Sonderdruck aus

Commentaries -

Kommentare

Edited by
Glenn W. Most

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Gottingen

I
I
!
Exploring the Common Ground:
Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi

RUDOLF G. WAGNER (Heidelberg)

1. Introduction I
The topic of the Conference is "Historical and Methodological Aspects of Com-
menting Texts." I will try to make a contribution by focusing on a minute body of
surviving fragments from two early fifth century Buddhist Commentaries on the
main Chinese Taoist classic, the Laozi. In the process I will try to make the opera-
tional steps as explicit as possible, hoping that an echo might be generated with
similar processes and operations elsewhere.
During the fourth and fifth centuries when Buddhism had begun to gain a foot-
hold among the educated elite in both North and South China, a number of Bud-
dhists are said to have written commentaries on the Laozi. The Laozi is the main
text of the Taoist tradition with its focus on techniques of life-prolongation, and
also one of the main texts of Xuanxue (Scholarly Exploration of That-which-is-
Dark), a philosophical school that dominated philosophical discussions since the
early third and well into the fifth century. Among these Laozi commentators were
Buddhist monks from Central Asian states beyond Chinese control such as Fo
Tudeng 1~ III ~ (b. around 232, d. 349) and Kumarajiva ~ • Ji 1+ (350-409)
from Kucha; northern and southern Chinese monks such as Kumarajiva's most
famous disciple Seng Zhao f1it ~ (359-414) in Chang'an; Shi Huiyan ~ ~ ~
(363-443), Shi Huiguan ~ ~ ~ (about 370-440), and Shi Huilin ~ ~ 1M' (first
half of fifth century), in Jiankang and other centers of the south; and Chinese
Buddhist laymen such as Liu Yimin ~J~R (354-410) from the circle around the
most important southern master of the time, Shi Huiyuan ~ ~~. While being
listed in the imperial book catalogues of the Sui and Tang dynasties or the ma-
gistral list drawn up by the learned Taoist Du Guangting if± ~ M (850-933) in
901, all of these commentaries have been considered lost by scholars, and since

I am very grateful to Mr. Zachmann for his research assistance. He was instrumental in
making the linkages between Seng Zhao's essays and his implied Laozi quotations there
accessible in a digitalized form.
96 RudolfG. Wagner
having been first listed by Pelliot in a seminal article in 1912,2 they have not been
dealt with until 1955, when Yan Lingfeng mentioned the survival of some frag-
ments of the commentaries by Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao in Song and Yuan
dynasty collections of Commentaries to the Laozi,3 all of which are preserved in
the Ming dynasty Taoist canon, the Daozang, the publication of which was
achieved in 1445; only in 1977 Isabelle Robinet wrote a few more lines on them in
her Les Commentaires du Tao To Kingjusqu'au VIIe siecle. 4
2. The Material
While not being the earliest Buddhist commentaries ofthe Laozi (nor the latest as
this type of commenting went on down to the Ming and Qing dynasties), these
fragments allow us a glimpse at the reverse side of the often described sinification
of Buddhism, namely the Buddhist reading of the Chinese philosophical and reli-
gious tradition.
The existence of the two commentaries with Kumarajiva's having 2 juan and
Seng Zhao's 4 is attested in various historical sources. s Quotations from Kumara-
jiva's and Seng Zhao's commentaries survive in various collections of Laozi
comments preserved in the Daozang. These collections are Li Lin's
lection of the Finest Comments on the Daodejing [=the Laozi}, Daode zhenjing
*
ft Se-
*
qushan ji ~ 1J~ JJt ~ ~ ~ with a preface dated 1172 under the Jin Dynasty;6
Zhao Bingwen's ~1!Hl~:)( (1197-1237) Daode zhenjingjijie ~1!JJt~~~;7 the
large fragment of Liu Weiyong's ;U '1t.;7]'( Daode zhenjing jiyi ~ t~ JJt ~ ~ ~
which was printed in 1299;8 a collection wrongly attributed to Gu Huan Ii IX. (ca
420-483), the Daode zhenjing zhushu ~ t~ JJt ~ tt imE, which contains pieces
from many later commentators, the latest being, as it seems, Chen Xianggu ~ ~
tt, who is mentioned with a date of 1101;9 and finally Jiao Hong's ~Yi sixteenth
2 P. Pelliot, "Autour d'une traduction sanscrite du Tao To King," in: T'oung Pao XIII: 419-
427 (1912).
3 Yan Lingfeng f!& Ii iI$, Zhongwai Laozi zhushu mulu r:p j} ~.:tlf" El ~ (Taipei, 1955),
p. 15.
4 1. Robinet, Les Commentaires du Tao To Kingjusqu'au VIle siecle (Paris: College de France,
1977), p. 90.
S Kumarajiva's Commentary in 2 ch. is not listed in Buddhist bibliographies or in the Suishu
catalogue. It fIrst appears in the Book catalogue of the Tangshu, liu Tangshu (Peking:
Zhonghua, 1975), p. 2027. Du Guangting lists it in his preface to his Daode zhenjing guang
sheng yi, Daozang, Schipper 725, p. 2b. Seng Zhao's commentary is not listed in any sur-
viving book catalogues. It is fIrst mentioned with 4 ch. in Du Guangting's preface.
6 Daode zhenjing qushanji, Daozang, Schipper 718.
7 Daode zhenjingjijie, Daozang, Schipper 695.
8 Daode zhenjingjiyi, Daozang, Schipper 724.
9 Daode zhenjing zhushu, Daozang, Schipper 710. On the controversy about the date of this
collection see Robinet, pp. 214-219.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 97
century Laozi yi :tt ~ ~.I 0 These collections are all later than 1100 CE, and alto-
gether only twenty-one quotations from Kumarajiva and five from Seng Zhao
survive. I I
While the great Taoist systematizer Du Guangting in Sichuan in 901 CE before
the final collapse of the Tang dynasty was still able to characterize Kumarajiva's
commentary and group it with others, which would presuppose access,12 it seems
to have become unavailable a century later. Its fame, however, seems to have been
sufficient for it to be included in a list of titles given by the Song dynasty court to
a Chinese delegation to Korea in 1091 with the request to locate copies there as
they were lost in China. 13 A copy was found and the fair number of quotations in
the Song-dynasty compilations of Laozi commentaries after 1100 attests to its
availability. At the same time, some quotations survive from the Commentary by
Seng Zhao; this might indeed signal that both the Kumarajiva and the Seng Zhao
quotations might have come from lost collected commentaries from the Tang
dynasty. Still, the number and volume of quotations from either commentary is by
far too small to make them into self-sustaining textual bodies, and we will have to
apply a variety of techniques of often extreme data enrichment in an effort to
make these fragments yield relevant information.
3. Exercises in Data Enrichment
a. Macro-level: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism
Among the potential addressees of Buddhist Mahayana teaching, namely among
those becoming interested in its philosophical teaching, and those becoming inter-
ested in its salvation project, a high degree of familiarity with the Laozi can be
10 Laozi yi, Daozang, Schipper 1486.
II The sources are for Kumarajiva Daode zhenjing qushan ji 4.13, 5.2,7.21, 7.22, 7.22f., 8.4,
8.11,8.2210.14,11.2,11.20,11.21,12.6; Daode zhenjing zhushu 1.6,2.1,4.1,5.24, 6.22bf.;
Daode zhenjing jijie 1.19f., 2.18; Laozi yi 4.8b; and for Seng Zhao Daode zhenjing jijie 1.3,
1.20, 1.35,2.5,3.19; Daode zhenjingjiyi 6.33. Yan Lingfeng, Zhongwai Laozi zhushu mulu
(Taipei, 1955), p. 15 has suggested that more quotations of Seng Zhao's are in Li Lin's
Daode zhenjing qushanji and in the Daode zhenjing zhushu, but a check failed to locate any
quotations there.
12 Du Guangting, Daode zhenjing guang sheng yi, Daozang, Schipper 725, ch. 5, p. 12b. Du
says "Kumarajiva, a contemporary of Fu Jian, [Fo] Tudeng f~ Ii m: (d.349) from the Later
Zhao [dynasty], Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty and the Taoist master Dou Lue"~ from
the time of Liang Dynasty (reg. 502-549) all [commented the Laozi by way of] explaining the
way of cause and effect [i.e. the karma doctrine] in human affairs" Iljj $- J:!Il.!EI:* Z~. Du
Guangting does not mention Seng Zhao's commentary in this list, but includes him in the
"over sixty" commentaries he lists in the preface to his work, p. 2b. On Du Guangting see F.
