LXXV
181The people are hungry:
It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes
That the people are hungry.
The people are difficult to govern:
It is because those in authority are too fond of action
That the people are difficult to govern.
The people treat death lightly:
It is because the people set too much store by life1
That they treat death lightly.
181aIt is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.
LXXVI
182A man is supple and weak when living, but hard and stiff when dead. Grass and trees1 are pliant and fragile when living, but dried and shrivelled when dead. Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death; the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.
183Therefore a weapon that is strong will not vanquish;
A tree that is strong will suffer the axe.2
The strong and big takes the lower position,
The supple and weak takes the higher position.*
LXXVII
184Is not the way of heaven like the stretching* of a bow?
The high it presses down,
The low it lifts up;
The excessive it takes from,
The deficient it gives to.
184aIt is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient. The way of man is otherwise. It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough. Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire? Only he who has the way.
185Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,
Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.
185aIs this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?
LXXVIII
186In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because1 there is nothing that can take its place.
187That the weak overcomes’the strong,
And the submissive overcomes the hard,
Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into practice.
188Therefore the sage says,
One who takes on himself the humiliation of the state
Is called a ruler worthy of offering sacrifices to the gods of earth and millet;*
One who takes on himself the calamity of the state
Is called a king worthy of dominion over the entire empire.
189Straightforward words
Seem paradoxical.
LXXIX
190When peace is made between great enemies,
Some enmity is bound to remain undispelled.
How can this be considered perfect?
191Therefore the sage takes the left-hand tally,* but exacts no payment from the people.
The man of virtue takes charge of the tally;
The man of no virtue takes charge of exaction.†
192It is the way of heaven to show no favouritism.
It is for ever on the side of the good man.
LXXX
193Reduce the size and population of the state. Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them; and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.
193aEven when they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them; and even when they have armour and weapons, they will have no occasion to make a show of them.
193bBring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,
Will find relish in their food
And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode
And happy in the way they live.
193cThough adjoining states are within sight of one another, and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.
LXXXI
194Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good. He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know.
195The sage does not hoard.
Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more;
Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.
196The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.
LIST OF PASSAGES FOR COMPARISON
(see p. 108)
3a, 129a 59, 59b, 102
6, 99; 10, 81, 82, 108, 147 61a, 62a, 79a, 119a
7, 26, 76, 116, 185 63, 91
8, 28, 156 64, 164, 72 (end)
9, 112, 157 66, 154
11, 17, 78, 101 70, 127
12, 118, 129 71 (end), 169
19, 160 72, 81, 76a, 133
22, 50c, 162 72 (end), 100 (end), 105, 105a
24, 63 76b, 150
26, 158 78, 147
29a, 84b, 176a 79a, 98, 186, 187
30a, 181a 86a, 95
32, 91 (end) 109, 131, 133
33, 49 113, 181 (end)
36 (end), 50, 101 121, 181
37, 119, 126 128, 194
38 (end), 117 (end) 130a, 146a
40, 53, 111; 61, 145 140, 159
41, 51 141ff., 183
49b, 124a, 131a 151a, 178a; 173a
50b, 55 161, 175
55a, 71 170, 187
56a, 88, 158 182 (end), 113
APPENDIX I
THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORSHIP
The most difficult problem in dealing with the history of Chinese thought in the ancient period is how to establish the approximate dates of the various philosophers and philosophical works so that a rough chronological order may be decided on, which is essential to an understanding of the historical development. For instance, given two philosophical works, A and B, the way the thought contained in them is interpreted if A is earlier than B often has to be radically changed if it is shown that B is, in fact, earlier than A. The interpretation of the Lao tzu is a case in point. This depends on whether we accept the traditional view that it was written by Lao Tzu who was an older contemporary of Confu- cius and so was a work of the sixth century BC, or the view favoured by a great number of modern scholars which would place the work in the late fourth or early third century BC. For this reason it is vital to our task of correctly interpreting the thought in the Lao tzu to examine the soundness of the traditional view.*
The traditional view is based on the fact that a meeting was supposed to have taken place between Confucius and Lao Tzu, and the earliest historical work that contains an account of such a meeting is the Shih chi. In both the biography of Lao Tzu and that of Confucius in this work, the account begins with Confucius going to Chou to put questions to Lao Tzu concerning the rites, but in the actual account nothing further is said about the rites. All that takes place is a lecture from Lao Tzu on the kind of behaviour to be avoided. This seems to show that Ssu-ma Chi’en must have used two distinct sources, one concerning Confucius receiving instruction in the rites which, as we shall see, is of Confucianist origin, and the other concerning the censure of Confucius by Lao Tzu which is of Taoist origin. Although we no longer have the sources that Ssu-ma Ch’ien used, fortunately we have accounts concerning the meeting in two extant works. On the one hand, we have in the Chuang tzu accounts of the meeting and of the censure of Confucius by Lao Tzu. On the other, in the Li chi (Records of Rites), a Confucianist work compiled in the first century BC, we have four instances of Confucius recalling what he learned about the rites from Lao Tzu, though there is no account of the actual meeting.
