Heguanzi Synopsis
1.
The Heguanzi text is usually differentiated between its seven dialog chapters and twelve essay chapters. Five of
the dialog chapters (7–9 and 14–15) consist of discussions in which Heguanzi answers questions about war or
government from his disciple Pangzi (龐子, Master Pang). Pangzi is generally identified as General Pang Xuan
(龐煖; c. 295-c. 240 BCE) from the state of Zhao (403–222 BCE), who defeated Yan in 242 BCE and led the
failed campaign of the six allied states against Qin in the next year. General or Master Pang is the common link
between the above five dialog chapters that mention Heguanzi and the two remaining ones that do not; in chapter 16, Pang Xuan gives advice to King Daoxiang of Zhao (r. 244–236), and in chapter 19, Pang Huan (龐煥), who Lu Dian identifies as Pang Xuan, reading huan (煥, "shine; glow") as a scribal error for xuan (煖, "warm"),
instructs King Wuling of Zhao (r. 325–299).
Heguanzi is a much neglected work whose authenticity as a classical text was finally vindicated by its affinities
with long-lost ‘Yellow Emperor’ texts, rediscovered in 1967, with two copies of Laozi 老子 on silk manuscripts
interred in the Mawangdui 馬王堆 tomb of 168 BC.1 Angus Graham dated the work to 230-200 BC ‘when the
One actually replaced the Tao “Way” as the central metaphysical concept’. Liu Xin 劉歆 in his Seven Summaries of 6 BC3 identified the author as a mountain hermit from the state of Chu 楚, who explained he wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Pheasant Cap Master’ (Heguan Zi). The headress of pheasant tail-feathers, still worn by warriors in Peking opera, is glossed by Later Han History: ‘King Wuling武靈 (r. 325-299) of Zhao 趙 used it to distinguish military officers, and Qin 秦 spread its use from there.’4 He would thus have martial-mystic paradoxically combined roles as the work attests.
A quasi-mystical text like the Laozi (Daode Jing 道德經), which contains not a single reference to time, place or
person, has been discussed mainly sub specie aeternitatis. Heguanzi by contrast is filled with references to all
three. It refers to the suicide of Ju Xin 劇辛 of Yan 燕 (12.507-10) in 242 BC, after defeat by Zhao general Pang
Xuan 龐煖. Pang Zi, interlocutor of Heguan Zi himself in five dialogues (7-9, 14-15), is thought to be this Pang
Xuan. It also includes a dialogue of Zhao King Daoxiang 悼襄 (r. 240-236) with Pang Xuan (16), and a concluding
dialogue of great martial King Wuling with Pang Huan 龐煥 on winning without fighting, in a nostalgic memory
of royal ancestor Xiang 襄’s victory in 453 BC won by covert diplomacy (19.6-9,14-20).
Such co-ordinates place the text in the context of the state of Zhao, a leading opponent of the emergent superpower of Qin at the end of the Warring States period. In 259 BC Zhao’s army, under King Xiaocheng 孝成 (r. 265-245), suffered encirclement and annihilation by Qin at Chángpíng (Shanxi). This could explain the text’s extraordinary call, after an unspecified disaster, for the king ‘publicly to apologise to the Under-Heaven for yielding to an enemy nation.’ (7.613-5 gong xie Tianxia yi rang diguo 公謝天下以讓敵國).
This means Heguanzi is not only a philosophical work, with strong religious overtones, but at the same time
political and military. It makes frequent use of correlative cosmology of the ‘five agents’ (wu-xing 五行)‚ music
and astrology of the Dipper constellation’s nine stars (dou 斗, 4.11ff.), familiar from Daoist tradition. Its use of
‘five agents’ as ‘five conquests’ (wu-sheng 五勝, 8.95-6 cf. 14-60ff.) (e.g. water overcoming fire etc), shows a
greater practicality in the martial field, than the converse ‘production cycle’ (e.g. metal producing water etc).
2.
