The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism: Zhuangzi’s Unique Moral Vision

By Jung H. Lee

The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism: Zhuangzi's Unique Moral Vision argues that we can read early Daoist texts as works of moral philosophy that speak to perennial concerns about the well-lived life in the context of the Way. Lee argues that we can interpret early Daoism as an ethics of attunement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137384867

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The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism: Zhuangzi’s Unique Moral Vision

By Jung H. Lee

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EARLY DAOISM

ZHUANGZI’S UNIQUE MORAL VISION

Jung H. Lee

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EARLY DAOISM

Copyright © Jung H. Lee, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

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For my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Conventions and Romanization

Introduction

1    Daoism and Morality

2    Hearing the Silent Harmony: Revisioning Ethics in the Zhuangzi

3    Travelers on the Way: Friendship in the Zhuangzi

4    The Preservation of the Way: Rights, Community, and Social Ethics in the Zhuangzi

5    The Great Returning: Death and Transformation in the Zhuangzi

6    Inwardly a Sage, Outwardly a King: The Way as Ruler

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the end of Chapter 3 of the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi says cryptically, Although we can only point to the fuel, the fire burns on, and we do not know where it ends. In some ways, this book represents the fuel from the fire that began in graduate school under the influence of my advisors, and I honestly do not know whether I could point to anything without their guiding wisdom and support. To Wendell Dietrich, I feel indebted for instilling in me the principles of critical history and the Troeltschian notion that history is where a religious idea can be grasped. Sumner B. Twiss relentlessly honed my powers of critical reasoning in seminars on Kierkegaard, human rights, and religious subjectivity. John P. Reeder, Jr., influenced how I viewed the discipline of religious ethics and probably did more than anyone else in fostering my interest in normativity and human flourishing as categories of interpretation. Harold Roth first introduced me to the wonders of the Zhuangzi and continues to teach me about its virtues to this day. I am grateful to all of my advisors for their care.

P. J. Ivanhoe and Mark Unno, though not formal advisors, have often served that role as well, providing timely advice and encouragement. P. J. has been particularly generous with his time, never refusing to look over a draft (including this book) even when he had more pressing work of his own. I also want to thank Andy Flescher and Aaron Stalnaker for their friendship over the years. My colleagues here at Northeastern have been remarkably supportive and encouraging in all of my intellectual endeavors. Whitney Kelting, Michael Meyer, Ron Sandler, and Susan Setta have all served as mentors, and I appreciate their guidance over the past four years. Patricia Illingworth and Steve Nathanson have been supererogatory with their time—reading drafts and providing advice—and I have learned much from their knowledge and benefited greatly from their friendship. Liz Bucar was instrumental in nudging me to get this book published, and I doubt I would be writing these words of thanks now without her help and encouragement.

I have had the good fortune of discussing many of the ideas in this book with audiences at Boston University; the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion; the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Brown University; the Biennial Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature, and Culture; and the Society for Indian Philosophy and Religion. The Daoism Panel at the 2012 AAS Conference held in Toronto on Classical Daoism and Ethics helped to crystallize my thoughts on many of these issues, and I would like to express my appreciation to Sarah Allan, Matt Duperon, Brian Hoffert, Andrew Meyer, Judson Murray, and Harold Roth for their participation.

I must also thank the following colleagues, friends, and students for help and feedback along the way: Roger Ames, Rebecca Bates, Chung-Ying Cheng, Alvin Cohen, Stephane Feuillas, Trent Foley, Chris Gilmartin (RIP), Yong Huang, David Keightley, Maria Khayutina, Victor Mair, Tong Shen, Taitetsu Unno, James Wrenn, Yang Xiao, Zhonghu Yan, and Meiqing Zhang (RIP). I owe a debt of gratitude to Hyong Rae Lee, who tirelessly read the entire manuscript and offered extensive comments on improving the text. My editors at Palgrave—Burke Gerstenschlager and Mary Jo Iozzio—have made the entire process of publishing this book stress free. I must also thank Maddie Crum, Susan Eberhart, Flora Kenson, and Caroline Kracunas for their assistance with all of the details during the production process. The anonymous reviewers for Palgrave were generous in their comments, and their constructive suggestions were helpful in thinking through several issues in the book.

