This innovative study explores both the Huainanzi, the text written at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, and presented to Emperor Wu in 139 B.C.E., and the events that led up to the death of Liu An in 122 B.C.E. Author Griet Vankeerberghen provides a fresh treatment of the Huainanzi, which she establishes as a unified work with a coherent moral philosophy. She shows that rather than defending any particular school of thought, as is often claimed, the Huainanzi was the primary means by which Liu An displayed his vision of the good and advertised his readiness to be a ruler. By 123 B.C.E. Liu An was accused of plotting rebellion and was forced to commit suicide a year later, but the disloyalty he was accused of may have had more to do with his independent intellectual stance than with a military plot. The book goes on to explore the relationship of moral, intellectual, and political authority in the first century of the Han dynasty, a period when the regime sought to monopolize all moral and intellectual authority.

The Han dynasty Huainanzi is a compendium of knowledge covering every subject from self-cultivation, astronomy, and calendrics, to the arts of government. This edited volume follows a multi-disciplinary approach to explore how and why the Huainanzi was produced and how we should interpret the work. The volume should be of interest to scholars of early China, as well as scholars of textual production in other periods of Chinese history and in other cultures. With contributions by Anne Behnke Kinney, Martin Kern, John S. Major, Andrew Meyer, Judson B. Murray, Michael Nylan, David W. Pankenier, Michael Puett, Sarah A. Queen, Harold D. Roth, and Griet Vankeerberghen.

Compiled by scholars at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, in the second century B.C.E, The Huainanzi is a tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han philosophy and statecraft. Outlining "all that a modern monarch needs to know," the text emphasizes rigorous self-cultivation and mental discipline, brilliantly synthesizing for readers past and present the full spectrum of early Chinese thought. The Huainanzi locates the key to successful rule in a balance of broad knowledge, diligent application, and the penetrating wisdom of a sage. It is a unique and creative synthesis of Daoist classics, such as the Laozi and the Zhuangzi; works associated with the Confucian tradition, such as the Changes, the Odes, and the Documents; and a wide range of other foundational philosophical and literary texts from the Mozi to the Hanfeizi. The product of twelve years of scholarship, this remarkable translation preserves The Huainanzi's special rhetorical features, such as parallel prose and verse, and showcases a compositional technique that conveys the work's powerful philosophical appeal. This path-breaking volume will have a transformative impact on the field of early Chinese intellectual history and will be of great interest to scholars and students alike.

Examines the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, and its impact on literati lives in Han China. Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven’s will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism. “Zhao’s study presents a model of intellectual history. Smartly written, it excels in connecting the analysis of specific texts and concepts with broader trends in the social-political realm. His work helps demythologize Chinese thought and makes it legible to scholars around the world.” — Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

Environmental Narratives in the Huainanzi and the Anthropocene analyzes the contemporary discourse of the Anthropocene using the Huainanzi 淮南子, an eastern Eurasian text from the second century BCE. Written to preserve and strengthen the Han Empire (202 BCE–220 CE), the Huainanzi describes a mode of rulership premised on periodizing the present as the end of history that domesticates humans and non-humans. Matthew James Hamm provides a contextualized reading of the Huainanzi’s argument and uses it as a theoretical lens to read Anthropocene scholarship in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Hamm argues that—irrespective of the name or historical narrative used to describe it—the idea of the Anthropocene as a new epoch not only lacks empirical evidence, but also empowers the existing periodization of modernity to provide ideological support for environmentally destructive neoliberal structures rooted in Western European imperial orders. By doing so, the Anthropocene framework actively inhibits the transformative social change needed to address global environmental crises such as climate change and mass extinction. Consequently, this book rejects periodization as a conceptual framework for addressing those issues and advocates for greater scholarly engagement with environmental theories outside the European and Anglo-American traditions, such as the Huainanzi.

Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).