9^th Annual Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought

University of Dayton/Wright State University

May 10-11, 2013

FRIDAY, MAY 10

Regular Session- University of Dayton

9:00a-10:45a: Daoism (chair: Alexus McLeod, University of Dayton)

David Chai, University of Toronto: “Xuan and Meontological Soteriology in the Thought of Ge Hong”

Stephen Walker, University of Chicago: “Why is Dao Concealed?”

Brian Hoffert, North Central College: “Devolutionary Presence: Relearning Our Ability to Live in the Present”

11:00a-12:45p: Philosophical Arguments in Confucianism (chair: Judson Murray, Wright State University)

Michael Harrington, Duquesne University: “Confucians and the Slippery Slope Argument”

Cheryl Cottine, Indiana University: “Obedient Wives: Virtue or Vice?”

Kelly Epley, University of Oklahoma: “Caring and the Li”

2:00-3:45p: Moral Development and Failure (chair: Alexus McLeod, University of Dayton)

Judson Murray, Wright State University: “The Water Mirror or Polished Jade: Debates on Moral Virtuosity and Human Excellence in Han China”

Michael Ing, Indiana University: “The People Have Fallen in a Filthy Ditch: Moral Stain and Compromise in Early Confucianism”

Jingyi Zhao, Cambridge University: “The Role of Shame in Moral Education in the Writings of Aristotle and Xunzi”

5:00-6:45p Keynote Address- Wright State University Nutter Center

Peng Guoxiang, Peking University: “Dialogical Confucianism as a Religious Tradition and Its Contribution in Globalization”

7:15-9:00p: Dinner

SATURDAY, MAY 11

Regular Session-University of Dayton

9:00a-10:45a:  Reading Mencius and Classical Texts (chair: Brian Hoffert, North Central College)

Thorian Harris, University of Hawaii: “The Hermeneutics of Pragmatic Language in Early Confucian Literature”

Joseph Harroff, University of Hawaii: “Reinterpreting the Mencian Doctrine of the ‘Goodness of Human Nature’ in Light of the Guodian Bamboo Slips”

Paul D’Ambrosio, Merrimack College/East China Normal University: “Lying in the Mengzi: Why Falsity is Never an Appropriate Means for a Moral End”

11:00p-12:45p:  Modern Issues in Chinese Thought (chair: Michael Ing, Indiana University)

Timothy Huson, Saint Louis University: “Lin Yutang and the Cross-Cultural Translation of Chinese Values”

Elisabeth Forster, Oxford University: “A Worldview for an Academic Programme: Evolutionist Theory in the New Tide and the National Heritage Magazines in 1919”

Manyul Im, Fairfield University and A. Minh Nguyen, Eastern Kentucky University : “The Dao of Teaching Chinese Philosophy: Lessons from a Survey”

2:00p-3:45p: Encounters With the West (chair: Aaron Stalnaker, Indiana University)

Kevin Tsai, Indiana University: “’Sacrificial Crisis’ in Girard, China, and Greece”

Charles Jones, Catholic University of America:  “Creation and Causality in Chinese-Jesuit Polemical Literature”

Zhao Qi, Saint Louis University: “Relation-Centered Ethics in Confucius and Aquinas”

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON/WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY

Dayton, OH

May 10-11, 2013

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:  PENG GUOXIANG, PEKING UNIVERSITY

The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought, as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives. Possible themes for submissions include: examining how recovered texts reframe familiar issues and debates in early Chinese thought; texts, movements, and figures from neglected eras and traditions; the current renaissance of philosophy and religious studies in China.

This year’s MCCT will be held on Friday, May 10 and Saturday, May 11 at the University of Dayton and Wright State University, in Dayton, OH.

To facilitate blind review, please submit abstracts of 1-2 pages in length to Patricia Johnson at pjohnson2@udayton.edu by MARCH 15th.  For further inquiries about this year’s MCCT, contact Alexus McLeod at gmcleod1@udayton.edu or Judson Murray at judson.murray@wright.edu.