In the Chuang tzu there are several versions of the story, and though these all differ considerab
ly from those in the Shih chi, they are, as is the case with the Shih chi accounts, of Taoist origin. The Li chi passages concern the rites only, but, as the Shih chi does no more than mention the rites, they serve to give us some idea of the nature of the points of rites involved and the kind of sources the Shih chi might have used. Because both the Shih chi and the Li chi are of comparatively late date, and the Li chi does not contain an account of the actual meeting between the two, far more weight has been attached to the Chuang tzu, and it is upon the accounts in the Chuang tzu that the traditional- ists’ case rests. It is argued that as accounts of the encounter between Lao Tzu and Confucius are to be found in the Chuang tzu, the story, at least, of such an encounter must have existed at the time of Chuang Tzu, and the man Lao Tzu must have existed before Chuang Tzu, and the book Lao tzu must have been written, even if the story is untrue, before the end of the fourth century BC, but as early as the sixth century if the story is true. Needless to say, this argument is highly unsatisfactory, as it rests on the simple but questionable assumption that the Chuang tzu was written by Chuang Tzu and the Lao tzu by Lao Tzu, with no more grounds than that these books are traditionally thought to have been named after their authors. It is further argued that as accounts are found in the Chuang tzu it follows that Chuang Tzu knew of Lao Tzu, and from this it is concluded that the book Lao tzu must have existed in the time of Chuang Tzu. Moreover, it is assumed that if the story was current in Chuang Tzu’s time, even if this was no more than a story, it established the priority in time of Lao Tzu over Chuang Tzu. This is to ignore the possibility that Lao Tzu might not have been a historical personage at all.
Let us take the assumption that the Lao tzu was written by Lao Tzu and the Chuang tzu by Chuang Tzu. This is an exceedingly questionable assumption and has to be carefully examined. In order to do this, we must make a digression and say something about the way books were compiled in ancient China.
The earliest works, as is well known, are collections of the sayings of particular thinkers which must have undergone more than once the process of compilation in the hands of disciples and their disciples in turn, and so on. These works came, at some time or other, to be known by the name of the thinkers in question. Practically all ancient philosophical works are so named, with the exception of the collection of sayings by Confucius which was known as the Lun yü.
Within the same work, another principle of compilation seemed to have operated as well. Passages that have something in common, a common topic or a common interlocutor, for instance, are placed together. It is not clear at what date this principle came to be adopted, but we can find examples of this in the Analects of Confucius and in the Mencius. For instance, in Book 4 of the Analects, sections i to 6 all deal with ‘benevolence’, and sections 18 to 21 with ‘filial conduct’, while in the Mencius Book 5 Part I consists solely of answers given by Mencius to questions expressing doubt over accepted traditions concerning sage kings. This principle was not only followed but explicitly stated by Liu Hsiang at the end of the first century BC when he edited the Shuo yuan and the Hsin hsii. Each of these two works is divided into a number of books, and each book comprises passages concerning a common topic. (Indeed this principle survived in the compilation of encyclopedias (‘lei shu’) in later times.) One suspects that parts of the Chuang tzu, for instance, were compiled on this principle as well, though this fact has been obscured by subsequent re-editing. We can still see that the chapter Jang wang (Abdication) consists of a number of stories concerning the abdication of the various legendary sage kings, though some extraneous matter has been introduced, while at the same time some of the abdication stories have found their way to other chapters.
In the case of stories, there are some instances where editors have not only placed those that are of the same kind together but have even included variant versions of the same story. These may be slightly different stories about the same characters or similar stories about different characters. This practice can be . most clearly seen in, for instance, the Hanfei tzu, particularly in chapters 30 to 35, where variant versions are often introduced by the formula ‘one version has it’.
