Heshang Gong 河上公 commentary on the Daodejing 道德经

The Heshang Gong 河上公 commentary, deemed to have been completed before the end of the Han 汉 dynasty, is the earliest complete commentary on the Daodejing 道德经 ("Classic of the Way and Virtue") that survived until the present day. It represents, together with Wang Bi's 王弼 edition, the most circulated edition of the Daodejing. The author, considered a Daoist hermit, is only known by the pseudonym Heshang Gong. His real name is unknown and very little is known about his life. The first mention of a Daodejing commentary bearing the name Heshang Gong appears in the catalogue of Daoist literature of the Sui shu 隨書: here an edition of the Daodejing in two parts, accompanied by a Heshang Gong's commentary (from the time of Han Wendi 文帝) is mentioned. Some biographical information is known from the preface to the commentary written by the Daoist Ge Xuan 葛玄 in the third century CE. Of him, it is said that he lived in a hut on the banks of the Huanghe 黃河 and that he devoted himself exclusively to the study of the Daodejing. There is also an anecdote that describes him as a sage with mystical abilities: after declining Wendi's invitation to court, when the emperor came to him seeking guidance on understanding the Daodejing, Heshang Gong is said to have ascended to heaven, floating in mid-air, admonishing the emperor - and then, according to this account, he finally provided the emperor with his commentary on the text. However, such an account is unrealistic for at least two reasons: firstly, the large number of synonymic compounds reveals a later date of the commentary's compilation; secondly, if the emperor had indeed received a copy, it would certainly have been catalogued in the Han shu 漢書. But thanks to direct references to the commentary or to Heshang Gong's proposed reading of the Daodejing in the Huainanzi and other texts, we know that it must have been compiled by the end of the later Han 后汉 (220 CE) at the latest – although the Laozi 老子 attached to it may have been interpolated by later editors. As pointed out by Robinet, the commentary uses a twofold register, serving both as a guide to individual self-cultivation practice (thus preparing the reader for the book's practical use as a guide to meditation) and as a political device for the state. In this way, the commentary reveals a Huanglao 黃老 approach, offering an understanding of the dao 道 on the one hand cosmological and on the other pragmatic and political. Methodologically, Heshang Gong uses an exegetical method distinctive of the Han period, namely the zhangju 章句, dividing the text into 81 chapters and glossing it sentence by sentence. The reading of the text proposed by Heshang Gong in his commentary introduces new concepts, absent or almost absent from the text, and gives particular prominence to certain ideas, such as that of unity or oneness (yi 一), which is recognized as an ordering principle. It makes extensive reference to concepts rooted in correlative cosmology, such as the principles of yin 陰 and yang 陽, theorizing a system of complete correspondence between cosmos, society and human beings, in which the sage embraces the one and emulates it through non-action, regulating his body as well as ordering the state. The philosophical analysis proposed in the commentary identifies the dao of heaven with the dao of the human being, theorizing a parallel development of the cosmic order, the socio-political order and individual longevity. From a prosodic point of view, compared to the bamboo and silk versions, the Daodejing accompanied by the Heshang Gong commentary amplifies the tendency to have four-character sentences. If some sentences of this type were already present in the manuscript editions, in the text of Heshang Gong, the 4-character sentences became a proper pattern. Both the received versions of Heshang Gong and Wang Bi manifest this tendency towards four-character sentences, basically achieved through the elimination of particles. Of the approximately 400 characters that have been eliminated in these editions, compared to the silk manuscripts, most are represented by particles such as zhi 之 or ye 也. For example, the following sentence from chapter 2: "有亡之相生也" in the Mawangdui editions became "故有無相生" in the Heshang Gong edition. In this sentence, another linguistic difference can be highlighted when compared to the earlier manuscript versions, namely the almost exclusive use of the negation wu 無 where the manuscripts have wang 亡. Furthermore, the Heshang Gong commentary provides titles for the individual chapters of the Daodejing, which almost serve as instructions for the reader, although these headings may have been added later by religious Daoists. For instance, the first chapter is titled Ti dao 體道 ("embodying the way"), the second, Yang shen 養身 ("nourishing the body/person"), the third, An min 安民 ("pacifying the people), and so on.