Huangdi Sijing
黃帝四經 (Huang-Lao Silk Manuscripts, Mawangdui)
Legitimate rule follows the impersonal, unchanging patterns of Dao and law already built into the cosmos, so a wise ruler governs by aligning administration with those patterns, fusing Daoist non-action with Legalist law, rather than choosing one philosophy over the other.
- fusion of Daoist cosmology with Legalist administration
- Huang-Lao thought as the dominant early Han court philosophy
- rediscovered in 1973 in a sealed Mawangdui tomb
- buried alongside a variant early copy of the Daodejing
A set of four silk-manuscript texts, given the modern scholarly title Huangdi Sijing ('Yellow Emperor's Four Classics'), found in 1973 in a sealed early Han tomb at Mawangdui near Changsha, alongside a copy of the Daodejing whose chapter order differs from the received text. Their content represents the fullest surviving statement of Huang-Lao thought, a fusion of Daoist cosmology with Legalist administrative technique that dominated early Han court philosophy before Confucianism was made the state orthodoxy under Emperor Wu, and their rediscovery gave scholars, for the first time, primary textual evidence for a school previously known mainly through later, hostile characterization.
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