Gentz, Joachim

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding theWind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist ClassicCitation for published version:Gentz, J 2012, 'Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: NewPerspectives on the Daoist Classic' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol 75, no. 3, pp.611-613., 10.1017/S0041977X12000912Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1017/S0041977X12000912Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher final version (usually the publisher pdf)Published In:Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African StudiesPublisher Rights Statement:© Gentz, J. (2012). Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: NewPerspectives on the Daoist Classic. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75(3), 611-613doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000912General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 20. Feb. 2015oracle bone inscriptions, down to the files and regulations of early imperial times,indicates that systematic instruction in literacy was mainly restricted to professionalgroups closely associated with the state, such as members of divination workshops,scribes and government clerks. Western Zhou elites may have maintained their own,lineage-centred, textual traditions but, as Cook points out, it appears that only withthe break-up of the Zhou order did textual competence became more common out-side of state and elite lineage structures. As a result, the political rhetoricians andcourt poets of the late Warring States and early imperial periods entered the stage.Finally, with the growing administrative demands on both officials and commoners,basic literacy percolated through the lower orders as village headmen, soldiers, arti-sans and, possibly, women from ordinary backgrounds were forced to keep registers,read lists, or sign their names. By then, writing had turned into a force for culturalcohesion but also, as Barbieri-Low emphasizes with Lévi-Strauss, into somethingmuch darker: a tool for governmental control.As both the amount of available archaeological evidence and the analytical sophis-tication brought to bear on it are increasing, such narratives about the spread of lit-eracy will remain open to revision. Smith, for instance, cautiously points out thateven though the practice inscriptions can be taken to support the hypothesis of a nar-rowly restricted scribal literacy in Shang China, competing hypotheses of more wide-spread literacy are far from being refuted. And as Richter argues, the study ofmanuscripts is likely to be dominated by highly technical research for years tocome, so any generalization about uses and functions of writing should at presentbe treated as preliminary. In the meantime, it is to be hoped that this fascinatingand carefully edited volume will not only be consulted by specialists but also attractmore students to one of the most fertile areas of research in Chinese studies.Oliver WeingartenMasaryk University, BrnoRONNIE LITTLEJOHN and JEFFREY DIPPMANN (eds):Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic.(SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture.), vii, 264 pp. Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 2011. ISBN 978 1 4384 3455 1.doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000912“Lieh-tzu is not the only Chinese philosophical text of disputed date, but it is perhapsthe most important”, wrote A.C. Graham in his seminal article “The date and com-position of the Lieh-tzu” (Asia Major 8/2, 1960–61, 139–98). Scholarship on theLiezi has not substantially advanced: since Graham wrote those lines over fiftyyears ago, the Liezi has continued to be neglected. Riding the Wind with Lieziaims to fill this gap by presenting a collection of twelve essays that re-engage theLiezi from different points of view and try “to find overlooked dimensions ofDaoist philosophy” as Roger Ames writes in his introduction. As the ambitious sub-title promises us New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic we shall discuss the kind ofperspectives presented and where their innovative contribution lies. For this purposethe essays may be divided into those which try to locate the Liezi by contextualizingthe text historically and philosophically on the one hand and those who locate the textby identifying themes in it that are well known from the fields of early Daoism orearly Chinese philosophy on the other. A fundamental difference with regard toR E V I E W S 611two basic assumptions about unity and diversity in the Liezi text and the Daoist tra-dition divide the perspectives and analytical approaches of the essays in the book.Although most of the articles in one way or another refer to A.C. Graham as theauthoritative voice on the Liezi, few follow Graham’s differentiation between thosepassages from