Verellen, Du Guangting, Taoiste de Cour a lajin de la Chine Medievale, Paris: College de
France, 1989.
13 Pelliot (see n. 2), pp. 422f.
98 RudolfG. Wagner
presupposed; there never was uniformity in the reading of this text, and Buddhist
acolytes might have approached it through commentaries from the Xuanxue
(Scholarly Exploration of the Dark) tradition of the third century such as Wang
Bi's x 585 (226-249) which read the Laozi as a philosophical exploration of the
basis of the ten thousand kinds of entities and the basis of social order,14 or
through Taoist readings of the text such as they are presented in the late second
century Xiang Er commentary ;fJt m,
which treated it as a guide to bodily immor-
tality.ls The early Buddhist biographical collections such as the The Biographies
ofEminent Monks, Gaoseng zhuan r'i'U'ffifft, by Hui Jiao (497-554) time and again
report that in their youth many of the most eminent monks had studied and loved
the works of Laozi and Zhuangzi before finding their way to the Buddhist
doctrine. 16 Writing Buddhist commentaries on the Laozi was thus a way to deal
with an important part of the intellectual background of the present and potential
members of the Chinese Buddhist community, and represented an effort to reread
these teachings in the light of the Buddhist doctrine. As Buddhist teaching contin-
ued to be promulgated in its own right, the writing of a commentary to the Laozi
did not presuppose the acceptance of a superiority of the Laozi's insights to those
of Buddhism, but implied a claim that Buddhism had something to offer beyond at
least the contemporary reading of the Laozi. Thus we may expect that these
Buddhist commentaries will deal and have to deal with the status of the Laozi in
regard to the Buddhist doctrine, and will deal and have to deal critically with the
contemporary reading of this text to the point of rejecting key parts of this reading.
Our commentaries are not the first to address the issue of the philosophical and
religious relationship between Buddhism and Chinese traditional philosophy in-
cluding Taoism. They are actually entering a heavily contested field liberally pro-
vided for with all sorts of landmines.
Many of the themes developed in the Xuanxue reading of the Chinese philo-
sophical tradition bore an uncanny resemblance to prominent themes and
questions dealt with in Mahayana Buddhism. This led to an early translation
strategy of directly translating Buddhist concepts such as sunyata (emptiness) or
nirvana into Xuanxue terms, and of liberally using literary expressions from the
Laozi and Zhuangzi in these translations and the Chinese commentaries to them.
Within these Xuanxue circles Mahayana Buddhism also found the first elite
14 For a critical edition of Wang Bi's work on Laozi, an analysis of his commenting techniques,
and of his philosophy see my The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi,
(Albany: SUNY Press, in press), and the two succeeding volumes Wang Bi's Commentary on
the Laozi. Critical text, Extrapolative translation, Philological Commentary and Language,
Ontology, and Political Philosophy: Wang Bi's Scholarly Exploration of the Dark
IS
(Xuanxue).
*
Rao Zongyi ~ 1m, Laozi Xiang Er zhu jiaozheng ~ T
guji Press, 1991).
mm m ff;f'5( (Shanghai: Shanghai
16 A listing of some of them is given in Pelliot (see n. 2), p. 418.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 99
converts. There was thus an assumption of some confluence and similarity
between the two teachings with Buddhism providing a highly systematized
voluminous body of works on different levels of sophistication and Taoism a very
terse and demanding small body of works with higWy sophisticated and equally
terse commentary, and at the same time a vast sea of ritual and alchemical
practices on different levels of sophistication. This belated perception of an axial-
age confluence between North India and China to the point that Laozi and the
Buddha might have lived at about the same time, has intrigued many Chinese
intellectuals of the fourth and fifth centuries. While this greatly contributed to the
acceptability of Buddhism in Chinese society, it also gave rise to a lively polemics
and apologetics, much of which is preserved. The theme of the relationship
between Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism is discussed through a variety of
narratives which have to do with the figures of the respective founders.
Since around 300 CE the story in Laozi's biography in the Shiji (second century
BCE) that he had "gone West over the pass" at the end of his life had developed
into the story that he had gone to India, and had in fact been involved in the early
development of Buddhism there.!7 As China's north came under control of such
Western barbarians, talk about them became much more focused, and a potential
link could be made between the Buddhists with their teaching and the presence of
Western military contingents in China. According to one variant, Laozi used his
magical powers to actually be born in India as the Buddha, or to have one of his
associates born in this role. Given the uncouth barbarian nature of these non-
Chinese, he taught them a special variant of Taoism. While sexual practices and
arts were very much a part of the Chinese version of Taoism, the Indian version
insisted on celibacy for the serious followers with the purpose of eventually
wiping the barbarians off the face of the planet through non-procreation. 18
According to the second variant, which we find in an early Chinese Buddhist
apocryphal text, the Qingjingfaxingjing #ifMt:.l'H~, Laozi was born in India as
the Buddha's senior disciple Kasyapa, and together with Confucius who in fact is
another disciple, and Confucius' beloved disciple Yan Hui, who is the Bodhisattva
Guangjing, was sent to China to teach the true faith to the Chinese. 19 Strangely
enough, the core pieces of the two theories which in terms of the evaluation of the
relative merits of Buddhism and Taoism are quite opposite to each other, occur in
the same text - the The Sutra about the Laozi Converting the Barbarians, Laozi
17 Cf. Livia Kohn, Laughing at the Tao. Debates among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval
China (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), pp.3-47, for a summary and bibliography of
these debates. See also E. Zuercher, The Buddhist Conquest ofChina (Leiden: Brill, 1972), p.
18
240-320.
E. Zuercher, Conquest, pp. 298f.
19 Kohn,Laughing,pp.16f.
100 RudolfG. Wagner
huahu jing ~ -f- 1t ~ *~, originally compiled around 300 CE - which has,
however, undergone many transformations in its history.20
It will be noted that Confucius also entered the Buddhist fray in this narrative.
Confucius had been transformed in Xuanxue teaching to a Sage embodying the
single feature of the root of all entities, namely, negativity towards all specificity,
and in this he was even considered superior to Laozi. Confucius had thus become
a philosopher in his own right who had, through his fleeting verba et gesta,
evoked what Laozi tried to commit to writing. In Xuanxue reading, the Sage men-
tioned in the Laozi is none other but Confucius. 21 Confucius thus ranked in the
same league as Laozi and Buddha, and if the Buddhists were to deal with China's
spiritual heritage, they certainly would have to deal with him. Indeed they did. The
Preface to the Buddhist monk Seng You's ff!t tti (445-518) most important col-
lection of essays by prominent Chinese Buddhist monks and laymen on philo-
sophical, religious and social issues, the Hongming j i "5.L..I3)j~, starts:
The sea of enlightenment is without limits, the mirror of cogni-
tion intuits everything all around.
The conversion by instruction is more subtle than all within
the realm, but indeed it has been cast into the [figures] of [the
mythical sage emperors of Chinese antiquity] Yao and Shun.
The principles [of truth] are cut off beyond the bound world,
but indeed they have been molded into Kongzi [Confucius] and
the Duke of Zhou. 22
The Buddhist dispensation is universal in character, and, for China, it has been
"cast" and "molded" into the figures of the sage emperors of old Yao and Shun,
and of the last of the Sages, Confucius. This inclusion of Confucius and the
former Sages has two implications. First, Xuanxue philosophy was built around an
assumption that Confucius was the highest Sage embodying all the deep truths the
Laozi was always speaking about, but himself never holding forth on them. But
this reading of Confucius still saw him as a man who had understood the prin-
ciples needed for a government to be able to bring about a self-regulative order in
society. The focus of Xuanxue was on ontology as the necessary underpinning of
political philosophy. With this emphasis on the management of worldly affairs,
Confucius and the earlier Chinese Sages seemed entirely different from Buddhism
with its stress on the deliverance of the individual from the "red dust" of samsara.
Much of the polemics against the Buddhists, however, since the Mouzi lihuo lun
$. -f- :f!I:1. ~ ~ somewhere in the late third or early fourth century, came in the
20 E. Zuercher, Conquest, p. 294.
21 Cf. my "Die Unhandlichkeit des Konfuzius," in A. Assmann (ed.), Weisheit. Archaeologie
der Literarischen Kommunikation III, (Munich: Fink, 1990), pp. 462-464.
22 Seng You, "Preface" to Hongmingji. T. 2102 vol. 52.la.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 101
form of charges that they disregarded Confucian precepts such as filial piety by
not having offspring to continue the ancestral rites, and that they were in fact un-
dermining social order. The inclusion into the early Buddhist apologetics of Con-
fucius and the sages of old as embodiments of Buddhist insights claimed their
heritage for Buddhism, and at the same time obliged the Buddhists to develop a
social teaching of their own which would leave a place for the monk and house-
holder, the king and the abbot alike.
