Peer-reviewed articles:

Tobias Benedikt Zürn, “Reception History and Early Chinese Classics,” Religions 13.12 (2022): https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121224

Thus far, the study of early China and its texts is dominated by originalist approaches that try to excavate the authentic meaning of the classics. In this article, I promote the idea that a shift in focus from the intentions of the authors to the readers’ concrete responses could meaningfully accompany our research on the classics’ “original” meaning. Beyond merely illuminating the cultural and intellectual environments in which the various receptions were produced, such research on the classics’ myriad interpretations could also serve as a postcolonial catalyst, helping us identify field-specific trends and reading strategies that, often unnoticed, impact our understandings of early Chinese texts. In other words, reception history would not only give us insights into the history of early Chinese classics and the variegated worlds they inhabited. It would also help us illuminate and reflect upon the ways we researchers shape and preconfigure our visions of premodern China and its texts.

Tobias Benedikt Zürn, “The Han Imaginaire of Writing as Weaving: Intertextuality and the Huainanzi’s Self-Fashioning as an Embodiment of the Way,” Journal of Asian Studies 79.2 (2020): 367-402.

Writers in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) apparently experienced writing in weaving terms. Such an imaginaire of writing as weaving was probably fully manifested in the first or second century BCE and crystallized in the coining of literary terminologies such as classics (jing), weft-writings (weishu), or literature/texts (wen). I claim in this article that situating the Huainanzi and its intertextual writing practice within this imaginaire enables us to re-assess its dismissal as a miscellaneous, encyclopedic behemoth in the first half of the twentieth century. According to the Huainanzi’s self-depictions, Liu An and his court erudites apparently created the scripture in such an intertextual way in order to textually mimic the process of weaving. Since the Huainanzi commonly associates weaving with the Way’s connective powers, I propose that the text’s extraordinary design might be the result of a literary attempt to create an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way by incorporating the act of weaving in its textual design.

Tobias Benedikt Zürn, “Overgrown Courtyards and Tilled Fields: Image-Based Debates on Governance and Body Politics in the Mengzi, Zhuangzi, and Huainanzi,” Early China 41 (2018): 297-332.

Thus far, scholarship on early China has mainly focused on conceptual debates and re-interpretations of terminology. I showcase in this article a methodology called metaphorology that enables us to analyze how discourses developed through the reworking of images. In particular, I reconstruct a discourse on governance and self-cultivational practices as enshrined in Mengzi 3A.4, the Zhuangzi’s “Mati” chapter and Huainanzi 9.13. While Mengzi 3A.4 purports that the cultivation of agricultural fields and human bodies are necessary steps in the civilizational process, the Zhuangzi’s “Mati” chapter demands a decultivation of the human population and a return to the wilderness. In my reading, Huainanzi 9.13, from the “Arts of Rulership” chapter, amalgamates these two image-based debates with the help of the metaphors of the ruler as an overgrown courtyard and the officials as tilled fields. Hence, I propose that Huainanzi 9.13 creates its integrative vision of governance that promotes both education and decultivation by synthesizing the “Mati” chapter’s focus on wilderness and Mengzi 3A.4’s concerns with tilling. As a result, I encourage us to engage fully in imagery’s role as a central and foundational aspect of early Chinese debate culture rather than a rhetorical side effect of its various discourses.

迄今為止的早期中國研究大多著力於對術語、概念的爭論和詮釋。在這篇 論文中，我希望展示一種新的研究方法，即通過研究意象的轉化來分析各 種話語的變化發展。尤以《孟子・滕文公上》、《莊子・馬蹄》和《淮南 子・主術訓》為例，我試圖重構這三個文本所體現的統治與修身話語。雖 然〈滕文公上〉主張耕作與修身是禮樂文明賴以發展的必經階段，〈馬 蹄〉的一些章節卻要求人們去除禮樂教化，回歸「廣莫之野」。而〈主術 訓〉一章藉由兩個比喻──以「朝廷蕪」比喻君主「無為而治」，以「田 野辟」比喻官吏「務功修業」──將《莊子・馬蹄》的荒野和《孟子・滕 文公上》的耕作這兩種不同意象融為一體。由此，《淮南子・主術訓》創 造性地提出了一種整合禮樂教化與無為復樸的統治術。

Book Chapters:

Tobias Benedikt Zürn, “The Practice of Erasing Traces in the Huainanzi,” in Albert Galvany ed., The Craft of Oblivion: Aspects of Forgetting and Memory in Ancient China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023), 181-214.