Chapters 4 and 6 include revised material from the following articles: Preserving One’s Nature: Primitivist Daoism and Human Rights, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34.4 (December 2007), 597–612; and "The Way of Poetic Influence: Revisioning the ‘Syncretist Chapters’ of the Zhuangzi," Philosophy East & West 58.4 (October 2008), 552–571. I thank the publishers and editors for granting permission to reprint portions of these essays here.

Finally, I want to thank my wife, Daryl Caggiano, for her uncommon patience and understanding as I finished this book. Her enthusiasm for the project sustained me on many days when I would have rather been trying to attune to the Way than writing about it.

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS AND ROMANIZATION

Dates in this book are identified by the convention BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era) rather than BC and AD. I follow Pinyin Romanization throughout the book except in cases of proper names where the authors have chosen Wade-Giles Romanization (e.g., Tu Wei-ming) and in cases of titles and quotes.

INTRODUCTION

In a review of Herbert Giles’s translation of the Zhuangzi that originally appeared in the February 1890 issue of the Speaker, Oscar Wilde writes the following about this very dangerous writer:

Morality is, of course, a different thing. It went out of fashion, says Chuang Tzu, when people began to moralise. Men ceased then to be spontaneous and to act on intuition. They became priggish and artificial, and were so blind as to have a definite purpose in life. Then came Governments and Philanthropists, those two pests of the age. The former tried to coerce people into being good, and so destroyed the natural goodness of man. The latter were a set of aggressive busybodies who caused confusion wherever they went. They were stupid enough to have principles, and unfortunate enough to act up to them. They all came to bad ends, and showed that universal altruism is as bad in its results as universal egotism.¹

Wilde’s review, while not remarkable for an avowed aesthete, in all likelihood reflects the view that many of us have had on first reading the early Daoist text Zhuangzi. With its celebration of the useless and the pleasures of the contemplative life, its mocking irony in regard to all matters official and public, and its many strange and wonderful episodes on mythical beasts and limbless sages, the Zhuangzi may give the impression that it resists ethical interpretations, that morality, as Wilde notes, went out of fashion for Zhuangzi. Indeed, the practical or moral import of the Zhuangzi seems to have been lost even on many readers among the masters and literati of the Chinese commentarial tradition. Xunzi (ca. 310–219 BCE) argued that Zhuangzi was obsessed with nature and did not appreciate the human realm ( ). The noted Ming loyalist Wang Fuzhi (1619– 1692), also a Confucian, criticized Zhuangzi for destroying loyalty and filial piety and losing the distinction between goodness and badness.² Critics during the Wei–Jin Period, such as Wang Danzhi (330–375) and Fan Ning (ca. 280–340), not only condemned the Zhuangzi as completely impractical but went so far as to blame the degenerate behavior of their contemporaries on its influence. Even the Syncretist authors (the putative compilers and redactors of the original Zhuangzi text) describe the namesake of their book as an untroubled idler who may have been more interested in free and easy wandering ( ) than in the moral life. What are we to make of these opinions? Does the Zhuangzi offer any wisdom in regard to the moral life, or are we being priggish in reading the Zhuangzi as a work of religious ethics?

This book asks whether the Zhuangzi contains a morality, and if it does, how can we best appreciate its contributions to religious ethics and comparative philosophy? Are there interpretive and historical contexts that need to be considered before the Zhuangzi can be viewed in a moral light? How does our location in the post-Enlightenment West affect our understanding of not only the Zhuangzi but also what we consider to be morality? The book begins with the provocative claim that our received understanding of Daoism as a mystical or amoral tradition owes as much to the Western invention of Daoism as it does to our attachment to putatively universal notions like morality and their translation in comparative contexts. Why do we tend to read Daoism as a mystical tradition? What difference does this make for how we imagine the nature of religious ethics as a discipline? The first question addresses issues dealing with the nature of cross-cultural inquiry and challenges many of the assumptions that have become received wisdom in the fields of religious ethics and comparative philosophy. The second question asks how we as comparativists and religious ethicists define what should count as a moral tradition and whether we can actually understand a tradition like early Daoism without the context of prior normative and methodological commitments.

