Robin D. S. Yates, in the blurb on the back of this thick volume, characterizes the Huainanzi as a text “long dismissed” as a “miscellaneous work of little intellectual interest.” Doubtless this breezy characterization is meant to pique interest and encourage sales of this important new translation, but no serious student of Han politics or culture has ever regarded the Huainanzi as anything less than a major touchstone. Every synoptic history of Chinese philosophy or political thought discusses the work, as do several specialized studies, as duly noted (pp. 38–39). For that reason, it is a cause for great celebration that students of Chinese culture can now consult this complete translation, twelve long years in the making. Close comparison of its contents with those of other Han masterworks in translation—especially the Lüshi chunqiu, Jia Yi's Xinshu, and the Yantie lun, perhaps—can only heighten our appreciation of the riches of Western Han thought. The translators are moreover to be applauded for appending to their chapters helpful essays designed to situate the Huainanzi chapters within a broader discourse.
In the main, translation reviews proceed by quibbling about the translations under review. However, this past summer I had the luxury of sitting in a quiet sunlit room with six senior scholars of early China struggling to make sense of the Zuozhuan. That members of the distinguished group seldom reached consensus on the correct readings for seemingly straightforward lines from the Zuo brought home to me not only our absolute dependence upon early commentarial traditions (however sharply they disagree with one another), but also the propensity for longstanding reading habits to color individual scholars' interpretations of tropes and themes. Hence my willingness to forego the customary pleasure of arguing the inherent superiority of my preferred readings for select passages, and my decision to raise two methodological questions of larger import.
My first observation concerns the intellectual background to the Huainanzi. The Introduction suggests that the Han founder faced a real dilemma: which model to choose, that of Zhou or Qin. Early Western Han sources offer no proof, so far as I know, that Liu Bang ever considered emulating any rule but that of Qin; he aspired to be a good hegemon (ba 霸), since the divided rule of Zhou had soon devolved into centuries of war. Political realities constrained Liu Bang to give his erstwhile allies approximately two-thirds of the territory nominally within his empire, but from 202 until his death in 195 BC Liu methodically sought to retrieve all lands not under the direct control of his immediate family members. Moreover, Liu Bang continued the Qin practices with respect to rites, music, and sacrifice, including worship of the Four (not Five) Powers. Criticism of the throne and its policies did not initially imply the strength of decentralizing impulses, as is clear from the Senior Archivist's objects of praise and blame. Hence the stunning disinterest the Huainanzi evinces in the Zhou model (see the index), which model plays no role in Chapter 9 devoted to the “Ruler's Techniques.” I wonder what evidence can then be marshaled for “Emperor Gaozu's commitment to Western Zhou ideals of government” (p. 4), or that of his immediate successors down to Han Wudi (r. 141–87 B.C.E.), aside from Ban Gu's revisionist accounts recasting the Han claims to legitimacy in light of the different values of Ban's own classicizing era (ca. C.E. 92). Michael Loewe's substantial body of work proves, I would have thought, that the “classical turn” to Western Zhou models (or rather, what passed for those) came decades after Wudi's demise, when it became safe to deliver harsh assessments of Wudi's governing methods and aspirations. To overlook Loewe's basic chronology is to risk skewing our basic understanding of the motives propelling the composition of the Huainanzi.
My second concern has to do with translation standards. Unlike certain early texts (the Mencius and the Han Feizi spring to mind), the Huainanzi confronts would-be translators with myriad puzzles arising from its particular mode of theorizing about the workings of the cosmos and the human body. Readers would likely profit from greater acknowledgment of the challenges presented by apparently illogical and opaque passages, and welcome the insertion of many more “reading uncertain” warning flags, though the publishers might have balked at an even longer book. Two minor instances of what I mean: how precisely does the indwelling spirits attaining their proper place(s?) affect the joints and (body?) hair (20/211/20-21, p. 801)? And do sages “take their forms or images” in response to local qi conditions or are they “the same as” their qi (4/34/22, p. 160)? Such questions aside, readers cannot but be sensible of the debt they owe to this team of translators for reminding them of the wonders to be found in this compendium.
