El análisis de Alfred Forke de 1901 de Hui Shi y los Sofistas Chinos

THE CHINESE SOPHISTS par Alfred FORKE (1867-1944) Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, XXXIV, Changhai, 1901, p. 1 100.

HUI SHIH

He was a contemporary of Chuang Tse, living at the court of King Hui of Liang, whose reign lasted from 370-335 B.C. Liang is another name for Wei, referring to the new capital of the Wei state Ta Liang, the modern Kai-feng-fu in Honan. Owing to constant attacks from the rival kingdoms of Chi and Chao, King Hui removed his capital from An-yi in Shansi to Ta-liang. Hui Tse survived his friend and patron king Hui  : his lifetime must, therefore, have fallen into the latter part of the 4th century B.C. According to the commentator of the Lü-shih-chun-chiu, Kao-yu, of the later Han time, Hui Tse was a native of the Sung state.

Hui Tse is generally believed to have held the position of a Minister of State in Liang , although the Shi-chi , in the chapter on the House of Wei, does not mention it. Hui Tse’s influence over King Hui must have been very great. Not only did the latter confer upon him the honorary title of Chung Fu, in remembrance of the famous statesman Kuan Chung or Kuan I-Wu , but he is even reported to have tried hard to yield his kingdom to him, which Hui Tse, however, did not accept. The Lü-shih-chun-chiu, which is our authority for this story, says that it was sham on both sides, king and minister wishing to acquire fame by pretending to imitate Yao and Shun. Hui Tse seems to have had some influence with the son and successor of his royal master also. The latter was about to celebrate the funeral of his father, when there was a heavy snowfall. All the dissuasion of the other officials was in vain, and it was Hui Tse alone who prevailed upon the king to postpone the interment . At all events Hui Tse was a great man in Liang. We learn that Chuang Tse saw him travelling with a hundred carriages.

Hui Tse worked out new laws for the Liang state, which pleased the people as well as King Hui but were opposed by a certain Ti Chien , who must have had some standing with the king. The Lü-shih-chun-chiu says that the king saved his kingdom by listening to the advice of Ti Chien . During the whole reign of King Hui his state was distracted with war. Out of fifty battles he is said to have lost twenty . In the last year of his reign he invited scholars from all sides, told them how unfortunate in war he had been, and asked their advice. It was then that Mencius had those famous interviews with King Hui which open the first book of Mencius’ work . Perhaps Hui Tse had his share of responsibility in the wars waged by King Hui. Kuang Chang at least, another adversary of his, lays the blame on him in the Lü-shih-chun-chiu, where Hui Tse defends his aggressive policy.

Hui Tse’s greatest opponent was the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tse. However different their views, they respected one another. A more generous tribute could not have been paid to the memory of Hui Tse than that paid by Chuang Tse saying that since the death of Hui Tse he had lost his material and had no one left to talk to . On the other hand, it is too much to say that they were intimate friends, a belief which appears to have been common in the Han period to judge from the fact that in the Hou Han-shu Chuang Tse and Hui Tse were ranked as a couple of friends like Po Ya and Chung Tse Chi . They disputed together and were on friendly terms, but nothing more. Chuang Tse went to visit Hui Tse in Liang. Hui Tse was at first afraid that Chuang Tse came with the intention of superseding him as minister . When Chuang Tse’s wife died, Hui Tse went to condole with him.

The conversations between Chuang Tse and Hui Tse as related in Chuang Tse must be taken with great reserve. They were probably never held, but invented by Chuang Tse’s pupils with a view to glorify their master. The philosophers of other schools, above all Confucius, seem to have been introduced only as foils for Chuang Tse to make the latter shine more brightly. They cut very poor figures ; either they receive instructions from Chuang Tse or are taken to task by him, but they never say anything clever on their own account.

The violent attacks upon Hui Tse in the last chapter of Chuang Tse do certainly not represent the latter’s views. But this chapter is evidently of much later origin than the others, and, as Giles points out, simply a summary by the first editors of Chuang Tse. Hui Tse is very hardly dealt with in the Lü-shih-chun-chiu . Hsün Tse criticises him and his paradoxes.

Hui Tse must have been a very prolific writer. His works are said to have been so numerous that they would have filled five carts . It is to be regretted that not a single one has come down to us. They were already lost in the Han dynasty, for the Han Catalogue contains the significant entry : ‘Hui Tse one chapter’. What we know of Hui Tse’s doctrine are his paradoxes, of which the greater number have been recorded in Chuang Tse and some few in Hsün Tse.

These paradoxes have been a stumbling-block to the Chinese commentators and the European translators. Some native scholars opine that they are riddles defying any attempt at unravelling them. Legge concurs with this view. Balfour agrees with those who declare these aphorisms to be devoid of sense. Giles ventures to explain their meaning, but his explanations are most of them so forced and unnatural that they cannot be correct. Hui Tse asserts that ‘a fowl has three legs’. According to Sse Ma Piao’s comment, adopted by Giles, the third leg would be volition. ‘Ying (the capital of Chu) is the world, because, says Giles, you cannot say it is not the world’. ‘A horse lays eggs’ would mean only that names are arbitrary. Hui Tse tells us that ‘a tortoise is longer than a snake’. The Chinese commentators and Giles submit that longer means longer lived.

To the paradox ‘A white dog is black’ Sse Ma Piao and Giles add the ridiculous comment that a white dog is black, if his eyes are black, part standing for the whole. Another commentator says that if a dog is not black but white, its whiteness may be regarded as its blackness !

None of these scholars has found the clue to Hui Tse’s queer sayings. Although Chuang Tse impresses upon us that Hui Tse’s own son searched his works for some clue in vain, and that it is impossible to derive from them a general principle , I presume that I have discovered it. To my mind Hui Tse denies the existence of space and time, in short of the reality of the world ; and his paradoxes serve only to illustrate this idea. My reasons are the following. The paradoxes enumerated in Chuang Tse are headed by the fundamental axiom

« The infinitely great, beyond which there is nothing, I call the great Unit. The infinitely small, within which there is nothing, I call the small Unit.

Thus Hui Tse recognises two opposite poles — the unlimited Infinite, beyond which there is nothing, and the Atom, which has no dimensions and within which there is nothing. The conception of the Atom without dimensions as the smallest unit of Substance leads Hui Tse into a dilemma or an antinomy, which in his paradoxical style he formulates thus :

« That which has no dimensions cannot be heaped up, and yet it spans a thousand Li.

It means that there is space, there are distances of a thousand Li. The matter filling up these thousand Li is composed of Atoms, but these unsubstantial Atoms heaped up or put together will never measure a thousand Li. One may combine ever so many millions of mathematical points, they never give more than one mathematical point . Out of the multiplication of non-dimensions there can never result a dimension. In this way Hui Tse perceived space practically, but could not construct or conceive it theoretically.

Consequently he assumed it to be unreal, a mere illusion of our senses. From his maxim :

« One must love all beings equally, for heaven and earth are one and the same, it would appear that he believed in some uniform entity. Time being so closely connected with space, i.e. with the movement of bodies, Hui Tse while denying the existence of space could not well uphold that of time, and along with space he had to give up things and their attributes or qualities.

That Hui Tse really held these views I infer moreover from the striking resemblance his paradoxes bear to those of the Greek Eleatic philosophers Parmenides and especially Zeno, who by their arguments attempted to prove that the assumption of a multitude of things, of movement and of time, is erroneous. Zeno argues that if there were a multitude of things, they must be at the same time infinitely small, their constituent particles being without dimensions, and infinitely great owing to their unlimited multitude. Hui Tse’s first axiom contains the same idea.

To show the impossibility of movement Zeno reasons as follows : A body moving in a certain direction will never reach a certain goal. In order to finish a certain distance, it must first have finished half of it, and, before this half is finished, half of this half, and so on ad infinitum. The given distance can be divided into an infinite number of smallest distances, to pass through all of which would take an infinite time, which amounts to saying that the moving body could never reach its goal . The same ratiocination is at the bottom of Zeno’s famous sophism on ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’. Achilles running after a tortoise cannot overtake it, because the moment he reaches the place where the tortoise was, it has already left it again. The two paradoxes of Hui Tse : ‘Cart-wheels do not triturate the ground’ and ‘The finger does not touch, the touching never comes to an end’ must be understood in the same sense. The wheel does not touch the ground nor the finger an object by reason of the infinite divisibility of space, an infinite number of atoms still lying between things apparently in touch. Hui Tse’s last paradox is very much akin to ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ :

« If every day you chop off half of a stick one foot long, you will not have finished with it after ten thousand generations, i.e. never, you can go on dividing and dividing for ever.

Zeno asserts that a flying arrow is at rest . Hui Tse shows that the idea of movement is self-contradictory by saying that « There is a time when a swiftly flying arrow is neither moving nor at rest.

It cannot be at rest, for we see it moving ; and it cannot move, because we do not understand how a movement through a space composed of an infinite number of atoms is possible within a limited time.

Parmenides denies the reality of time. Real entity, as he conceives it, is uncreated, indestructible, a whole, single, unmoveable and eternal, it has not been and it will not be, but it is now, a continuous One . I may be allowed to quote a modern poet who more paradoxically describes real existence as past and present at the same time :

Ich bin schon lange begraben, Ich weiss, dass ich einst war. Ich koste des Lebens Gaben Und athme immerdar. Ich gankle, ein lüsterner Falter, Unsterblich im flüchtigen Schein. Ich kenne nicht Jugend, nicht Alter, Ich bin das ewige Sein.