The most striking feature of Heguanzi, is not focus on mythical antiquity (pace Graham 1992: 128), but on a
‘future that is to be’ (18,93-7 weiyouzhi jiangran 未有之將然). This leadsto the issue of messianism, well attested
in imperial cults and ‘millenium’ rebellions, but little explored in the pre-Qin. Its earliest manifestation may be in
the cult of the ‘Yellow Emperor’ Huangdi 黃帝, a vocal homonym for ‘Augustan Emperor’ 皇帝 and symbol of
imperial unification from prehistory as in the Mawangdui manuscripts.
Unification is likewise the predominant theme of Heguanzi and should be understood from the perspective of the
political situation of Warring States that culminated in its achievement by Qin in 221 BC. Graham has pointed to
its taboo avoidance of Qin Shihuangdi’s personal name Zheng 正. It contains criticisms of ‘law’s savagery’
fameng 法猛 (ch. 8.51-2) and tyrnnical rule (2 passim), but also offers a blue-print for centralised bureaucracy,
calibrated to a solar calendar of 360 days with draconian penalties for non-compliant officials. (9.1113-16 Tianqu
Rishu 天曲日術) This appears to anticipate a system of centralised rule implemented by Qin whose future First
Emperor was born in Zhao, where his father was befriended by the wealthy merchant Lü Buwei 呂不韋, a proponent of ‘Grand Unity’, Taiyi 太一, who became their patron and first premier.
Graham identifies three distinct programs for political ‘utopias’ in Heguanzi (6, 9, 13). Clearly the work is
collection of writings on common themes in different stages of development. They would thus appear to be a
compilation by followers of the eponymous ‘author’ within the state of Zhao in its final years. The most elaborated is a system of ‘five governances’, namely: divine, bureaucrative, educative, adaptative, and operative, exemplified by different periods of history. (8.732-4 ‘promulgate five governances’ bu wu-zheng 布五正) They are cited, but not explained, in the program of unification by the Yellow Emperor in a Mawangdui text.
It is at this point that Heguanzi, with its frequent parallels to the Mawangdui texts, diverges in its theological
matrix. Here the quasi-divine protagonist is not the Yellow Emperor, conqueror and unifier by force of arms, but
Grand Unity (Taiyi 泰/太一) and his interrogator Grand Augustan (Taihuang 泰皇). (10.98ff.) Grand Unity is
identified with ‘Great Equality’s system’ (Datong-zhi zhi 大同之制 10.5-8) and the Nine Augustans’ transmission
(Jiu-huang shou/zhi chuan 九皇受/之傅=傳, 10.22-5, 11.35-8). The former is a supreme deity attested by
archaeology from early times and subsequently by Daoist tradition and linked to the North Pole star and the Dipper constellation’s nine stars, termed Nine Augustans, seen as a celestial clock.
These nine stars are introduced as manifesting Heaven’s law and the Sage’s social program. (4.111ff.)
Interestingly, Qin’s First Emperor on achieving unification in 221 BC, canonised himself as First Augustan God
(Shihuangdi 始皇帝) and his father as ‘Grand Augustan’ as in Heguanzi (10.8-9ff.) before banning all such
posthumous canonisations (shihao 諡號) in future. His assumed name implies the First Augustan saw himself
as initiator of a new age of successive Augustans.
3.
Heguanzi predicts the coming of a Ninth Augustan (Jiu-Huang 九皇), or Complete Ninth (Chengjiu 成鳩 9.10ff.) written with the bird classifier on ‘Ninth’,to succeed a past series of Augustans in a cosmic cycle of return (5.89-90 ‘circular flow’ huanliu 環流; 8.795-7 ‘return/reach to Grand Purity’ fan/ji Taiqing fa反/及太清; 9.1665-
8/1710-3/1851-4 ‘re-start renewal’ gengshi yuxin 更始逾新; 17.1150-4 ‘antiquity and the present return to one
day’ gujin fu yi-ri 古今復一日). This messianic ruler would unify the Under Heaven and establish a utopian order on earth, joining the Way to Law as ‘Way’s Law’ (Dao-zhi Fa道之法, 5.199-201) but never in a binome as Way-Law (Daofa), the title of a Mawangdui text.11 Daofa or Huang-Lao became the ruling ideology of Han until
replaced by Confucianism post 140 BC under Han Wudi.
