China & East Asia · 226–249
Wang Bi
Prodigy commentator who founded Xuanxue metaphysics
Read the Laozi and the Book of Changes as pointing to non-being (wu) as the root of all beings, and taught that once meaning is grasped, words and images can be forgotten. He died at twenty-three.
Life and thought
Wang Bi was a prodigy of the Wei kingdom in the decades after the Han collapsed. Still in his teens he impressed the leading minister He Yan in the salons of “pure conversation”, where scholars debated the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Book of Changes. Before he died of illness in 249, at twenty-three, he had written commentaries on the Laozi and the Changes that would be read for more than a thousand years.
He asked what must lie at the root of all things. Every determinate thing is this and not that, so it cannot be the source of everything else; the root must be what has no determinate form, which the Laozi calls non-being (wu). A good ruler likewise governs by simplicity, not by multiplying measures. For reading he gave a famous rule: words serve images and images serve meaning, so once the meaning is grasped the images, and then the words, can be forgotten. He also said Confucius embodied non-being and therefore did not talk about it, while Laozi, who had not, talked of nothing else. His Laozi commentary became the standard text.