Work

Huainanzi

Overview

The Huainanzi is an ancient philosophical and governmental Chinese text made up of essays from scholarly debates held at the court of Liu An, Prince of Huainan, before 139 BCE. Compiled as a compendium for an enlightened sovereign and his court, the work attempts to define the conditions for a perfect socio-political order, derived mainly from a perfect (or enlightened) ruler. With a notable Zhuangzi 'Taoist' influence, alongside Chinese folk theories of yin and yang and Wu Xing, the Huainanzi draws on Taoist, Legalist, Confucian, and Mohist concepts. But it subverts the latter three in favor of a less active ruler, as prominent in the early Han dynasty before the Emperor Wu.

The early Han authors of the Huainanzi themselves likely preceded Taoist identification, and differ from Taoism as later understood. Sima Tan may have had the "subversive 'syncretism'" of the Huainanzi in mind when he coined the term Daojia ("Taoism"), claiming to "pick what is good among the Confucians and Mohists". Its ideas theoretically contributed to the founding of the Taoist church in 184 c.e..

Confucian bibliographers classified it as Zajia or 'Syncretist', but came to often consider it a Taoist classic, at least by extension of its use of themes from Laozi and Zhuangzi as classics. Though not achieving the status of a classic, it came to be considered an important philosophical work, and was later included in the Daozang. K.C. Hsiao and the work's modern translators considered it a 'principal' example of Han 'Taoism', retrospectively.

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

Huainanzi

Overview

Philosophers who discussed Huainanzi

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Place in the tradition