Xuanxue emerged at the Wei court in the 240s CE, when a group of young intellectuals turned back to the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, texts that had drawn less sustained attention during the preceding Han dynasty's Confucian orthodoxy, and began reading them as a resource for questions Han commentary had not asked. He Yan, an official active around 207 to 249 CE, and Wang Bi, who died in 249 CE before the age of twenty four having already completed major commentaries on both the Laozi and the Yijing, made the relation between wu, non being, and you, being, the central problem of the movement: how the many concrete things of the ordinary world arise from and depend on something that is not itself a thing at all.
Wang Bi did not treat this as work confined to Daoist texts. His commentary on the Yijing, the Book of Changes claimed by the Confucian classical tradition, occupied an esteemed place beside his Laozi commentary and became a standard reference for readers of that text for centuries. Later, Guo Xiang, who died in 312 CE, took the argument in a different direction in his Zhuangzi commentary, treating each thing as self so, spontaneously and completely itself, needing no external non being to generate it at all.
The movement's social form was qingtan, pure conversation, gatherings where participants debated a set topic through rapid, allusive argument prized as much for elegance as for conclusion. It has sometimes been read as escapism, officials retreating into abstraction under a dangerous court, but its commentaries on the Laozi and the Zhuangzi remained standard reading for centuries, and its habits of argument fed directly into the vocabulary Chinese Buddhist translators reached for when rendering Indian concepts into Chinese a generation later.