Wang Bi's Taoist Interpretation of the Book of Changes

In the near end of the Later Han period, the academic tradition maintained by factional succession which emphasized its own style of the lexical and phraseological explications on the canonical texts was gradually declining. This historical tendency revived the studies on the texts of the Hundred schools, facilitating a new tide of the Wei-Jin thought. Wang Bi's commentary on the Laozi brought the learning of the Hundred schools into the domain of the canonical studies, and contributed to its revival. In his cross-annotating work of the Laozi and the Book of Changes, Wang Bi transformed the interpretative style of the Book of Changes which used to consist of an unduly focus on mathematical and symbolic aspects of the canon, into in-depth analysis of its meanings. In this interpretative transformation, his new perspective on the interpretation of the Book of Changes, can be summarized by a phrase: “Words will be forgotten in acquiring a hexagram, and the hexagram will be forgotten in acquiring its meaning.” In this interpretative work, what he attempted was to overcome the limitation which was inevitably brought by traditional interpretative attitude unduly focusing on the mathematical and symbolic aspects of the canonical texts. Wang Bi's interpretation of the meaning of the Book of Changes was attained mainly on the basis of his understanding of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. His inclusion of the two texts reveals the characteristic of Wang Bi's own interpretation and represents the tendency of the synthesizing of the texts of the three esoteric learnings,i.e., the Book of Changes, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi during the Wei-Jin period. In his cross-interpretation of the Book of Changes and Taoist tenet, Wang Bi, on the one hand, incorporated the major concepts of Taoism into his interpretation on the Book of Changes. On the other, he in turn elucidated the significance of the Way with the help of the concepts in the Book of Changes. This strongly suggests that his interpretation of the Book of Changes was crystallized in his reflection of Taoism. It is owing to his cross-interpretation of the Book of Changes and Taoism that Wang Bi could develop his theoretical thinking concerning the unification of the Change (i.e., yi) and the Way. In his interpretation of the Book of Changes with the concept of the Way, he shifted the locus of the discourse concerning the pair of categorical concepts, e.g. being (you) and nothingness (wu) in the Laozi from cosmogony and etiology to ontology, and, then, in turn, incorporated the ontological concepts of being and nothingness into his work on the Book of Changes, which invested his work with a metaphysical foundation. By utilizing the concepts of being and nothingness in his interpretation on the method of the divination, Wang Bi allows the Book of Changes to demonstrate not only its metaphysical thought, but also a new aspect of the Laozi's metaphysical thought which had been also originally contained in the thought of the Book of Changes. Wang Bi's incorporation of the Taoist tenets into his annotation on the Book of Changes is not limited to his theoretical efforts of constructing a metaphysical framework of his annotation. Wang Bi also owed to the Taoist work both the wisdom for daily life and the insight into realistic society. Concerning his argument of “elucidating the Way with the help of the Book of Changes,” Wang Bi, first, adopted an interpretative method that pays particular attention to an element in a hexagram, which supports the idea of “ruling a multitude by grasping a few.” This adequately matched Laozi's esoteric metaphysical thought that also emphasized the importance of a few. And second, in its elucidation of the concept of time and position in the Book of Changes, Wang Bi's argument was also in accordance with Huang-Lao's advocacy of appropriate change and transition in the course of time. In sum, in his synthesis of the Way and the Change, Wang Bi combined the thoughts of the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Book of Changes together in their viewpoints about word, meaning, and symbol. Moreover, Wang Bi's method for interpreting canonical texts, which advocated “forgetting words in obtaining a hexagram” and “forgetting the hexagram in a acquiring meaning,” gave a profound impact on the commentary work of the Zhuangzi by Guo Xiang