鬼谷子

Guǐgǔzǐ 鬼谷子

The Master of the Ghost Valley

by 鬼谷子 (Guǐgǔzǐ, “Master of the Ghost Valley,” attributed; legendary Warring-States master, alleged teacher of Sū Qín 蘇秦 and Zhāng Yí 張儀)

About the work

The principal pre-modern manual of persuasion, diplomatic rhetoric, and political-strategic manipulation in the Chinese tradition, in one juan (originally three) and twelve surviving piān (with the Zhuǎn wán 轉丸 and Qū qiè 胠篋 chapters now lost). The work is traditionally attributed to a recluse styled “Master of the Ghost-Valley” 鬼谷子 (Guǐgǔ being conventionally located near Yángchéng 陽城 in Luòzhōu 雒州), said to have lived in the Warring States and to have taught the great diplomats Sū Qín 蘇秦 and Zhāng Yí 張儀, and possibly the military theorist Sūn Bìn 孫臏. Nearly every aspect of this attribution is contested. The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì does not record the work; the Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì lists Guǐgǔ in three juan under the Zònghéng jiā 縱橫家 (“Vertical-and-Horizontal” or Diplomatic school), with annotations by Huángfǔ Mì 皇甫謐 (215–282), Táo Hóngjǐng 陶弘景 (456–536), and Yuè Yī 樂壹 (HànWèi). The Táng zhì 唐志 attributes the work to Sū Qín himself. The Sìkù editors place it under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division.

Tiyao

[The Sìkù tiyao for Guǐgǔzǐ is appended to the Gōngsūn Lóngzǐ tiyao in the SKQS imprint and is presented here as it stands in that source.]

We respectfully submit that Guǐgǔzǐ is not recorded in the Hàn zhì. The Suí zhì’s Zònghéng jiā 縱橫家 contains Guǐgǔ in three juan, with the note “[a man of] Zhōu times, hidden at Ghost Valley.” The Yùhǎi 玉海 cites the Zhōngxīng shūmù 中興書目: “An exalted gentleman of the Zhōu, with no native place, no clan, no surname, no name, no style; he took his hidden retreat as his name and called himself Guǐgǔ Xiānsheng. Sū Qín 蘇秦 and Zhāng Yí 張儀 served him; he transmitted to them Bǎi hé 捭闔 down to Fú yán 符言*, twelve piān; and Zhuǎn wán 轉丸, Běn jīng 本經, Chí shū 持樞, Zhōng jīng 中經 and other piān” — following the Suí zhì line. The Táng zhì gives the same juan-count but adds “composed by Sū Qín.”

Zhāng Shǒujié’s 張守節 Shǐjì zhèngyì 史記正義 says: “Ghost Valley is five li north of Yángchéng County 陽城縣 in Luòzhōu 雒州.” The Qī lù 七錄 lists “Sū Qín’s book,” and Yuè Yī’s 樂壹 commentary says: “[Sū] Qín wished to make his arts mysterious and so borrowed the name Guǐgǔ” — this is what the Táng zhì is following.

Hú Yìnglín’s 胡應麟 Bǐcóng 筆叢 holds that the Suí zhì has Sū Qín in 31 piān and Zhāng Yí in 10 piān, so the present book must be the work of an Eastern-Hàn man combining the two and ascribing it to “Guǐgǔ” — like the Zǐ Xū 子虛 and Wú shì 亡是 belles-lettres pieces [Hàn fictitious-character literary form]. His view is fairly close to reason, but in the end without firm proof. The Suí zhì names Huángfǔ Mì 皇甫謐 [215–282] as commentator — so the book is certainly WèiJìn or earlier, no doubt of that.

