Wang Bi's Laozi Commentary (c. 249 CE)
The twenty-three-year-old's annotation that became the book's earliest surviving philosophical reading — no chapter titles, no qi-work, just mystery and emptiness: the received text's other foundation.
The event, in layers
The philosophical reading’s founding document:
- The text: Wang Bi’s Laozi zhu, composed in the 240s CE — 81 chapters, no chapter titles (unlike the Heshang Gong recension’s named chapters), slightly longer than Heshang Gong’s text mostly in function-words. With Han and Three-Kingdoms commentaries lost, this became the earliest surviving Laozi commentary and the book’s standard philosophical recension.
- The reading: not philology but a system — mystery and emptiness (玄虚), 本末 (root and branches), and the principle the scholarship names: 名教本于自然, “names and teachings are rooted in the natural.” The site documents this reading the same way it documents the Heshang Gong reading: as a historical interpretation, not adopted as doctrine.
- The fate: the author died at 24 in 249, the year of the Gaoping Tomb coup; the commentary survived through a Ming reprint (Zhang Zhixiang’s edition, collated against the Jingdian shiwen and Yongle dadian, per the Siku abstract), and became — with Heshang Gong’s — one of the four great transmitted-text families (王弼本, 河上公本, 严遵《老子指归》, 傅奕本). The modern standard critical edition is Lou Yulie’s (中华书局).
Why it matters
- The received text is two recensions. Every time the site writes “the received text,” it means the Wang Bi and Heshang Gong lines together: the ch. 1 punctuation debate is Wang Bi’s cutting against the received one, and the ch. 37 paradox reaches us in his form. The two timelines — this one and the Heshang Gong commentary — are the site’s paired anchor for the Daodejing text page.
- The contrast is the lesson. Heshang Gong read the book as body-cultivation; Wang Bi read it as discourse. The tradition has always had both readings, and the site’s translation policy inherits the tension: translate the practice terms carefully and the philosophy carefully, because the same book has been carrying both for eighteen centuries.
Sources
- Wikipedia (zh) biography of Wang Bi and the Shuge Classic Library edition of the Laozi Wang Bi zhu (with the Siku quanshu abstract), verified on the wang-bi page
- Sun Mingjun, 'Notes on Laozi Editions': the four transmitted-text families; Wang Bi's 81 chapters without titles; the reading as xuanxue, 'names and teachings rooted in the natural'; the recommended modern critical edition is Lou Yulie's (Zhonghua shuju)