Storytelling as Commentary:
Illumination, Persuasion, and Entertainment in Chinese Hermeneutics

Yuet Keung Lo
National University of Singapore

What does a commentator’s style reveal? As much as it weaves form and content together, style is no mere decoration and is integral to what a commentary is. On a purely functional level, style betrays, wittingly or unwittingly, a commentator’s philosophical outlook, his view on narrative as a form of commentary, as well as the telos of his commentary. A commentary can illuminate the hidden meanings in a text; it can persuade and convert; or it can entertain. Most important, it can be doing all these at once.

This paper addresses a fundamental issue in Chinese hermeneutics: the role of style in commentary as a form of narrative. Specifically, it will examine storytelling as an expressive vehicle in commentarial literature, its styles and its telos. As much as storytelling is a crucial development in Chinese hermeneutics, it demands different styles from different storytellers cum commentators in the service of their specific exegetical agendas. From the perspective of storytelling as commentary, the text it seeks to explicate or illustrate is not necessarily bound to a written one. Indeed it can be, as in the case of the Taoist Zhuangzi, a wordless text, which, by definition, is beyond language.

By focusing on the dynamic relationship between text and commentary, this paper will unpack the meaning, significance, and telos of storytelling as commentary represented in a diverse group of texts from the Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions including the Zhuangzi, the interpretive chapters on the Laozi in the Hanfeizi, Hanshi waizhuan (The External Commentary on the Odes in the Han Tradition), Kumarajiva’s (344-413) Commentary on the Vimalakirtinirdesa, and Huang Kan’s (488-545) commentary on the Analects. It will argue that commentary need not be symbiotically subsumed under text and therefore subservient to it. Rather, commentary can take on a life of its own upon its creation. And Buddhist storytelling facilitated such a paradigmatic switch in Chinese hermeneutics during the early medieval period.