Nothing, and a Commentary That Rewrote a Classic

Wang Bi read the Laozi as a book about wu, which is usually translated as nothingness or non being and in his hands means something more precise: whatever is determinate is limited by being that thing rather than another, so the ground of all determinate things cannot itself be determinate. What has no shape can give rise to every shape. What has no preference can support everything. The Way is not a very great thing among things; it is the absence out of which things are what they are, and to name it at all is already to have missed.

From that follows a politics. A ruler who acts on a preference organises the world around his preference and generates the resistance that goes with it, while a ruler who holds to wu leaves the ten thousand things to order themselves, which is what the term non action means in this commentary and it is not passivity. The reading has a famous edge to it. Asked why Confucius, who never discusses wu, was the greater sage, Wang Bi is reported to have answered that Confucius embodied it and therefore did not need to speak of it, whereas Laozi and Zhuangzi were still on the side of what they lacked and talked about it constantly. That answer let a Daoist metaphysics be held by people whose public commitments were Confucian, which is what the Dark Learning of the third century was doing.