Well in tune with this accomodating view of the Chinese heritage, neither of
the two commentaries under study here adopts a hostile or critical attitude towards
the Laozi, the founding text of their main opponents, the Taoists. Other early
Chinese Buddhists commented on the Confucian founding text, the Analects,
Lunyu; little of these commentaries seems to have survived, but we can surmise
that the same accomodating attitude prevailed there. 23 The commentaries by
Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao both proceed from the assumption that the Laozi text
contains highest truth which might have been overlooked, however, by Taoist and
Xuanxue commentators. The burden therefore is not on the text to come up with
brilliant insights, but on the commentary to discover them against a tradition that
had forgotten or buried them.
A fair part of the surviving passages deal with a key character in the Laozi, the
shengren ~,A, or Sage. In the Laozi, this is the perfect human being, achieving
optimal regulation of the world and himself by taking his model from the grand
entities such as Heaven and Earth and the Dao. Neither in the Laozi nor in the eyes
of the later commentators could this ideal be reached through any effort by a
common mortal. The Sages were historical events, and they were events of the
past with Confucius being the last one to be recognized as such. Although Kuma-
raj iva had made sure to introduce a higher level of reliability and technicality into
the translation terminology for Buddhist concepts, which he developed to the
point of using transliterations where he felt no Chinese match was available, the
Chinese term shengren continued to be widely used, for example in Seng Zhao's
philosophical essays, for the Buddha. 24 The surviving Laozi commentary passages
dealing with the Shengren are clearly read as describing the Buddha or a person of
this level of enlightenment.
23 I only know of some fragments of the Lunyu commentary by Shi Huilin ~ ¥ f.l* in Ma Guo-
han ,~~ \!3], Yuhanshanfang ji yishu .:E ~ L1J m ~ it};:« (repr. Taipei: Zhongwen, 1979),
voI.3p.1840.
24 The entire first section of Seng Zhao's "On Prajna not Having Knowledge," Bore wuzhi lun
%!:;E=1I\Oilliffili, in: Tsukamoto Zenryu (ed.), Joron Kenkyu 1iiffililiff1'E (Kyoto: Jinbun Kagaku
Kenkyujo, 1958) pp. 22 ff. uses the term sheng (sage) or shengren (sage man) for the person
with the highest enlightenment, the Buddha. See further down for an example where Seng
Zhao's Laozi commentary and his essay on Prajna overlap.
102 RudolfG. Wagner
That the Chinese "sages" would be in the same register as the Buddha was oc-
casionally stated explicitly. Li Lin quotes Kumarajiva's comment about a lively
description in Laozi 50 of the person who has given up all craving in life and
therefore cannot be hurt even by the fiercest animals. "And why is this so," the
Laozi asks. "Because his is a place without death." This translation follows Kuma-
rajiva's comment, '''place' is like 'life' ," which suggests a reading "because his is
a iife / place without death." For the same Laozi statement Li Lin also quotes
Wang Fang (d. 1070), the son of the famous reformer Wang Anshi:
"Being in a place without death" is due to his being without
[attachment to] life. This person without [attachment to] life has
a pure eternal life, but does not live for his own purposes. That
is why he never experiences death and never experiences life. If
[his progress on the] Dao has come to this point, then even if his
body does not sit in meditation [read ~ ftl for :f'f ftl], his mind
will never have a change - how should he be liable to death?
This refers to the Chinese Sages and the Western Buddha. 25
While this identification firmly inserted the Laozi into the series of texts quotable
as authorities for Buddhist scholars, an unspoken but very important problem re-
mained: on the textual surface the text did not provide a path to reach the status of
a Shengren. Bending the text to the point of breaking it, segments of the Taoist
dispensation had extracted a doctrine of physical immortality and had transformed
the text into a series of cryptic directives in dietetic, sexual and social matters
leading towards this goal, even if the Immortal was never seen as being on par
with the Shengren. This path with its dangerous immortality drugs of cinnabar, its
rumoured or actual sexual practices and its disdain for the social conventions had
always met with strong opposition even amongst the amateurs of the Laozi, one of
the consequences being that with the Xuanxue a school developed which focused
on the philosophical analysis of the Laozi but rejected as crude the quest for phys-
ical immortality.The Buddhists with their Indian traditions of ascetism, celibacy,
and meditation seemed to provide a viable path to Buddhahood, and this led many
from the quest of immortality to that of Buddhahood. In the surviving fragments
of the two commentaries we do not find any commentaries that would force into
the Laozi the key elements of the Boddhisattvamarga, the Way of the Bodhisattva,
but the Laozi is made to accomodate some of its key features. In his comments on
quest, the "two vehicles" =*
Laozi 13, Seng Zhao will argue that those still in the lower reaches of the Buddhist
of the Sravaka and Pratyekabuddhas, will get no-
where if they do not understand the "Sage's" highest meaning. 26 Commenting the
first phrase of Laozi 20, ~ ~ ~ ~, which has to be translated here as "Breaking
25 Kumarajiva and Wang Fang commenting on Laozi 50, in: Li Lin, Qushanji, 8.l1b-12a.
26 Seng Zhao on Laozi 13, quoted in Zhao, Jijie, 1.21a.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 103
off study annihilates worry," Seng Zhao again evokes the stages of insight of
which the Laozi certainly did not speak in this phrase:
Someone who studies is referred to as a hearer, M [standing
here, 1 believe, as a short term for the Small Vehicle monk sra-
vaka WM]; someone who breaks off studying is referred to as
someone 'getting close' to [enlightenment] m
[referring, I be-
lieve, to the next stage, the pratyekabuddha]; and those getting
beyond these two [studying and giving up studying] are referred
to as the true ~ [referring, I believe, to the stage of the Bodhi-
sattva]. [This means] that beyond this, beyond breaking off study
there are further tasks on the way ahead [to Buddhahood].27
In this manner, the Laozi in no way replaced the Buddhist texts, but continued to
be compatible and provided much needed rhetorical features and terminological
help for the Chinese expression of Buddhist concepts. At the same time, Seng
Zhao's commentary here supplements what clearly is a deficiency in the Laozi.
This passage seems stuck to the simple negation of "breaking off study." Seng
Zhao first supplements an initial stage of studying [the Buddhist teaching], then
proceeds to the item mentioned by the Laozi as the negation of this studying, and
finally argues that the Boddhisattva has an insight into the truth that is beyond
affirmation and negation, in short, "there are further tasks ahead" beyond what the
Laozi described. We will see more of the background of this double negation
further down.
We have here a structure not rare in the history of religion and philosophy. In
China itself, the Jesuit and Protestant missionaries reread the Chinese classics as
containing the notion of God and the fundamental moral precepts, although they
claimed they had by now been largely forgotten by the Chinese themselves. On the
basis of this basic compatibility the missionaries could claim that they only
brought back to the Chinese the original wisdom of their sages of antiquity, adding
the new message about Christ's salvational role. In the same manner, the Chinese
Buddhists of the fourth and fifth centuries offered themselves as the rediscoverers
of the true and exceedingly sophisticated teachings of the Laozi which had been
buried in the superstitious nonsense of contemporary believers or by the cryptic
density of the Laozi's statements. At the same time, they brought something new,
namely, a path to reach Buddhahood. In the West we would find similar develop-
ments in the scholastic appropriation of Aristotle and the Christian appropriation
of the Hebrew testament, which in both cases proceeded through a radical and
often commentarial rereading of the material in the light of the new dispensation,
and resulted in as radical a cultural and conceptual enrichment, quite independent
of the cultural capital to be gained through this inheritance.
27 Seng Zhao on Laozi 20, quoted in Zhao, Jijie, 1.35b.
104 RudolfG. Wagner
On a still more fundamental level, the debate was one about the geographical
and cultural limits of truth. A theory was current in China at least since the third
century BCE which saw the particular nature of human beings determined to such
a degree by their particular physical environment that it was not clear whether
people growing up in the cold north or in the West where the element metal was
prevailing could be considered part of the same species as the Chinese from the
Central Plain. Depictions and descriptions showed evidence that these others were
different both physically and mentally. A teaching and a truth appropriate for the
Chinese in their particular mild environmental conditions would be perfectly
inappropriate and untrue for the greedy and warlike barbarians from the West, not
to mention those Central Asian peoples who had a major hole in their belly
through which their servants stuck a pole to carry them around. 28 In this sense it
was argued in both Confucian and Taoist polemics that Buddhism was appropriate
for the natures of the Westerners, but unfitting and untrue for the Chinese. Against
this line of argument, Buddhist apologetics had a field day with their enlightened
claim of the universality of truth and the regional character of vulgar teachings. A
fine example was the preface ofSeng You's Hongmingji which we have quoted,
but an even finer one is his postface:
The two truths are separate, and [the relationship between] Bud-
dhism and vulgar teachings reflects this separation. The teaching
of the Way is empty and calm, and encompasses the three
worlds because of its regarding all things as equal. But the vul-
gar teachings are limited and confined and are valid only for one
country because of their narrow-mindedness. Once the mind is
narrowed down to a single state, everything beyond what one
has personally seen and heard is open to doubt. But if, with an
attitude of regarding all things as equal, one looks at the three
worlds, the principles of spiritual transformation will be intuited
permanently.