The Huainanzi, an extraordinary scripture from the Western Han dynasty that is known for its constructed and comprehensive form, contains a fascinating passage that illustrates the True Person as someone who dwells in (cang 藏 or ju 居), as well as moves (xing 行) and roams (you 遊) throughout a realm that is defined by being beyond time and space as conveyed by the expressions formless (wu xing 無形), traceless (wu ji 無跡), and without a beginning (wu zhen 無朕). Since these terms and contrastive illustrations are ubiquitous in proto-Daoist writings on the True Person and the Dao, we tend to read them simply as metaphors for the realm “beyond the dust and dirt of the phenomenal world” (chen’gou zhi wai 塵垢之外 or chen’ai zhi wai 塵埃之外). In so doing, however, we turn a blind eye to the fact that these images arose in a specific discursive environment. In this book chapter, I reconstruct the intellectual background to one of these expressions, the term tracelessness (wu ji), and explore how it relates to both practices of embodiment (ti 體) mentioned in the Huainanzi and contemporaneous debates on remembrance (ji 記), record-taking (ji 紀 or 記), and erasure (mie 滅 or jue 絕). I showcase that the term trace (ji 跡/迹 or 蹟) took on several connotations beyond its literal meaning as the track of an animal or any other being (wu 物) in early China. In fact, ji were considered to be valuable containers that enshrine the actions (xing 行) and deeds (shi 事) of the past. Any being was thought to leave their traces in the dust and dirt (chen’gou 塵垢 or chen’ai 塵埃) of the phenomenal world, which could be visited, engaged in, read, and sometimes even re-animated to create a connection with the past. I demonstrate that several early Chinese texts extended this basic understanding of traces as the actions and deeds of beings to the realm of words (yan 言), writings (wen 文), and written records (ji 記). Based on the myth that Cang Jie 倉頡, a legendary official of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝), derived Chinese characters from bird tracks (niaoji 鳥跡), writings and records of the past—like the aforementioned actions—were thought to capture the knowledge and ways (dao 道) of actions and words (particularly in the realms of governance and ritual) that had been preserved in the “traces of the sage kings” (shengwang zhi ji 聖王之跡). However, this discourse on traces as writings and records of actions, deeds, and words of the past that contain sage wisdom became contested in the third and second century BCE. Texts like the Zhuangzi and Huainanzi 淮南子 opposed the importance of traces of the past and proposed that sage rulership may only be achieved if the rulers forget about their human disposition and cover up (yanji 掩跡), eradicate (mieji 滅跡), or hide [their] traces (cangji 藏跡) so they may “embody the [traceless] Way” (tidao 體道). If we situate the Huainanzi’s discourse on the sage within this debate on the nature of traces and their value, we will see that a mere metaphorical reading of wu ji as an illustration of the Way (or, to be precise, one of its features) reduces the term to a rhetorical ornamentation and therefore does not do justice to its allusive qualities, argumentative explosiveness, and complexity. By introducing the term of “tracelessness,” these proto-Daoist texts justified their regime of body-politics and, at the same time, powerfully rejected the culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) Ruists and other groups were promoting in the transitional phase from the Warring States to the early imperial period.

translations:

Tobias Benedikt Zürn, “Seng Qixu 僧契虛 (Monk Attached to Emptiness),” in Tang Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader Volume 2. Edited by William H. Nienhauser Jr. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2016, pp. 365-424.

The story “Seng Qixu 僧契虛” (“Monk Qixu”) is included in the Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (The Extensive Gleanings of the Reign of Great Tranquility, hereafter TPGJ) compiled by Li Fang 李昉 (925–996) in the late tenth century. Despite the fact that “Seng Qixu” has originally been included in the Xuanshi zhi 宣室志 (Records from the Spacious Hall), which Zhang Du 張讀 (834–882), a matrilineal grandson of the famous collector and editor of Tang tales, Niu Sengru 牛僧孺 (779–847), is said to have edited, the narrative has unfortunately not received much attention since its compilation. In contrast to other examples of Tang tales such as “Du Zichun” 杜子春, “Nanke Taishou zhuan” 南可太守傳 (An Account of the Governor of the Southern Branch), or “Li Wa zhuan” 李娃傳 (The Tale of Li Wa), the plot of “Seng Qixu” has not been reworked into other narratives, dramas or poems. In other words, Qixu's story has remained mostly ignored. However, once one considers the story's significant length and its comparatively elaborated narrative structure, both traits quite unusual for most of the Tang tales, one realizes that it enables us to catch a glimpse into the literary employment of historical times and places to create narrative units, a fact that of itself warrants its translation into English and a narratological analysis.