This study aims to illustrate not only why this history of misinterpretation exists but also how we can read a text like the Zhuangzi as a work of ethics that resists the familiar categories of Western moral philosophy. In essence, Zhuangzi defines how one should live based on how one’s actions and behaviors conform to and embody the workings of the Way (Dao )—whether one is literally in tune or out of tune with the Way. For Zhuangzi, reasons for action do not lie in concepts like ritual authority, autonomy, or the moral law but in the Way itself. In other words, the Daoist’s test of reflective endorsement is just whether the impulses and motives that arise during moral deliberations track and conform to the movements of the Way. This ethics of attunement challenges the agent to take the action that most closely or most clearly reflects the workings of the Way. To be a Daoist, on my reading, is to attune oneself to the noiseless harmony of the Way.

I argue that the blindness to the moral dimensions of early Daoism, particularly the Zhuangzi, can be traced not only to forces within Chinese intellectual history and the lingering legacy of the Victorian invention of Daoism but also to the myopic ways in which contemporary scholars, particularly those influenced by the global West, tend to understand morality as a system of obligations. The significance of this understanding of morality for comparative work, specifically the study of Daoist ethics, lies in the ways in which the methodological horizons of sinologists and comparative ethicists alike seem to be framed by the guiding assumptions of morality, goading some scholars to dismiss Daoism as a moral form of life simpliciter, while leading others to finesse Daoism under one of morality’s guises. By reframing the entire category of the moral, the book will argue that we can read much of the Zhuangzi (and perhaps other relevant Daoist texts) in a normatively significant way.

This book attempts to articulate just how Daoist ethics in general and Zhuangzi’s ethics in particular depart from our received understanding of morality and in what unfamiliar ways early Daoists like Zhuangzi imagine the moral life, especially in regard to those elements of the Daoist imagination that press us in the direction of religion and matters of the spirit. Conversely, I reflect on Zhuangzi’s moral philosophy in the light of some of the more enduring topics and themes in the Western tradition—notions of friendship, community, government, and death. Thus, I reflect on notions of Zhuangzian friendship, community, and government within the framework of an ethics of attunement and bring into relief how the normative commitments of Zhuangzi are revealed in these various realms of human relating and association.³ I also attempt to bring the text into conversation with contemporary philosophers and ethicists on the nature of normativity, action, rationality, and human rights, identifying points of convergence but more often illuminating the differences.

A related goal of this book is to examine how histories of interpretation, particularly in comparative contexts, can influence and bias not only our understanding of specific texts and figures but also entire categories of investigation. I argue that in the case of comparative ethics, our methodological horizon has been shaped unwittingly by the dominance of morality defined as a special system of obligations, if not in letter then in spirit. The conceptual features of morality (e.g., focus on duty and obligation, the priority of moral reasons) have essentially read early Daoism out of the category of ethics by excluding questions of what it is good to be or desire. As Jeffrey Stout suggests, if comparative study reveals significant conceptual diversity in ethics across classes, cultures, and historical periods, as many ethicists now hold, it makes less sense to speak as if there were a singular and uniform subject matter in view.⁴ By examining the specific ways in which seemingly universal concepts like morality define and shape our understanding of the realm of ethics, I contend that we can achieve a greater methodological perspicuity that enables us to view early Daoist ethics as an alternative possibility in relation to some human constants at work in both ancient China and the contemporary West.

ZHUANG ZHOU AND THE ZHUANGZI

What little we know about the historical Zhuang Zhou (ca. 369–286 BCE) comes from the brief biography penned by the Han historian Sima Qian (145–86 BCE) in Chapter 63 of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji ):