Holding fast onto these doubts by way of being blinded with
regard to the intuition [of truth] is what keeps the living beings
eternally sunk [in samsara].29
Buddhism thus is a teaching of universal truth, while many contemporary scholars
i
with a "perception" described elsewhere in this text as being that of "[frogs at the
bottom] of a well," jing shi # ~,30 only see as valid what is around them, con-
I
i
28 Zuercher, Conquest (see n. 17), p. 305. Illustrations of the people with the hole in their bellies
are found in the main source for the ideas about the environmental conditioning of man, the
Shanhai jingo
29 Seng You, "Postface" to the Hongmingji T. 2102 vol. 52.95a.
30 Ibid. 95b 1.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 105
sider truth to be bound by geographical and cultural limits, and thus are com-
pletely unable to reach the great heights of insight. As a sad consequence, they
will remain "eternallysunk [in sanlsara]." This argument is coupled with a second
one that already has been spelled out in the Preface: The Chinese Sages of old,
including Confucius and Laozi, had insights compatible with the great truths, and
they were, like Confucius, open-minded enough to mention that they had heard of
a great Sage in the West which can only refer to Buddha,31 or they would go, like
Laozi, in person to the West. 32 But Laozi's later followers have become ever more
narrow-minded in their inability to perceive truth, and while they are cheaply
copying core features of Buddhism's teaching, they loudly denounce it as unfit for
China as if there was such a thing as a geographical and cultural constraint to
truth. The Buddhists on the other hand are the true followers of the path of the old
Chinese sages that had fallen into disuse in China itself until it was revived by
Buddhism coming from India. This fresh intellectual internationalism was also a
different kind of reaction to the massive military, political and spiritual presence
of Central Asian foreigners in China at the time. Kumarajiva was born to a Central
Asian father and a Chinese mother, and both he and his student Seng Zhao were
proteges of a ruler of Tibetan origin, Yao Xing, who personally was involved in
many of the Buddhist translation projects.
The friendly reading of the Laozi by learned Buddhists thus linked up with their
own intellectual and spiritual past, reflected the great and ongoing importance of
Xuanxue for the acculturation of philosophical Buddhism in China, established
the compatibility with Buddhism of a text most dear to many non-Buddhist intel-
lectuals at the time, conceded to the Laozi core Buddhist insights which were re-
discovered and grandly developed by the newly arrived Buddhist texts, proclaimed
the universality of truth against a parochial and petty Chinese argument, and on
the way appropriated a nice share of Chinese cultural capital.
Inserting the surviving fragments into their particular cultural and intellectual
milieu enables us to come up with meaningful hypotheses concerning the proper
approach to their reading.
31 This story is told in the Liezi, a "Taoist" work compiled early in the fourth century but con-
taining much older material. Cf. Yang Bojun m 113 ~ (ed.), Liezi jijie :7tl-f- ~ M (Peking:
Zhonghua, 1979), chA, p.121. Confucius is quoted here as saying: "The people from the
West do have a Sage; he does not govern [from above], but there is no chaos [below]; he
does not hold forth but [people] spontaneously have faith in him; he does not engage in trans-
forming [people], but [they] spontaneously act [in the manner he wants them to]. So vast is he
that none of the people are able to give a proper name to him."
32 The story of Laozi's leaving his job as a librarian of the Zhou and going West, writing his
book at the request ofa guardian of a pass, is first told in Sima Qian's RecordY o/the Histor-
ian, Shiji.
106 RudolfG. Wagner
b. Micro-level: The immediate environment of the quotations
Commentaries are texts characterized by an ostentatious disclaimer - encoded
into their very structure -- of textual independence and a self-sufficiency of mean-
ing. While it may be said of any text that its meaning comes to life only if read in
,
i
I
its proper context and environment, these other textual types still claim to have
some textual cohesiveness on their own. Not so the commentary. While a com-
mentary might be able to impose a grand and perfectly unified meaning upon an
entire text and to actually constitute the meaning of this text in this manner, it un-
folds this meaning only by fragmenting and subordinating itself argumentatively
and ultimately physically to the structures of the text it comments on. (Early
Chinese commentaries up to the end of the second century CE were separate
works even if they were phrase by phrase commentaries. Since the end of the
second century CE they were inserted into the text to the point that canonical texts
were by and large unavailable without commentary.)
Intrinsically, the fragments of the two commentaries in our hands are meaning-
less babble. This situation is not fundamentally changed if we double their mean-
ing by including the Laozi phrases they comment on into our consideration, be-
cause there often is not enough commentary matter to substantiate in a plausible
way a particular construction of a given piece of the main text. Happily enough,
the quotations survive inserted into highly cohesive texts, which, while enhancing
the meaningfulness of the environment within which to situate our textual frag-
ment, also makes for a high degree of unified selectiveness. The surviving quota-
tions from the Commentaries of both Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao are included in
selections of Laozi commentaries by scholars living between the 11 th and the 14th
centuries in the Song and Yuan dynasties. While they clearly were fascinated
enough with this text to spend many years of their lives studying it, hunting down
commentaries and eventually selecting what they considered the best pieces, none
of them included elements of a tradition that read the Laozi as a coded handbook
for immortality practices or even for the manufacture of immortality drugs. From
this negative selection we see a certain animosity against this trend. This animos-
ity is most clearly expressed in the preface to a collection that, sadly, does not
contain any of our quotations, Dong Sijing's Ji ,~, ~ Daode zhenjing jijie ~ t~
~ *~ ~ ~~ that was originally published in 1246. 33 Dong approvingly quotes the
Tang poet Bo Juyi (772-846) with the statement: "The five thousand words [ofthe
Laozi] neither talk about drugs nor about immortals nor about levitating to the sky
in broad daylight!" He buttresses his argument against people who "mess up" this
sublime text with their "far-fetched explanations and little devices" ft!!, ~ IJ\ Ill: by
getting another famous poet on board, Su Shi !* ~ (1037-1101), whom he quotes
as writing:
33 Daode zhenjingjijie, Daozang, Schipper 705.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi
The Taoist current originally came from the Yellow Emperor
and Laozi. Its Dao has pure calmness and non-interference as its
core tenet, responding to other things with a clear and unper-
turbed mind as an application, and modesty and compassion and
107
non-engaging in competition as a life-practice. In this it is in
agreement with [tenets of the Confucian classic] Book of
Changes, Zhouyi, ... and the Analects, Lunyu ... Since the Qin
and Han [dynasties] this [current] first made use of the words of
magicians and went so far as to have the arts of flying immor-
tals and of [magical] transformations, the methods of the
'Yellow Palace and the Great Cave,' appellations such as
Wooden Sir and Golden Mother, sacrifices for the Taiyi and the
Ciwei, and this went to the point that immortality drugs, acrobat-
ic tricks, talismans and little tricks all came under the heading
Taoist. 34
This tradition had become exceedingly strong at their time with many pursuing
alchemical experiments to find immortality drugs or developing techniques of
"internal" or spiritual alchemy, neidan, for the same purpose. The compilers of
these selections of commentaries to the Laozi would use their selection as argu-
ments in this debate which involved the interpretive control of the Laozi. To for-
tify their own readings against an otherwise strong or even prevailing reading
tradition they would quote commentaries that accorded with their own line of
thinking, and they would go so far as to quote from our two Buddhist comment-
aries because with them they shared the animosity against this particular Taoist
trend. Their selections of commentaries to a given passage thus is not random, but
only includes comments basically agreeing with their line of argument. We thus
gain a sizeable amount of emphatic contextual environment to fix the meaning of
the individual passages and to see in what tradition we have to read the passage of
the Laozi text to which they are attached. In other words the other comments on
the same passage become proper material for textual enrichment of our often
miserably short fragments. Furthermore, as these authors still had the full texts of
the commentaries by Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao, we are justified in the hypo-
thesis that their quotations would not be frivolous and decontextualized but would
reflect the main trend of the reading of these two commentators.
c. Uses of the Laozi in other writings of Seng Zhao and Kumarajiva.
