Introducing China
Jwangdz: Empire and Its Discontents
A Taeko and E Bruce Brooks
(estimated publication date: 2009)

This wide-audience work separates the Jwangdz passages from our major study The Emergence of China, retains the statements of other philosophers with which those passages interact, adds passages in order to give a more rounded idea of the Jwangdz text as a whole, and briefly discusses the rise and fate of the several strands of which it is composed.

1. What we now regard as the Jwangdz text, and what many think of as coming from the hand of Jwang Jou, is actually an amalgam of the work of many different groups of writers and their individually small output, ranging from the radical social disengagement of the Primitivists (JZ 8-10) to the disaffected members of the elite in the so-called Inner Chapters (JZ 1-7), to the political theorists of the Statecraft chapters (JZ 13-15). To these somewhat incompatible Warring States expressions, some literary satires and impressions were added during early Han. No part of this mix explains any other, but samples from across the mix give a sense of at least some of the opposition to the coming Empire at the time when it was still only the coming Empire. Some of them are fun to read, and all of them are fascinating as part of the mind of the time.

2. How all this came together to make one book is a story in itself., It seems that various local texts were combined into one, not once but several times, and that the role of the final Han compilers was limited to gathering some Han literary evocations, and adding a plea for the place of Dauism in the emerging national ideology of Han. Understanding these manipulations is part of understanding the Jwangdz.

3. Modern ideas of the Jwangdz are its supposed author were created by the Six Dynasties romantics, who picked up on several suggestive passages in their artful discourses, and ignored much of the rest. It was then that the Jwangdz was edited down from its 55-chapter form to our present 33 chapters, and that the now standard commentary of Gwo Syang was written. This is a part of Jwangdz history that needs to be known in order to get behind it, as far as we now can, to the Jwangdz of classical times.

4. When this preparatory work is done, it becomes possible to seek for the actual role of Jwang Jou in the text we know as the Jwangdz. Finding it is complicated by the fact that some parts of our text have never heard of Jwang Jou, and other parts are hostile to him. But once it is found, we can also see what other forces went into creating the text that we have. Those voices too deserve to be recognized as co-creators of one of the most durably enjoyable works of Chinese antiquity.

The resulting study gives a detailed sense of the Jwangdz without being that heavy thing, a full translation. It surrounds that sense with an understanding of the the text came to be and to be preserved, without obscuring the enjoyment that its many writers have somehow managed to bequeath to the world. It will be welcomed by scholars who want to consider the story of the Jwangdz apart from the complex narrative of The Emergence of China, by all students and enthusiasts of early Chinese literature and thought, and by those in search of something different to read, for that rainy weekend at the summer cottage.

17 May 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications Page