Let me throw a particular issue out there that I’ve been thinking about recently, related to part of what I cover in this paper.  I considered the question of the source of ritual in Xunzi, and whether we ought to see Xunzi as endorsing a conventionalist view or a realist view of ritual.  One of my contentions in the paper is that reading Xunzi in comparison with the Mimamsa Sutra and similar Indian texts might help us to answer this question, given certain structural similarities of the theory of ritual in these texts, and numerous ways Mimamsa elaborates beyond what is found in Xunzi concerning the source of ritual.  Of course, such comparative work can only ultimately be suggestive—nothing that we find in the Mimamsa Sutra, for example, will demonstrate that Xunzi held some particular view or the other.

One kind of conventionalist view would hold that any rituals performing the requisite function of limiting desires and thereby having the necessary interpersonal and intrapersonal effects are adequate.  Although the Zhou rituals are the uniquely correct ones for Xunzi’s community, there might be different rituals for different communities, etc.  This would lead to a kind of ritual pluralism.  Although my primary goal in this project is to correctly interpret Xunzi, I do think there is a deep philosophical problem with this kind of pluralism.  Lucky for me, I also think Xunzi was not a ritual conventionalist or pluralist.   One might object at this point, on grounds that the conventionalism I outline above doesn’t necessarily entail pluralism.  Couldn’t it be the case, after all, that ritual is a purely human construct, yet there are uniquely efficacious rituals for any human being?  That is, there might be a limited number of ways to sufficiently limit desire such that it leads to the proper interpersonal and intrapersonal effects.

I think there is a problem with that response.  If there is a single sufficient set of rituals for any culture, community, etc., in what way can it be said that these rituals are creations, rather than discoveries of humans?  Human action is certainly necessary to bring about ritual, but it is also necessary to bring about scientific theories, for example.  Yet scientific theories are, if correct, uniquely correct, and not so based on mere convention, but based on facts about the world making them so (or whatever relation obtains between the world and language determining truth—I don’t want to wade into that problem here).  There is certainly a conventional aspect of scientific theory (we could have used a different language of mathematics to express certain laws, different equations, etc.), but any difference in these conventions would still leave us with the same theory.  It seems to me that if one maintains a conventionalism beyond a trivial one, then one has to buy in to some kind of pluralism.  The ritual conventionalist then, if this is true, is in some sense a ritual pluralist.  We could have constructed different ritual conventions, and some other communities may have different ritual conventions, all of which are justified as long as ritual limits desire and has the relevant effects.

I won’t elaborate here on all my problems with pluralism, but in general, my biggest issue with it is that it seems to generate insoluble normative problems.  If various systems of ritual are acceptable as long as they perform the central function of ritual, what reasons can I have to adhere to this system of ritual (rather than some other acceptable system)?  It seems to me insufficient to respond that this system is the accepted system of my community, because this gives normative force to a consideration that falls outside of the realm of what makes ritual acceptable.  If the acceptability of a system of ritual is based on its ability to limit desires in a certain way, then our reasons to adhere to ritual are also thus constrained.  The purely conventional features of ritual unconnected to its performance of this function can have no normative relevance.

A realist view of ritual, some version of which I think Xunzi actually held, would take the ritual system to either be part of or be based on mind-independent features of the world.  Such a view would likely lead to absolutism about ritual—that there is one uniquely privileged or correct set of rituals (those of the Zhou, according to Xunzi).

The issue of conventionalism or lack thereof about ritual in Xunzi has been discussed widely, of course, but one interesting feature of this that can be easy to overlook is that the issue of whether Xunzi is a pluralist or absolutist about ritual depends on whether he is a conventionalist or realist concerning the source of ritual.  The absolutist view seems to follow from realism just as the pluralist view follows from conventionalism.