Seng Zhao makes extensive use of the Laozi in his other surviving works. He con-
stantly uses concepts and short quotations from the Laozi in his essays which sur-
34 Daode zhenjingjijie, preface, p. 6b-7a.
108 RudolfG. Wagner
vive under the collective name of Zhao lun if~, Essays by [Seng] Zhao,35 and
in his Commentary to the Vimalakirtinirdesa. 36 While these do not have the form
of a commentary to the Laozi they allow us to see what rank and function he
ascribed to the Laozi in his writings, and thus to extract some of the basic decis-
ions he made with regard to his handling of the Laozi, quite apart from enabling us
to extrapolate his reading of some more Laozi passages. This evidence can be used
as a prop for and a check on the other proceedings of textual emichment we are
describing and proposing here, and can generally enhance the plausibility of the
conclusions.
d. Countertexts
Every text is written against the background of other texts; these might be author-
ities it agrees with, or other authors it disagrees with; they might be mentioned but
as a rule they are not. I will call these virtual goblins on the desk of the writer
"countertexts." In the case of a commentary they take the form of other construc-
tions of the same main text. We have seen our commentaries quoted as emphatic
support for the opinions of Song commentators, and we now suggest inverting this
relationship and mining these rejected readings to supplement our understanding
of our fragments. What are the countertexts of Kumarajiva's and Seng Zhao's
com mentaries?
I can identify three such countertexts, the Taoist teaching about achieving the
immortality of the body, the Xuanxue reading of negativity being the basis of the
ten thousand kinds of entities, and the related Chinese Buddhist philosophical as-
sumptions among fourth century Prajnaparamita specialists.
In one strand of tradition, the Laozi was read since the late second century as
the revelation by the highest God, Laozi, who embodied the Dao, the Way. It was
read to contain the precepts for reaching the immortality of the body, and com-
mentaries such as the Xiang Er ;tJjt m were written to make the text speak on this
issue)7 This tradition is that of the emerging Taoist "church." It was the only
widely available religiously inspired doctrine in China which defined human life
as naturally deficient and in need of some dramatic salvational exercise to over-
come death. This teaching had found adherents as well as critics across a fairly
broad spectrum of the educated. While not defining life as suffering and proposing
35 They are edited in Joron Kenkyu, see n. 24.
36 This commentary, the Weimojie jing zhu, was written between 406 and 410 and contains a
record of his notes on Kurnarajiva's oral comments as well as Zhu Daosheng's comments, T.
37
1775.
*
Rao Zongyi ~ 1m, Dunhuang Liuchao xieben Zhang tianshi Daoling zhu: Laozi Xiang Er
zhu jiaojian 5& 1£ 1\ W3 ~:;$: ~ 7( giji ~ ~ ~: ~r mm i.t t)( ~ (Hongkong: Tong Nam
Printers & Publishers, 1956).
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 109
a physical and spiritual exercise to overcome life's fetters, it was the natural com-
petitor for the Buddhist salvation doctrine; we can see this from many prominent
Buddhist converts, who had started their religious lives with the xianren zhi dao
lrlJ A Z~, the Way of [becoming] an Immortal. It also borrowed freely and ex-
tensively core concepts such as the Karma doctrine from Buddhism, and claimed
itself to be the better Buddhism.
This background knowledge highlights certain features of the surviving com-
mentary fragments. Both Seng Zhao and Kumarajiva are quoted extensively with
statements on the body. Seng Zhao comments on Laozi 13.2 and 13.3:
No big disaster can compare to holding on to the body. That is
why he annihilates the body by way of returning to negativity.
Thus how should those from the realms of the Sravaka and
Pratyekabuddha [the two first stages on the Buddhist way of
salvation] who hold forth on the Way understand what the Sage
is pointing at if they do not take it as the highest achievement to
treat glory and distress as [equally] irritating, to leave behind the
body and annihilate knowledge?38
"He" in this text is the Sage, who in Seng's other writings is identical with the
Buddha. Through this text we have to construct his reading of the Laozi passage as
follows:
What means taking it serious as a great disaster if one has a
body? The reason why I [the Sage] would be stuck with a great
disaster is that I would be holding on to [my] body. Once it came
to pass that I had negated my body, what disaster could I be
stuck with?
The hypothetical turn at the end is necessitated by the fact that the Sage is not in
fact holding on to his body but is constructing a hypothetical case for the edifica-
tion of the readers.
Seng Zhao's commentary translates the ;IW" "not having," a body of the Laozi
text into the transitive verbs mie i~, to annihilate, and yi j i "to leave behind." The
Buddha/Sage thus has annihilated and left behind his body, and the great disaster
would be his, if he still had this body. In a discussion of Nirvana in one of his
essays, Seng Zhao uses the term miedu "annihilating crossing-over," ~ f-l, for
Nirvana, and uses this Laozi passage when he says "this [nirvana] means that his
[the Buddha's] great disaster [= the body] is forever annihilated."39 In another pas-
sage of the Zhao/un, "Generally spoken, no great disaster compares to having a
38
39
Daode zhenjingjijie (see n. 7), 1.21a.
Seng Zhao, Jiu zhe shi yan zhe jlAJf+~1\3, ~ * I, in: Joron Kenkyu (see n. 24), p. 59. ~
13ft 1\3 § :l't:*: J~, 71<.~, "Nirvana [translated as annihilation] means that one's great desaster
[the body] is eternally annihilated."
 110 RudolfG. Wagner
body, that is why he [the Buddha] annihilates the body by way of returning back to
negativity."40 The term we have rendered here for Seng Zhao as the "body," shen
~, with its cravings, desires and mortality is read by other early commentators
such as Wang Bi as "personality" with particular markers, but mortality is not an
issue there. The inordinate stress on this question of the great disaster, dahuan *-
,tif;t, of having a body, and the need to annihilate it, signals a strong countertext
with a different reading against which this reading is set. The most important
countertext is the Taoist immortality tradition with its emphasis on preserving the
body for a long life. This countertext is present in an entire cultural current and a
set of cultural practices, namely the quest for immortality in the flesh. This current
finds expression in a great variety of texts and reports about practices, and it is
confirmed as the most important countertext to the Buddhist doctrine at the time
through a fair number of surviving Buddhist polemics.41 This current also
manifests itself through commentaries to the very passage we are dealing with.
This passage presents this "immortality" current with a big problem because the
spontaneous reading of this passage would support the constructions of Wang Bi
and Seng Zhao which have the "having" of a body or a personality as a great
disaster. The advocates of reading the Laozi as a guidebook for the quest for
immortality thus had to come up with a reading of this passage that would defuse
its potentially devastating rejection of their dearest aspirations. The late second
century Xiang Er commentary was official teaching material in the largest of the
Taoist sects down to the sixth century. We can thus consider it to have been a very
*-
official and widely spread text. The Laozi passage fpJ ~ .. ,1i!\t B ~ which Seng
Zhao read as "What means taking it seriously as a great disaster if one has a
body?" is read by this Xiang Er commentary as "What means being honoured is a
great desaster for your body?"42 By reading the "if' B as meaning "you" _
which is a theoretical possibility but marks a radical departure from the
spontaneous reading - the speaker of the phrase is the Dao itself speaking to the
Taoist adept. By reading the" as meaning "being honoured" instead of "taking
40 Seng Zhao, "Heti ;(~," in: Tsukamoto Zenryu (ed.) Joron Kenkyu (see n. 24), p. 63.
41 Some of these very lively polemics against (and for) the Taoist longevity practices can be
found in the numerous tracts of the Buddho-Taoist controversy of the fifth century. Cf. Yuan
Can (420-477), "Bo Yi Xia lun," in: Nan Qi shu 54, sununarized in: Kohn, Laughing at the
Tao (see n. 17), pp. 165f., and the answer by Gu Huan, the author of the Yi Xia lun, "Da
Y~an Can bo Yi Xia lun," also in: Nan Qi shu 54, sununarized in Kohn, Laughing, p.l66.
Mmg Sengshao (d. 483), "Zheng erjiao lun," text in: Hongmingji 6, T. 2102, vol. 52.37b-
38c., summarized in Kohn. Laughing, pp. 167-168. Shi Sengmin, "Rong Hua lun," in:
Hongmingji 7, T. 2102 vol. 52.47a-48a, summarized in: Kohn, Laughing, pp. 168-169. Shi
Xuanguang, "Sian huo lun," in: Hongming ji 8, T. 2102, vol. 52.48a-49c, sununarized in:
Kohn, Laughing, pp. 169-170; Liu Xie, "Miehuo lun," in: Hongming ji 8, T. 2102, vol.
