Philosopher
Guo Xiang
c. 252 – 312 CE
Also known as Kuo Hsiang, Zixuan
Author of the leading commentary on the Zhuangzi, who taught that all things transform themselves without any creator, and that the Daoist sage belongs in public life, not in retreat.
Little is known of Guo Xiang’s life, except that in an age of great political upheaval he held high office in one of the factions that helped bring down the Western Jin dynasty. Unlike contemporaries who withdrew from what they saw as corrupt government, he stayed to play what he took to be the proper part of an engaged official, and his philosophy defends that choice.
He arranged the Zhuangzi in the thirty-three chapters it has today, and his commentary on it is a philosophical achievement in its own right, adding many ideas of his own. An early history accused him of copying most of it from Xiang Xiu, an earlier commentator, but current scholarship, while granting that he used Xiang’s work, still treats Guo as its principal author. Like Wang Bi, he belonged to the movement of “profound learning” (xuanxue) that sought to join Confucian morality to the insights of the Daoist classics, and the framework he built helped Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism find ways to coexist.
Key ideas
- Self-transformation, without a creator
- All things come into being through “self-transformation” (zihua), each responsible for its own creation and for its relations with everything else. It may look as if a true ruler directs them, but no trace of one can be found; things arise of themselves.
- Naturalness includes society
- For Guo, ziran, things being so of themselves, is not opposed to social life. Roles such as parent, child, ruler and subject arise naturally from self-transformation; chaos comes only when people fail to recognise their place.
- Content in one’s role
- Each person’s share of qi fixes their fen, at once their natural endowment and their part in the whole, as hands, feet and head each serve the body. Differences in talent decide roles, not worth.
- Nonaction is not withdrawal
- “Taking no action does not mean folding one’s arms and closing one’s mouth.” The sage responds to things without a deliberate mind of his own, and so is inwardly a sage and outwardly a ruler; the hermit who spurns office is the lesser model.
- Tradition
- Chinese
- Region
- Western Jin China
- Schools
- Neo-Daoism
Influences
Key works
- Commentary on the Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi zhu)
Terms on this page
- Xuanxue
- “Learning in the Profound” (玄學), the Chinese name for the movement called Neo-Daoism in English, which centred on the Classic of Changes, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.
- zihua
- Self-transformation (自化): Guo Xiang’s name for how all things come to exist by themselves, without a creator, each responsible for its own creation and its relations with everything else.
- ziran
- Naturalness, literally being “self so” (自然): how things are when they follow their own course. The Laozi uses it to describe the workings of the Dao, and Guo Xiang held that social roles too arise naturally.
- qi
- Vital force or material force (氣), the stuff of which all things are made. Neo-Confucians paired it with principle (li), and explained the differences between people by the qi each is endowed with.
- fen
- Share or role (分): in Guo Xiang, the allotment fixed by the qi a person receives, which decides their part in the whole, as hands, feet and head each serve the body.
Sources
- J. Scot Brackenridge, Guo Xiang, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy