Background
Heng Gao was born in 1900 in Shuangyang, Jilin, China.
亨高
Heng Gao was born in 1900 in Shuangyang, Jilin, China.
Heng Gao graduated from Beijing Normal University, University of Beijing (now Peking University) and Qinghua University (now Tsinghua University).
Heng Gaowas was a leading scholar of classical Chinese Philosophy, specializing in meticulously prepared editions of pre-Qin dynasty texts and detailed commentaries upon them. The depth of his learning and the ingenuity of his suggestions for correcting corrupt texts to make them intelligible have had an important influence even on scholars who challenge his interpretations.
His famous and widely used commentary on the Laozi was Published in 1940 and shows his mastery of early daoist philosophy. In its 1956 edition, Gao criticized his own approach to Laozi as possibly entirely wrong because of his ignorance of Marxism, but presented the text itself without change.
His work on the Moist Canon by followers of Mozi again clarified a difficult text and contributed to lhe modern revival of interest in the ancient Chinese philosophical school most embodying an interest in logic and science. In his studies of the Book of Changes and other ancient works, he used textual criticism incorporating rigorous syntactic. Phonetic and semantic study.