Wang Bi (王弼)
Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249) — the twenty-three-year-old genius whose Laozi commentary became the book's earliest surviving philosophical reading, and the other half of the received text's dual foundation.
The man, and the two records that must be kept apart
- The historical record. Wang Bi, courtesy name Fusi, of Gaoping in Shanyang (present-day Shandong), born 226, held the post of shangshu lang, and died in the autumn of 249 — the year of the Gaoping Tomb coup — of a febrile illness, aged 24. He annotated the Laozi and the Zhouyi; the Tang court later made his Zhouyi commentary the basis of the official Zhouyi zhengyi. The sources agree on all of this, and the site records it as history.
- The intellectual record. With most earlier Laozi commentaries lost, Wang Bi’s Laozi commentary is the earliest surviving philosophical reading of the book — the text through which the “dark learning” (xuanxue) of the Zhengshi era read the Laozi. The contrast the scholarship draws (and the site keeps) is with the Heshang Gong commentary: Heshang Gong reads the book as body-cultivation and qi-work (治身), Wang Bi reads it as discourse on mystery and emptiness (谈玄说虚) — 81 chapters, no chapter titles, slightly longer than the Heshang Gong text mostly by function-words. Together the two recensions are the received text’s dual foundation: the translation pages document variants from both lines.
- The site’s specific dependence. Ch. 1’s punctuation debate — 无，名天地之始 vs 无名，天地之始 — is the Wang Bi reading against the received cutting, and the site double-writes it. The ch. 37 paradox is quoted in the philosophical form his recension carried. The person page exists so these editorial debts have a face.
Why he belongs in this knowledge base
Because the site’s Heshang Gong page ends with the oldest practice reading of the Laozi being anonymous — and Wang Bi is the counterweight: the oldest philosophical reading, by a named, dated, twenty-three-year-old. The pair is the site’s standing lesson about the source policy: the tradition’s two founding readings of the same book are one legendary name and one historical one, and the discipline is to know which is which on every page.
Uncertainty preserved: the biography follows the standard sources (226–249, the post, the death at 24); the intellectual characterization follows the scholarly account recorded above; the site does not adopt the xuanxue reading’s metaphysics — it documents it, exactly as it documents the Heshang Gong reading without adopting its physiology.
The commentary that fixed the received text is dated at Wang Bi’s Laozi Commentary (c. 249 CE).
Sources
- Wikipedia (zh) biography: Wang Bi (226–249), courtesy name Fusi, of Gaoping in Shanyang; held the post of shangshu lang; the Cao-Wei era's leading representative of Zhengshi xuanxue; author of the Laozi commentary and the Zhouyi commentary. Because most Han and Three-Kingdoms Laozi commentaries were lost, Wang Bi's Daodejing zhu became the book's earliest surviving commentary
- The Shuge Classic Library edition of the Laozi Wang Bi zhu: Wang Bi (226–249), died in the autumn of Zhengshi 10 (249) of a febrile illness, aged 24; the received text verified against Zhang Zhixiang's Ming edition, with the Siku quanshu abstract
- Sun Mingjun, 'Notes on Laozi Editions' (Zhonghua dushu bao, via chinawriter.com.cn): the four great transmitted-text families (Wang Bi, Heshang Gong, Yan Zun Zhigui, Fu Yi); the Wang Bi text's 81 chapters without chapter titles; Heshang Gong reads the book as body-cultivation and qi-work, Wang Bi reads it as discourse on mystery and emptiness; Wang Bi's aim was not philology but a xuanxue system, 'names and teachings rooted in the natural'