earlier texts (of pre-Qin and Han provenance) that have been copiedinto the Liezi and make up a quarter of the whole text, the non-Daoist hedonist YangZhu chapter and the fatalist Endeavour and Destiny chapter, and the rest of the textwhich Graham finds coherent and Daoist. May Sim in her comparison of Liezi’sDaoism with Epictetus’s Stoicism, John Berthrong in his discussion of themesof process and transformations in the Liezi, Thomas Michael in his analysis ofLiezi’s reformed cosmogony, Philip J. Ivanhoe in his exploration of the theme ofunselfconsciousness in the Liezi, Jeffrey Dippmann in his examination of how theLiezi re-reads the Zhuangzi, Jeffrey L. Richey in his contribution on the self asmachine in the Liezi, Robin R. Wang in his interpretation of Yinyang as the emer-gent structure in the Liezi and David Jones in his analysis of Liezi passages that“speak to the question of death and death’s relation to life” all try to point out par-ticular features of the text as a whole and thereby reconstruct a unified position ofthe text based on selected passages. Other authors start from a different assumption.Livia Kohn differentiates two distinct positions on the body in the Liezi which shelocates in certain chapters and links to different Daoist traditions. Ronnie Littlejohnand Erin M. Cline both provide an analysis only of specific parts of the Liezi whichthey compare with the earlier texts of Zhuangzi and Laozi. Littlejohn only focuseson the part which he thinks has been copied into the Liezi from the Zhuangzi, he isthus interested in the Zhuangzi rather than in the Liezi text.The second basic assumption – that the Liezi can be explained as part of a unifiedand coherent tradition of early Daoist or Chinese philosophy – underlies the essayby Berthrong, who identifies motifs of transformation in the Liezi with motifs foundin Yijing and correlative philosophy, Zhuangzi and Laozi to such a degree that theLiezi appears as a mere derivative of these earlier texts without its own character-istics. Ivanhoe uses Liezi as one among other examples to introduce the theme ofunselfconsciousness, the main focus of his interest. Wang takes the Liezi to illumi-nate a general principle of Chinese trinary thinking; and Jones repeatedly empha-sizes that positions on life and death taken in the Liezi are the same as in otherDaoist texts. In contrast, the other authors try to focus on the difference betweenLiezi and earlier Daoist texts. Littlejohn and Dippmann both point out differencesbetween the Zhuangzi passages of the Liezi and the transmitted Zhuangzi, providingdifferent hypotheses for these deviations. While Littlejohn interprets them as tracesof an earlier Zhuangzi text transmitted in the Liezi, Dippmann explains them asdeliberate changes added to the text by later editors to advocate their pursuit ofimmortality in the milieu of religious Daoism in southern China. Sim restricts hercomparison strictly to the Liezi text, Michael regards the Liezi as a modified exten-sion of Laozi, Zhuangzi and Huainanzi and as a reform work, Kohn relates differentstrands of the Liezi to different Daoist traditions, Richey sees the Liezi as a “recordof Taoist engagement with competing Buddhist ideas and practices in early medie-val China”, and Cline analyses the differences in the concept of wuwei between theLaozi, the Zhuangzi and one passage in the Liezi.Most of the contributions discuss the Liezi out of historical context. OnlyMichael, Dippmann, Kohn and Richey try to locate the text in its fourth-centuryCE social and intellectual context, explaining its philosophy as a response to apoc-ryphal weishu, religious Daoism, yangsheng practices or Buddhism. Tim Barrettapproaches the Liezi from the perspective of reception history, providing a 1,000year long history of commentarial readings of the Liezi in China.612 R E V I E W SReading through the contributions it is striking that a number of text passagesfrom the Liezi are taken up in several essays as evidence for various, sometimesquite diverging, arguments and analytical approaches. Apart from Dippmann,who once refers to the other editor Littlejohn’s diverging interpretation of thesame phenomenon, we do not find any cross-references to, or discussions of, diver-ging interpretations of the same passages, which indicates that the authors were notaware of each other’s research. We hope that this rich new contribution to Liezistudies will inspire further scholars to engage in a discussion with the variousnew perspectives on the Liezi presented in this publication.Joachim GentzUniversity of EdinburghPETER LORGE (ed.):Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.ix, 252 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011. $52. ISBN 978962996418 4.doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000924This book is a collection of seven articles on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdomsperiod, a