The Shuōyuàn 說苑 cites Guǐgǔzǐ’s saying “It is hard to put right one who is unkind” — not in the present text. Hé Hóng 惠洪’s Lěngzhāi yèhuà 冷齋夜話 cites Guǐgǔzǐ “yámì 崖蜜 means cherries” — also not in the present text. One might suspect the present recension is not the old book. But the present recension has lost the Zhuǎn wán and Qū qiè chapters, retaining only Bǎi hé through Fú yán — twelve piān. The lines Liú Xiàng cited may be in the lost piān. As to Hé Hóng’s citation, by the Wáng Zhífāng shīhuà 王直方詩話 it is in fact a passage from the Jīnlóu zǐ 金樓子, which Hé Hóng mistakenly took for Guǐgǔzǐ. (Note: the Wáng Zhífāng shīhuà is now incomplete; this entry is preserved through Zhū Yì’s 朱翌 Yījuéliáo zázhì 猗覺寮雜志 citation.) None of these cases need cause us to doubt the book.

Gāo Sìsūn’s 高似孫 Zǐlüè 子畧 takes its “one closing, one opening” as the spirit of the Yì 易, and “one drawing-in, one stretching-out” as the technique of Lǎo[zǐ] — issuing forth among the men of the Warring States — really an overestimation. Sòng Lián’s 宋濂 Qiánxī jí 潛溪集 dismisses it as “the cunning of snake and mouse” and says the prose is shallow and unlike Warring-States — too steep an underestimation. Liǔ Zōngyuán’s 柳宗元 Biàn Guǐgǔzǐ 辨鬼谷子 says “the language grows ever more strange and the Way ever more cramped” — that gets close to the truth. For though its arts may not deserve discussion, the strange variety and grotesque grandeur of its prose is decidedly not what later ages can produce.

Respectfully revised and submitted, ninth month of the forty-seventh year of Qiánlóng [1782].

General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀 (note: 均 in the original is a typographical slip for 昀), Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Guǐgǔzǐ is the principal classical Chinese treatise on persuasion and rhetorical-political manipulation, surviving in twelve piān (originally fourteen — Zhuǎn wán 轉丸 and Qū qiè 胠篋 are lost): Bǎi hé 捭闔 (“Opening and Closing”), Fǎn yìng 反應 (“Reaction”), Nèi jiàn 內揵 (“Internal Engagement”), Dǐ xì 抵巇 (“Stopping the Crack”), Fēi qián 飛鉗 (“Flying Pincers”), Wǔ hé 忤合 (“Opposition and Conjunction”), Chuǎi 揣 (“Sounding Out”), Mó 摩 (“Probing”), Quán 權 (“Weighing”), Móu 謀 (“Planning”), Jué 決 (“Deciding”), Fú yán 符言 (“Tally Words”), with an appended Běn jīng yīn fú 本經陰符 supplement. The work is unique in the Chinese textual tradition for its sustained, technical, and unsentimental treatment of how to read an interlocutor’s intentions and bend a conversation to one’s purpose — a Chinese counterpart to the rhetorical-strategic literature of the Greek sophists or to Machiavelli.

The traditional attribution is to a Warring-States recluse known only as “Master of the Ghost Valley” (Guǐgǔzǐ 鬼谷子) — said to have lived in retreat at Ghost Valley near Yángchéng 陽城 (in modern Hénán) and to have taught the great Warring-States diplomats Sū Qín 蘇秦 and Zhāng Yí 張儀 of the Zònghéng (Vertical-and-Horizontal) school of strategy. None of this is straightforwardly historical. The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì knew no Guǐgǔzǐ; the Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì gives the first reliable record (three juan, Zònghéng jiā division, with commentaries of Huángfǔ Mì 皇甫謐 [215–282], Táo Hóngjǐng 陶弐景 [456–536], and Yuè Yī 樂壹 [HànWèi]). The Táng zhì attributes the work to Sū Qín himself.

