Zhuangzi’s “Three Words”: Text and Authority

Abstract

The “Three Words” (sanyan 三言) passage of the Zhuangzi has always had particular authority for traditional and modern exegetes. Not only does it seem to announce and describe Zhuangzi’s rhetorical method, it contains the first extant usage of the term “imputed words” (yuyan 寓言), the trope with which Zhuangzi is particularly identified. And much of the language of the passage has definite intertextual linkages with the most authoritative passages from the “Discourse on Making Things Equal” (Qiwulun 齊物論) in the inner chapters, thereby apparently giving the text the appearance of direct sourcing from Zhuang Zhou himself. Because so many commentators have discussed the passage in philosophical terms, this essay does not try to offer a new argument about the proper meaning of the passage as a hermeneutical tool with which to approach the rest of the Zhuangzi. Instead, it uses the tools of textual criticism to both trace the nature of links with other portions of the text, and to examine the ways in which the passage’s textual history may have been both affected and shaped by its own thematic content. In particular, it argues that the anxiety over authority which is the central theme of the passage is also what brought it to the forefront of Zhuangzi exegesis, as readers sought to ground their own interpretations in a passage seemingly closest to expressing the compositional “intention” of Zhuang Zhou.