I wrote a post some time ago at Warp, Weft, and Way about ways of reading the Zhuangzi, in particular that perhaps part of the lesson of the Zhuangzi (insofar as it can be taken to have one) is that we shouldn’t be looking for coherent “explanations” of major themes, goals, etc. of the Zhuangzi.  That’s simply not the kind of thing Zhuangzi endorses, and the authors of Zhuangzi write the way they to to jar us out of this kind of mindset.  While I do think there are certain themes in the text and clear messages it intends to get across, I also think these messages are often missed because we look too closely at the language, take what is said too literally, and look too deeply for something “profound”, because the Zhuangzi is supposed to be a “great work”.  Part of the point of one of the articles I’m working on now is that the Zhuangzi text is something very different than, for example, the Lunyu, Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, or even Daodejing.  However, if we look at how it is often presented, it is side by side with these texts (as an “early Chinese philosophical text”), presented as if it is doing something very similar.  To my mind, this is like putting a script of Monty Python’s “And Now For Something Completely Different” beside Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity” and Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice”.  This is not to say that Zhuangzi is philosophically unimportant, but rather that it is a different kind of text, with different aims than those it is often associated with.

I can refer to another Monty Python example to explain this, actually.

In the classic “argument clinic” skit, we can clearly isolate a number of themes and derive particular claims about the nature of argument, human interaction, etc.  But what if we approach this skit asking the question: “what is it trying to tell us?” we’re likely going to see strange specters of meaning everywhere and contort ourselves into all kinds of strange interpretive configurations to try to supply such a meaning.”  Indeed, what does this Python skit mean?  What is it’s intention?  Is it trying to tell us that argument is useless?  Meaningless?  That’s it’s really nothing more than irrational disagreement?  Is it making a point about modern human interactions?  Most of us would recognize that asking these questions of this skit is to misunderstand the purpose of the skit.  It’s simply using ambiguities in our language and certain applications of language to construct a humorous situation.  The point is that we laugh.

And, for all the philosophical content of the Zhuangzi, perhaps its point is not to make a philosophical point, insofar as it expresses a position about anything in particular.  But the question becomes: “what then is the point of the Zhuangzi?”  Perhaps, just like the point of the Monty Python skit is that we laugh, the point of the Zhuangzi is that we stop conceptualizing, stop forming identities, based on things (wu), stop making points.

This leads into my second point (I’m a bad Zhuangist):  we often read in the Zhuangzi ringing endorsements of the strangest kinds of characters–bums of various kinds, madmen, deformed and otherwise warped people, the extremely ugly, the seemingly brainless.  And we read (in ch. 4 specifically) that in order to be successful in life one should literally eschew one’s identity, such that one becomes like (Zhangzi’s version of) Yan Hui, who undergoes “fasting of the mind” such that he is able to see himself as “no longer beginning to be Hui”.  How do we make sense of all of this?  Does the Zhuangzi really advocate that the ideal person is one who wanders around like an idiot and knows nothing, not even his or her own name, or even that he or she is an individual?  I don’t think so–in fact, I think Zhuangzi’s ideal person is someone who will look a lot like a normal person, but without the various neuroses that tend to characterize our lives.  Indeed, I think that’s part of Zhuangzi’s point in attacking values like de, for example.  Mirroring the dao is a matter of allowing to happen the natural ways of life that will unfold when one avoids the identity construction and conceptualization that Zhuangzi thinks is so problematic.  If we give up our striving to be virtuous, we won’t thereby stop caring for our families and communities.  Indeed, we can often care for our families and communities better by focusing on manifesting our natural concern for them, rather than on the artificial value of attaining virtue, which inevitably ends in alienation (the kinds of cases Michael Stocker discussed, visiting a friend in the hospital because it’s one’s duty, rather than simply from spontaneous concern).

What the madman and idiot represent are people with the ability to avoid falling into the trap of conceptualization and identity construction that leads to such alienation.  They don’t engage in these things themselves, and there is no one in the world who can make them do so.  If you offer them the empire (which would normally turn one into a “ruler”, and give them “responsibilities”), they’ll just throw it away.

