Stephen C. Walker

This chapter examines three early Chinese texts that offer extended reflections on the variety of contending masters and traditions that purport to teach us dao. All three texts treat a range of rival schools as getting something right—as not entirely excluded from the proper way, but also as expressing it imperfectly. Their analyses of why this is diverge, along with their advice for choosing what to study and how to engage with our contemporaries. The Xunzi models confidence that one specific lineage of leaders (political and educational) embodies what is best in human teachings; chapter 33 of the Zhuangzi models confidence that no existing lineage can claim as much, because they all teach fragments of what was once (and should be) unified. The Huainanzi argues that effective use of dao requires appreciating, adapting, and indeed inventing diverse teachings as appropriate to shifting circumstances. These three texts lean on different intuitions surrounding the multivalent concept of dao, foregrounding its exclusionary and assertive possibilities, its open and uncommitted ones, and its aspect of sheer pragmatism respectively.

The Routledge Companion to Chinese Philosophy features more than 40 chapter-length introductions to the concepts, claims, and arguments that animate the Chinese philosophical tradition. Taking a topic-by-topic rather than text-by-text approach, this Companion aims at helping contemporary Anglophone readers access the philosophical riches of the Chinese tradition by balancing close analysis with broad contextualization. The book is divided into four "Acts" that reflect system-level changes in how the Chinese philosophical conversation has been conducted: Act I draws primarily on pre-imperial texts, foregrounding competition among persuaders in the absence of a geographical or canonical center of gravity. Act II focuses on the early imperial centralization of intellectual culture around the corpus of Confucian classics. Act III restructures the conversation space according to the radically innovative priorities of Buddhism. Act IV focuses on Neo-Confucianism, which combines some of the priorities of Act II with the ongoing legacy of Act III. Within each Act, contributors focus on topics like religious and political thought, ethics and self-cultivation, philosophical anthropology and theory of agency, language, epistemology, metaphysics, hermeneutics, and debate. This volume is essential reading for students, academics, and philosophers with an interest in Chinese philosophy. Brook Ziporyn is Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the Divinity School, University of Chicago. His recent works include the monographs Ironies of Oneness and Difference (2012), Beyond Oneness and Difference (2013), Emptiness and Omnipresence (2016), and Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond (2024), as well as the translations Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (2020) and Daodejing (2022). Stephen C. Walker teaches at the University of Chicago and DePaul University. His articles on classical Chinese philosophy (particularly the Zhuangzi and related texts) have appeared in Dao, Oriens Extremus, Philosophy East and West, and other venues"-- Provided by publisher.

This entry examines a set of ancient Chinese texts – with their associated literary and ideological tendencies – that had come to be seen as distinctive by the early Han period. This set constitutes one of the standard referents of “Daoism,” a word whose difficulties command attention in their own right. The ancient writers we could label “Daoists” were united by no single text, founder, agenda, or concept; grouped together, they show tendencies towards dissidence, paradox, and humor that distinguish them from moralistic and technocratic rivals. These writers engaged a variety of themes and practices familiar from the early Chinese religious environment; alongside the eccentricities of Daoist writers themselves, the distinctiveness of this environment makes it challenging to put them in philosophical dialogue with other religious traditions. Buddhist uses of the Daoist heritage illustrate its potential relevance to a range of other religious perspectives.

This essay examines the questions raised about debate in _Zhuāngzǐ_ 莊子 2, the practical advice this chapter offers us for dealing with debates when they arise, and some of the questions that will predictably occur about how and why to apply that advice. On the present interpretation, _Zhuāngzǐ_ 2 argues that joining any side in a verbal conflict promotes continued conflict, and that only appreciating and working along with each speaker’s distinct point of view affords us access to what is “really” or “conclusively” (_guǒ_ 果) the case. In contentious situations, the text advises that we pay close attention to speakers and their ways of life—rather than to what they are supposedly speaking about—and that we abandon any immediate goal beyond preserving our own health. Along the way, it foregrounds pleasure and comfort rather than rightness as what we are most attuned to when we listen and respond to one another’s words.

Abstract:This article aims to help Anglophone scholars recover a neglected Zhuangist dialogue for philosophical engagement. The discussion between "Knowlittle" and "Great Unbiased Harmony" in Zhuangzi 25 preserves an extensive, relatively technical analysis of "dao" and its infinite referent that throws interesting light on many other treatments of this topic in the surrounding literature. Apparently taking exception to the practice of using "dao" as a label for something different in kind from ordinary things, whoever wrote this dialogue maintains that dao includes those things—and hence is just as available for understanding and description as they are. While its place in the historical development of "Daoist" conversations remains an open question for future research, this dialogue's fascinating claims and arguments in and of themselves reward attention.