Riding the Wind with Liezi

Description

The Liezi is the forgotten classic of Daoism. Along with the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi, it's been considered a Daoist masterwork since the mid-eighth century, yet unlike those well-read works, the Liezi is little known and receives scant scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the Liezi is an important text that sheds valuable light on the early history of Daoism, particularly the formative period of sectarian Daoism. We do not know exactly what shape the original text took, but what remains is replete with fantastic characters, whimsical tales, paradoxical aphorisms, and philosophically sophisticated reflection on the nature of the world and humanity's place within it. Ultimately, the Liezi sees the world as one of change and indeterminacy.

Arguing for the Liezi's historical, philosophical, and literary significance, the contributors to this volume offer a fresh look at this text, using contemporary approaches and providing novel insights. The volume is unique in its attention to both philosophical and religious perspectives.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I The Liezi Text

1. Reading the Liezi: The First Thousand Years

2.The Liezi’s Use of the Lost Zhuangzi

3. Is the Liezi an Encheiridion?

Part II Interpretive Essays

1.Torches of Chaos and Doubt: Themes of Process and Transformations in the Liezi

2. The That-Beyond-Which of the Pristine Dao: Cosmogony in the Liezi

3.The Theme of Unselfconsciousness in the Liezi

4. Reading the Zhuangzi in Liezi: Redefining Xianship

Part III Applying the Teachings of the Liezi

1. Body and Identity

2. I, Robot: Self as Machine in the Liezi

3. Dancing with Yinyang: The Art of Emergence

4. How To Fish Like a Daoist

5. When Butterflflies Change into Birds: Life and Death in the Liezi

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• East Asian religions
• Taoism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438434575
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Riding the Wind with Liezi
New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic
Edited by Ronnie Littlejohn & Jeffrey Dippmann
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Riding the Wind with LieziSUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
Roger T. Ames, editor
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Riding the Wind with Liezi
New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic
Edited by
Ronnie Littlejohn
and
Jeffrey DippmannPublished by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic
tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission
in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riding the wind with Liezi : new perspectives on the Daoist classic / edited by
Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–1–4384–3455–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Liezi, 4th cent. b.c. Liezi.
I. Littlejohn, Ronnie. II. Dippmann, Jeffrey Walter. III. Title: Riding the wind
with Liezi.
BL1900.L485R53 2011
299.5'1482––dc22
2010031922
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Roger T. Ames
The Liezi Text
Reading the Liezi: The First Thousand Years 15
T. H. Barrett
The Liezi’s Use of the Lost Zhuangzi 31
Ronnie Littlejohn
Is the Liezi an Encheiridion? 51
May Sim
Interpretive Essays
Torches of Chaos and Doubt: Themes of Process 77
and Transformations in the Liezi
John H. Berthrong
The That-Beyond-Which of the Pristine Dao: 101
Cosmogony in the Liezi
Thomas Michael
The Theme of Unselfconsciousness in the Liezi 127
Philip J. Ivanhoe
Reading the Zhuangzi in Liezi: Redefining Xianship 151
Jeffrey Dippmann
vvi Contents
Applying the Teachings of the Liezi
Body and Identity 167
Livia Kohn
I, Robot: Self as Machine in the Liezi 193
Jeffrey L. Richey
Dancing with Yinyang: The Art of Emergence 209
Robin R. Wang
How To Fish Like a Daoist 225
Erin M. Cline
When Butterfl flies Change into Birds: 241
Life and Death in the Liezi
David Jones
Contributors 255
Index 261
Acknowledgments
As co-editors, we would like to express our thanks and deep
gratitude to each of this volume’s contributors. Without their patience
and enthusiastic support of this project, it would have never seen
fruition. We wish to thank Roger Ames in particular for his
steadfast encouragement and wise counsel throughout the entire process,
from conception to publication. In addition, we need to express
our appreciation for the community of friends and scholars that
we have come to cherish through the Asian Studies Development
Program, and the Association of Regional Centers. Both
organizations owe their inception to the work of Roger, Peter Hershock,
and Betty Buck, and their members have been stalwart supporters
and in some cases contributors to this anthology.
I want to express my deep gratitude to Jeff Dippmann for his
friendship and deep commitment to our project in this book, and
to the many contributors who allowed us to bring their new work
on Liezi into the ongoing conversation about Daoism. As always,
my thanks and affection goes out to my family and colleagues who
inspire me to follow the Dao.
I would like to personally thank Ronnie Littlejohn for his
unwavering friendship and support throughout this process, and can never
fully express my gratitude for all that he did to ensure the success of
this volume. Most importantly, my thanks to my loving wife Cheri,
and children Angela, Brooks, David, and Jennifer, whose unfailing
support, encouragement and advice made this volume possible.
vii
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Introduction
Roger T. Ames
The Liezi as a text seems almost as elusive as Liezi the historical
person. The Liezi is associated with perhaps the most mystical of all