Lots of not-completely-worked-out thoughts here as I try to read through the Zhuangzi again, in a more Zhuangist way, and work on two related papers.  But I’ll end on a fun note.  I heard a story on NPR this morning in which someone said something that struck me as very Zhuangist, both in style and content.  There was an interview with Peter Lassally, the executive producer of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, who explained a bit about his approach to hosting talk shows.  He talked about working with Craig Ferguson, a Scottish comedian, and his advice to him about being a successful talk show host.  Later on, when the black comedian D.L. Hughley asked Lassally for his advice about the hosting talk shows, Lassally said “I gave him the same advise I gave Craig Ferguson: ‘don’t be too Scottish.’ “  He said Hughley laughed and said “oh, I get it.”

The reason this struck me as particularly Zhuangist was, as I mentioned, both the style and content.  Regarding the style:  telling D.L. Hughley “don’t be too Scottish” was clearly part joke, part serious advice.  On the surface, this advice is meaningless, because Hughley isn’t Scottish.  But to look at it this way is to both miss the humor and the advice.  Regarding the substance: what Lassally was really telling Hughley was “don’t be too black”, and what he meant by that was shouldn’t just turn himself into “the black guy,” trying to get too much play out of his racial identity, but rather to construct his own stage persona through authentic and spontaneous response to his particular audience.  The comedian Garry Shandling says of Lassally:  ”One of Peter’s real strengths is getting the host to understand how to listen, how to ask the questions that an audience might want to hear, and to listen to the answer and to not be thinking ahead with the joke.”

This all strikes me as very Zhuangist, and Lassally’s advice to Hughley seems to me just the kind of thing Zhuangzi’s Confucius was trying to tell Yan Hui in ch. 4 of the Zhuangzi.  Yan Hui wanted to travel to Wei to reform its ruler, and asked Confucius for his advice.  Basically, what Confucius told Yan Hui was “if you go to Wei as Yan Hui, trying to reform the ruler, you’re going to fail.  You have to lose that identity, and the conceptualization it’s based on.”

“Hui, don’t be too Scottish.”

In Tan tian, Wang argues against the views that 1) Tian is fluid/vapor 2) tian is close to us, 3) tian has a mind or agency, 4) tian can reward, punish, or even be aware of individual human activities.  He seems particularly concerned in Tan tian with refuting the view that tian is a fluid (identifiable with the sky) and thus close to humans, a view he attributes to ru scholars.

Toward the end of Tan tian, Wang has this to say: 人生於天，何嫌天無氣？猶有體在上，與人相遠。(Humans originate in tian, how can we then criticize the view that tian is not a fluid?  It resembles something with a body, above humans and far distant.) [note: Wang is using 氣 here in its non-technical sense of "fluid/vapor" as opposed to 體 ti (body)]

So tian is a physical entity (this keeps with Wang’s general materialism), and is something that creates (somehow) humans, or plays a role in their creation.  And it is far distant, above the sky.  This is strange.  If tian is something like a “first material principle,” why insist that it is distant?  He argues in Tan tian and elsewhere that even if tian were capable of having the mental states, will, and ability required to reward and punish us for actions, it is too distant from us to hand out rewards or punishments.  But if this is the case, how can it have been instrumental in our creation and endowment with a certain quantity of qi? (see my previous post on qi and ming here).

In addition, if tian is a body rather than something like a principle, it’s unclear how it could be responsible for the creation of humans other than through a kind of distant “first cause” relationship.  Perhaps the distant, physical tian first created the cosmos and its workings (spontaneously, of course), and the resulting birth of the individual human somewhere down the line is then attributable ultimately to the first creative act of tian.  This seems inconsistent with some things Wang says elsewhere in the Lunheng, however, where he claims that tian provides individual humans with their alloted qi.  Of course, we might work this out by reading such claims to mean that tian is ultimately, if not directly, responsible for the measure of qi one receives.  But then what is directly responsible?  What mechanistic process determines my quantity of qi?  The qi of my parents?  Features of the environment in which I was born?

All of this just raises more questions, which I’ll have to try to answer by digging deeper into the issue of tian in the Lunheng.  Back to the text I go…

I engage with Wang Chong as philosopher, rather than as social critic, political thinker, or historical figure.  Certainly, aspects of these features of Wang Chong’s work must be considered in any study of Wang’s thought, but I focus mainly in this project on the philosophical thought of Wang, as it reveals itself through the method he advocates, his arguments and conclusions, and the sometimes startling ways these arguments can help to inform certain positions and debates in contemporary philosophy.

