Reading the Chuang-tzu in the T'ang Dynasty: The Commentary of Ch'eng Hsuan-ying (fl. 631-652).

• Author: Kirkland, Russell
• Position: Book Review

Reading the Chuang-tzu in the T'ang Dynasty: The Commentary of Ch'eng Hsuan-ying (fl. 631-652). By SHIYI YU. Asian Thought and Culture, vol. 39. Bern: PETER LANG, 2000. Pp. xiv + 209. $54.95.

This book originated as a dissertation on how an early T'ang commentator, Ch'eng Hsuan-ying, explained the Taoist text, Chuang-tzu. Ch'eng was one of the scholars whom the early T'ang emperors brought to the capital and gave scholarly tasks, such as the peculiar project of translating the Tao te citing into Sanskrit. (1) Since Ch'eng's surviving works include commentaries to the Ling-pao scripture, Tu-jen citing (Scripture for Human Salvation), as well as to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, some have called him "a representative of the unity of the two aspects of Taoism, the so-called philosophical and religious ones." (2) But since Ch'eng also utilized Mahayana Buddhist ideas, he really belonged to an old intellectual tradition--reading Taoism in terms of Buddhism, and vice versa. (3) One would thus expect a new analysis of Ch'eng's life and thought to be worthwhile and interesting. The present work is therefore disappointing.

This book cannot be ascribed to any familiar discipline. Readers familiar with the writings of early twentieth-century Chinese scholars who had no exposure to Western academia will find here something quite reminiscent. Many elements simply suggest that the author never determined exactly what he was trying to accomplish or how to accomplish it. In structure, substance, and wording, the book is what one would expect of a desultory dissertation. The Introduction, for instance, gives little clue as to the author's ultimate findings, or their significance. It merely tells what the author "hopes" to do in each chapter.

Chapter one concerns the scholarly reception of the Chuangtzu up to the T'ang period. Chapter two discusses Ch'eng's biography. Chapters three and four examine two themes in Ch'eng's commentaries on the Chaang-tzn--" the Double Mystery" (ch'ung-hsuan) and "the Void" (hsu). Chapter five--backtracking into contextual issues--examines Ch'eng's "Negotiations with Buddhism." And Chapter six--which the Introduction, tellingly, hardly mentions--interposes material on unrelated issues under the misleading title, "Ch'eng Hsuan-ying's Style: A Conclusion."

Even by the final chapter, one still finds no indication that the author has constructed the book to advance a clear thesis. The chapter's first section is confusingly titled, "Interpretiveness--how does it signal a categorical shift in the commentarial tradition?" The indecipherable neologism "interpretiveness" does not even appear until the section's final paragraph, where one reads: "The 'interpretiveness' I referred to earlier [where?] with regard to Ch'eng Hsuan-ying particularly points to the character, quality, and function of oral translation" (p. 178). This is the closest that one comes to a finding in the book. With effort, one ascertains that Yu here argues as follows: previous commentators, like Kuo Hsiang, "explained" the Chuang-tzu, in "commentaries" (chu); Ch'eng, however, "interpreted" the Chuang-tzu, in a "subcommentary" (shu). Such "interpretive" shu, Yu asserts, originated from an oral event: in Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist contexts alike, a tu-chiang would read aloud from a text and exp lain it. "These explanations, when published, were called a subcommentary" (p. 174). Yu cites selected Chinese and Japanese scholars, and constructs a facile argument by stringing together their thoughts pertaining to different periods, genres, and traditions. Based on no specific data, Yu claims that in Ch'eng's case "teaching, or perhaps we may say preaching, would not have been uncommon in his activities as a Taoist master, whose day-to-day duty was to teach the scriptures" (p. 171). He does not specify any T'ang Taoist master who can be shown to have engaged in such an activity. To my knowledge, the leading T'ang Taoists, from Wang Yuan-chih to Tu Kuang-t'ing, are not in fact represented--in sources of any provenance--as having "preached" about "the scriptures" as a "day-to-day duty."

Yu admits that "there is no direct mention of (Ch'eng) teaching the Chuang-tzu," but cites a Japanese scholar to the effect that the Buddhist pilgrim Ennin (794-864) mentions that Taoists had lectured on Chuang-tzu at abbeys in Ch'ang-an sometime previously. (4) Ennin was fanatically hostile to Taoism, and his references to it are notoriously untrustworthy. (5) But in this case, there is no reason to question his report that on 4 February 841 one otherwise-unknown Chu-ling-fei, on imperial command, lectured on "the Nan-hua [i.e., Chuang-tzu] and other scriptures." (6) But Ennin reports that Chu-ling-fei held the title of "Court Priest" (nei-kung-feng), "a Buddhist office created by the T'ang in 756." (7) Ennin's...