the Daoist adepts who surfaces here and there in the philosophical
literature only to ride elsewhere on the winds. What Liezi was
originally as a text we do not know, but as it has been received, it
is a compendium of hyperbolic anecdotes, seemingly paradoxical
aphorisms, and curious parables, an anthology that ranges as far
and as wide as the winds blow, that loses its reader in a wild world
of unfathomable change and indeterminacy, and that quite literally
makes a great deal out of nothing. Like most of the Daoist texts,
the Liezi is normative, recommending a way of being in this world
that presumably enables the willing adept to make the most of the
human experience.
This present volume is a long-overdue collection of seminal
essays on this most curious Liezi, one of the most understudied
texts in the classical Chinese corpus. Rather than being read for
what it is, Liezi has often been disrespected if not dismissed in
the historical scholarship because of what it is not. In sum, then,
this present volume contests this unfortunate situation. It begins
from the recognition that most if not all of the classical Chinese
philosophical texts are suspicious in their origins and as such, are
other than what they purport to be. Setting aside the problem of
“authenticity” as an only marginally relevant question, this set of
essays provides a multidimensional argument for the historical,
literary, and philosophical importance of this document by an
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2 Roger T. Ames
assembly of some of our finest interpreters of the classical Chinese
literature. These scholars certainly embrace the now seemingly
incontrovertible evidence against the traditional pre-Qin dating of
this text, but on other more compelling grounds, they also insist on
reevaluating and indeed reinstating its philosophical and historical
worth.
It is entirely appropriate that the opening section of this
anthology—a critical discussion of the Liezi as a text—begin with
a series of essays that engage and make use of Angus Graham’s the
“Date and Composition of the Lieh-Tzu [Liezi].” Although not
included in this volume, Graham’s essay is seminal, and is
appropriately rehearsed here to remind us of the ground on which these new
essays are constructed. Graham’s essay opens by reporting on the
ambivalence that Western and Japanese sinologists have had to the
unwavering opinion of their Chinese counterparts that the Liezi is
a spurious document (weishu ) dating from the Wei-Jin period
in the late fourth century ce. Indeed, it was this groundbreaking
essay of Graham’s that effectively turned the tide on this resistance,
and brought world sinology into firm agreement that the present
Liezi far from being that eight-chapter text listed in a Han dynasty
bibliography is in fact a later and a most deliberate forgery.
Graham’s essay is comprehensive. He provides a list of passages
from the Liezi that overlap with other Han and pre-Han texts that
in sum run to approximately one quarter of the entire document.
Loading the charge of his arguments by invoking various forms of
grammatical evidence and textual devices, Graham demonstrates
persuasively that by and large, this portion of the Leizi as we have
it today was compiled by copying directly from earlier sources.
Having thus retained the grammatical features of these original
documents, this borrowed portion of the text has all the markings
of an earlier age. As argued further in the essay by Ronnie
Littlejohn below, what complicates the picture somewhat is that where
Liezi copies from the Zhuangzi as its major source, it is a different,
fuller, and perhaps better redaction of the Zhuangzi than we have
available to us today. Again, another interesting observation that
Graham makes with respect to the origins of this text is that the
compilers of the Liezi seem to have scoured the early corpus for
any reference to the person Liezi, and to have included all of these
passages herein regardless of their length, importance, or overall
consistency.Introduction 3
Having explained the nature and the origins of the copied
portions of the Liezi, Graham then turns to a detailed linguistic
analysis of the remaining three quarters of the text, applying the
best of our current understanding of the evolution of classical
Chinese grammatical patterns and usages. Demonstrating that the
language of this substantial portion of the Liezi is largely
homogeneous, this philological evidence can then be added to other
anachronistic historical and literary allusions to claim fairly that
this larger portion of the text is of a fourth-century Wei-Jin period
vintage. Such then are Graham’s conclusions.
Tim Barrett in his contribution to this anthology provides us
with a history of how the Liezi has been read across the centuries.
“Reading the Liezi: The First Thousand Years” carries us back to
the earlier days of the Liezi when its readers would be confronted
with a very different, much more complex experience. Each passage
of this syncretic work would certainly invoke in a literate reader
intricate allusions to other familiar works on their library shelves.
But further, assumed by its reader to be a transmitted original in
the tradition of the Laozi and Zhuangzi, the lines of the Liezi
themselves became increasingly honeycombed by a persistent yet always
evolving commentarial tradition that sought to authorize the fluid
intellectual, social, and political machinations of the times. Barrett
locates the widespread readings of this increasingly nested Daoist
text within the changing material, commentarial, and intellectual
culture of early and middle China. He registers the contributions
made by an invested company of literati and bibliographers who
each in his own unique way sought to perpetuate the aggregating