Thus, my purpose is in some sense historical, but in a larger sense it is an attempt to reflect along side of Wang Chong, thinking about solutions to pressing philosophical problems in ways that often import Wang’s thinking to solve contemporary problems and vice-versa.   I necessarily consider Wang outside of his historical and cultural context, assuming that philosophical method and arguments need not be tied to particular historical and cultural contexts (as we regularly do with philosophers such as Kant or Plato, and to a somewhat lesser extent with religious philosophers like Aquinas, Augustine, or Avicenna, whose central theological motives are often seen as archaic and therefore historically and culturally bound).

One way of seeing the intent of this work, then, is that of thinking through contemporary philosophical problems through the lenses of and with the aid of Wang Chong, a unique and penetrating ancient Chinese thinker, whose method and arguments can be of immense use in contemporary philosophy.  Wang approaches subjects from ethics and politics to metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and philosophical method, in an often very different way than his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the earliest and most widely studied (by philosophers in the west) period of Chinese thought. Wang Chong’s thought is well suited to inform contemporary debates in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, and contemporary philosophical concepts can also help illuminate Wang’s own project.

Keep an eye out for much more on Wang here on Unpolished Jade in the coming days and weeks!

穀足食多，禮義之心生；禮豐義重，平安之基立矣。故饑歲之春，不食親戚，穰歲之秋，召及四鄰。不食親戚，惡行 也；召及四鄰，善義也。為善惡之行，不在人質性，在於歲之饑穰
“When there is sufficient grain and abundant food, the heart of ritual and righteousness (liyi) grows.  When ritual flourishes and righteousness is taken seriously, the foundations of peaceful order are established.  Therefore in the spring of a famine year, one does not feed one’s relatives, while in the autumn harvest of an year of abundant yield, one calls together one’s neighbors (to eat).  Not feeding one’s relatives is bad conduct.  Calling together one’s neighbors to eat is good conduct.  Production of good or bad conduct is not a matter of the substance and nature (zhi xing) of persons, rather it is a matter of whether the year is one of famine or abundance.”

Wow.

Lest I get too carried away, though–the context of this quote is important.  Wang is arguing against (as he so often is) the view that virtuous rulership is effective (in some way) in creating virtuous subjects, a revered Confucian position.  Wang argues that this cannot be the case, as there can be virtuous rulers whose states are in disorder and whose subjects are unvirtuous.  He offers a number of historical examples and examples from the classic literature to demonstrate this.  He then turns to an explanation for this disconnect–what accounts for the moral quality of human behavior is the external situation, such as whether or not food is abundant.  Of course, there are difficulties for this view as there are for any behaviorist/situationist view (what explains heroics, altruism in stressful situations, etc.), but what is so startling about this is that Wang says something like this, given his seeming commitment elsewhere to the efficacy of deliberate effort in creating virtuous character.

He talks in the essay 率性 Shuai xing, for example, about the “completion of character” (成為性 cheng wei xing), claiming that this completion happens through either instruction (for those with initially deficient/bad character), or preservation (in the case of those with initially good character (kind of a mix of the Mencian and Xunzian positions it seems).  Interestingly, there are really two senses of xing here–that which one has naturally as a result of being born with it, and that which is “completed”.  The “completed” xing sounds closest to what we generally mean by “character”, and human effort in some sense is necessary for attaining it (whether through education or actively guarding), while the raw xing is independent of human activity and given (spontaneously, of course) by 天tian.

What is interesting here is that it seems like Wang wants to be a determinist/situationist as well as to uphold the efficacy of character.  But how can he do this?  What differences are there between the person of good completed xing and the person of bad completed xing in a situation of famine, for example?  Will it be the case that both of them will fail to feed their relatives?  The above passage from Zhi qi seems to suggest so.  And if this is the case more generally for external situations, how can xing play any role at all in behavior, completed or not?