The worthy are to be promoted and hereditary succession replaced by abdication to the most worthy. Victory is
to be ‘won without fighting’ (19.6-9), yet arms are given priority. The army is to be organised on the model of
music but covert tactics of the ‘Night Walker’ (Yexing 夜行 3.134-5, 19.292-3) are commended. Heguanzi
(3.58ff.) links this mysterious figure to Laozi’s description of the Ineffable, but one concerned with ‘human
enterprises’ (3.128-9 renye 人業). Its sequence of lines in the couplet ‘Follow... Meet ...’ (3.58ff, 64ff: Sui...
Ying... 隨... 迎...) matches both Mawangdui Laozi, not the reverse order of received versions.
Divisions of the One are to be implemented by the tool of law, of which heavenly bodies are for Heguanzi the
model, to be strictly implemented and enforced by five periods in a solar calendar of 360 days (‘Heavenly
Melody’s Solar Technique’ Tianqu Rishu 天曲日術9.477ff ). Usage of the term ‘fa 法’, translated literally as
‘law’, a term shunned by Confucius, must be understood to cover ‘method’, ‘model’ or objective ‘standards’
according to context.
Following Marcel Granet’s dictum ‘neither God nor law’, Joseph Needham questioned the existence of an ancient Chinese concept of ‘laws of nature’ without a divine lawgiver. Randall Peerenboom on the contrary
argued for a Chinese transcendent law of the cosmos on the evidence of Mawangdui ‘Yellow Emperor’ texts,
dubbed ‘Huang-Lao’, an ideology in early Han fusing Huangdi with Lao Zi, and Heguanzi (9-11).
4.
Chad Hansen, extrapolating from the ‘mass noun hypothesis’, claimed ‘Western thought is predisposed by number termination to conceive the world as an aggregate of distinct objects, Chinese by the mass noun to conceive it as a whole variously divisible into parts.’ This concept is well exemplified by Heguanzi’s theory of unity anddifferentiation (yi 異) in dynamics of ‘mutual conquests’ (xiangsheng 相勝, 5.650, 12.13). Thus the dynamics oflifting a heavy beam from different positions and its ‘physics’ (14.60ff.,147 ‘things’ life’ wusheng 物生)
demonstrate how success depends on adaptation. Graham, remarking: ‘Nothing could be further from Taoism thanto define the Way as differing... depending on positional advantage...’, notes Heguanzi’s affinities with Legalism, and recalls Hanfeizi’s use of Laozi.
In contrast to Laozi’s ‘non-contrivance’ (wuwei 無爲), Heguanzi is socially ‘pro-active’ (16.13-14 youwei 有爲)
but, as Laozi implied and Pang Zi explains, timely action makes its results appear ‘natural’ (ziran 自然), (16.302-
Heguanzi reserves non-contrivance for the highest level of Sagehood (7.429-30; 17.420-1). It interprets Laozi
dialectics of opposites as dynamics (shi 勢, ‘positional advantage’), ultimately by the Sage’s self (18.565ff;
5.747ff. ‘mutually benefitting, mutually harming’ xiangli xianghai... 相利相害; 12.840ff. ‘arms by dynamics
conquer’ bing yi shi sheng 兵以勢勝, 18.571ff. ‘take it by dynamics’, qu zhi yu shi 取之於埶=勢). This
philosophy of dynamics, by divisions of time and space, has been sourced to Shen Dao 慎到 (ca. 300) of whose
writings only fragments survive.It may be called relativist since it urges adaptation to circumstances, as
eulogised by Zhuangzi, but here it directs dynamic unity of opposites to the higher end of new world order.