Page 674 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

632 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM A-L

(753-93; lC 562--63), a prominent Buddhist layman who had exchanged a now
lost correspondence with the famous Taoist writer *Wu Yun. Such elements
in his thought as the deliberate choice of the term foxing may reflect a delib-
erate challenge to Taoism. The use of the term as applied to self-cultivation
is late, apparently deriving from *Guo Xiang commentary on the *Zhuangzi
(Sibu congkan ed., 6-4a) on the impossibility of using common learning to
"return to the basis of the nature and destiny" (fit xingming zhi ben 1tl. ,It frl
Z;;$:). Similar terms are then deployed by *Cheng Xuanying writing on the
Zhuangzi and elsewhere, whence perhaps they were borrowed for polemical
purposes by Buddhist laymen of Liang's generation. That Li was actually
using a common stock of self-cultivation language (much of which could be
found in Confucian texts like the *Yijing) in order to make points against both
Buddhism and Taoism is further supported by a close reading of the Fuxing
shu, which betrays a not entirely explicit concern with transcending mortality.
No suggestion may be found, however, that Taoist solutions are acceptable:
the "fasting of the mind" (*xinzhai), for instance, a term from Zhuangzi, is
accorded only a strictly relative importance.
The notion that Li's opposition to Taoism may have diminished in his
later career has sometimes been argued on the basis of texts such as the "bi-
ography" He Shouwu zhuan 1ilT §( ,tH~ (Biography of He "Black Hair"). But
there is no more in this tale of the discovery of a plant conferring long life
on those who ingest it to suggest that its author had changed his ideas (and
his practical opposition to Taoism in his role as a civil servant) than in any of
Li's occasional purely literary references to stories of immortals. What the
Fuxing shu does demonstrate, however, is that the efforts of writers like Wu
Yun in making Taoist self-cultivation techniques as widely available as Bud-
dhist ones did succeed in presenting those who wished to argue for a purely
Confucian approach in this area with the double task of delimiting a system
neither Buddhist nor Taoist. This task, moreover, was certainly not completed
by Li Ao, but remained a problem even under the Song dynasty.

T. H. BARRETT
W Barrett 1992; Hartman 1986

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