淮南鴻烈解

Huáinán hónglièjiě 淮南鴻烈解

Explanations of the Great Brilliance of Huáinán — i.e. the Huáinánzǐ 淮南子

by 劉安 (Liú Ān, 179?–122 BCE; King of Huáinán); commentary by 高誘 (Gāo Yòu, fl. c. 205–212; Eastern Hàn philological commentator)

About the work

The Huáinánzǐ — here under its honorific full title Huáinán hónglièjiě (“explanations of the great brilliance of Huáinán”) — is the major surviving philosophical compendium of the early Western Hàn, presented to Emperor Wǔ in 139 BCE by Liú Ān 劉安, King of Huáinán and grandson of the Hàn founder. The book in twenty-one piān / juan is the so-called “inner” recension (nèi 內篇); a parallel “outer” recension in 33 piān (wài 外篇) and a further nineteen-piān “middle” recension (zhōng 中篇 or Hónglièjiān 鴻烈間) on alchemical and esoteric matters were already noted as separate by the Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì and have since been lost (only fragments survive). The received text is a tightly-edited cosmological and political treatise produced by the salon of scholars Liú Ān maintained at his Huáinán court — the famous “Eight Worthies” 八公 (Sū Fēi 蘇飛, Lǐ Shàng 李尚, Zuǒ Wú 左吳, Tián Yóu 田由, Léi Bèi 雷被, Máo Bèi 毛被, Wǔ Bèi 伍被, Jìn Chāng 晉昌) plus the disciples of Greater and Lesser Mount Mountain (大山小山之徒) — composed around the lost Yuándàoxùn 原道訓 as cosmological keystone and concluding with the Yàolüè 要略 (a self-summary of the entire work). Doctrinally it is the most fully-realized representative of Western-Hàn HuángLǎo 黃老 syncretism, drawing on Daoist, Confucian, Legalist, Mohist, YīnYáng / Five-Phase, and military traditions in service of an ideal of imperial governance grounded in the natural order. Catalogued in the Sìkù under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit that Huáinán hónglièjiě in twenty-one juan was composed by the Hàn King of Huáinán Liú Ān 劉安 — his deeds are recorded in his biography in the Hàn shū. The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì lists Huáinán among the zájiā, with twenty-one inner piān and thirty-three outer; Yán Shīgǔ’s 顏師古 note says: “the inner piān discuss the Way; the outer piān contain miscellaneous discussions.” What survives today is the twenty-one piān — these are evidently the inner. Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Dúshū zhì 讀書志 reports that the Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目 was missing three piān; Lǐ Shū 李淑’s Hándān túshū zhì 邯鄲圖書志 was missing two; his own family copy retained only seventeen piān (four lost). Gāo Sìsūn’s 高似孫 Zǐlüè 子畧 says he “read Huáinán in twenty piān” — so even by the Sòng a complete recension was rare. Only Hóng Mài 洪邁’s Róngzhāi suíbǐ 容齋隨筆 records “what is now extant is twenty-one juan,” matching our present text. Yet Bái Jūyì 白居易’s Liù tiē 六帖, citing the legend of magpies bridging the Heavenly River, attributes it to the Huáinánzǐ, and the present text does not contain it — so there are still lacunae.

The annotation is variously attributed in different sources to Xǔ Shèn 許慎 or to Gāo Yòu — the Suí zhì, Táng zhì, and Sòng zhì all list both annotations side by side. Lù Démíng’s 陸德明 Zhuāngzǐ shìwén 莊子釋文 cites the Huáinánzǐ zhù under Xǔ Shèn; Lǐ Shàn’s 李善 Wén xuǎn annotation and Yīn Jìngshùn’s 殷敬順 Lièzǐ shìwén 列子釋文 cite the Huáinánzǐ zhù sometimes under Gāo Yòu and sometimes under Xǔ Shèn — clear evidence that there were originally two annotations. Subsequently the Xǔ Shèn annotation was lost and its scattered fragments preserved; later editors mistakenly relabelled Gāo’s annotation under Xǔ’s name, so that the attribution drifted. Observe that the text writes 景 ancient for yǐng 影 (“shadow”), but Xǔ’s Shuōwén has no character 影 — proof positive that the gloss does not come from him. We have therefore corrected the attribution and restored the title to Gāo Yòu.

Yòu was a man of Zhuō Commandery, a disciple of Lú Zhí 盧植. In the Jiàn’ān period he was made Sīkòng yuàn 司空掾 (gentleman-attendant in the Office of Works), then served successively as Magistrate of Púyáng 濮陽 in the Eastern Capital region, and was promoted to Inspector of Hédōng 河東監 — all noted in his own preface.

Respectfully revised and submitted, intercalary fifth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng [1781].

