Finding Meaning After the World Falls Apart

Wang Bi was born in A.D. 226.

Six years earlier, the Han dynasty had officially come to an end.

He therefore grew up in a world of civil war and social uncertainty. Traditional political and cultural relationships were breaking down. China had divided into competing states.

Wang Bi was also extraordinarily intelligent. By about ten years old, according to an early biography, he had developed a strong interest in the Lao-tzu and could discuss it easily. He died when he was only twenty-three, but his commentary on the Lao-tzu became enormously influential.

Why would a young intellectual living after the collapse of the Han become so interested in a book written centuries earlier?

The historical context provides part of the answer.

The Lao-tzu had itself developed during an earlier period of Chinese disintegration. The Warring States Period had been characterized by political division, violence, competing philosophies, and uncertainty about how order could ever be restored.

The world Wang Bi inherited after the Han looked surprisingly similar.

One historian quoted in a paper I wrote years ago observed that the general suffering after the Han was probably not very different from conditions during the Warring States Period.

Wang Bi therefore found himself reading a thinker who had confronted a challenge remarkably similar to his own.

This is where Arnold Toynbee's idea of challenge and response becomes helpful.

A creative response does not necessarily require abandoning the past. Sometimes creativity involves returning to something old because we are finally in a position to understand it differently.

Wang Bi did not simply repeat Lao-tzu.

He developed ideas that were implicit in the older text. Two concepts became particularly important in his thought: wu, or non-being, and li, or principle.

Like Lao-tzu, Wang Bi believed that language could not fully express the nature of reality. Words distinguish one thing from another, but ultimate reality cannot simply be captured by those distinctions.

Yet Wang Bi did not conclude that nothing could be known.

He believed that by understanding li—principle—we could understand something about reality that individual words could not completely express. Wang Bi used the term wu, or “non-being,” to describe the underlying reality of the Tao. Because wu has no particular form or properties of its own, Wang believed it could underlie and give rise to all the distinct things that exist.

One of his favorite ways of describing this was the relationship between roots and branches.

If we understand the roots, we can understand the branches. But if we become preoccupied with the branches while forgetting the roots, we lose our ability to understand the whole.

There is something useful in that insight even if we do not accept Wang Bi's metaphysics.

When life falls apart, our natural tendency is often to focus on the branches.

How do I solve this particular problem? How do I get this person to change? How do I restore what I lost? How do I make the pain stop?

Those questions matter.

But sometimes a challenge reaches deep enough that it forces us to reconsider the roots.

What do I believe about God? What do I believe about the world? What makes something good? What gives my life meaning? What remains true when circumstances change?

Wang Bi lived only twenty-three years, but his attempt to answer questions like these influenced Chinese philosophy for centuries. His philosophy later influenced Chinese Buddhists and Neo-Confucian thinkers.

He lived during the disintegration of an old world. His response was to return to a much older thinker who had lived through another period of disintegration and ask the questions again.

There is an important difference between returning to the past and trying to live in it.

Toynbee's challenge-and-response model requires creativity. We cannot simply repeat yesterday's answers because they once worked.

But neither do we have to begin from nothing.

Sometimes responding creatively to a new challenge requires returning to the roots, understanding them more deeply, and discovering what they have to say to a challenge we have never faced before.