I haven’t yet found any proposed solution to this in Lunheng, or even an indication that Wang is aware of the problem.  It could be, of course, that he was overstating the case for determinism in order to make a broader point about rulership, and that this statement from the Zhi qi should be thought of as having the invisible preface “generally speaking…”

I’ve come across an interesting issue in Lunheng recently, and an interesting translation difficulty/issue.  Wang Chong distinguished three types of ming 命(destiny) in the essay Ming yi 命義, and there is a difficulty surrounding how this distinction ought to be understood.  The three types Wang mentions are zheng ming (no not that one, rather 正命), sui ming 隋命, and zao ming 遭命.  In some places, Wang seems to define these in terms of the primary cause of the destined outcome in question.  Thus zheng ming is understood as the destiny one has as a result of their xing, or natural characteristics, which have (according to Wang) nothing to do with post-birth environmental/external forces.  Sui ming is destiny one has as a result of effort, whether inadvertent or intentional.  A person who is naturally weak yet works hard to build the body might attain a different ming than they would have if they left things to their natural course, for example.  The final type, zao ming, is destiny one receives incidentally.  One might meet an early death not as the result of a frail nature or weakening oneself through one’s own efforts (say one drinks too much or fails to eat a nutritious diet, etc), but rather because one is in the wrong place at the wrong time, wandering into a battlefield, or getting hit by a runaway chariot in the road.

It is with this third type of ming that the difficulty is generated.  Wang seems to talk about zao ming as if it is only consistent with a negative, even disastrous, destiny.  Zao ming is always a ming connected with early death, bad luck, catastrophe of some type.  This is odd, to say the least.  Wang doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that one could incidentally stumble upon fortune, rather than disaster.  Sure, one could get run over by a car, but couldn’t one just as accidentally find a sack full of money on the side of the road making one rich for the rest of his life, or some other fortunate event?  Isn’t it possible, that is, for zao ming to be positive rather than negative?

Clearly noticing this correspondence between zao ming and catastrophe in Ming yi, Alfred Forke translates it “adverse destiny.”  At the end of Ming yi, however, Wang discusses zao itself (independently of the type of ming associated with zao) as something much more akin to “incident” or “accident”.  It is this sense of zao I think Wang means to call on for his use in connection with ming, even though he seems to think that zao ming is always negative.  Thus, I translate zao ming as “incidental destiny.”  Forke’s translation choice shows us something interesting, however.  I think he was on to something–that is, it does seem like Wang thinks that not only is zao ming incidental, but that it is catastrophic, or “adverse.”  Why would he think this?  Part of it doubtlessly has to do with the nature of the problem he took himself to offer a solution to with his distinction of three types of ming.  The main problem is that we often observe that those who seem to be robust and healthy (and presumably thus have a ming determining long life–Wang does say that we can determine what kind of ming one has through physical signs such as this–frail and sickly people have a ming condemning them to short life, while the healthy and strong have a ming connected to long life) nonetheless die early as the result of some accidental situation–a war, natural disaster, or other accident.  How can we square such early deaths with the coexistence of natural ming determining that they will have long lives?

The distinctions Wang makes between different types of ming is meant to answer this.  One kind of ming can supersede any other, so that zao ming (in the above case wandering into the road where a runaway chariot is bearing down) can trump zheng ming, which would in this case indicate a long life.  However, zheng ming can sometimes also trump zao ming.  For example, we might imagine a person surviving an injury in battle that would kill a less physically robust person.  Because Wang is so focused on these negative examples, in which zao ming undercuts fortune, long life, etc., he neglects possible cases of zao ming leading to positive results.

