Research On Wangbi As A Commentator Of Laozi By Rudolf G. Wagner

Prof.Rudolf G. Wagner explores WangBi’s craft as a schlorly commentator who is also a philosopher in his own right.By situating his work within the context of other competing commentaries and extracting their way of reading the Laozi,Laozi Zhu by Wangbi shows how the Laozi has been approached in many different ways,ranging from a philosophical underpinning for a particular theory of political rule to guide to techniques of life-prolongation.Amidst his competitors,however,Wang Bi stands out through a literary and pholosophical analysis of the Laozi that manages to "use the Laozi to explain the Laozi",rather than imposing an agenda on the text.Through a critical adaptation of several hundred years of commentaries on the classics,Wang Bi reaches a scholoarly level in the art of understanding that is unmatched anywhere else in the world.This thesis is divided into four parts.The introduction is a brief interpretation of the general situation of Chinese researchs on Wang Bi.The first chapter attachs academical experience of Wagner and Hermeneutics which is his theoretical background.The first part of Chapter2introduces research on "Vorstruktur" of Wang Bi when he started his annotation work,there are four main viewpoints:firstly,Confucianism lost its authority, people began to re-pay attention to other doctrines produced before Qin Dynasty;Secondly,the doxographic traditions was rejected,standards of annotation from external authority back to the quality of the exegesis text itself;Thirdly,a rapidly growing number of men of letters realised the excessive attachment of Zhangju commentaries to the surface text,and their concomitant disregard for the ultimate "meaning";Last but not least,people believe the search for the pholosophical rather than the moral bequests of the Sages,for the subtle meaning rather than the vocabulary of the surface text,could be pursued by irreverent young men from the best families in an enviroment of open and relatively friendly competition.These young men were brilliant,and they knew it,they felt they were up to the task of coming up with subtle words of their own and as a group might match the depth and historical importance of Confucius and his students.The second part analyzes the craft of WangBi’s exegesis that has been researched deeply by Wagner,WangBi’s work shows the extraoirdingary ananlytical sophistication and philosophical depth,he extract his own strategy of reading the Laozi from the implicit and explicit parameters provided by the text itself.Wagner also works on the form of Wang Bi’s analysis of the Laozi,namely with his analysis of an important stylistic feature of the Laozi that he calls interlocking parallel style.The third Chapter is my point of view.I argue that interlocking parallel style is more like inductive method than a forward-looking methodology.But his research gives much inspiration of the question that how to explain Chinese classic text well for foreigner readers who come from different cultural background.