Zhuangzi was a native of Meng, with a given name Zhou. He once served as a minor official in the lacquer garden. He was a contemporary of King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi. There was nowhere that his teachings did not reach, but the main points can be traced back originally to the words of Laozi. Thus his works exceeded 100,000 words and were mostly allegorical. He wrote The Old Fisherman, Robber Zhi, and Rifling Trunks to critique Confucius and illuminate the artistry of Laozi. Chapters like Kang Sangzi and Wei Lei Xu were without substance and empty. He was skilled in writing and turning a phrase, hiding his meanings and intentions to cast aspersions on Confucians and Mohists. Even the most profound scholars of his age could not defend themselves. His words sparkled and billowed as he indulged himself. Thus kings and lords could not employ his talents.⁵

There is also another anecdote that Sima Qian attaches to this biography about Zhuangzi refusing an offer from King Wei of Chu to serve in his government. In addition, there are vignettes in the Zhuangzi itself that reveal particulars of the historical Zhuangzi, though they are most likely literary inventions rather than documents of historical fact. Of course, the writings themselves, particularly the Inner Chapters, reveal what this man might have been like—brilliant, sometimes caustic, reflective, and singular even within the prolific history of Chinese literature.

We believe that the original version of the Zhuangzi contained 52 chapters, which were later redacted and edited by the Wei–Jin Dark Learning (xuanxue ) scholar Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE) into 33 chapters, which is the version that we have now. Thus, it would be reasonable to assume that the current version of the text reflects the biases and philosophical concerns of Guo Xiang in how he redacted, compiled, and arranged the various parts of the completed text. The text has traditionally been divided into three sections—the Inner Chapters (1–7), the Outer Chapters (8–22), and Miscellaneous Chapters (23–33). There is a scholarly consensus, based on the textual analysis of style, content, and grammar, that we can reliably attribute only the Inner Chapters to the historical Zhuangzi, with the understanding that disciples and later followers, whose identities are unknown, produced the remaining chapters. The Inner Chapters have justifiably received the most scholarly attention, containing within their pages the themes and topics most familiar to readers, particularly those related to issues in epistemology, mysticism, cosmology, and metaphysics. The Inner Chapters are also the site of some of the more celebrated passages and characters of the Zhuangzi, including Cook Ding, the butterfly dream, and the monkey-keeper.

Scholars have also identified different authorial voices, some stronger and more consistent than others, within the remaining chapters of the book. For example, Angus Graham locates five different authorial voices within the text: (1) the historical Zhuangzi; (2) the followers of Zhuangzi; (3) Yangist chapters, which reflect the influence of the individualist thinker Yang Zhu (early fourth century BCE); (4) Primitivist chapters, which show the influence of the Daodejing; and (5) Syncretist chapters, which reflect an eclectic form of Daoism.⁶ The connection between the Inner Chapters and the rest of the Zhuangzi has been an issue that has historically divided commentators, with some (e.g., Guo Xiang, Fukunaga Mitsuji )⁷ seeing a unity among the various chapters and others seeing a more fragmented text (e.g., Graham, Wang Fuzhi). Although I recognize the multiplicity of voices within the text, I would submit that there is a normative unity to the 33 chapters that can be articulated in the ethics of attunement. This normative unity binds the various sections of the Zhuangzi together and directs the reader to consider the moral life in terms of how to respond fittingly and appropriately to the reality of the Way. It is this ethical imperative that informs all of the different chapters and sections, and it is this normative vision that casts the Zhuangzi as a work of moral philosophy worthy of serious consideration by ethicists and comparative philosophers.

A NOTE ON "DAOISM"

Consider the following thought by Holmes Welch:

Lists of the world’s principal religions usually include Daoism. We might therefore suppose that Daoism was a religion comparable to Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. We might suppose that like them it could be traced back to a founding prophet—in its case, Laozi—whose followers set up a church—the Daoist church; that various branches of Daoism developed as the church divided into sects; and that the church and its doctrines, originally pure, became corrupted with the passing of centuries until they ended up as the Daoist priests and sorcery of today.⁸

But this supposition would be almost wholly mistaken.⁹ In contradistinction to other unified religions that derive their institutional identities from a founding historical personality, a canonized set of scriptures, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy, Daoism seems to have emerged from a congeries of teachings based on a variety of revelations. Without recourse to a precipitating cause to which the early community of practitioners could align itself in a collective act of recollection, Daoism, from its incipience, lacked a fundamental legitimating resource (e.g., in Christianity the