Miscellany · za he

In brief

The emperor’s question has two halves, and they are not the same accusation. 智未及邪 asks whether Lei Gong’s understanding falls short; 將言以雜合耶 asks whether, instead of speaking from what he knows, he will patch an answer together out of pieces. The second is the more serious charge, because it is the failure of the second of the four errors — 受師不卒，妄作雜術，謬言爲道 — where an unfinished education is covered over by borrowed fragments and given the name of a method. 雜合 is therefore not a neutral word for mixture: it is what a physician does when he has no whole to speak from. The same graph returns at the close of the chapter as 雜術, the counterfeit art, and the pair frames the four failures.