Concept

Huangdi Sijing

Overview

The Huangdi Sijing (simplified Chinese: 黄帝四经; traditional Chinese: 黃帝四經; pinyin: Huángdì sìjīng; lit. "Yellow Emperor's Four Classics") are ancient Chinese texts thought to be long-lost, manuscripts of which however are generally thought to have been discovered among the Mawangdui Silk Texts in 1973. Also known as the Huang-Lao boshu (simplified Chinese: 黄老帛书; traditional Chinese: 黃老帛書; pinyin: Huáng-Lǎo bóshū; lit. 'Huang-Lao Silk Texts'), or Huangdi shu 黄帝書 (Yellow Thearch Manuscripts), they are thought by modern scholars to reflect a lost branch of early syncretist Daoism, referred to as the "Huang–Lao school of thought" named after the legendary Huangdi (黃帝; "Yellow Emperor") and Laozi (老子; "Master Lao"). One finds in it "technical jargon" derived of Taoism, Legalism, Confucianism and Mohism.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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In the opening and shutting of his gates of heaven, cannot he do so as a female bird? While his intelligence reaches in every direction, cannot he (appear to) be without knowledge? 3. (The Tao) produces (all things) and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them. This is what is called 'The…
Laozi, The Tao Teh King
States what Huangdi Sijing is; the author is tied to Huangdi Sijing in the knowledge graph.
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This I-hi-weï or I-H-W[16] is further made to signify an absolute vacuity and that which is Nothing; to the Chinese what is highest and the origin of things is nothing, emptiness, the altogether undetermined, the abstract universal, and this is also called Tao or reason. When the Greeks say that the absolute is one, or when men in modern times say that it is the highest existence, all determinations are abolished…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Huangdi Sijing is.
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The pertinacious zeal with which the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strove to inculcate their own relatively new doctrines into the minds of this very ancient nation, and their futile endeavours to discover early traces of their own faith in that country, left them no time for a profound study of the belief which prevails there. Therefore Europe has only lately obtained some slight…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
Close in meaning to Huangdi Sijing; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Legalism (Chinese philosophy)

Place in the tradition

Part of Legalism (Chinese philosophy).

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