Presents wide-ranging and up-to-date interpretations of the Zhuangzi, the Daoist classic and one of the most elusive works ever written.

This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English.

Zhuang Zi's relation to the Confucian school is reexamined. It is argued that although Zhuang Zi was fond of highlighting the absurdities of the Confucian enterprise, we can nonetheless detect in his writings a great admiration for much of what constituted the central core of the Confucian vision. This essay analyzes Confucius' image of "musical perfection," representing the total concordance of ritual restraints and harmonious freedom; traces the Confucian notion of self-cultivation through Mencius' passage on the "full-flowing energy"; and concludes (...) with an examination of Zhuang Zi's "Butcher Ding" story, showing that while Zhuang Zi's whole concept of self-nurturing is approached from a diametrically opposite angle, he nonetheless ends up celebrating a state of mastery and freedom in many ways identical to Confucius' notion of musical perfection. (shrink)

Traditional sources for understanding of the thought of Confucius, such as the Lunyu 論語 (Analects) and Li ji 禮記 (Book of Ritual), are fraught with uncertainty in terms of dating and reliability. Recently excavated manuscripts from Warring States China, however, have begun to shed new light on the development of Confucian thought and the shaping of Confucius as a narrative figure during the two centuries following his death. This paper surveys and briefly assesses the significance of the relevant texts from (...) two major unearthed corpuses: the Guodian Bamboo Manuscripts of Chu 郭店楚墓竹簡 and the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts of Chu 上海博物館藏戰國楚竹書. These include: “Ziyi,” “Zun deyi,” “Min zhi fumu,” “Zhonggong,” “Zigao,” “Lu bang da han,” “Xiang bang zhi dao,” “Yan Yuan wen yu Kong Zi,” “Junzi wei li,” “Dizi wen,” “Kongzi jian Ji Huanzi,” “Ji Kangzi wen yu Kong Zi,” “Kong Zi shilun,” and “Cong zheng.”. (shrink)

Aside from the Yue Ji 樂記, the “Xiu Wen 修文” chapter of the Shuoyuan 說苑 is perhaps our richest source of pre-Qin and early Han 漢 Confucian musical thought. Though woven together from earlier sources, “Xiu Wen” nonetheless manages to present its own distinctive expression of the role of music and its relationship to the greater system of ritual institutions. This article undertakes an examination of the chapter’s philosophies of ritual and music, focusing especially on the latter, and in the (...) process attempts to demonstrate what is unique about the text in relation to its forerunners in the realm of musical thought. (shrink)

The debate over what constituted the most effective means of political control—governance through moral suasion or through coercive measures—was one that came to define the main battle lines between the Confucians and their “Legalist” rivals over the course of Warring States period China. While the importance of this debate is by no means new, recently unearthed Warring States manuscripts have done much to help shed new light upon the emergence of this debate: in particular the Chu-region bamboo manuscripts of Guodian (...) 郭店楚墓竹簡, which reveal the extent to which this issue was already at the forefront of Confucian thought by the mid-to-late fourth century bce. This paper discusses how these manuscript texts go about making the argument against coercive order and for rulership through ritual and musical education, which they do, in short, by staking the claim that the latter derive ultimately from human nature itself and, because of this, are the only true and natural means of successfully guiding and controlling it. (shrink)