Hui Tse does not mean anything else when he says

« The sun sets when it is in the zenith. Creatures die when they are born. « Going to Yüeh to-day, one arrives there yesterday.

Someone might object that I credit Hui Tse with ideas which may be Greek or modern but are alien to the Chinese mind. To those who think thus I would recommend the study of Chuang Tse, where amongst others they will find the following passage :

« There is nothing under the canopy of heaven greater than the tip of an autumn spikelet. A vast mountain is a small thing. Neither is there any age greater than that of a child cut off in infancy. P‘êng Tsu (the Chinese Methusaleh) himself died young. The universe and I came into being together ; and I, and everything therein, are One.

Here Chuang Tse denies the reality of space and time quite evidently, and his paradoxes are very much like those of Hui Tse. He starts, however, from another basis, viz. the relativity of all our notions, such as great and small, old and young, good and bad, which induces him to identify and thus dissolve all contraries. Chuang Tse dissents from Hui Tse’s atomistic views, maintaining that the Atom as well as the Universe must possess form and therefore dimensions.

To sum up, I believe that the paradoxes of Hui Tse are intended to illustrate the unreality of space and time and their attributes. A hypothesis is considered a good one if it establishes a general principle which explains things in an easy, natural way. I trust that mine does. It is based upon and evolved out of Hui Tse’s own sayings. It shows that the Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno, as well as Chuang Tse, use the same or very similar arguments to prove that our visible world is sham and illusion.

Against space the following paradoxes are directed :

II. — ‘That which has no dimensions cannot be heaped up, but it spans a thousand Li’, which has already been mentioned. III. — ‘Heaven is as low as earth. A mountain is on a level with a lake’, which Hsün Tse gives in the following form : ‘Mountains and pools are equally high, heaven and earth are level’. This means to imply that height and depth are imaginary, that their contrast is not real. IX. — ‘I know that the centre of the world lies north of Yen (the modern Chili) and south of Yüeh (Fukien)’. If such be the case, the distance between these two states cannot exist, which involves the existence of space in general. X. — ‘One must love all beings equally, for heaven and earth are one and the same’, has been noticed. XIII. — ‘Ying (the capital of the kingdom of Chu) is the world’, then the world cannot have the extension which we see. XXII. — ‘A tortoise is longer than a snake’. This must not be taken literally. Hui Tse wants to show that the difference in length between the two creatures is only a seeming one. In fact there exists neither length nor shortness. II. — Chi (a state in Shantung) and Chili (in the province of Shensi) are conterminous. This is a counterpart to No. IX. That space is divisible ad infinitum is brought home to us in the aphorisms : XIX. — ‘Cart-wheels do not triturate the grounds. XXI. — ‘The finger does not touch, the touching never comes to an end’, already mentioned. XXIV. — ‘A handle does not fit in a chisel’, there being still innumerable atoms between the chisel and its handle. XXXI. — ‘If every day you chop off half of a stick one foot long, you will not have finished with it after ten thousand generations’, also referred to. The reality of time is negatived in the following paradoxes : IV. — ‘The sun sets when it is in the zenith. VII. — ‘Going to Yüeh to-day one arrives there yesterday. XL. — ‘There are feathers in an egg’, i.e. the feathers of the young bird which exists already although it has not yet been born. Future and present are the same. XXVI. — ‘There is a time when a swiftly flying arrow is neither moving nor at rest’, mentioned before. XXX. — ‘An orphan colt has not had a mother’. Past and present being the same, the colt was already an orphan when it had its mother.

All things are conditioned by space. Without space things cannot be as they appear to us. They cannot have those qualities which we see in them. This is implied by the following propositions :

VIII. — ‘Linked rings can be separated’, i.e. without breaking them. Connexion and separation have no reality. XII. — ‘A fowl has three legs’. Hui Tse does not mean that a fowl really has three legs, but only wants to refute the illusion that it has two. Being without dimensions it has neither body nor legs. XXIII. — ‘A square is not square, and a circle cannot be considered as round’. XXIX. — ‘A white dog is black’. Geometrical forms and colours have no real existence.

That the nature of things is quite different from what we fancy, Hui Tse tries to make clear by the following paradoxes. It must always be borne in mind that they are not to be taken au pied de la lettre but cum grano salis. They are only negative. The positive and categorical form is nothing but a dialectical façon de parler :

XIV. — ‘A dog can be regarded as a sheep’. XV. — ‘A horse lays eggs’, i.e. is a bird. XVI. — ‘A nail has a tail’. IV. ‘A hook has a barb’. Then both would be animate beings. XVIII. — ‘Mountains speak’. XXVII. — ‘A dog is no hound’, because the categories and species which we use for the classification of things do not exist. Some few paradoxes — XVII, XX, XXV and XXVIII — do not fall under the above scheme. On XVII ‘Fire is not hot’ and XX ‘The eye does not see’, I am going to discourse more fully while speaking of the third sophist.