52.49c-51c, sununarized in: Kohn, Laughing, pp. 171-173.
42 Rao, Laozi Xiang Er (see n. 15), pp. 15-16.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi III
sen'ous1v"
" the text suddenly talks about the deleterious effect upon the quest for
immortality of an official career with all its adornments. The advice here is that
one should not strive for great honours and social standing, and thus deflect
attention from the essential pursuit of the Taoist goal of "nourishing one's spirit"
and "mastering the Way" "with one's body." In this reading, there is no word of
annihilating the body, but of preserving it in the proper manner. The Xiang Er thus
inserts this passage into a string of other, similarly constructed phrases, and with
some violence manages to get a fairly homogenuous reading of the text. Seng
Zhao's interpretation not only rejects the plausibility of this reading, but turns it
exactly upside down. It not only claims that the quest for immortality has no basis
in the Laozi, but that the Laozi explicitly denounces this body as a great disaster,
and asks the adept to annihilate it. We should signal, however, that Seng Zhao's
commentary also contains a polemic against other Buddhist schools which are
described as hovering on the lower levels of the path of salvation.
The two remaining countertexts come in a pack. Against them Kumarajiva and
Seng Zhao establish what Isabelle Robinet has described as Taoist Madhyamika. 43
The confrontation between the Buddhist quest for Nirvana and the Taoist for
immortality in the flesh is visible in the contest for the interpretive control of the
Laozi. But while it certainly was a relevant topic in terms of legitimacy, public
standing and proselytism, it certainly was not at the height of the philosophical
debates of the day. Seng Zhao's famous treatises had been quite explicitly written
in a debate with other Buddhist schools, not with either Taoists or Confucians.
Within the broad current of Mahayana thinking, Seng Zhao was the first Chinese
Buddhist to have a more solid grasp of Madhyamika thinking due to the new
translations provided by the team under Kumarajiva, and Kumarajiva himself was
in this respect his teacher. The core contribution of Madhyamika was to go beyond
the antagonism between you If, "existence" and wu ~ or benwu ::$:~, "non-
existence," terms also used to translate suchness, tathata, in early Chinese transla-
tions of Prajnaparamita texts.
Anecdotical evidence from collections such as the Shishuo xinyu tt ~ ~~;g: as
well as biographical evidence indicates that the Laozi was part of the curriculum
of the children of the aristocratic clans and beyond since the early third century.
The Laozi entered this curriculum with a commentary, and by the time of Kuma-
raj iva and Seng Zhao there were dozens if not a hundred of them in circulation,
the most important being that by Wang Bi I I} (226-249). The Laozi together
with the Book of Changes, Zhouyi, and the Confucian Analects, Lunyu, belonged
to the core group of texts assumed by the leading proponents of the "Scholarly
Investigation of That-which-is-Dark," Xuanxue ~ ~, in the third century to be
based on or concerned with the insights of the Shengren, the Sage, concerning the
43 Robinet, Commentaires (see n. 4), pp. 97-133.
 112 RudolfG. Wagner
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 113

establishment of order in society. By the fourth century, the Lunyu had been re-
placed by another "Taoist" philosophical work, the Zhuangzi. With this switch,
the way was opened for a philosophical reflection not so much on the state, but on
the individual.
Within the Chinese debate about the Laozi, Wang Bi, the most important com-
mentator of this text in the Xuanxue tradition, had argued that "that by which" all
specific entities were, was itself "by necessity" without specificity. He created the
most radical term for the absence of specificity, namely wu ~, negativity. While
this term has nothing to do with the "nothingness" or "Ie neant," it established an
ultimate and uncognizeable condition for the possibility of entities' existence with
a bifurcation of the realm of the Absolute and the realm of the Specific. This pro-
vided a translation language, a philosophical echo, and a structural receptacle for
the Prajnaparamita notion of the two truths, and Prajnaparamita specialists of the
fourth century such as Zhi Dun (314-366) and Shi Daoan (312-385) articulated
read in his Commentary: "If there is something that is known, then there is some-
thing that is not known. Because in the Sage's mind there is nothing that is
known, there is nothing that is not known. The knowing of unknowing is termed
all-knowing·"~1'f?ff~D ~1J1'f?ff/j\~D ,l;J~{.'~~D ~~?ff/j\~D /j\
~DZ~DJJEl-W~D.46
Read through Seng Zhao's commentary, the corresponding Laozi phrase {~:fIt
71 ~
A -J=;- Ir:D ~T- ~
"" 'f] 7' I IF:' *-
~§ otE tit!! ~ ~ has the Sage as the unmentioned• subject and
:I.E! •
therefore is hypothetical: "Had I a little knowledge, I would be afraId of ~akmg
use of it while being on the Great Way." This would then mean that accordmg to
the Laozi the Sage who is defined as the person to understand the entire unive~se
and have the totality of knowledge, is afraid of even having a little knowledge, m-
dicating the necessary identity of the totality of knowledge with its complete ab-
sence. Kumarajiva, whose commentary probably was earlier than Seng Zhao's,
had not discovered this potential of the phrase. Read through his commentary,

damental Non-being, benwu zong *

positions which were later formalized into their belonging to the School of Fun-
~ *.44 Seng Zhao's generation had mostly
been brought up in this tradition, and he was among the first to be confronted with
"Even if I had only a little bit of understanding, I would straight away march on
the Great Way," the Laozi phrase means: "Supposed I had only a little knowledge,
I would march [with its help] on the Great Way."47 No comment survives for the
the Madhyamika doctrine of the ultimate "emptiness" of all dharma kong ?'a
, =, last segment of the Laozi phrase. In Kumarajiva's reading, the speaker also is the
which obviates the distinction between a non-describable that-by-which and the
Sage giving advice to the readers to follow the Great Way even if they had as yet
ten thousand entities, and between an ultimate truth and trivia. Seng Zhao's
only little understanding. Seng Zhao thus discovers in the Laozi ~lements .of
buddhological treatises are mostly debates in dialogue form between the new
Madhyamika doctrine of the emptiness of both knowing and not-knowmg, and m-
doctrine of emptiness, and the older readings of the Prajnaparamita texts, which
serts the Laozi among the Buddhist authorities for this teaching.
would make use of the Laozi in Wang Bi's reading to buttress their case and find
In this discovery, Kumarajiva has preceded him, albeit not in his analysis of
their concepts. Seng Zhao's and Kumarajiva's Laozi commentaries thus must also
Laozi 53. A surviving quotation from Kumarajiva on Laozi 48.3 shows the very
be :ead as discussions with other Buddhists about the proper meaning of a text
double elimination which has become the hallmark of Madhyamika teaching. Isa-
whIch, as they agreed, corresponded to key notions of Buddhism.
Commenting on Laozi 53.1, Seng Zhao writes: belle Robinet has first remarked on this connection. 48 Kumarajiva writes:
~Z~~.OO/j\~ ~Z¥f~~ ~~~~OO/j\~
1'f fiff ~D ~U 1'f fiff /j\ ~D ~ 'l:.' ~ ~ ~ ~ fiff /j\ ~D IJ\ ~D *- ~D
zlltX-tIL ~Z¥f~W ~~~-tIL W~~-tIL ft~~~X~
~~ *El~zX~ ~~m~m.ft~ MWmft
If he had something he knew there would be something he did ¥~~~ Bn~~ ffM~z~~ ~~/j\~-tIL
not know. The Sage's mind has no knowledge and therefore
"Diminishing them" means that there is no coarse thing that is
there is nothing that it does not know. Small [Particular]
not cast away so that this casting away gets to the point of
knowledge is the detractor of great [absolute] knowledge. 45
forgetting about evil. Thereupon there is no fine thing that is not
In Prajnaparamita reading, the Buddha or the Sage has the perfect Prajna, Know- eliminated so that this eliminating gets to the point of forgetting
ledge. Against this position, Seng Zhao wrote an essay with the shocking title On about good. [Normally] evil is what is to be rejected, good is
Prqjna Being Without Knowledge, Bore wuzhi lun ~ E ~ t!f fnB. In this treatise, what is to be approved. Having diminished what is to be rejected
he opened the explanation of his argument with exactly the words we have just

44
Imai Usaburo, Sodai ekigaku no kenkyu, appendix II, "Honwugi no genryu" (Tokyo: Meiji 46 Seng Zhao, "Bore wuzhi lun," in: Joron Kenkyu (see n. 24), p.24.
tsusho, 1958) pp. 478-484. 47 Quoted in Daode zhenjing zhushu (see n. 9), 5.24.