less than popular period for historians of imperial China. Two factors lar-gely explain the neglect: first, the limited number of source materials, especiallycompared with the abundance of official documents and private texts from theTang and Song dynasties, increases the difficulty of inquiry. Second, the FiveDynasties era is relatively short and multi-polar to the point of impeding the sortof analytic patterns that appeal to most historians. Even though the Tang–Song tran-sition has drawn some recent attention, the period between the two dynasties isusually considered anomalous or irrelevant.Peter Lorge targets this book at the academic reader, the introduction and con-cluding chapter emphasizing the importance and meaning of the Five Dynastiesperiod. These two chapters successfully demonstrate that what we identify todayas Song culture had evolved gradually by integrating northern and southernelements, while showing how the lack of central authority produced momentumto create a new culture with local traits.The remaining six articles cover various topics, but fall roughly into three cat-egories. Naomi Standen and Johannes Kurz separately discuss the historical evalu-ation of political figures: Zhao Dejun in the north and Han Xizai in the south.Traditional historians criticized Zhao for disloyalty to the state, while Han wasseen as a talented and ambitious official whose aims were thwarted by material dis-tractions. Standen and Kurz both criticize later historians for imposing their ownvalues on these men, while failing to appreciate the circumstances under whichthey lived and made critical choices.Hugh Clark and Ruth Mostern write about local politics, although they employdifferent approaches. By analysing the origins of new leaders in the southernregimes, Clark demonstrates that the upheaval of the late Tang produced circum-stances that empowered scoundrels to vie for political power. In as much as theirprimary concern was personal benefit, such leaders were not the sort of RobinHood nobles that some writers allege. Mostern analyses local administration bydescribing the gradual transition from a highly militarized Tang system to theR E V I E W S 613

Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic

Joachim Gentz

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann (eds): Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic. (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture.), vii, 264 pp. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. ISBN 978 1 4384 3455 1.

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding theWind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist ClassicCitation for published version:Gentz, J 2012, 'Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: NewPerspectives on the Daoist Classic', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 75, no. 3, pp.611-613. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X12000912Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1017/S0041977X12000912Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African StudiesPublisher Rights Statement:© Gentz, J. (2012). Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: NewPerspectives on the Daoist Classic. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75(3), 611-613doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000912General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 29. Nov. 2025oracle bone inscriptions, down to the files and regulations of early imperial times,indicates that systematic instruction in literacy was mainly restricted to professionalgroups closely associated with the state, such as members of divination workshops,scribes and government clerks. Western Zhou elites may have maintained their own,lineage-centred, textual traditions but, as Cook points out, it appears that only withthe break-up of the Zhou order did textual competence became more common out-side of state and elite lineage structures. As a result, the political rhetoricians andcourt poets of the late Warring States and early imperial periods entered the stage.Finally, with the growing administrative demands on both officials and commoners,basic literacy percolated through the lower orders as village headmen, soldiers, arti-sans and, possibly, women from ordinary backgrounds were forced to keep registers,read lists, or sign their names. By then, writing had turned into a force for culturalcohesion but also, as Barbieri-Low emphasizes with Lévi-Strauss, into somethingmuch darker: a tool for governmental control.As both the amount of available archaeological evidence and the analytical sophis-tication brought to bear on it are increasing, such narratives about the spread of lit-eracy will remain open to revision. Smith, for instance, cautiously points out thateven though the practice inscriptions can be taken to support the hypothesis of a nar-rowly restricted scribal literacy in Shang China, competing hypotheses of more wide-spread literacy are far from being refuted. And as Richter argues, the study ofmanuscripts is likely to be dominated by highly technical research for years tocome, so any generalization about uses and functions of writing should at presentbe treated as preliminary. In the meantime, it is to be hoped that this fascinatingand carefully edited volume will not only be consulted by specialists but also attractmore students to one of the most fertile areas of research in Chinese studies.Oliver WeingartenMasaryk University, BrnoRONNIE LITTLEJOHN and JEFFREY DIPPMANN (eds):Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic.(SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture.), vii, 264 pp. Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 2011. ISBN 978 1 4384 3455 1.doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000912“Lieh-tzu is not the only Chinese philosophical text of disputed date, but it is perhapsthe most important”, wrote A.C. Graham in his seminal article “The date and com-position of the Lieh-tzu” (Asia Major 8/2, 1960–61, 139–98). Scholarship on theLiezi has not substantially advanced: since Graham wrote those lines over fiftyyears ago, the Liezi has continued to be neglected. Riding the Wind with Lieziaims to fill this gap by presenting a collection of twelve essays that re-engage theLiezi from different points of view and try “to find overlooked dimensions ofDaoist philosophy” as Roger Ames writes in his introduction. As the ambitious sub-title promises us New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic we shall discuss the kind ofperspectives presented and where their innovative contribution lies. For this purposethe essays may be divided into those which try to locate the Liezi by contextualizingthe text historically and philosophically on the one hand and those who locate the textby identifying themes in it that are well known from the fields of early Daoism orearly Chinese philosophy on the other. A fundamental difference with regard toR E V I E W S 611two basic assumptions about unity and diversity in the Liezi text and the Daoist tra-dition divide the perspectives and analytical approaches of the essays in the book.Although most of the articles in one way or another refer to A.C. Graham as theauthoritative voice on the Liezi, few follow Graham’s differentiation between thosepassages from earlier texts (of pre-Qin and Han provenance) that have been copiedinto the Liezi and make up a quarter of the whole text, the non-Daoist hedonist YangZhu chapter and the fatalist Endeavour and Destiny chapter, and the rest of the textwhich Graham finds coherent and Daoist. May Sim in her comparison of Liezi’sDaoism with Epictetus’s Stoicism, John Berthrong in his discussion of themesof process and transformations in the Liezi, Thomas Michael in his analysis ofLiezi’s reformed cosmogony, Philip J. Ivanhoe in his exploration of the theme ofunselfconsciousness in the Liezi, Jeffrey Dippmann in his examination of how theLiezi re-reads the Zhuangzi, Jeffrey L. Richey in his contribution on the self asmachine in the Liezi, Robin R. Wang in his interpretation of Yinyang as the emer-gent structure in the Liezi and David Jones in his analysis of Liezi passages that“speak to the question of death and death’s relation to life” all try to point out par-ticular features of the text as a whole and thereby reconstruct a unified position ofthe text based on selected passages. Other authors start from a different assumption.Livia Kohn differentiates two distinct positions on the body in the Liezi which shelocates in certain chapters and links to different Daoist traditions. Ronnie Littlejohnand Erin M. Cline both provide an analysis only of specific parts of the Liezi whichthey compare with the earlier texts of Zhuangzi and Laozi. Littlejohn only focuseson the part which he thinks has been copied into the Liezi from the Zhuangzi, he isthus interested in the Zhuangzi rather than in the Liezi text.The second basic assumption – that the Liezi can be explained as part of a unifiedand coherent tradition of early Daoist or Chinese philosophy – underlies the essayby Berthrong, who identifies motifs of transformation in the Liezi with motifs foundin Yijing and correlative philosophy, Zhuangzi and Laozi to such a degree that theLiezi appears as a mere derivative of these earlier texts without its own character-istics. Ivanhoe uses Liezi as one among other examples to introduce the theme ofunselfconsciousness, the main focus of his interest. Wang takes the Liezi to illumi-nate a general principle of Chinese trinary thinking; and Jones repeatedly empha-sizes that positions on life and death taken in the Liezi are the same as in otherDaoist texts. In contrast, the other authors try to focus on the difference betweenLiezi and earlier