Zhuangzian ideal type would come periously close to Rawls ideal type.
122Allan Gibbard, Truth and Correct Belief, Philosophical Issues 15 (issue on
Normativity): 338350.
123See ibid., p. 343.
124To my mind, Gibbards person who has objective knowledge is not unlike
Rortys autonomous individual in this one sense: no such person exists in
the real world (and only comes up, quite possibly, as the result of the Western
traditions long-standing belief that humans are made, supposedly, in the image of an omniscient God or other impossible Ideal).
125Gibbard, Truth and Correct Belief, p. 339.
126Unfortunately, my computer program does not produce upside-down quotation marks, which Gibbard uses to indicate an imperative.
127Gibbard, Truth and Correct Belief, p. 345.
128Ibid.
129Ibid., p. 344.

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