My suspicion, even though Wang is not clear on this, is that this is due to a peculiar view Wang has concerning qi and its connection to ming.  Wang argues in a number of chapters that the quality of one’s ming is due to the quantity of qi one has received from birth.  The length of one’s life, for example, connected to zheng ming, is determined the amount of qi one has.  A person with abundant qi will have a long life (barring zao, of course), and the less qi a person has, the shorter they will generally live.  No one, Wang seems to hold, has a short life or misfortune based on possession of some property (generally a type of qi), but rather misfortunes of various kinds are based on privation.  This view, perhaps, leads him to see zao ming as undercutting positive properties.  No one could gain additional qi, and this is presumably what it would take to “accidentally” gain fortunate ming.  Thus, we might read Wang (although again he is not explicit about this, and his view has to be reconstructed from a number of positions) as one cannot accidentally be fortunate.  Fortune is always a result of zheng ming (though not necessarily tied to health, talent, etc., as he argues in a number of chapters), which involves possession of positive properties (mainly abundance of qi), and anything that gets in the way of this can only affect zheng ming by undermining it.  Notice that this does not entail that the zheng ming of everyone is the same or completely positive.  It is not that zheng ming of every person commits them to a long life and zao ming might undermine this.  Rather, because people can have different quantities of qi, the zheng ming of some people can condemn them to a short life, as they have relatively little qi.  What cannot happen, however, is that zao ming intervenes and makes this person’s life longer than that specified by their zheng ming.  It can make it shorter, though.  A sickly or dying person can still meet their demise on the battlefield earlier than they would have otherwise, for example.  This, of course, still leaves the question of how sui ming works, as it seems one might make one’s life longer than it would be dependent on their zheng ming alone through effort (nutrition, doctors, etc.)

Thus, while I agree with Forke’s intuition that zao ming is necessarily (relatively) negative, I think we should still translate it as “incidental destiny” rather than “adverse destiny.”

In Wang’s essay on zuo, he’s mainly concerned with defending himself against the (presumed) accusation that he’s engaging in zuo with his writing of the essays of the Lunheng, and thus doing something unacceptable.  Interestingly, Wang’s view in Dui Zuo is similar to Yu’s position in that it takes zuo to be something culturally foundational, but (unlike Yu’s position), Wang argues that no literary work is zuo in the problematic sense, and that every literary work is zuo in a trivial sense.  What Wang attempts to do, in the end, is to shift the focus of the dispute away from the consideration of whether a literary work is or is not zuo to the more important consideration (according to Wang, at least) of whether a literary work contains truths (實 shi) or falsehoods (虛 xu).

The reason Wang’s view on zuo vs. shu (transmission) here interests me is because it puts pressure on the view that common Han dynasty view (and one that spanned most of the history of Chinese thought) that zuo is problematic.  Wang argues that the view that one engages in zuo when composing a new literary work is either trivially true or necessarily false.

Wang’s argument for the latter is basically a version of “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Every literary work relies on the styles, concepts, and views of others in the past and present, and thus no literary work can be completely innovative.  According to Wang, one only engages in zuo if one creates something that did not exist before, as in the case of the first creation of writing or chariots  (造端更為，前始未有，若倉頡作書、奚仲作車是也).  His use of non-literary examples here is meant in part to show that no literary work can meet such a standard.  The invention of writing itself may have been zuo, but nothing written is zuo.

Wang’s argument for the triviality of zuo in a different sense is simple.  If we understand zuo in the above sense, it is clearly impossible for any literary work to be zuo.  But if we think of it in a more conventional sense, in which to engage in creation is simply to produce something new through one’s own efforts, then clearly any literary work is zuo.  Even a commentary on the Analects by a devoted Confucian would be zuo in this sense.

While we might take issue with Wang’s two senses of zuo (that is, it seems Wang’s two senses don’t exhaust all the possibilities of what one might mean by ‘zuo‘), the view is nonetheless interesting because of the pressure it puts on the position that zuo is problematic.  What is it about zuo, we might imagine Wang saying, that is so problematic?  It clearly can’t be the trivial sense of zuo that people object to.  Presumably, what one might find objectionable about attempts to engage in zuo is that they are unnecessary or unwise given that there is already sufficient material available to us (from the sages) in the realm of ethics, politics, or whatever else.  To engage in zuo is to try to “reinvent the wheel.”  What Wang does in Dui Zuo is to (among other things) point out that no one in the history of literature has actually done this or even attempted to do this (even the sages themselves–who related norms they didn’t invent through writing them).