The most brilliant prodigy of Wei-Jin Dark Learning, who accomplished an ontological revolution in Chinese philosophy while still in his youth. His three works—the Laozi Commentary, the Book of Changes Commentary, and the Analerta Explanatory Notes—thoroughly swept away the apocryphal theology and pedantic scholasticism of the Han dynasty, taking "Non-Being as Foundation" as the central thesis and elevating the Daoist concept of "Non-Being" from a cosmogonic principle to a pure ontological category. "Non-Being" is not nihilism but the formless, nameless metaphysical entity that is the existential ground of all "Being." In methodology, he proposed the intuitive epistemology of "forgetting the image once the meaning is grasped, forgetting the words once the image is grasped"—language and symbols are merely rafts for reaching truth, and once the meaning is attained, the means must be transcended—an insight that profoundly influenced Chinese aesthetics, Chan Buddhism, and the poetic tradition.
Courtesy name Fusi, a native of Gaoping in Shanyang (modern Jinxiang, Shandong), 226–249 CE. Born into a scholarly family—his grandfather Wang Kai was a notable of Jingzhou, and the family was related to Wang Can of the Seven Masters of Jian'an—Wang Bi was extraordinarily precocious. "From childhood he was perceptive and intelligent; at over ten years of age, he loved Laozi and was skilled in debate and discourse." As a teenager he debated with the renowned Minister of Personnel He Yan in pure conversation, and He Yan was so impressed that he exclaimed: "A formidable younger generation! A man like this can discourse with you on the relationship between heaven and humanity!" At the age of twenty, he completed his Commentary on the Laozi, whose depth and subtlety made He Yan, upon reading it, feel his own Commentary on the Laozi was inferior and rewrote it as the "Two Discourses on the Dao and Virtue." Wang Bi then wrote his Commentary on the Zhou Yi and his Elucidation of Problems in the Analects, completing at astonishing speed an entire system of Xuanxue classical commentary. But heaven was jealous of genius: in the autumn of the tenth year of Zhengshi (249), Wang Bi died suddenly of illness, aged only twenty-four. Sima Shi, upon hearing the news, sighed for days. His brief life flashed across the history of thought like a meteor, but the light he left behind illuminated Chinese philosophy's ontological reflection for over a millennium.
Ontologically, Wang Bi takes "Non-being" as the absolute and eternal cosmic ground: "Though heaven and earth are vast, rich in the ten thousand things, thunder rolling and wind blowing, transforming in myriad ways, it is the still and ultimate Non-being that is their root." All "being" is but phenomenon; "Non-being" is what makes all being possible. On the substance-function relationship, he proposes that Non-being is the substance (ti) and being is its function (yong): "The beginning of being is grounded in Non-being"—establishing the classic paradigm of substance-function theory in Chinese philosophy. Epistemologically, the three-layer structure of "grasping the meaning by forgetting the image, grasping the image by forgetting the words"—words (language) → image (hexagram, metaphor) → meaning (ontological truth)—holds that language and symbols are cognitive intermediaries, not endpoints. To cling to words and images is to fail to reach the image and the meaning; one must use intuition to penetrate through form and arrive directly at the substance. In political philosophy, Wang Bi proposes "honoring the root and resting the branches"—taking the great Dao of non-action as fundamental and the ethical codes as secondary. The ruler should "take emptiness as master, take non-being as root," reducing coercive intervention so that social order arises naturally through following nature.
"Grasping the meaning lies in forgetting the image; grasping the image lies in forgetting the words. All things in the world are born from being; the beginning of being is grounded in non-being. — Zhou Yi Lueli, "On the Image"; Laozi Commentary, Chapter 1"
Wang Bi's "forgetting the image to grasp the meaning" advocates abandoning cumbersome details to reach the core essence. How does this resonate with Western hermeneutics' exploration of text and the depths of meaning?
Wang Bi takes "Non-being" as the ground of all being; Heidegger asks "Why are there beings at all, and why not far rather Nothing?" Both go beyond beings to probe Being itself, using ontological depth-inquiry to inaugurate fundamental shifts in their philosophical traditions.
Is "Non-being" the deepest question philosophy can ask, or a dead end? Do the ontological inquiries of Wang Bi and Heidegger converge on the same insight through different philosophical languages?
Zhuangzi uses parable and poetic reflection to dissolve conceptual attachments; Wang Bi uses rigorous substance-function logic to construct an ontological system. Both originate from "Non-being"—one toward the freedom of deconstruction, the other toward the thought of construction—marking the divergence of the poetic and the systematic in Daoist thought.
Is Daoist philosophy best expressed through poetic parable or systematic logic? Do Zhuangzi's deconstruction and Wang Bi's construction represent complementary or fundamentally opposed approaches to the same truth?
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