It is obvious, if books were compiled on such a principle, that material from alien sources and possibly of a considerably later date might easily find its way into a work in spite of the fact that the work is named after a particular thinker and indeed represents in the main the thought of that thinker or at least his school. There are reasons for thinking that this happened more often with works of the later part of the Warring States period, say, from the beginning of the third century BC, than with works of the preceding period. Earlier works, viz. the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius, not only consist of sayings by a particular philosopher, but these are invariably introduced by the formula ‘Master So-and-so said’ or simply ‘The Master said’ in the case of the Analects, and although passages with a common topic are placed together they remain distinctly separate sayings. Further- more, the formula, though it can obviously never guarantee the authenticity of a saying, nevertheless serves as a sign that the saying was at one time accepted as a saying of the Master, thus rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for alien material to have been incorporated by accident.
Again, most of the passages consist of serious discussions about moral and political problems. The occasional story is used only to illustrate a point under discussion. The impression one gets in reading these works is that the sayings were taken down by disciples to whom the memory of the Master was sacred. The result is that these sayings truly reflect both the thought and the style of the man. We feel we are listening to the individual voice of a thinker whose thought exhibits a high degree of unity. There is bound to be material which was probably of a later date, but even this is still material belonging to the same school, though it may belong to a tradition somewhat further removed from the Master. In the case of Mencius, we are probably fortunate in having only a version of his works with all books of a doubtful nature removed by the editor of the third century AD. Confucius is a more complicated case, because at a very early stage he became known as a sage and so attracted the attribution of apocryphal sayings and the invention of apocryphal stories. But even the inclusion of these, because they are invented deliberately, is quite different from the inclusion of totally alien material by accident.
All this was changed in the case of later works like the Chuang tzu and the Hsün tzu. These works no longer consist of a series of short sayings introduced by the formula ‘Master So-and-so said’. In fact the name of the thinker after whom the work is known figures but rarely. In the Chuang tzu, Chuang Tzu’s name appears far less frequently than those of the legendary kings Yao and Shun and even that of Confucius. In the Hsün tzu, which is a work of considerable length, Hsün Tzu’s name occurs in no more than half a dozen or so passages where actual conversations in which Hsün Tzu took part are recorded. Moreover, short sayings have given way to much longer passages, which are often couched in the deceptive form of a continuous exposition. It is only when one examines these passages carefully that one realizes that they are very often actually compiled out of shorter units which are only loosely connected and sometimes not connected at all. This lack of connexion is often disguised by the appearance of connecting words like ku (therefore) and shih yi (hence). This is a point to which we shall return.
In this respect, the first thirty-five chapters of the Mo tzu stand half way between the Analects and the Mencius on the one hand, and the later works on the other. These chapters in the Mo tzu seem to contain continuous exposition, though, in fact, they consist of independent units which have been put together. These shorter units are often of such generality that they can be used equally in a number of contexts. But in one respect the Mo tzu is still akin to the Analects and the Mencius. The formula ‘Master So-and-so said’ is still to be found, at least at the beginning of each chapter. This, together with the distinctive style of Mohist writing, is to a certain extent a reassurance that the mate
rial, though it underwent subsequent editing, is more or less homo- geneous and belongs to the same school. In the case of the later works we no longer have such reassurance, particularly where the text is corrupt. The Chuang tzu, with which we are immedi- ately concerned, is a case in point. The state of the text is exceedingly corrupt, and it would be over-sanguine not to expect a good deal of alien material to have found its way into such a work. In some chapters there are parts, for instance the end of chapters 23 to 26, which give the impression that not only extraneous matter has been incorporated but that the text has been compiled from broken bamboo slips* so fragmentary in nature as to make no sense whatsoever as they stand.
There is one other feature of these later works. In some of them, there is an increasing tendency to use stories for the sake of the moral in them. These stories are no longer used in the context of an actual argument as in the earlier works, but are entirely independent. In such cases, it is difficult to find any marks of authorship or of origin, particularly when slightly different ver- sions of the same story sometimes occur in more than one work.
It is possible that if a detailed study were made of such stories they could be grouped into categories according to their form. But a discussion of this problem will take us too far afield. The category that has special relevance for our immediate purpose is what may be called the illustrative story. An illustrative story is a story which is told for its point, and this is the only factor which matters and which remains constant while other factors may vary from version to version. These include the identity of the characters other than the main character, the location of the story and so on. We shall return to this point.
To go back to the works of the latter part of the Warring States period. Because of the features that we have seen, unless there are strong reasons, it is never safe to assume that any such work was actually written by a particular thinker or even that the whole work represents a single tradition in a closely knit school. It is far safer to assume that it is an anthology which passed through the hands of a compiler or of a series of compilers, in the course of time. The judgement of the compilers need not always be sound, and the fact that passages are placed together need not have very much to do with their contents. Although in the majority of cases such passages deal with a common topic, it sometimes happens that these have nothing more in common than one or more catchwords and the point made in each passage is quite different.