Modern scholarship is divided. Hú Yìnglín 胡應麟 (Míng) argued that the work is an Eastern-Hàn fabrication built out of the Hàn zhì Sū Qín (31 piān) and Zhāng Yí (10 piān) — both lost — under the pseudonym “Guǐgǔ”; the Sìkù editors call this “fairly close to reason.” Recent scholarship (Coyle 1999, Schuessler in his etymological work) tends to accept a substantial pre-Hàn or early-Hàn core, on the grounds that Yuè Yī’s commentary already presupposes a stable text by the late Hàn, that Huángfǔ Mì’s commentary places it firmly in WèiJìn, and that the rhetorical doctrine is genuinely continuous with what we can independently reconstruct of Warring-States zònghéng practice from the Zhànguó cè 戰國策 and the SūZhāng archives.

The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore −250, notAfter 250) reflects this uncertainty: the rhetorical-doctrinal core is most plausibly late Warring-States to early Hàn (with Sū Qín / Zhāng Yí school traditions as background), the editorial frame and probably the Běn jīng yīn fú supplement are no later than the third century CE (Huángfǔ Mì commentary). The figure of “Guǐgǔzǐ” himself is, on present evidence, legendary.

Liǔ Zōngyuán 柳宗元’s medieval Biàn Guǐgǔzǐ 辨鬼谷子 dismissed the work; Sòng Lián 宋濂 (YuánMíng) called it “the cunning of snake and mouse”; the Sìkù editors take a more measured view, allowing that the rhetorical arts may be “not worth discussing” but the prose is genuinely strange and inimitable. The work is included in 《隋書·經籍志》, 《唐書·經籍志》, the Sìkù, and the Dàozàng (parallel recension at KR5d0048).

Translations and research

• Thomas Cleary (tr.), Thunder in the Sky: On the Acquisition and Exercise of Power (Shambhala, 1993). Selective English translation.
• Robert van Gulik, manuscript translation (unpublished); see his Sexual Life in Ancient China (Brill, 1961) for incidental references.
• Wú Bǎohé 吳寶和 (?Coyle), Daniel Coyle, “Guiguzi: A Study of Influence in the Argumentative Tradition of Pre-Han China” (PhD diss., University of Hawai’i, 1999). Substantial English-language doctoral study.
• Hans van Ess, “The Guiguzi and Its Relation to Late Warring States zonghengjia Rhetoric,” in various publications.
• Christoph Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7.1: Language and Logic (Cambridge, 1998), with treatment of the Guǐgǔzǐ as a logical-rhetorical text.
• Xiào Dēngfú 蕭登福, Guǐgǔzǐ yánjiū 鬼谷子研究 (Wénjīn, 1984). Standard modern Chinese monograph.
• Chén Pǔqīng 陳蒲清, Guǐgǔzǐ xiángjiě 鬼谷子詳解 (Yuèlù Shūshè, 2005). Modern critical edition with full commentary.
• Hsiang-yi Lin Chu, “An Annotated Translation and Study of the Guigu zi” (Master’s thesis, McGill University, 1996).
• Recent French translation: Jean Lévi, Guigu zi: Le Maître de la vallée des fantômes (Editions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 2014).

Other points of interest

The book is the principal — and almost the only — surviving textual source for the Zònghéng jiā 縱橫家 (“Vertical-and-Horizontal” or Diplomatic school) of pre-Qín political thought, the school whose doctrines underlay the great Warring-States diplomatic shifts that culminated in the Qín conquest. As such it is also the indirect ancestor of much later Chinese strategic and rhetorical literature, including the Chángduǎn jīng 長短經 (Táng) and the Zhào shū 灶書 / Móu lüè 謀略 traditions of the Sòng and after. It has had a prominent place in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Chinese popular and business literature, where it is repackaged as an East Asian counterpart to The Art of War and The Prince.

Links

• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Guǐgǔzǐ entry.
• Wikipedia: Guiguzi; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Guiguzi” (where extant).
• Wikidata: Q1004196 (Guiguzi).
• Parallel recension: KR5d0048 (Dàozàng).