Daoist texts. Littlejohn and Dippmann both point out differencesbetween the Zhuangzi passages of the Liezi and the transmitted Zhuangzi, providingdifferent hypotheses for these deviations. While Littlejohn interprets them as tracesof an earlier Zhuangzi text transmitted in the Liezi, Dippmann explains them asdeliberate changes added to the text by later editors to advocate their pursuit ofimmortality in the milieu of religious Daoism in southern China. Sim restricts hercomparison strictly to the Liezi text, Michael regards the Liezi as a modified exten-sion of Laozi, Zhuangzi and Huainanzi and as a reform work, Kohn relates differentstrands of the Liezi to different Daoist traditions, Richey sees the Liezi as a “recordof Taoist engagement with competing Buddhist ideas and practices in early medie-val China”, and Cline analyses the differences in the concept of wuwei between theLaozi, the Zhuangzi and one passage in the Liezi.Most of the contributions discuss the Liezi out of historical context. OnlyMichael, Dippmann, Kohn and Richey try to locate the text in its fourth-centuryCE social and intellectual context, explaining its philosophy as a response to apoc-ryphal weishu, religious Daoism, yangsheng practices or Buddhism. Tim Barrettapproaches the Liezi from the perspective of reception history, providing a 1,000year long history of commentarial readings of the Liezi in China.612 R E V I E W SReading through the contributions it is striking that a number of text passagesfrom the Liezi are taken up in several essays as evidence for various, sometimesquite diverging, arguments and analytical approaches. Apart from Dippmann,who once refers to the other editor Littlejohn’s diverging interpretation of thesame phenomenon, we do not find any cross-references to, or discussions of, diver-ging interpretations of the same passages, which indicates that the authors were notaware of each other’s research. We hope that this rich new contribution to Liezistudies will inspire further scholars to engage in a discussion with the variousnew perspectives on the Liezi presented in this publication.Joachim GentzUniversity of EdinburghPETER LORGE (ed.):Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.ix, 252 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011. $52. ISBN 978962996418 4.doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000924This book is a collection of seven articles on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdomsperiod, a less than popular period for historians of imperial China. Two factors lar-gely explain the neglect: first, the limited number of source materials, especiallycompared with the abundance of official documents and private texts from theTang and Song dynasties, increases the difficulty of inquiry. Second, the FiveDynasties era is relatively short and multi-polar to the point of impeding the sortof analytic patterns that appeal to most historians. Even though the Tang–Song tran-sition has drawn some recent attention, the period between the two dynasties isusually considered anomalous or irrelevant.Peter Lorge targets this book at the academic reader, the introduction and con-cluding chapter emphasizing the importance and meaning of the Five Dynastiesperiod. These two chapters successfully demonstrate that what we identify todayas Song culture had evolved gradually by integrating northern and southernelements, while showing how the lack of central authority produced momentumto create a new culture with local traits.The remaining six articles cover various topics, but fall roughly into three cat-egories. Naomi Standen and Johannes Kurz separately discuss the historical evalu-ation of political figures: Zhao Dejun in the north and Han Xizai in the south.Traditional historians criticized Zhao for disloyalty to the state, while Han wasseen as a talented and ambitious official whose aims were thwarted by material dis-tractions. Standen and Kurz both criticize later historians for imposing their ownvalues on these men, while failing to appreciate the circumstances under whichthey lived and made critical choices.Hugh Clark and Ruth Mostern write about local politics, although they employdifferent approaches. By analysing the origins of new leaders in the southernregimes, Clark demonstrates that the upheaval of the late Tang produced circum-stances that empowered scoundrels to vie for political power. In as much as theirprimary concern was personal benefit, such leaders were not the sort of RobinHood nobles that some writers allege. Mostern analyses local administration bydescribing the gradual transition from a highly militarized Tang system to theR E V I E W S 613

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Review of Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann (eds). Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic

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