General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

Liú Ān 劉安 (179?–122 BCE), King of Huáinán, was a grandson of Liú Bāng 劉邦 (Hàn Gāozǔ) and son of Liú Cháng 劉長 (King Lì of Huáinán), a half-brother of Emperor Wén. A man of letters who maintained a celebrated court of Daoist fāngshì 方術士 and learned scholars, he is recorded in the Hàn shū (44) as having presented his Huáinán in 21 nèipiān + 33 wàipiān to Emperor Wǔ at the yuánshòu 元朔 court ceremony of 139 BCE — the date now standardly accepted as the terminus ante quem for the inner chapters as a redacted whole. The work is collective: Gāo Yòu’s preface names the “Eight Worthies” of the salon plus the followers of “Greater and Lesser Mountain,” but doctrinal coherence and the architectonic Yàolüè 要略 chapter at the close indicate strong editorial control, almost certainly by Liú Ān himself. The bracket adopted here (notBefore −150, notAfter −139) reflects the most plausible window for the composition of the inner chapters: Liú Ān’s accession to the kingship was in 164 BCE and the active phase of his court is generally placed in the 150s–140s BCE. He died in 122 BCE in disgrace, by his own hand, after Emperor Wǔ’s prosecutors uncovered (or fabricated) a charge of treason; the tradition that he ascended into the heavens “with his dogs and his chickens” 雞犬升天 is the first witness to his later canonisation in Daoist cult.

The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì lists the work under Zájiā 雜家 with the inner / outer / middle division; the inner 21 piān are the only large-scale surviving block. Modern scholarship (Le Blanc 1985; Major 1993, 1997; Major et al. 2010; Queen and Puett 2014) treats the text as the most fully realized programmatic statement of Western-Hàn HuángLǎo syncretism — cosmological in framework, Daoist in metaphysical spine, but consciously syncretic in incorporating Confucian moral, Legalist administrative, Mohist utilitarian, and YīnYáng / Five-Phase calendrical materials toward an ideal of wúwéi 無為 imperial governance. Wilkinson (Chinese History: A New Manual §59.6.7) treats it as one of the four foundational Zǐ works of the Hàn.

The text was transmitted with two parallel commentaries — Xǔ Shèn 許慎 (c. 58–148 CE) and Gāo Yòu (fl. c. 205–212) — between which the Sìkù editors disentangle the long-standing confusion (concluding, persuasively, that the surviving recension is essentially Gāo Yòu’s, with Xǔ’s annotation interpolated only in fragments, and that later transmitters had misattributed the conflated whole to Xǔ). The Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì preserves both annotations; the Daozang preserves an independent recension under Xǔ Shèn’s name (DZ 1184; cf. KR5f0018 Huáinán hónglièjiě attributed to 許愼).

Translations and research

The Huáinánzǐ is now exceptionally well-served in modern scholarship.

• John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth, with Michael Puett and Judson Murray, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (Columbia University Press, 2010). The standard complete annotated English translation. Reissued in an abridged paperback as The Essential Huainanzi (2012).
• Sarah A. Queen and Michael Puett, eds., The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China (Brill, 2014). Major collected volume on the text’s composition, sources, and transmission.
• Charles Le Blanc, Huai-nan Tzu: Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought — The Idea of Resonance (kan-ying), with a Translation and Analysis of Chapter Six (Hong Kong University Press, 1985). The pioneering Western-language monograph.
• John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought: Chapters Three, Four, and Five of the Huainanzi (SUNY Press, 1993). The foundational study of the cosmological and astronomical chapters.
• Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Hawaii, 1983; rev. SUNY 1994). Translation and study of piān 9, Zhǔshù xùn 主術訓.
• Andrew Seth Meyer, The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War (Columbia University Press, 2012). Translation of piān 15, Bīnglüè xùn 兵略訓.
• Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu (Association for Asian Studies, 1992). Detailed philological reconstruction.
• Charles Le Blanc, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (ed. Loewe, 1993), 189–95. Standard handbook entry.
• Liú Wéndiǎn 劉文典, Huáinán hónglièjíjiě 淮南鴻烈集解 (Shāngwù, 1923; rep. Zhōnghuá, 1989). The indispensable modern Chinese critical edition.
• Hé Níng 何寧, Huáinánzǐ jíshì 淮南子集釋 (Zhōnghuá, 1998). Comprehensive variorum.
• Institute of Chinese Studies Concordance to the Huainanzi 淮南子逐字索引 (ICS Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, no. 9; Hong Kong: Commercial Press).

French: Claude Larre, Isabelle Robinet, and Élisabeth Rochat de la Vallée, Les Grands traités du Huainan zi (Cerf, 1993; partial translation). Italian: a complete translation by Francesca Tarocco appeared as Huainan zi (Mondadori, 2013). The German tradition begins with Eduard Erkes’s partial translations (1917) but lacks a modern complete version.

Other points of interest

The Huáinánzǐ is the most architecturally self-conscious of the major Western-Hàn zǐ-books: its closing Yàolüè 要略 chapter functions as a programmatic statement and table of contents — a feature unique among pre-Hàn / early-Hàn philosophical compendia and an explicit attempt by the editors to control how the work would be read. The internal arrangement (cosmology → physical world → human nature → governance → military and ritual practice) anticipates the encyclopedic ordering of later lèishū 類書. The Tiānwén xùn 天文訓 (piān 3) provides the earliest complete listing of the twenty-eight xiù 宿 (lunar lodges) and the twenty-four jiéqì 節氣 (climatic periods, see Wilkinson §39.10) and is a milestone in the history of Chinese astronomy. The Lǎnmíng xùn 覽冥訓 episode of Cháng É 嫦娥 stealing the elixir of immortality and fleeing to the moon is the locus classicus of one of the most enduring of Chinese myths.

Links

• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Huáinán hónglièjiě entry.
• Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed.), §59.6.7.
• Wikipedia: Huainanzi; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Huainanzi” (Sarah A. Queen).
• Wikidata: Q852403 (Huainanzi).
• Parallel recension: KR5f0018 (Dàozàng DZ 1184, attributed to Xǔ Shèn).