School of Xuanxue (Neo-Daoism)

The claim

Wu — nothing, or non-being — is the root of being. Not an empty space but the undifferentiated ground from which determinate things arise, and to which nothing determinate can be added.

What it held

Xuanxue arose when the Han collapsed and Confucian orthodoxy lost its authority with it. Educated men returned to the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Book of Changes, and read them as metaphysics rather than as guidance.

Wang Bi, who wrote the standard commentary on the Daodejing before dying at twenty-three, argued that being arises from non-being — not from a void but from what has no particular character and can therefore ground everything that has one. Guo Xiang disagreed sharply: things are self-so, arising of themselves, and nothing grounds them at all.

The question of whether the sage has emotions was argued with equal seriousness. He Yan said no; Wang Bi said the sage feels but is not entangled, which is a subtler position and the one that lasted.

The practice was qingtan, pure conversation — philosophical debate as a social form, conducted with fly-whisks and considerable style, and often deliberately impractical at a time when practical service meant serving usurpers. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove are its emblem: brilliant, drunk, and pointedly unemployed.

How it argued

Commentary on the three mysterious texts, and public philosophical conversation judged as much on elegance as on argument.

What it was arguing against

The exhausted Han Confucian synthesis and its correlative cosmology, though most Xuanxue figures held Confucius to be the greater sage precisely because he did not talk about nothingness.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether being comes from non-being, which divided Wang Bi from Guo Xiang. Whether the sage has feelings.

Common misconceptions

That it is anti-Confucian. Wang Bi ranked Confucius above Laozi, on the grounds that Laozi kept discussing what cannot be discussed while Confucius embodied it and said nothing.

How it began

The Han collapse, and a generation of gifted young men for whom orthodox service was dangerous and orthodox belief no longer convincing.

What became of it

Absorbed into the encounter with Buddhism, whose emptiness was initially understood through Xuanxue's vocabulary of nothingness — a translation that shaped Chinese Buddhism permanently.

Lasting influence

Chinese Buddhism's early reception, decisively. Chinese aesthetics and the ideal of the cultivated recluse. Chan's paradoxical style owes it a good deal.

Why it still matters

The argument about whether the ground of being can be characterised at all is a permanent one, and Wang Bi's version is unusually clean.

Put another way

A hub, which is useful because there is nothing in the middle of it.

Where to start

The Shishuo Xinyu for the atmosphere, then Wang Bi for the argument.

The surprising bit

Wang Bi wrote the commentaries that remained standard for the next fifteen centuries and died at twenty-three of an epidemic.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Daoism (Dao-jia)

Influenced

Chan (Zen) Buddhism (Chinese), Tiantai Buddhism

The verdict

A brilliant, short-lived metaphysics produced by people who had good reasons not to be doing anything else.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy