A Philosophical Translation of the Heng Xian Erica F. Brindley & Paul R. Goldin & Esther S. Klein # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Keywords Daoism . Cosmogony . Cosmology . Constancy . Qi . Names 1 Preface to the Translation The following translation represents a single, synthetic interpretation that considered the proposals, suggestions, and discussions not only of the three translators mentioned, but of everyone present at the Heng Xian workshop held at the Pennsylvania State University in late 2010. Innumerable possibilities abound in the translation of this text, and, indeed, every word, phrase, and bamboo strip was discussed in a countless number of ways. While the final product may still contain flaws and errors, it has at the least been vetted thoroughly. Committed to the goal of presenting a single, coherent perspective, one that made philosophical sense of the various cosmological concepts presented, the three translators made their final selections according to a “majority rules” approach. To that end, they each had to settle on words or phrasings that any single one of them may not have considered optimal. This is not to say that there was no agreement among the translators, but that what follows should be viewed very much as a collaborative product and not the single vision of any individual. In the papers that follow this translation, DOI 10.1007/s11712-013-9322-5 The translators wish to thank the many of those scholars present at a reading workshop on this text at Pennsylvania State University on November 12–13, 2010. Our translation also takes into account the various translations and proposed ordering of the strips by such scholars as XING Wen 邢文,DING Sixin, PANG Pu 龐樸,LI Ling, CAO Feng 曹峰, and Donald Harper. For a recent translation, see Tan 2010. See also Ding 2005; Xing 2010; Harper 2009; Cao 2004/5/16; and Pang 2004. Erica F. Brindley (*) Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, 108 Weaver Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA e-mail: efb12@psu.edu Paul R. Goldin Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 847 Williams Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA e-mail: prg@sas.upenn.edu Esther S. Klein School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sydney, Brennan MacCallum Building A18, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: esther.s.klein@gmail.com Dao (2013) 12:145–151 Published online: 27 April 2013