The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China.

• Author: Roberts, Moss
• Position: Translations from the Asian Classics - Book review

The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. By LIU AN, KING OF HUAINAN. Translated and edited by JOHN S. MAJOR, SARAH A. QUEEN, ANDREW SETH MEYER, and HAROLD D. ROTH. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010, Pp. xi + 986. $75.

The publication of this second-century B.C.E. compendium of Daoist thought, for the first time complete in English, is a noteworthy event for the Sinological community and for the larger readership interested in China's long and complex history. The extant Huainanzi is a comprehensive philosophical project organized around Daoist concepts and encompassing such topics as cosmology, philosophy, history, political theory and authority, philology, and bibliography.

There are three reasons for the Huainanzi's importance: its rich and varied content, its relevance to the early Han Dynasty and the dynasty's later course, and the influence of the Han as a whole on future dynasties and indeed in our own time. The study of the Han in the US has been gradually coming into its own, having been overshadowed by a sinological tradition that favored Song neo-Confucianism and its embrace of the pre-Han Confucians. This new edition of the Huainanzi contributes to rectifying the imbalance.

Working on the Huainanzi over the course of a decade and a half, a team of four American sinologists, John Major, Andrew Meyer, Sarah Queen, and Harold Roth, multi-tasking as translators, editors, and scholars, have produced an excellent and richly annotated translation. Major and Roth had already published important studies of the Huainanzi, the former on cosmology and the latter on textual history, and Queen has published on the Huainanzi's contemporary rival, the Chunqiu fanlu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. This publication consummates their significant earlier work.

This edition has a thoughtful introduction, elaborate appendices of key terms, an extensive bibliography, a detailed index, ample accounts of the Huainanzi's textual history, and a useful survey of scholarly debates about the nature and value of the work. In addition, the translation contains a valuable lexicon. A large number of unusual technical terms and rare nouns in a wide range of fields--astronomy, cosmology, botany, biology, medicine, and so forth--have been painstakingly researched. Some Of the arcane English equivalents will send readers to their dictionaries.

The Huainanzi synthesizes and elaborates many strands of pre-Han and early Han thought; it also contains important historical and cosmological material. The dominant paradigms are Daoist. The whole, in twenty-one chapters, was completed and presented to Emperor Wu in 139 B.C.E., two years after his enthronement. During the preceding reigns of emperors Wen and Jing (179-140 B.C.E.) the new dynasty succeeded in overcoming the trauma of the Warring States period and of the great civil war between Liu Bang (representing statecraft and large-scale organization) and Xiang Yu (representing restoration of the feudal kingdoms). Liu Bang's victory did not however fully decide the issue and was rather the beginning of a complex struggle between the "neofeudal" or centrifugal forces (what Americans might...