The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty

"This is hard-hitting philosophy, as hardcore as Chinese philosophy gets. It’s The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying , who wrote it at the height of Tang dynasty Daoism in the 7th century. Cheng Xuanying was right at the center of the imperial court in Chang’an (present day Xi’an). He was working side by side with Xuanzang, the great Buddhist translator who made his Journey to the West , spent 15 years there, brought 600 scrolls back to China, and started the greatest translation project in Chinese history up to that point. This was a really amazing time in Daoism because it was one of the few periods in Chinese history where the imperial bureaucracy really embraced Daoism. At this time, the Daodejing actually made its way onto the reading list of the Imperial Examination System in China. Cheng Xuanying and Xuanzang together translated the Daodejing into Sanskrit in this period. Unfortunately, the Sanskrit translation is no longer extant, but it was a period of intense Buddho-Daoist fusion. So what Cheng Xuanying does is he really combines the most sophisticated forms of Buddhist logic with Daoist philosophy. And he creates this very, very interesting and highly erudite and systematic commentary on the Daodejing. What I find so interesting is what happens with this highly ambiguous, poetic philosophical text, because the Daodejing is a series of 81 aphoristic poems. They’re highly interpretable and plastic. Different commentaries arise through the Daoist tradition. Some of them take this series of 81 aphoristic poems and turn them into systematic philosophical systems—and no one does that better than Cheng Xuanying. I really enjoy this coincidence of opposites, having a series of philosophical poems that are very non-specific in their implications, and then a highly systematic interpretation and rendition of them in almost a structured theology. The reason I have this on my list is that everybody knows about the Daodejing at this point—the ‘dao’ of this and the ‘dao’ of that—but this gives you a taste of how seriously and systematically these ideas were taken in the Chinese tradition. There’s nowhere better to start than the opening line of the first chapter. So this is Friederike Assandri’s translation of Cheng Xuanying’s commentary: “道可道, 非常道”.“The dao that can be spoken of as dao is not the constant dao.” And then several pages of commentary. Then “名可名非常名”: “The name that can be named is not the constant name.” “无名天地之始” “Without name, it is the beginning of heaven and earth. “有名万物之母” “Having a name is the mother of the 10,000 things.” What Cheng Xuanying does in those first few lines of the poem is he goes and renders, character by character, what’s really an ontological dialectic. He talks about these categories of ‘being’ (“having a name”) and ‘non-being’ (“without a name”) and their mutual interactions by bringing in the sophisticated Buddhist logic of the Madhyamaka School of Nāgārjuna. He brings the dialectical engagement with these categories of being and non-being to bear on these first four lines of the Daodejing. Cheng Xuanying is regarded as the founder of the Chongxuan school or ‘school of the double mystery,’ a highly sophisticated school of Daoist philosophy. It actually goes back to the last line of the first chapter of the Daodejing , where it says, 玄之又玄，众妙之门 “Mysterious and mysterious again, it is the door to all marvels.” ‘Mysterious’ is an extremely common term in Chinese aesthetics and philosophy. What Cheng Xuanying argues is that Laozi says the first mysterious in order “to eliminate our clingings to phenomena.” When we say something is mysterious, we know that we can’t grasp it. But it’s not just one mysterious. The line continues, “mysterious and mysterious again.” And this is key to Cheng Xuanying’s philosophy. “The first mysterious eliminates our clingings, but then he is afraid the adept may be attached to this conception of the mysterious. Therefore he now says mysterious again to eliminate also the latter sickness.” So it’s not just mysterious in a way we can’t grasp it, because then you can grasp onto that mysteriousness itself and be lost in that. So it’s the mystery of mystery, or the mystery beyond mystery. This is classic Buddhist Madhyamaka dialectics that he’s applying to the text. You’re trying to eliminate your grasping at concepts, but you can actually get lost in the nihilism of the ungraspable. So you have to eliminate your grasping to the ungraspable as well. This is the central feature of the double mystery school of philosophy and this is the stuff that absolutely suffuses his engagement with the Daodejing . These lines of thinking are present in the Western philosophical tradition as well, among the skeptics, from Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus . Hume was a modern incarnation of that thinking, as is early Descartes . These are philosophical dialectical tricks that show up repeatedly throughout global philosophy but they’re done in a very high falutin fashion here at the height of the Tang Dynasty, in Cheng Xuanying’s commentary on the Daodejing."