45 Quoted in Daode zhenjingjijie (see n. 7), 3.19. 48 Robinet, Commentaires (see n. 4), p. 112, has noted the connection between the two phrases
in the Chongxuan school, and quotes Kumarajiva's commentary as evidence.
 114 RudolfG. Wagner
he will also diminish what is to be approved. That is why [the
text] says "Diminishing this [the one], and then again
diminishing that [the other]." Once [things to be] approved and
[things to be] rejected are both forgotten, the feelings and desires
are cut off. [Then] one's [own] capacity harmonizes with the
Dao to the point of reaching non-interference [with other
entities]. Although [in this case] oneself is ''without inter-
ference," one brings to fruition the other entities' own activities,
that is why there "is nothing that is not done."49
Here we have a twofold process of "diminishing" to the point of elimination. Not
only the coarse evil matter is eliminated from the mind, but in a second step the
fine good matter is eliminated as well, and only then is the highest state achieved,
harmony with the Dao and the complete unfolding of the entities without any in-
terference from the self. Kumarajiva discovers in the Laozi a standard type of
Madhyamika proposition. In his reading the corresponding Laozi phrase t~ Z Y..
t~ Z i:J. .¥ ~ ffli m ffli mffiJ ffli :;if' m has to be rendered "he diminishes this
[the one] and then again diminishes that [the other], and in this manner reaches
non-interference. With this non-interference there is nothing that remains
undone." In the reading of this phrase, Seng Zhao follows his teacher. We have no
commentary from him, but a passage in the essay on Prajna already quoted, Bore
wuzhi tun, in which Seng Zhao quotes the result of this double diminishing
process with the implication that the reader knows the Laozi by heart and will be
able to link the passages. Seng Zhao writes:
~Affliffliffi~ W~ ~~ffliffimffliffi ffliffi~mffi
~~ffiJZffli .m~~ffiJ~m m:;if'~~~~ ~~
.¥A~~ffiJ:;if'~ mffliffiJ:;if'ffli ~:;if'~~~ffli~#:;if'
~M~ffli m~~~.~ ~~li. a~ffiJtt ~
mffiJ * 't3 ¥~ ffli mffiJ ffli :;if' m
For the Sage marklessness is inexistent. Why? If he considered
the markless to be markless, then being markless would become
a mark. To forsake the existent and go to the inexistent is like
shunning the peaks and walking into a canyon. In neither case
does one escape trouble. Therefore the Perfect Man while
dwelling in the existent does not consider it existent, and while
residing in the inexistent, does not consider it inexistent. Though
he does not grasp for the existent and the inexistent, neither does
he forsake the existent and the inexistent. For this reason he
blends his brilliance into the "dust and grief' and circulates
49 Quoted in Daode zhenjing qushan (see n. 6), 8.4.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 115
throughout the Five Forms of Destiny (gati). Though at rest, he
goes; though in repose, he comes. Though serenely without
interference, there is nothing that is not done. 5o
The last phrase quotes the end of our Laozi passage about the double reduction.
The comparison of these tidbits of commentary from Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao
gives us a basis for a conjecture that Seng Zhao's commentary was later than
Kumarajiva's, and outdid his teacher's by discovering even more Madhyamika
elements in the Laozi.
While both writers are engaged in a very Buddhist debate, they also join with
the same passages a Xuanxue and a Taoist debate. Philosophically speaking, the
fourth and fifth centuries are characterized by massive conceptual and organiza-
tional imports from Buddhism into Xuanxue as well as Taoism. While these
happened in a variety of areas, philosophically the most important was the new
school of reading the Laozi that reacted to the new Buddhist Madhyamika
teaching of "emptiness", the so-called School of the Double Dark, chongxuan - m
1;.5\ This school might have received its first impetus from an early Chinese
Buddhist, Zhi Dun (314-366), who in a preface to a Prajnaparamitasutra rejected
both positions of "emulating negativity" associated with Wang Bi, and of
"emulating entities" associated with Pei Wei (early fourth century).52 It became
dominant only in the sixth century. The term chongxuan comes from the final
phrase of Laozi 1 ~ ~ IPJ t±:l ffiJ ~ :g IPJ ~ Z 1; 1; Z Y.. 1;
which reads through Wang Bi's commentary: "Both [the Many and the Subtle]
*
~9J Z F~,
emerge from a common [origin] but they have different names. Their common
[origin] is spoken of as the Dark, the Dark-and-Dark-Again. It is the door [from
which] the many and the subtle [emerge]." The last element in this statement, "the
Dark-and-Dark-Again, the door [from which] the many and the subtle [emerge],"
was read in this tradition as the double elimination of positive as well as negative
propositions about the highest truth. The grammatical and content analogy be-
tween the "Dark-and-Dark-Again" 1; Z Y... 1; and the "diminishing and dimin-
ishing again," sun zhi you sun t~ Z Y... t~, in Laozi 48 has led to their insertion
into a similar argumentative track. As we have no surviving commentary by either
Kumarajiva or Seng Zhao on Laozi I we might be entitled to read their interpreta-
tion of Laozi 48, which has just been quoted, as an indicator of their role within a
clearly Xuanxue / Taoist tradition which was emulating the new developments in
50 Seng Zhao, "Bore wuzhi lun," in: Joron Kenkyu (see n. 24), p. 33.
5\ For an introduction to this school cf. Robinet, Commentaires (see n. 4), p. 96ff.
52 Cf. Lu Guolong III ~ ft, Zhongguo chongxuan xue q:t mJ]Ii ~ ~ (peking: Renmin Zhong-
guo Press, 1993), p. 14. Lu follows the development of the Chongxuan school exclusively in
Taoist terms and misses the Madhyamika connection that had been convincingly pointed out
many years before by Isabelle Robinet in her Commentaires. Zhi Dun is normally associated
with the School of Fundarnental Non-being mentioned above.
116 RudolfG. Wagner
Buddhist doctrine. The Chongxuan commentators such as Cheng Xuanying ,oX: y£
~ (active between 631 and 650) followed Kumarajiva's line of commentary on
this passage. 53
Proceeding along the line of controlled textual enrichment, we now have three
countertexts, Immortality Taoism, Buddhist debates about the two Truths, and
Xuanxue / Taoist debates about the proper reading of the Laozi in the light of the
new and very sophisticated Buddhist Madhyamika teachings. Concerning the first
countertext, the commentaries sided with Confucian as well as Taoist and Xuan-
xue critics of what they saw as a destructive and dangerous religious trend, appro-
priating in the process the privilege of the most sophisticated and text-based ana-
lysis of the Taoist classic Laozi for themselves. Concerning the second counter-
text, Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao established a new standard of Buddhist analysis
of consciousness and reality against the Xuanxue-influenced readings of the
Prajnaparamita literature of the preceeding two generations, subjecting the Laozi
to a new critical inquiry of its compatibility with the highest Buddhist dispensa-
tions, and arriving at the conclusion that the Laozi was up to standard and could be
read meaningfully in terms of Buddhist Madhyamika teachings. Concerning the
third countertext, they seem to have had a dramatic impact within the Xuanxue /
Taoist tradition itself, starting off an entire school of 'bouddhisant' interpretation
to the point of becoming something like recognized "Taoist Madhyamika masters"
and helping the Xuanxue / Taoist tradition to match the Buddhist Madhyamika
challenge with textual matter of it's own.
4. Commentarial technique and implied addressee
The surviving commentaries allow us a further observation which has to do with
the implied addressee of the commentary. Since the end of the Han dynasty at the
end of the second century CE, the social circumstances of canonical reading have
undergone an important change. Up to that time, it was the rule that texts would
be studied under the guidance of a teacher in a school environment. In this respect
it did not matter whether the teachers were the official "doctors of the Five Clas-
sics" in the state university, or the heads of the mushrooming private academies of
the second century CEo The end of the dynasty saw the collapse of this school
structure, and with it that of the interpretive authority of the teacher. In an organ-
ized teaching environment the teacher alone was in control of interpretation, and
his disciples developed a social interest to spread his line of reading as a way of
forming connections and alliances and promoting their own careers. With the col-
lapse of what was called the shixue gffi ~ (Studying with a teacher) orjiaxue ~
(Studying with a school of thought), the different commentaries were confronting
* 54
53 Robinet, Commentaires, p. 112.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 117
each other in a completely new arena, a market place of ideas. The rapid replace-
ment of bamboo strips with writing paper had enhanced the availability of texts,
and it seems that a commercial book market developed where one could buy
handwritten copies. The demise of school teaching, however, dramatically in-
creased the pressure on the commentaries, because they could no longer bank on
the authority of the teacher and the cohesiveness of the school. They had to rely
increasingly on their capacity to convince by providing sophisticated analyses of
the canonical texts which would be intersubjectively convincing, and would abide
by the laws of consistency, plausibility, and economy of explanatory devices.
