There are four representative commentaries on the Duren jing from the Southern Song and Yuan Dynasties, authored by Qingyuan Zhenren, Xiao Yingsou, Chen Guanwu, and Xue Jizhao. These four commentaries combine both philological interpretation and philosophical interpretation, but each emphasizes one over the other. The Qingyuan and Xue focus on philological interpretation, aiming to reveal the original meaning of the text. The former offers detailed and in-depth philological analysis, occasionally integrating ideas on self-cultivation; the latter provides concise explanations, avoiding speculation and forced analogies. The Xiao and Chen commentaries, on the other hand, emphasize philosophical interpretation. Though grounded in philology, they primarily use the scripture as a medium to construct and develop the theory of internal alchemy. Xiao’s commentary pioneered a systematic approach to internal alchemy, while Chen’s work inherited and further developed this approach. In terms of interpretive strategy, the Qingyuan and Xue commentaries primarily use Taoist texts to support philological mutual verification, while the Xiao and Chen commentaries widely reference Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist resources to conduct philosophical mutual verification. The differences in their interpretive approaches essentially originate from the commentators’ distinctly different pre-understandings. Through textual interpretation, they achieved varying degrees of “fusion of horizons” between the text’s original historical horizon and the contemporary horizon of the Song and Yuan Dynasties. The evolution from “explaining the text based on its original meaning” to “elucidating new philosophical ideas through the scripture” not only reflects a shift in Taoism from external ritual practices to internal alchemical cultivation, but also demonstrates the dialectical relationship between objective explanation and creative understanding, and provides significant intellectual resources for the development of contemporary Chinese hermeneutics.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.