Dark Learning

…was known as Xuanxue (“Dark Learning”); it came to reign supreme in cultural circles, especially at Jiankang during the period of division, and represented the more abstract, unworldly, and idealistic tendency in early medieval Chinese thought.

In the neo-Daoist and Buddhist period (3rd–9th century ce), there was a radical turn to strictly metaphysical concepts. Going beyond Laozi’s characterization of Dao as Nonbeing, the neo-Daoists concentrated on the question of whether Ultimate Reality is Being or Nonbeing and whether the principle (li) underlying a…

…founder of the school of Dark Learning (xuanxue), a highly conservative philosophical movement that enjoyed a certain vogue among the cultured elite of the 3rd and 4th centuries. The Zhuangzi was not long afterward annotated by Guo Xiang (died 312), in whose work the fundamental Confucian bias is even more…