Wang Bi 226 – 249

Wang Bi was a Chinese philosopher of the Three Kingdoms period and the most important early commentator on the Daode jing and the Yijing. Although he died at twenty-three, his short life produced commentaries that decisively shaped the reading of the foundational Daoist texts for the next eighteen centuries. Drawing on the metaphysics of original non-being, he developed the school known as Profound Learning, in which the underlying Dao is identified with the formless ground from which the manifold of phenomena emerges. His commentaries are now read alongside the original texts as part of the classical Daoist canon.

Wang Bi was born in 226 in the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, the son of an established literary family. He served briefly in office but his fame rests on a body of philosophical work completed almost entirely in his early twenties; he died at twenty-three of an illness, leaving the field of neo-Taoist metaphysics permanently marked by his contributions.

His surviving works are commentaries on the Daodejing and on the Yijing — both of which became the standard received commentaries for the next millennium and beyond — together with the Outline Introduction to the Daodejing (Laozi zhilue) and shorter pieces on the Analects. He was a leading figure of the Xuanxue or 'mysterious learning' movement, in dialogue with the longer-lived He Yan, that recovered the early Daoist classics for a sophisticated philosophical readership after the Han.

Wang Bi argued that the Way (Dao) and original non-being (wu) are the implicit ground of all appearances, that the sage participates in being by being rooted in non-being, and that the apparent differences between Confucian and Daoist classics resolve at this deeper metaphysical level. His readings shaped Chinese Buddhist hermeneutics, neo-Confucian metaphysics, and East Asian commentarial style for centuries. He died at Luoyang in 249.