WANG Bi and Xuanxue

Abstract

Wang Bi’s syncretistic hermeneutics, influenced by his affiliations with the Jingzhou school of learning, draws on a combination of Confucian political and social thought, Daoist naturalism, and Huang-Lao concepts of the sage ruler, while his interest in the function of language also owes much to the School of Names. This study of Wang Bi’s life and works focuses on the distinction between “nothingness” and “somethingness” and the “substance” and “function” of “nothingness”: wu (nothingness), though possessing no physical existence, is both the primogenitor of and the cosmic program that directs all phenomenal existence, the ultimate principle of principles, the “one” that governs the “many.” As such, Wang’s xuanxue (arcane learning) fuses Daoist naturalism with Confucian ethics for the human world. For language, Wang’s analysis of the relationships among “images” (xiang), “ideas” (yi), “concepts” (yi), “principles” (li), and “words” (yan), develops a view of language that had immense impact on later Chinese hermeneutics and poetics. Finally, an account is provided of Wang’s influence on the later Daoist philosophical and religious traditions, and his veneration of wu “nothingness” is contrasted with Guo Xiang’s emphasis on the spontaneous self-generation of everything, entirely without a transcendent creator, his rejection of “nothingness” and veneration of you “somethingness” (phenomenal reality).