There was only one realm where the old-style commentaries could survive, be-
cause its institutions survived the end of the Han, the evolving Taoist church. The
Xiang Er commentary claimed higher inspiration from Laozi himself, and was in
no need of being convincing and consistent to simple minds, who were getting
their religious education in the strict hierarchical framework of their sect. True,
this commentary explicitly deals with other readings, which means that the
disciples might have been exposed to these readings, but they came from other
schools in the same religiously inspired Taoism, not from secular political philo-
sophers. 54 Seng Zhao's and Kumarajiva's commentaries to the Laozi do not speak
in the mode of a divinely inspired teacher who therefore was entitled to interpret-
ive devices not acceptable to the critical and sober mind. They went by the rule of
staying as closely as possible to the spontaneous reading, and of making their
points through a more careful analysis of the philosophical implications. This
means that their texts were entering the market place competition with other
commentators in front of an abstract but highly literate audience which could be
assumed to be familiar with other readings of the same passage, and which did not
owe the author the allegiance due to a teacher. The implied addressee of these
commentaries therefore is not the Taoist convert who would never see it, but the
range of intellectuals thinking about their own life projects, who might go either
way.
5. By way ofa Summary
The Chinese Buddhist Commentaries to the Laozi are part of a debate of mutual
appropriation between the Taoist, the Xuanxue and the Buddhist tradition.
They clearly reject the only salvational alternative open at the time competing
with theirs, namely the prolongation of life, as incompatible with this highest text.
Cf. my analysis of these polemics in the Xiang Er commentary of Laozi 6 in "Der Vergessene
Hinweis. Wang Pi ueber den Lao-tzu," in: 1. Assmann, B. Gladigow (eds.), Text und Kom-
mentar. Archaeologie der Literarischen Kommunikation IV (Munich: Fink, 1995), p. 269.
See also S. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), pp. 83ff.
118 RudolfG. Wagner
In this rejection they were in unison with other amateurs of the Laozi and
Zhuangzi who were appalled by the association of these texts with alchemical and
magical practices. It is due to this commonality of interests that elements of their
commentaries survive.
By identifying the early Chinese Sages with the Buddha, they claimed that their
original teaching had been lost, and was now being revived and brought back to
China through the Buddhists, who in this sense only revived and developed what
had been there in antiquity.
The texts inserted the Laozi into a path of living leading towards the achieve-
ment of Sageliness or Buddhahood, a path not offered in any meaningful way in
Chinese tradition. They imputed an initial knowledge of this path to the Laozi.
Their interpreting strategies were largely based on the stringent procedures
tried by the Xuanxue protagonists and did not take the liberties assumed by the
immortality advocates such as Xiang Er or Heshang Gong. This also implied that
they addressed the Xuanxue scholars, and based themselves not on a sect or
school teaching but on an open market of competing ideas where they had to con-
vince with arguments, not with authority.
In their positive resonance with the Laozi they claimed the universal validity of
truth, and in particular of the truths of their Buddhist teaching against a parochial
polemics coming from Taoists and some Confucians against them. In this mood
they were able to deal with the Laozi in a positive way without having to de-
nounce it, but they could heartily denounce the modem adepts. They did not use
the possible alternative avenue of handling the Laozi, namely to describe it as a
lower but acceptable level of truth to be accomodated under the provisions of
upaya, the listener-adjusted form of Buddhist teaching.
The Laozi commentaries were part of other international dialogues as well,
which have to do with the translation of Chinese classics into Turkic and Indian
languages, such as the Classic ofFilial Piety, Xiaojing, by the Tuoba Wei,55 and
of the Laozi into Sanskrit, and with the Buddhist commentaries not just to the
Laozi but also to the Classic ofFilial Piety, Xiaojing, and the Analects, Lunyu. 56
The Laozi commentaries by Kumarajiva and Seng Zhao were part of their new
discovery of the Madhyamika doctrine and were used in this context for debates
55 According to the book catalogue of the Suishu, p. 935, the II mq;~ "Classic of Filial Piety
in the National Language [of the Tuoba Wei]" was made because when the Wei took over,
they did not understand Chinese, and Emperor Xiaowen asked someone to translate the
message of the Xiaojing into barbarian language P) ~ § ~ q; ~ z.
'gj', and teach it to his
subjects.
56 The Buddhist monks Shi Huishi ~~Uii and Shi Huilin ~~$ both wrote Commentaries to
the Xiaojing in 1 j. q;if<] ~ijt, Sui shu, p. 934. Shi Sengzhi ~fj ~ is listed, p. 936, with a
Lunyu commentary which was already lost when this catalogue was compiled. For fragments
of a Lunyu commentary by Shi Huilin see n. 23.
Exploring the Common Ground: Buddhist Commentaries on the Taoist Classic Laozi 119
with other Buddhists. At the same time they opened a way for the Chongxuan
school of Taoism which developed into a Taoist emulation of Madhyamika.
To enrich the small volume of surviving pieces from the two commentaries and
to increase the reliability of their reading, the following supplementary strategies
were applied:
enhancing microtext through linkages with passages in other writings by the
same author that go back to the same passage of the Laozi, a technique es-
pecially successful with Seng Zhao;
enhancing environment by linking the commentaries up with others in the
same "collected commentary" edition which normally were going into the
same direction so that they could come in as supplementary environment for
textual stability;
enhancing environment by inserting the debate into the contemporary debates
with other teachings and schools, and thus creating a framework of plausibility
for certain opinions extracted from these small fragments;
enhancing context by linking particular points with direct polemics against
specific schools;
enhancing the environment by opposing their comments with those most pre-
valent on the market at their time;
enhancing context by linking biographical material on familiarity with Laozi
and Zhuangzi with their interpretive efforts.
With scholars from other extractions and other religious beliefs assuming the right
to comment on the Laozi, the text is consolidated in its function as an interna-
tionally relevant and accessible contribution towards philosophical insight. This
process has begun with the appropriation of the Laozi into quite different intel-
lectual traditions, ranging from those of the different schools within the Taoist
church to the different Han dynasty readings in the Huang / Lao tradition, to the
insertion of the Laozi and eventually Zhuangzi into a hierarchy of texts dominated
by the person of Confucius as the last Chinese Sage in a line of arguments that
denied the traditional Confucianists, the Ru, the authority of properly understand-
ing the bequests of Confucius. The qualitative change is that the Laozi becomes
part of a cross-cultural heritage.
The relationship of the Laozi with the Buddhist tradition has been told through
many stories and models, ranging from the Laozi converting the barbarians and in-
corporating himself to become the Buddha, to the Laozi being a disciple of the
Buddha, to the version contained in the two commentaries, namely, Laozi being an
author with profound and valid insights into some of the questions for which Bud-
dhism provided the answers.
The open-mindedness of the Buddhists in this debate is part of a defensive
stance. The Taoists, during this same time, were incorporating numerous Buddhist
120 RudolfG. Wagner

structures and doctrinal matters - including the Karma doctrine - into their own
teaching, but it is not known that any of them ever sat down to wTite a comment-
ary - even a hostile one - on a Buddhist text in the manner Kumarajiva and
Seng Zhao did with the Laozi. The Buddhists could rely on the universal presence
of the Laozi in the basic philosophical education of young members of the Chinese
elite, even if later they would turn Buddhist. As far as they belonged to this stra-
tum, they only had to go back to a text they were intimately familiar with, and
reread it in the light of their new experience, while for the Taoists studying
Buddhist texts meant acquiring familiarity with a huge body of very complex texts
during their adult lives. We have, to my knowledge, no Taoist commentaries to
Buddhist texts prior to the Sung dynasty, although many of the Taoists involved in
the Buddho-Taoist polemics proclaim and evince a knowledge of Buddhist texts
and concepts.
The appropriation of a tradition through the commentarial appropriation of a
text is not a rare phenomenon in the history and phenomenology of the comment-
ary. We can observe very similar processes since the late 16th century with the
Jesuits, the Protestant Missionaries, and eventually the Taipings in China entering
the competition for the interpretation of the Chinese classics.
In this process the commentary becomes a vital instrument to incorporate into a
tradition the vital elements of another while at the same time subordinating its
teaching to the new dispensation and thus disclaiming the superiority and author-
ity of the traditional guardians of the text.