2: Book as Being: Guo Xiang and the Ontological Transformation of the Zhuangzi
Sunday, March 15, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 303
Presenting Author(s)
HD
Heng Du
Wellesley College, United States
In his preface to the Zhuangzi, the early medieval commentator Guo Xiang (d. 312) makes a startling claim. In contrast to the inadequacies of Zhuangzi the man—his failure to fully embody the Dao—Guo asserts that Zhuangzi’s “words” did “reach perfection.” This pronouncement is striking, given the skepticism toward textual learning espoused by the Zhuangzi, where words are at best an expedient means and more often an obstacle to understanding. To explicate this statement, we might ask what Guo’s conceptions of words, texts, and books may have been. This question is significant since Guo was also the redactor of the received 33-chapter Zhuangzi—that is, he made Zhuangzi the book as we know it. The textual skepticism within the Zhuangzi was part of a broader debate over the role and efficacy of language in early Chinese thought. Existing scholarship tends to interpret this debate through the lens of epistemology and heuristics. In this talk, I reinterpret this debate as one over the ambiguous ontology of text: is it a thing or a being, an impersonal object or a social extension of a person? I suggest that these competing visions of textuality may have shaped the multi-generational formation process of the Zhuangzi compilation. Retracing this debate contextualizes Guo Xiang’s redactional and exegetical work, showing how his textual enterprise was shaped by competing visions of what a text is. It in turn sheds light on the elite book culture of the early medieval period.
