The ‘hard and white’ disputations of the Chinese sophists

A. C. Graham

doi:10.1017/S0041977X00062261

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Volume 30, Issue 2
June 1967 , pp. 358-368

The ‘hard and white’ disputations of the Chinese sophists

A. C. Graham

- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00062261
- Published online: 24 December 2009

Extract

Among the five essays ascribed to the sophist Kung-sun Lung (c. 300 B.C.) is an ‘Essay on hard and white’ () which argues that a hard white stone is two things, the white stone which one sees and the hard stone which one touches. In an earlier paper I offered evidence that the last three essays in Kung-sun Lung tzŭ (including the ‘Essay on hard and white’) were written between A.D. 300 and 600, but did not question the apparently self-evident facts that many pre-Han and Han writers mention a sophism of Kung-sun Lung about the separation of hard and white and that in the third century B.C. the common-sense position that hardness and whiteness are mutually pervasive was defended against the sophists in the Mohist Canons. The purpose of the present inquiry is to look again at the whole of the early evidence with fresh eyes.

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COPYRIGHT: © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1967

References

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¹ cf. G(1).

² cf. Fung, I,265–70.

³ Liang, 108 f.

⁴ The first character (or characters) of a Canon, even when the word is a grammatical particle, serves as heading for the Explanation.,: these characters are interchanged in B 42. : = (regular throughout most part B Explanations).

⁵ : corrected from the Explanation. : 5, as in B 13, 14a quoted below (the latter character is not used in the Mohist dialectical chapters). 1: ‘duplication’, first of four kinds of ‘similarity’ (), defined as ‘two names for one object’ () in A 86 (translated G(2), 25; Fung, I, 263). []…: displaced 34 places backward ? : ‘point sideways’? (point at objects in other directions ?).: literally ‘straighten it by aligning’. The metaphor is of aligning () two posts in a straight line () with the sun, in aprocedure for determining the centre of the earth. Cf. A 57 (with T'an's note).: = , as in B 57. ‘still’, a common compound in Mo-tzū (Sun, 32/1, 35/7, et al.). Cf. the examples in P'ei, 561f.

⁶ …: = …, proposed by Kao (158), who emends the first character to ‘winter’. But the idea is perhaps that because the snakes revive every spring we know that they are alive in the winter. The position of yeh shows that it is not the particle. ‘Its analogy: “ a dead snake”’ at the end of the Ta-ch'ü; , where there is a variant (Sun, 260/8). (): corrected from the Explanation. Kao , ch'üan : the living and the obsolete words for ‘dog’ (G(2),15). A man who knows dogs cannot point out a ch'üan if he does not know them by this name. Cf.B 40 ‘Knowing kou it is a mistake to say that one does not know ch'üan’.

⁷ , accidentally repeated, a common error in the Canons.

⁸ : = ? (cf. T'ran's note). But Sun (215/14) takes as ‘not being each other’.

⁹ The emendations are all proposed by Sun (216) on grounds of parallelism.

¹⁰ A couple of Canons in this series do not seem to be definitions (A 43, 50).

¹¹ T'ran combines B 4a, 4b by deleting the former's concluding formula; others (Sun, Liang, Kao, Liu, et al.) agree that it is a separate Canon, although they do not recognize the head character. : corrected from a parallel in Kung-sun Lung lzň (Ch'en, 181). The characters are confused also in B 64 and elsewhere in Mo-tzň (Sun, 24/3, 189/4). : the head character is often one place too late (cf. B 13, quoted p. 363 below), never one place too early, suggesting that it was originally written at the side of the first character. : corrected from the Canon.

¹² Ch'en, 177 (quoted p. 368 below).

¹³ The divisions between the Canons of B 13, 14a, 14b are those of Luan (op. cit., 14), confirmed by the parallelism of B 14a and 14b and by its provision of convincing head characters. But they make nonsense of the text unless one recognizes the meaning of chien-pai: Kao and Liu therefore divide as follows: B 13… ; B 14a B 14b . But these divisions provide no head characters. : corrected from the Explanation. The characters are confused also in A 49, B 16. : ‘shift in relation to the environment’, used to define ‘Motion’ in A 49: : cf. p. 360, n. 5, above.

¹⁴ The Canon is broken in the standard text by the intrusion after the second character of a displaced block of Canons (B 21–23a).: ‘space’ and ‘duration’, defined together in A 39, 40. : the characters are confused also in A 39 and elsewhere in Mo-tzň (Sun, 333/6, 382/2). : cf. p. 360, n. 5, above. : as in A 39.

¹⁵ : ‘durationless (time)’, ‘moment’. Cf. A 43 : ‘Some times have duration, some not; a commencement corresponds to one without duration’. : ‘criterion’, the test for pronouncing X and Y chien-pai. Cf. A 95b ‘fix the criterion’ (parallel to B 1 ‘fix the analogy’); judging by the Explanations of A 95, 96 an example would be the decision whether to take black eyes or white skin as the test when judging whether X is a ‘black man’ (translated G(2), 19 f., cf. 33 f.).

¹⁶ T'ran's evidence is a saying of the sophists in Chuang-tzň , 5/9B/3,, an obscure sentence doubtfully interpreted as ‘Separating hard from white is like suspending space (apart from time)’.

¹⁷ Hu, 16, 55, 75–80. All are mentioned in the course of this article except Shih chi , 76/5B/8. I have noticed one more: Ch'ien fu lnn , 3/13B/1.

¹⁸ Chuang-tzň, 4/3B/5, 24B/8; 6/24B/2; 10/29B/3. Haün-tzň , 1/21B/3; 4/6B/4; 13/7B/4. Lü-shih ch'un-ch'iu , 17/5A/3. Han Fei tzň, 17/4A/2. Huai-nan-tzň , 11/12A/9. Shih-chi, 23/11A/6; 74/6A/5. Liu Hsiang (79–8 B.c.) apud Han shu (commentary), 30/18A/1; memorial attached to Haün-tzň, 20/35A/8.