Cheng Xuanying (成玄英)
Cheng Xuanying 成玄英 (608–669) — the Tang Daoist who wrote the second half of the standard Zhuangzi: the sub-commentary that turned Guo Xiang's notes into the Nanhua zhenjing zhushu, and the thinker who built the Chongxuan (twofold-dark) reading of the Laozi from a single phrase — 玄之又玄, the dark that is dark again.
The man and the book
- The second half of the standard Zhuangzi. Every quotation of the Zhuangzi on this site that carries a “sub-commentary” reading — the cripple Shu’s 忘形 as the ancestor of forgetting, the half-shadow’s 天机自张, the true ruler’s 或曰 — is Cheng Xuanying’s voice, filtered through the tradition’s editors. The Daoist catalogue record is explicit: Guo Xiang’s commentary and Cheng’s sub-commentary were transmitted as one book (the Nanhua zhenjing zhushu, 35 juan, in the Ming canon), and Guo Qingfan’s definitive Zhuangzi jishi incorporated the pair whole. The site’s layering rule rests on the Guo Xiang recension; the glosses the site quotes rest, more often than not, on this man.
- The dates and the title. 608–669, courtesy name Zishi, from Shanzhou: summoned to court at 23 (Zhenguan 5, 631) and titled Xihua fashi — the “Western Florescence” of his name pointing, the record notes, to the western mountain of his later retreat (Yuntai, modern Lianyungang), and the title itself to the Tang court’s Daoist patronage. The dating rule applies to what the record does not give: his teachers and his death’s circumstances are not in the verified sources, and the page does not supply them.
- The Chongxuan school, in one phrase. 重玄, “twofold dark,” is built from the first chapter’s closing words — 玄之又玄, the dark and darker still — read as a method: the first dark dissolves the things; the second dissolves the dissolving. The site’s xuan page already holds the term as depth rather than secrecy; Cheng Xuanying is the thinker who made that depth a school — the verified record says the school “became the mainstream of early Tang Daoist philosophy” under him, and the Daoist catalogue record adds the precise inheritance: his sub-commentary builds on Guo Xiang’s 独化 (each thing’s self-transformation) and extends it through the twofold-dark method. The site’s ch. 2 translation notes the same negation-stacking in the Laozi’s own pairs; the Chongxuan school is that stacking, systematized.
- The Buddhist question, registered whole. The record’s sharpest item is the contemporary Buddhist charge (Chengguan, quoted in the Gong Pengcheng study): Cheng “broadly cites the Buddhist teachings” but “sees small verbal similarities and misses the great difference in meaning.” The study adds the frame the site keeps: Cheng was a committed Daoist — the huahu thesis (Laozi went west and taught the barbarians, i.e., the Buddha), the claim that Laozi taught all three traditions — who nevertheless absorbed Buddhist vocabulary because the early Tang court ran three-teachings debates (the Wude 7 record) and a polemicist must know the other side. The site’s borrowing boundary — which keeps Buddhist terminology and refuses Buddhist doctrine — is, in a precise sense, Cheng Xuanying’s own policy, six centuries early: use the words, keep the Way.
- Why he belongs here. He closes the site’s commentary arc: Wang Bi made the Laozi philosophical at 23; Guo Xiang made the Zhuangzi standard; Cheng Xuanying made the pair Daoist — institutional, two-thirds of the canon’s hermeneutic apparatus, and the last name in the site’s own chain of quoted glosses. And he belongs to the site’s practice lineage as its counterweight: where Tao Hongjing compiled the revelations into a church, Cheng Xuanying compiled the commentaries into a philosophy — the same century, the same three-teachings competition, the two halves of Tang Daoism.
Sources
- The biographical record (Baidu Baike Zhuangzi zhushu entry): Cheng Xuanying, 608–669, courtesy name Zishi, from Shanzhou (modern Shan county, Henan); summoned to the capital in Zhenguan 5 (631) and given the title Xihua fashi (Master of the Western Florescence); later retired to Yuntai mountain in Yuzhou (modern Lianyungang); representative of the Chongxuan school, which under him became the mainstream of early Tang Daoist philosophy; author of the Daode zhenjing yishu, the Zhuangzi shu (Nanhua zhenjing zhushu), and the Kaiti xujue yishu
- The textual record (Daoist Culture Centre database, daoinfo): the Nanhua zhenjing zhushu in 35 juan, Guo Xiang's commentary with Cheng Xuanying's sub-commentary, preserved in the Zhengtong Daozang (Dongzhen section, Yujue category); Cheng's shu builds on Guo Xiang's duhua ontology and develops the Chongxuan way; his philological glosses on historical allusions, persons, places, and word readings are fuller than the Guo-Xiang commentary; the work is fully incorporated in Guo Qingfan's Zhuangzi jishi; the Zhonghua shuju 1998 punctuated edition (Cao Chuji, Huang Lanfa) is the standard modern text
- The intellectual-historical record (Gong Pengcheng's study 'Remaking the Zhuangzi,' Medium): Chengguan's Huayan jing shuchao xuantan notes of Cheng Xuanying that 'he broadly cites the Buddhist teachings to set against those scriptures — one sees small verbal similarities but misses the great difference in meaning'; Cheng held the laozi-huahu thesis and the position that Laozi was the teacher of all three teachings; and the early Tang 'three-teachings debates' court context (recorded in the Xin Tang shu for Wude 7, 624) framed his polemical absorption of Buddhist theory against Confucianism